Space syntax


The term space syntax encompasses a set of theories and techniques for the analysis of spatial configurations. It was conceived by Bill Hillier, Julienne Hanson, and colleagues at The Bartlett, University College London in the late 1970s to early 1980s to develop insights into the mutually constructive relation between society and space. As space syntax has evolved, certain measures have been found to correlate with human spatial behavior, and space syntax has thus come to be used to forecast likely effects of architectural and urban space on users.

Thesis

The general idea is that spaces can be broken down into components, analyzed as networks of choices, then represented as maps and graphs that describe the relative connectivity and integration of those spaces. It rests on three basic conceptions of space:
The three most popular ways of analysing a street network are Integration, Choice and Depth Distance.
Theoretically, the integration measure shows the cognitive complexity of reaching a street, and is often argued to 'predict' the pedestrian use of a street: the easier it is to reach a street, the more popular it should be. While there is some evidence of this being true, the method is biased towards long, straight streets that intersect with lots of other streets. Such streets, as Oxford Street in London, come out as especially strongly integrated. However, a slightly curvy street of the same length would typically be segmented into individual straight segments, not counted as a single line, which makes curvy streets appear less integrated in the analysis.
Like Integration, Choice analysis can be restricted to limited local radii, for instance 400m, 800m, 1600m. Interpreting Choice analysis is trickier than Integration. Space syntax argues that these values often predict the car traffic flow of streets, but, strictly speaking, Choice analysis can also be thought to represent the number of intersections that need to be crossed to reach a street. However, since flow values are divided at each intersection, the output shows an exponential distribution. It is considered best to take a log of base two of the final values in order to get a more accurate picture.
From these components it is thought to be possible to quantify and describe how easily navigable any space is, useful for the design of museums, airports, hospitals, and other settings where wayfinding is a significant issue. Space syntax has also been applied to predict the correlation between spatial layouts and social effects such as crime, traffic flow, and sales per unit area.

Software

In general, the analysis uses one of many software programs that allow researchers to analyse graphs of one of the primary spatial components.

History

Space syntax originated as a programme research in the early 1970s when Bill Hillier, Adrian Leaman and Alan Beattie came together at the School of Environmental Studies at University College London. Bill Hillier had been appointed Director of the Unit for Architectural Studies as successor to John Musgrove. They established a new MSc programme in Advanced Architectural Studies and embarked on a programme of research aimed at developing a theoretical basis for architecture. Previously Bill Hillier had written papers with others as secretary to the RIBA, notably 'Knowledge and Design' and 'How is Design Possible'. These laid the theoretical foundation for a series of studies that sought to clarify how the built environment relates to society. One of the first cohort of students on the MScAAS was Julienne Hanson who went on to co-author The Social Logic of Space with Bill Hillier. This brought together in one place a comprehensive review of the programme of research up to that point, but also developed a full theoretical account for how the buildings and settlements we construct an not merely the product of social processes, but also play a role in producing social forms. SLS also developed an analytic approach to representation and quantification of spatial configuration at the building and the settlement scale, making possible both comparative studies as well as analysis of the relationship between spatial configuration and aspect of social function in the built environment. These methods coupled to the social theories have turned out to have a good deal of explanatory power. Space syntax has grown to become a tool used around the world in a variety of research areas and design applications in architecture, urban design, urban planning, transport and interior design. Many prominent design applications have been made by the architectural and urban planning practice Space Syntax Limited, which was founded at The Bartlett, University College London in 1989. These include the redesign of Trafalgar Square with Foster and Partners and the Pedestrian Movement Model for the City of London.
Over the past decade, Space syntax techniques have been used for research in archaeology, information technology, urban and human geography, and anthropology. Since 1997, the Space syntax community has held biennial conferences, and many journal papers have been published on the subject, chiefly in Environment and Planning B.

Criticism

Space syntax's mathematical reliability has come under scrutiny because of a seeming paradox that arises under certain geometric configurations with 'axial maps', one of the method's primary representations of spatial configuration. This paradox was proposed by Carlo Ratti at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but comprehensively refuted in a passionate academic exchange with Bill Hillier and Alan Penn . There have been moves to combine space syntax with more traditional transport engineering models, using intersections as nodes and constructing visibility graphs to link them, by researchers including Bin Jiang, Valerio Cutini and Michael Batty. Recently there has also been research development that combines space syntax with geographic accessibility analysis in GIS, such as the place syntax-models developed by the research group Spatial Analysis and Design at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. A series of published from 2006 by , and colleagues, proposing a network approach to and , have highlighted Space Syntax' contribution to decades of previous studies in .