Configuration and context: a study of spatial patterns in social encounters

Abstract

In this thesis we shall attempt to show the way in which occasions of face-to-face interaction are spatially structured, and how this spatial structuring is related to the immediate context of the gathering. A series of detailed observations of gatherings in an urban pedestrian setting will be reported and analysed from the point of view of their relationship to the physical and social features of the setting itself. These observations will lead us to propose some of the ways in which spatial configurations adopted by a gathering serve not only the requirements of the communication arrangements internal to the gathering - a topic which has received considerable attention in the literature, but also the requirements that the gathering has of maintaining its relationship with that of its surroundings. These "external" relationships are aimed at securing the configuration's integrity as a gathering, and so separating it off from its surroundings, while at the same time helping to keep it sufficiently alive to what is going on around it so that the encounter as a whole can adapt to its surroundings. Particular attention will be paid to the spatial relationships of gatherings to features of other people. As we shall see, gatherings in public settings space themselves both in relation to one another and in relation to features of the physical environment, in consistent patterns. The spacing patterns observed are suggested to facilitate the process by which participants in face-to-face encounters may attend to and adapt to the flux of events around them, as they sustain a coherent interactional event within the frame of the encounter.