=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2050/shapes-paper5
|storemode=property
|title=Towards an Understanding of Place Forms through the Lens of Social Practice Theories
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2050/SHAPES_paper_5.pdf
|volume=Vol-2050
|authors=Alessia Calafiore,Guido Boella
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/jowo/CalafioreB17
}}
==Towards an Understanding of Place Forms through the Lens of Social Practice Theories==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2050/SHAPES_paper_5.pdf
September 2017
Towards an understanding of Place Forms
through the lens of Social Practice
Theories
Alessia CALAFIORE a,b and Guido BOELLA a
a Department of Computer Science, University of Turin, Italy
b SnT, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Abstract. What follow aims at contributing to the recognition of place forms from
the interaction between spaces and human activities. We will discuss the use of
social practice theories to frame the reality as social construction and to describe
the emergence of place forms.
Keywords. place forms, social practice theories, socio-spatial systems, multilevel
modeling
1. Introduction
The increasing complexity in governing the urban environment, more and more animated
by the ambition of realizing an interconnected and smart city, calls for the replacement
of the traditional notion of eucliedean space, based on topological relation, with the con-
cept of relational place, emerging from the interaction between subjects and objects1
in socio-cultural contexts. The notion of relational place comes from theories of post-
structural geographers [8, 12, 14] who abandoned the search for a well − ordered space2
and focused on the multiple and dynamic meanings of place, which emerge from people
through their behavior. It means that places cannot be seen as containers but they are
active drivers for actions and production of knowledge; therefore, place forms are not
mere manifestation of an underlying structure, but they come into existence as a result
of the complexity of human behavior also in unexpected ways. Moreover, to take into
account how social relations and spatial relations intersect, combine and, sometimes,
conflict, it is crucial to recognize the different viewpoints about place meanings coming
from different social groups, aggregating the way subjects play power in acting. Among
post-structuralist geography, the non-representational theory by Thrift [14], introduced
the idea of the per f ormativity of place, addressed through spaces of embodiment. In his
view, limits to representation derive from our embodiment in space (and time). Recog-
1 The interactivity, rather than the relationship, between subjects and objects is made possible also by the
existence and spreading of agentive objects in the Internet of Things paradigm
2 Aiming at representing a well-ordered and topographical space implies to concentrate on mechanism in
the euclidean spatiality, as it was for geographer influenced by structuralism i.e. Low and Urry, rather than on
people and behavior
September 2017
nizing embodiment implies to take into account the multiplicity of relations that connect
humans both to given spaces and to other humans, and the existence of several perspec-
tives that count as knowledge, or more accurately knowledges [13].
The embodiment and the idea of a meaningful environment has been developed also
in the field of cognitive and ecological psychology. Gibson’s notion of affordances re-
sulted in the rejection of the dicotomy between the objective/physical and the subjec-
tive/mental worlds. The perceived environment, theorized as the different ways differ-
ent individuals afford objects, may have referents located both in mind or in the envi-
ronment [6]. Gibsonian affordances have enlightened the importance of experiences for
attributing perceptual meanings to the environment. However, the collective, rather than
individual, level of knowledge has not been considered in depth from the cognitive psy-
chology point of view until the contribution of Baker’s framework on behavior settings.
Barker found evidences of behavioral setting’s existence in the data he collected in his
studies [2]; he characterized them as a function of collective actions of groups of indi-
viduals and the interdependence of actions is imposed as the primary criterion to identify
a behavior setting. As a consequence of behavioral settings evidences, he suggested that
the environment, independently from any individual experiences, is structured and or-
dered, therefore, in his view there are identifiable structures that influence behavior in a
predictable way. Barker’s theory of behavior settings, from the perspective of ecological
psychology, fills with evidences the idea of place as a relational concept developed in
post-structuralist geography, so as an entity which emerges from the interaction between
objects and subjects through collective behavior. However, post-structuralists refused the
idea of predictable behavior even though they recognized the importance of perceiving
the environment as a first step to conceptualize places. To recognize place forms it may
be helpful attempting to bridge these two disciplinary approaches, underlining the role
of spatial planning and design. This is clearly valid only in the case anthropization pro-
cesses of natural spaces have happened. What is not emphasized in Baker’s perspective,
but underlined in post structuralist view3 , is that behavior patterns can be spontaneous
or directly addressed by the way spaces are planned and built. In both cases place forms
or settings emerge as an entity other that subject and object 4 , from the relation of the
two of them; however, understanding how they emerge in relation to who are the actors
performing some spatial behavior could make more evident the non neutrality of urban
development in socio cultural terms and led us to predict space uses non only on the basis
of physical characteristics of the perceived built environment (as in Barker’s framework)
but also from socio-cultural dynamics (post structuralism).
Therefore specifying the social nature of the possible behavior patterns is pivotal to
recognize and contextualize place forms in the socio − spatial environment. To do this
we looked into social practice theories.
2. Social Practice Theories
The social reality has generally been described as placed in a continuum that goes from
the individualistic view to the idea of a social totality. The individualistic view is ex-
3 Even if they did not accept the idea of deterministic mechanisms behind structures existence, many of them
reference Foucaultian idea of architecture and spatial organization as a political mean, nonetheless having in
mind the possibility people react to an overimposed structure.
4 the existence of a third entity is also mentioned in [4].
September 2017
pressed by the utilitaristic perspective, where human’s agency is driven by a rational con-
cept of utility which can be generalized to represent each individuals. On the other ex-
treme of the continuum, there are unified theories which consider the society not merely
as the sum of its parts but as a social whole existing beyond them.
In between of the continuum extremes there are theorists, such as Pierre Bourdieu,
Anthony Giddens and, to some extent late Michel Foucoult, who account social practices
as the fundamental social phenomenon, the minimum unit to interpret the social reality.
Theories of the social reality have significantly influenced the way cities are studied. So-
cial Practice theory has added an other heuristic perspective in the study of the city in-
troducing the social practice type of entity, which is directed at reconstructing how webs
of agents coordinate themselves with their milieus [11]. This has opened up alternative
perspectives to the interpretation of social order where not only patterns of behavior are
meaningful but it is also crucial to recognize the certain way of understanding, wanting
and feeling the performed social practice, which is shared in a social group. As Reck-
witz [10] has underlined a specific social practice contains specific forms of knowledge
which characterize the carriers of a practice. He also added that social practices are bod-
ily performed overcoming both the idea of the distinction between mind and body and the
general assumption of a norm-based behavior. Rules and principles governing the pro-
duction and reproduction of a social equilibrium are not related to any social whole but
to social practices themselves [10]. Here we focus particularly in understanding social
practices composed by actions which take place in some location. Schatzki [11] defines
different types of settings of action as medium of sociality when the lives of participants
in a practice hang together by virtue of taking place within the same or different loca-
tions. He distinguished socialities in this medium into those embracing single settings
(namely commonality) and those encompassing multiple ones (namely orchestration).
In both cases coordinated and not coordinated set of actions are considered as consti-
tuting a social practice and settings can be organized in a specific layout of objects or
not. In Tuomela [15] the core sense of a social practice is summarized as a repeatedly
performed collective social action (CSA) because of a certain shared we-attitude, where
the we-attitude must be a primary reason for the repeated activity, one without which the
agents would not take part in it.
Starting from social practices theories mentioned above, we can say that actions
constituting a social practice can be performed in a single or multiple localized settings in
a routinized way and the agents in performing the action bring their social group identity
given by a shared we attitude.
3. Conceptualizing Social Practices with a multi-level Ontological Approach: a
preliminary Proposal
From an ontological perspective social practices are particularly challenging to be rep-
resented given their performative nature, that excludes the possibility of a priori cate-
gorizations, and to their dual essence as subtypes of action and as a concrete entity. An
action and a social practice cannot be defined the same way since, as we have seen in
the previous section, social practices have their own properties to be taken into account.
Notably, a social practice is related to the way an agent is performing an action that can
be ascribed to a specific social collective of agents. Therefore, instances of a class of
September 2017
Figure 1. A powertype pattern for modeling Social Practice
social practice should refer to a particular subtype of the class of action. It is known that
traditional semantics of instantiation do not allow a model element influencing anything
other than its immediate instances. As a consequence, it is often necessary to replicate in-
formation at multiple levels [1]. Powertypes were introduced by Odell [9] in order to link
concepts expressed in multiple levels. A powertype, indeed, is a type whose instances are
subtype of another type. Powertype and subtype are thus related indirectly through the
entities that are instances of the former and, at the same time, subtypes of the latter [9]5 .
A common exemplification and use of powertype is related to biological species
classification [1, 5, 7]. In these cases it is generally recognized the problem of treating
species as concrete entities existing in time and space in order to explain their biolog-
ical evolution or changes in their typical habitat [5]. Likewise, our intention is to con-
sider a social practice as a subtype of actions, since the existence of a social practice
depends on performed actions, but it has its own properties that are not the same of
the action properties. For instance, the action of running can be subtyped by different
agent’s intentionality such as the agonisticRunning whose agent wants to compete or the
runningAsHobby; the agonisticRunning as social practice instance has properties which
differ from the agonisticRunning instance of the subtype of action, starting from who
performs it, that, in the former, is a collective of agents while in the latter is an individual
agent. The unification criteria to subtype the class of action indeed must be the recogni-
tion of a social collective of agents that perform the social practice (not merely partici-
pate in an action). In Figure 1 a powertype pattern, using the UML notation, for modeling
social practice is shown. Social practices have different properties than actions, such as
hasSocialCollective, hasSocialTime and hasGeneralLocation. The hasSocialCollective
5 It is important to notice that powertypes in Odell do not follow the same rules than in Cardelli’s definition [3]
who directly derives the concept from the mathematical notion of powerset.
September 2017
property is resulted from the unification criteria which allows the subtyping relation, in
the example represented in Figure 1 it is the praying of Muslims expressing a specific
way of performing the action of praying; the hasSocialTime property is referred to the
temporal distribution of the action instances of the same subtype and can be seen as
expression of the probability of the action, which is related to the social practice, oc-
curence; finally, the hasGeneralLocation property aggregate the geographical presence
of social practices of the same type. The light gray ellipse stresses the duality in con-
ceptualizing social practices as action’s subtypes and class instances. Considering social
practices as powertypes raise the issue of which kind of collective entity a powertype is
as it is extensively discussed in Guizzardi et al. [5]. Their approach provides an ontolog-
ical interpretation of powertype as variable embodiement, rather than abstract universal
or mereological sum, which exist in time, can bear modal properties and can qualitatively
change while remaining numerically the same [5].
4. Conclusions
Modeling social practices is a preliminary task to shape place forms as the result of the
intersection between the spatial and the social systems. In recent years, the incredible
increase in numbers of applications aimed at collecting geo data, the spread of sensors
in the cities and the Internet of Things gives us the opportunity to apply theories of the
social world, which so far have been used as referent to qualitative research approaches,
to organize, manage and analyse the information gathered. This contribution wants to be
a very short survey of the theoretical perspectives on socio-spatial systems which have
led us to focus on social practice theories as the way places are socially constructed. It is
aimed at opening up discussions about the modeling possibilities to represent geo social
phenomena from crowdsourced data on human activities in the urban environment.
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