Neighbourhood spatial process by stephen read

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>> Neighbourhood spatial processes: Notes on Public Space, 'Thick' Space, Scale and Centrality

Stephen Read s.a.read@bk.tudelft.nl

1.0 Urban Centrality To talk of urban centrality and public space may sound a little old fashioned, the subject of wishful thinking or misty-eyed nostalgia. The city is of course changing - seemingly torn apart by the exploding scales and speeds of the processes playing themselves out there, and we sometimes think of the dynamism of these spatial processes as being foreign to the city as it once was, and often still is in its historical cores - as if the new 'space of flows' is conceptually incompatible with a fundamentally static 'space of places' (Castells, 1996). But the richness of these traditional 'places' is just as much a product of life patterns in motion as is the fragmentation of the experiential and social fabric of the city on it's periphery. The city and change are no strangers to each other and cities have burst beyond the constraints of their edges before. The space of the city has always existed in a tension between inside and outside, between the local and larger scales, and between inhabitant and the traveller, trader or stranger. It is possible to overstate presentday change and to imagine that all that we know about cities from their histories is becoming irrelevant - and also to lose sight of the importance of centrality and a rich diversity of scales in any story about the city. Those who claim the city is becoming uniformly generic without centrality and peripherality, and without public space, haven't been shopping in my neighbourhood. Of course there is a new city emerging and of course it is recasting the question about the nature of the city - but it is forcing us to reappraise our concepts of what both the old city of centres and peripheries and our new dispersed 'generic' city are. The two continue to coexist alongside one another - as indeed they did before the terms generic or edge city were ever coined. And the reappraisal can do as much to help us to understand what the nature of centrality is as it can help us to understand what the diffusing and invading generic city is.

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I'm going to approach the problem of public space in a way that may sound strange at first - by talking about urban space as a mechanism. I will try to avoid some of the more difficult issues of meaning by considering the city as a functional thing - as something that works at a simple level of everyday activity and experience. The city is of course complex but one of the remarkable things about it is that although it seems to be such a difficult thing to describe and analyse in any way which explains its workings, we seem to use it very easily indeed. Perhaps there is something about the way we deal with the city at a very everyday, very intuitive level which may be a key to its understanding. Of course meaning comes back into this as well. A lot of questions about the city and our relation to it - and our relation to neighbours and strangers within more or less public space - are about the way the city acts at the same time as a physical environment and as a model in everyday life of less tangible things like society, community, and so on. It is more than a metaphor, it is a demonstration in the real world of the workings of social and cultural systems. And the important thing is that it happens right there before our eyes - in our sensible experiential world - and it happens in such a way that we are immersed in it. So it is at the same time the real thing and a representation of itself which we latch onto and use as a model or metaphor for understanding the workings of things like society and community. So the city is at one and the same time both a material environment (made up of both people and things) that we engage in a very direct way - and a material grounding for a mental construct supporting all sorts of ideas that we take for granted as constituting our lives, often without crediting the city for doing any of these things. It's like language in a way, an only half-seen background to our everyday lives which nonetheless supports constructs of everyday meaning and knowledge.

But if the city is a machine, what sort of machine is it? What is clear is that it is not the sort of machine that has a very clear programmatic aim, or necessarily any built in programmatic aim at all. Nor is it a machine for supporting something like community or neighbourhood or economy or anything like that, though it may eventually do all these things as a lucky consequence of what it was doing in the first place. I suggest that the city is, or rather has been in its best moments, a machine for supporting intelligibility and for supporting interface - interface between people, and particularly interface between people operating and doing things at different scales. We are talking here about networks of course and about the ways networks at different scales overlap each other and then interface in the urban field. I believe that we can talk here about both virtual networks and those networks of social and economic contact and interaction built into the spatial infrastructures of streets squares and public and private transport networks, but here I will be considering these effects as they play out within and affect the quality of public space.

But the city, because it is not programmatically specific, is also a machine for change. The city, as a field or background for human activity, will absorb the dominant activities of the time - form 'permanences' (Harvey, 1996) or encrustations of relatively ephemeral programmatic and institutional stuff around the urban spatial network structure, which can change as the city changes from for example an industrial base to a services base to an entertainment and tourist base. The city organises and structures human activity, but it does this according to a principle of scale not a principle of programme, and different scales are held in relation to each other in a way which supports intelligibility and coherence. 2.0 Space, public space, and relations between local and higher scales If what I have just said is true, urban space is not just the simple physical stuff, or the void between the physical stuff, that we draw on maps. Urban space is at the same time both physical and mental. Lefebvre has taught us that if we want to understand anything about urban space we have to look at both these aspects together and never reduce the urban to simply the physical or simply the mental (Lefebvre, 1991). Space, or rather ideas about space, are also ways that we understand and construct our world. Recently there has been a lot of talk about space as flux. This is a space with multiple overlapping dynamics, one which emphasises multivalent connection. It is about extension continuity and unity, about a field whose centralities and voids are defined by and emergent out of the dynamics that play out within the field. There is another kind of space with which many of us (especially designers) are even more familiar, which involves codes for the production of our physical environment, some of which are so familiar they have become almost invisible. This space is much more closely tied to issues of territory and bounding. It is about the parts which make up wholes, about areas which are assumed to have a certain autonomy and about the relations between them. Many of our familiar ideas about neighbourhood, about urban functional zones and so on are based in a basic framework of bounded areas and the relations between them. This conception of space leads to a fundamentally different view of neighbourhood - or more generally 'the local' - and its relations with the rest of the city than does that of the idea of different scales of network interfacing each other in a structured manner. On the one hand we have a patchwork of local zones with relations between themselves, and on the other we have relations between local networks and higher scales - these higher scales acting as network systems in their own right and mediating relations between local zones.

In fact if we look at neighbourhoods in a lot of more traditional cities it is clear that neighbourhood is not this clearly bounded phenomenon. Neighbourhood seems difficult to delimit spatially and seems to be something which emerges

out of urban processes, rather than being the result of bounding intended to control urban processes. The second spatial framework mentioned above has been used for the more planned production of urban space but the first (that of flux) has always produced urban space, especially where the more conscious and deliberate process of the second has not dominated. Today, the first spatial process is again becoming more insistent and taking over from the second as the flows in our urban landscape speed up and escape the control of the spatial techniques and practices of planning and design. The space of flux has always produced urban space in more organic settlements, where preconceived ideas of neighbourhood or of urban programme do not form a prestructuring framework. Rather the prestructuring framework in organic settlements is more directly influenced by everyday life processes and their patterns, especially those related to mobility. The notion of a public space is one of those seemingly self-evident ideas which benefits from a more rigorous inspection. We tend to define public space in opposition to the notion of private - rendering it crudely homogeneous and failing to account for its complexity and unevenness as a field for social activity and meaning. In fact public space has always been highly uneven in the way it supports urban activity and urban society and in its accessibility and meaning, and it is not at all clear within the public-private polarity what the exact dimensions of public space are as they affect issues of social power and empowerment. The concepts public and private are not absolute, they acquire meaning in context and in relation to one another. Public and private serve to organise contrasts within different paradigms while across paradigm boundaries meanings can differ profoundly - the public of the public sector is something different to that of the public realm and is different again to that of the public interest. Clearly then, the public-private polarity presents epistemiological and terminological problems, and is less straight-forward than it is sometimes taken to be. In relation to the public of social groupings in a larger society, what in fact seems to happen is that segments of society pursue their own limited interests in opposition, or at least in differentiation, to a wider public - clearly segmenting the amorphous idea of the public or the public realm by scale (Borret, 2001). This scale segmentation can be taken further and related not just to more formal social organisational structures, but also to multiple, more mobile, less clearly articulated, but nonetheless real issues of everyday identification in urban space. The public may then be defined not in opposition to the private but rather in terms of the relations between multiple publics.

3.0 Urban fabrics and their typologies To talk about produced social environments as typologies or shapes of layout is ineffective without talking at the same time about typologies or shapes of use. And as soon as one starts talking about use, we can no longer talk about that layout without considering the way that everyday patterns of use and activity weave an area into the surrounding fabric and beyond. In a sense

the interwoven patterns of peoples everyday activities becomes the fabric of the city of our social and cultural experience. The expanding everyday processes of the new city and new patterns of use are producing new environments on the periphery. But they are also often emphasising the dynamic, connective, integrative aspect of use and space in centres and giving rise to programmatically different ways of using the city in the centre that nonetheless (in many or most cases) do not fall outside of the capacities of central urban space for programmatic adaptation and change. The city sometimes looks to be unravelling - processes of mobility and habitation are disengaging from each other as the city expands beyond the centre. The historical centre is characterised by proximity and contiguity - mobility connects all places with all other places within a context of high densities of people and things. Local and larger scales confront one another and contiguous flows of people, goods, money and information energise and enrich each other. On the periphery with mobility patterns historically directed towards the centre, mobility tends to concentrate in engineered infrastructures and to disengage from the functionally and experientially diluted fabric through which it is woven. The dense, integrated experience of the city is lost as habitation is consigned to capsular interstices between high speed arteries where the direct friction between local and larger scales is evaded. Relationships of scales and patterns of activity in the periphery become very different to those in the inner cities. The question is; how is the environment on the periphery we are sketching out here public, and how does its publicness relate to that of our traditional city centre model? The public space that one enters as one steps out one's front door in a neighbourhood like that of the Pijp in Amsterdam (see Figure 7b) is not an empty neutral form. The local intrinsic qualities - what is immediate and seen - mask another space whose qualities are extrinsic and which comprises a pattern of known and understood relations, relations with friends, neighbours, work, shops, facilities, meeting points, entertainment. There is no doubt that many of these relations are undergoing transformation but many remain grounded in the public space of neighbourhoods such as this. What I would like to do is examine how these relations are grounded in old and new types of neighbourhoods, and what the consequences might be for public space.

3.1 A neighbourhood within the inner city

Figure 1. A local relational space.

Social spaces are constructed in use, and the ways experience and identity are grounded in urban space are multiple and highly specific. Meaning is constructed in the way places are inhabited and experienced in relation to each other, and then insofar as these spatial relations and meanings are shared, they become one of the ways that social groups define and identify themselves. A local social space therefore may consist of the shared experience and the shared significance of locations and relations within a field of connective possibilities, and crude representations of the set of relations can be constructed using node and edge diagrams. Local spaces may, in a mixed neighbourhood, consist of the dwelling places of the members of an ethnic group along with the places - shops and cultural facilities - they use and with which they identify. It may also simply be the locations of the houses of a group of friends along with the cafe they frequent and the supermarket where they bump into each other.

Figure 2. An inner-city neighbourhood. Local relational space superimposed over the physical layout. Mapping trajectories through the physical layout generates the social space. 6

The diagram is of course a gross simplification, and represents relations between nodes as abstracted topological connections. But consider how these connections are going to be translated into movement through the actual geometry of the layout, and one gets a sense of the way that members of the same group could meet on the street in the course of their everyday activities. Mapping trajectories through the physical layout therefore generates the social space one finds on the street.

Figure 3. Overlapping local relational spaces superimposed over the physical layout.

Many of these local social spaces will of course coexist and overlap in the same urban area. Superimposing just two of them already begins to give a sense of the huge density of connections and relations that are starting to be generated. What is also interesting is the way, if you map trajectories of people through the streets of the layout you can show how people using different local social spaces will come into daily contact with each other - building a dense web of social interface and co-presence - a thick urban social space.

The local social space in a traditional urban neighbourhood is also subject to certain characteristic urban scale differentiations and hierarchies, as in the difference between streets which are quiet and residential and those where shopping and facilities concentrate - typically on the high-street, where local people and those from outside the neighbourhood are co-present. Within the normal compass therefore of a person's daily neighbourhood activities and within the local walkable neighbourhood, there are not one but two scales of urban activity. Contact and co-presence is made on a daily basis not only with immediate neighbours but also with people from outside the neighbourhood who use the shops and other facilities on the high streets. Although the high streets serve as traffic arteries they are in no way specialised as such. I will illustrate this further in my discussion of the example. It is interesting to note that the neighbourhood 'territory' is not simplistically bounded, but is defined in a relational way and that it is this that allows and supports the social and cultural overlap and diversity that we find in traditional urban space.

3.2 A neighbourhood on the periphery

Figure 4. A neighbourhood on the periphery. Local relational space superimposed over the physical layout.

In contrast, neighbourhood and community on the periphery is in general founded on territory that is about the bounding or encapsulation of land - generally in the interstices between specialised movement routes. These neighbourhoods tend also to be more socially and culturally homogeneous while social and commercial facilities tend to become segregated from the housing and concentrated in more 'generic' capsules of malls and 'centres' of various types, accessed through the specialised mobility network. Relations which may have been local in the centre, embedded in the neighbourhood and in the local social space, have become distantiated and accessible only through the specialised mobility network. 3.3 The territorial gradient; capturing the spatial/social typology

Figure 5. An inner-city neighbourhood. Territorial gradient.

Figure 6. A neighbourhood on the periphery. Territorial gradient.

Julia Robinson has coined the term territorial gradient for these diagrams (Robinson, 2001). They represent a schematic section through the gradient of privacy that a person experiences in his or her everyday life - from the largest public scale to the most intimate and private - marked off in steps from bottom to top. There is a sequence from the very private, the bedroom, through gradations of involvement with others within the dwelling, then through local social space - through different scales of public space - and eventually to those 'generic' public spaces, the 'centres', malls and other facilities attached to no particular public. Historically, when the city encompassed the daily lives of almost all people, this largest scale was associated with the public centre of the city. As the lives of people escape the bounds of the old city of course the new accessibility and centrality (at this regional scale) of the periphery siphons many of the facilities associated with this scale off into the periphery.

The local social space in the area on the periphery is much reduced compared with that in the urban centre. This is not to suggest that no distantiated relationships exist in social patterns in the inner city, simply that in the process represented by the change from urban life to suburban, relations which were local have tended to become distantiated. The relative social homogeneity of new residential areas and the use of private transport in local areas means that relations between different local social spaces are effectively eliminated. These factors have a serious consequence for the 'shape' of public space as it is defined by these relations. Consider the outline I have traced around the public space that is effectively experienced by the people whose territorial gradients are drawn here. The thick shape of the public space for the inner-city neighbourhood is a consequence of the richness of connection between local relational and social spaces. The thinness of the experience of public space in the neighbourhood on the periphery is a direct consequence of the lack of this richness of connectedness and co-presence.

Another serious transformation in the 'shape' of this set of relations is the loss of the scale represented in the centre by the high street. The simple pattern of mobility network and attached 'capsules' means that the largest generic and the smallest local scales predominate and the middle scales of direct connection to adjacent areas is lost, along with the economic and cultural advantages this kind of connection can be seen to generate in inner city areas like the Pijp in Amsterdam. Central public space is much richer in relationships, as local social spaces come in contact with each other, and in the relationship of the local with a 'middle' scale in the high street. This illustrates further how peripheral spatial layouts suffer a loss in the experience of 'the public'. If the meaning and quality of public space are dependent on this spatial connective richness and breadth, the territorial gradient demonstrates how 'public space' in the periphery, even that in well-designed 'new urbanist' neighbourhoods with all the obvious intrinsic qualities designed in - the house styles, the street furniture, even the 'corner shop' - may be experienced quite differently. It is the extrinsic qualities of space - demonstrated by the territorial gradient - that make the difference, and here it is difficult to find common ground between the 'space of many publics' of the traditional centre and this 'space of a rather depleted public', no matter how visually attractive, on the periphery. 4.0 The spatial mechanics of the local and middle scales I have done a lot of work establishing that there is a two part hierarchy - corresponding to the high-street, residential street distinction - in normal central urban space which has a fundamentally spatial basis. I have argued that the distribution of activities is not simply based in an historical narrative of decisions and events but rather that it is fundamentally based in a spatial patterning which influences the ways people move. Flows of people through the traditional urban spatial grid tend to concentrate in a higher level network called the supergrid, and I have argued elsewhere that this two part hierarchy of supergrid and less-used, usually residential, streets is fundamental to our everyday experience of the historical city. I have argued further that it underpins the mechanisms of interface and intelligibility that I am talking about here (Read, forthcoming 2002).

We can understand from our experience of traditional urban space the characteristic distinction in any local area between relatively busy streets and relatively much quieter ones. I am arguing that this is a principle feature of the spatial mechanism - one that designers often understand intuitively. When we look at plans of cities we can usually pick out with some degree of accuracy which are going to be the busy streets just by their geometrical attributes. My work with spatial models has established this systematically and I have been using these models to investigate the relationship between the high-street and the area around it. In particular how the relationship between high-street and area radically influences the character of both high street and the lesser-used streets comprising the area (Read, 2001).

It is in fact this interaction between the high-street and the area - between therefore the scale of the local neighbourhood and the urban scales just above that of the neighbourhood - which seems to determine a lot of the character and commercial and social functioning of urban spaces. 4.1 The Pijp neighbourhood in Amsterdam I will use the example of the Pijp neighbourhood in Amsterdam in order to discuss the spatial/social mechanics of the local and middle scales.

Figure 7a.

Figure 7b.

Ferdinand Bolstraat, the Pijp

Jacob van Campenstraat, the Pijp

Figure 7a shows a high-street space in the Pijp and Figure 7b a quiet residential street. What is significant is the way the readability of the urban environment - its knowability and usability therefore - are connected to the simple code that is reflected by this bipartite ordering. The city at the level of its particulars is manifestly rich and complex, but the complexity of the detail with which we are confronted in our daily interaction with the city is referenced to this intuitively known and understood spatial order, rendering complexity knowable and the well-functioning urban context thick with meaning and information. Multiple particulars relating to street-scene and the life-patterns of people become meaningful and intelligible with respect to each other through their relation to this order. Particular locations become related to the wider city while they at the same time maintain their local particularity and distinctiveness.

Figure 8. Map of the Pijp neighbourhood in Amsterdam.

The Pijp is crossed by four strong high-street axes, two running roughly north-south, two running east-west, making it an area which is powerfully connected to the rest of the city. The radial north-south axes are the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat, and the circumferential eastwest axes are the Stadhouderskade and the Centuurbaan. I will concentrate on these streets and the area around them. I want to first look at how the interface between the scales of the area and the supergrid is constructed in the patterning of streets. There is nothing spatially forced or complicated about the spatial layout, minor streets simply meet supergrid streets at right angles, more often than not crossing them so that a four-way crossing is established. If we look at the way these spaces are used, the first thing that can be said is that the characters and the types of function supported on the circumferential, east-west supergrid streets are different to those supported on the radial supergrid streets.

Figure 9a.

Figure 9b.

The Stadhouderskade - running east-west.

The Centuurbaan - running east-west.

The extremely good accessibility from the rest of the city of this circumferential axis, the Stadhouderskade and the Ceintuurbaan, is reflected functionally in the concentration of computer, carpet, curtain, furniture and household goods stores which clearly serve a much wider area than just the local neighbourhood.

Figure 10a.

Figure 10b.

The Ferdinand Bolstraat - running north-south.

The van Woustraat - running north-south.

The characters of the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat, the northsouth axis, are very noticeably different. Although they both also carry high volumes of motor traffic, the volume of pedestrian movement on these two routes is very much higher and the types of shops supported here reflect a much closer link with the immediate neighbourhood. Many smaller stores are supplemented by the high-street clothing, electrical goods and general household goods chains.

Figure 11a. The Pijp: point depth diagram showing direct links from the Stadhouderskade and Centuurbaan with the interior of the area (in green). Figure 11b.

The Pijp: point depth diagram showing direct links from the Ferdinand Bolstraat and van Woustraat with the interior of the area (in green).

It is clear if we look at these diagrams that the openness of the area grid and the transparency of the area from the north-south axes is quite significantly higher than it is from the the east-west axes. The block geometries are such that there are more than twice the density of inner-area streets that connect with the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat as connect with the Ceintuurbaan and the Stadhouderskade. The visual link down these innerarea streets is strong and direct - the green spikes represent direct sightlines and permeabilities from within the area. The area therefore has a strong eastwest bias, orientating itself on the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat and making them the dominant local-area shopping streets. From within the area the Ferdinand Bolstraat and van Woustraat are felt as a constant presence. Much of this is related to the awareness of movement and to the awareness of a higher intensity of activity along these routes. This movement and higher activity are picked up visually, and serve to orientate and to signal the spatial structure, which they do without ever becoming intrusive.

But while it is clear that the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat relate strongly to the local area, the link with the wider city is also strong, and the people on these streets and the clientele in the shops are by no means restricted to people from the local neighbourhood. Rather this is also a popular medium-priced shopping area for people from other parts of Amsterdam and even for visitors from out of town.

While spatial hierarchies are reflected functionally through a concentration of shopping and activity in the circuit defined by the crossing of the high-street axes, this is by no means the end of the story. The openness of the area engendered by the simple open grid ensures that though the functional hierarchies are clear they are by no means rigid. Shopping penetrates the interior of the area, where rentals are cheaper and where non-prime positions are taken by second-hand shops, bicycle and other repair shops, specialist food shops, restaurants, cafes etc.

Figure 12a.

Figure 12b.

Gerald Douplein

Albert Cuyp Market

The interior of the area seems to serve to some extent as overflow space to the major supergrid spaces. It is apparent that the openness of the grid serves to soften and blur the structure, and that the blurring that this openness engenders allows a freer use of space both for movement, and commercially - where shops which serve the local area and which cannot afford the high-street rentals find places which are still exposed, though at a lower intensity, within these blurred movement patterns. The whole 'interior' of the Pijp between these four major supergrid streets therefore has its activity levels raised. The most remarkable example of this slippage of commercial functions into the interior of the area is the Albert Cuyp Market, the largest daily street market in Amsterdam, which occupies a whole inner-area street strung between the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat - in a sense becoming an extension of the shopping frontage of these shopping streets.

Figure 13a. 15

Frans Halsstraat.

A contrary effect to this infusion of movement and activity into the interior of the large 'block' bounded by the major high-street spaces, can be observed on the other sides of the Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Woustraat. Here the grids are also extremely open but the effects of the pull of strong highstreet spaces does not work across the area itself, given that the spaces on the other sides of these areas exert a much weaker attraction than do the four streets already mentioned. These areas then, while being highly open and transparent, as well as highly intelligible and strongly located because of their visual openness - are bypassed by the major movement patterns. Here high clarity and intelligibility combines with a quiet ambience, the whole adding up to a quality in the total environment whose parameters are rather difficult at first sight to pin down. These areas are popular with young professionals and other urbanites in spite of their high densities and very small houses. 5.0 Summing up: Places of flows Multiple overlapping processes and their respective scales are coordinated within public space by the fact that they are grounded in material flows within a real urban spatial connective context. The grounding of these processes draws the spatial factor into the equation with its specific configurations of spatial connection, permeability and resistance. The Pijp shows how the structure produced within this spatial context may order the details of urban circumstance as well as patterns of social interface in the surface of the city, differentiating volumes and scales of movement and activity, and formally articulating the city as a intelligible field for everyday use. What I can begin to propose, is that certain spatial layouts, characterised by openness and transparency at the local scale, combined with strong connection to their surroundings at the scale immediately above the local, offer the necessary spatial-structural qualities to support the sort of structured diversity, overlap and busy-ness characteristic of well-functioning central urban locations. They enable a multiplicity of use which is at the same time spatially and functionally articulated and intelligible. These environments absorb and sustain a life of the city, structured around but not determined by the scales of the local and the wider city. The particular social and cultural vitality of these environments is underpinned by a rich overlap of social and cultural meanings constructed within relational spaces - where individual and group territories are specific and clear without being exclusive, and relations between the local and the middle urban scales is strong and direct.

These environments also underpin a potential for change. It is the strength of places like the Pijp that they are capable of changing in tune with changing times - in fact it is often on the streets of places like this that we first notice that social or cultural change is taking place. Here periodic decline has always been followed by new awakenings, with new street cultures and

economies growing up to replace older ones as wider social and economic orders are transformed. The 'permanences' - comprising particular material encrustations of function and culture - break down as social and economic conditions change, but the underlying structure, founded in space and in mobility remains, around which new encrustations, emerging from new social and economic conditions, may form. Urban centrality is constructed on movement flows and activity patterns within the urban spatial matrix. It is constructed on a dynamic and is itself dynamic. A conception of urban centrality and place founded in these ideas may offer a framework both for investigating the shifting fortunes of urban centres and locations as they respond to shifts in the scales and circuits of these flows in the city the region and beyond, and for designing vital urban places capable of supporting a rich mix of urban life and culture.

Bibliography Borret, K. (2001). 'On Domains: the Public, The Private and the Collective', OASE 54, Winter 2001, 50-61. Castells, M. (1996), The Rise of the Network Society, Blackwell, Oxford. Harvey, D. (1996), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Blackwell, Oxford. Lefebvre, H. (1991), The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford. Read, S. (2001), ''Thick' Urban Space: Shape, Scale and the Articulation of 'the Urban' in an Inner-city Neighbourhood of Amsterdam.' As yet unpublished paper presented at the Third International Symposium on space Syntax, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. Read, S. forthcoming in Space Syntax I, 2002, 'The Patchwork Landscape and the 'Engendineered' Web; Space and Scale in the Dutch City', Available as working paper. Robinson, JW. (2001), 'Institutional Space, Domestic Space and Power: Revisiting Territoriality with Space Syntax.' As yet unpublished paper presented at the Third International Symposium on space Syntax, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta.