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Mapping spatial cultures: contributions of space syntax to research in the urban history of the nineteenth-century city

Part of: Thinking Spatially: New Horizons for Urban History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2020

Sam Griffiths Open the ORCID record for Sam Griffiths [Opens in a new window]  and
Laura Vaughan
Sam Griffiths*
Affiliation:
Space Syntax Laboratory, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, UK
Laura Vaughan
Affiliation:
Space Syntax Laboratory, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, UK
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The theory and methods of space syntax can help to rebalance the prevailing cultural perspective, which views maps as ideological representations, with an analytical approach that emphasizes maps as sources for understanding space and spatial relationships embedded in built forms. The quantitative descriptions of urban street networks produced by space syntax analyses can be used to formulate and test hypotheses about patterns of urban movement, encounter and socio-economic activity in the past that can help in the interpretation of other historical source materials to give an overall account of urban spatial culture. In this article, the authors explain how space syntax, a theory and method originally developed in the field of architectural research, is making a distinctive contribution to research in social and urban history. The key principles of the method are explained by clarifying the relationship of space syntax to HGIS (Historical Geographical Information Systems) and through a worked example of research undertaken into political meeting places. A survey of research into the urban history of the nineteenth-century city using space syntax is used to highlight a number of important methodological themes and also demonstrates the range of innovative contributions that this interdisciplinary approach is able to advance. A final, theoretical, section reflects on maps and the practice of ‘mapping’ from a space syntax perspective.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 47 , Special Issue 3: Thinking spatially: new horizons for urban history , August 2020 , pp. 488 - 511
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Higher resolution, colour versions of the figures in this article can be viewed online as supplementary material. Follow the URL at the end of this article.

References

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5 The most widely used space syntax software is DepthmapX. DepthmapX is available on an open source licence from UCL's Space Syntax Laboratory http://varoudis.github.io/depthmapX/, accessed 24 Jan. 2019. For the integration of space syntax software with QGIS software, see: Gil, J., Varoudis, T., Karimi, K. and Penn, A., ‘The space syntax toolkit: integrating DepthmapX and exploratory spatial analysis workflows in QGIS’, in Karimi, K., Vaughan, L., Sailer, K., Palaiologou, G. and Bolton, T. (eds.), Proceedings of the 10th International Space Syntax Symposium (London, 2015), 148:1–16Google Scholar.

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14 The authors would like to acknowledge Dr Katrina Navickas, Reader in History at the University of Hertfordshire, for her integral role in developing the political meetings research presented in this section and for permission to represent her data in this context.

15 The research project: ‘Applying space syntax methods to historical data: mapping popular political meetings in 19th century British cities’ is part-funded by an Architectural Research Fund grant (2016) from the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture and is expected to conclude in 2019.

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18 S. Griffiths, K. Navickas and D. Blerta, ‘Political meeting places in Manchester and Sheffield c. 1780–1860: the built environment as a quotidian source of political agency’, unpublished paper presented to the European Association of Urban Historians, 29 Aug. to 1 Sep., Rome (2018).

19 For example L. Mumford, The City in History (Harmondsworth, 1961). Mumford believed the industrial city was essentially dehumanizing. Whatever the justice of this view, from a twenty-first-century standpoint it is also clear that critique of industrial cities that informed post-war modernism also expressed a class-based distaste for industrial cities that too easily associated environmental degradation with social degradation – a form of environmental determinism. See Evans, R., ‘Rookeries and model dwellings’, in Translations from Drawing to Buildings and Other Essays (London, 1997), 94–117Google Scholar.

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21 It is intended that the detailed methodological process and findings from the political meetings research project should be published in full in the near future.

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40 A. Dhanani, ‘Suburban continuity and change’, in Vaughan (ed.), Suburban Urbanities, 53–76.

41 Griffiths, Jones, Vaughan and Haklay, ‘The persistence of suburban centres in Greater London’; Törma, I., Griffiths, S. and Vaughan, L., ‘High street changeability: the relationship between morphology and demolition, modification and use change in two south London suburbs’, Urban Morphology, 17 (2017), 5–28Google Scholar.

42 Griffiths, ‘The high street as a morphological event’. Elsewhere in Suburban Urbanities, Vaughan illustrates the nature of historical continuity with a painting from c. 1830 by John Constable that shows Sir Richard Steele's cottage, Hampstead in the foreground and St Paul's Cathedral in the background, to highlight both the process of urban change – Hampstead was an outlying suburb at the time, while today it is considered part of London – and the continuity of urban elements despite that change. The continuity of the road section depicted as the locus for drinking culture in a succession of inns and pubs ‘signals a kind of path dependency that is one of the ways in which cities such as London have managed to adapt to change’, Vaughan (ed.), Suburban Urbanities, 5–6.

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