INTERVIEW: SPACE SYNTAX Bill Hillier Founder and Director
What motivated you to start researching spatial organisation? A building has to work for the community, so knowledge of space organisation and its social effects is a critical part of architectural knowledge. In the 1960s there seemed to be a gap in this knowledge. Our concepts were naïve and too simple. Back then, we were replacing the street-ori- ented system with a highly broken-up system. The only people who went to certain areas were the people who lived there. Residents were cut off from the main structure of the city. Many places were so problematic they had to be pulled down. What was happening seemed to be producing a social and psychological effect unlike anything we were familiar with.
And so you began testing the theory? I was looking for ways of systematically understanding the relationship between architectural organisation and its social consequences. It became clear that fi rst and foremost it was a problem of space. There was something about how cities were organ- ised spatially, which made them work the way they did, and there was something about those new places that didn’t work spatially.
What have you learned so far? How space is structured has a critical relation- ship to economic and social effects. It’s led to a theory about how the city is put together as a system of space, both a place you can ‘live’ in a cultural and social sense, and a place where you are close to economic activity.
In London, for example, you’re always close to a small centre and not far from a much bigger one. There’s interaction between eco- nomic activity and where we live. The duality of our existence is refl ected in the structure of the city: we work, but we’re also social. We developed a theory of the city as a very subtle structure, which refl ects both microeconomic activity and social and cultural factors.
How have your ideas progressed? They’ve become more subtle and also appli- cable at a much larger scale. At the moment, for example, I’m working on a space syntax map of England, Scotland and Wales.
What is the purpose of mapping Britain? I wanted to see if I could fi nd effects at this scale. The crucial thing is not the city but the system of cities.
Twenty years ago, cities were thought to be bad things. New Town programmes wanted to decant the population into smaller remote cities. Now it’s completely changed. We understand cities are economic drivers and much more powerful than we thought. They work in excess of their size. Increasing the size of the city by a certain percentage will increase its productivity many times more. Now, in the UK – for example – instead of saying London is too big, we’re saying Manchester and Birmingham are too small. The range of poverty and the economic power of a city relate to the way the city is structured. Two things matter, the location of cities in relation to each other and the internal structure of cities and how that facilitates the intensity of economic activity against a viable social background to make cities productive.
Where does responsibility lie for bringing in this thinking? Government, and local government. Work we’re doing in places like Jeddah and Dubai shows space syntax isn’t just a way of analysing space, but a new concept and methodology of town planning. By analysing spatial configuration you
can predict 60 to 80 per cent of movement. The astonishing thing is that applied at the national level, about 70 per cent of movement can still be explained just by the grid confi g- uration. Scientifi cally this is very important; it’s an amazing result. We thought it would be different in different places but it isn’t, it works as a system.
THE SOCIAL LOGIC OF SPACE
Developed by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson in the mid-80s, space syntax is an all encompassing method of analysing how people react in and to a space. Using a combination of angular movement analysis and multi-scale activity
analysis while integrating an existing layout enables Space Syntax to understand how a site is used and deliver environments that enhance mobility, economic activity, safety and social conviviality. The modelling that Space
Syntax uses takes all of this data and transforms it into a network graph. Each section of the site
is divided up from a centre point, designating individual areas into ‘segments’. For a building, these segments become designated tiles, allowing a micro approach to analysing space. The segments are then assessed using integration depths and mathematical algorithms to further understand their accessibility; for example,
how easy it is to reach the specifi ed segment. Once this is established, clear patterns begin to appear about how the space is used, and how to improve the space. Space Syntax’s method of
understanding space gives architects, developers and investors the chance to use their spaces to their full potential.
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CLADmag 2015 ISSUE 2
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