Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The problem of space
- 2 The logic of space
- 3 The analysis of settlement layouts
- 4 Buildings and their genotypes
- 5 The elementary building and its transformations
- 6 The spatial logic of arrangements
- 7 The spatial logic of encounters: a computer-aided thought experiment
- 8 Societies as spatial systems
- Postscript
- Notes
- Index
2 - The logic of space
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The problem of space
- 2 The logic of space
- 3 The analysis of settlement layouts
- 4 Buildings and their genotypes
- 5 The elementary building and its transformations
- 6 The spatial logic of arrangements
- 7 The spatial logic of encounters: a computer-aided thought experiment
- 8 Societies as spatial systems
- Postscript
- Notes
- Index
Summary
SUMMARY
This chapter does three things. First, it introduces a new concept of order in space, as restrictions on an otherwise random process. It does this by showing experimentally that certain kinds of spatial order in settlements can be captured by manual or computer simulation. Second, it extends the argument to show that more complex restrictions on the random process can give rise to more complex and quite different forms of order, permitting an analytic approach to space through the concept of a fundamental set of elementary generators. Third, some conclusions are drawn from this approach to order from the point of view of scientific strategy. However, the chapter ends by showing the severe limitations of this approach, other than in establishing the fundamental dimensions of analysis. The reader is warned that this chapter is the most tortuous and perhaps the least rewarding in the book. Those who do not manage to work their way through it can, however, easily proceed to the next chapter, provided they have grasped the basic syntactic notions of symmetry–asymmetry and distributed–nondistributed.
Introduction
Even allowing for its purely descriptive and non-mathematical intentions, a syntax model must nevertheless aim to do certain things:
– to find the irreducible objects and relations, or ‘elementary structures’ of the system of interest – in this case, human spatial organisation in all its variability;
– to represent these elementary structures in some kind of notation or ideography, in order to escape from the difficulty of always having to use cumbersome verbal constructs for sets of ideas which are used repeatedly;
– to show how elementary structures are related to each other to make a coherent system; and
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- The Social Logic of Space , pp. 52 - 81Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1984
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