Boella, G.

Calafiore, A.

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     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Towards an understanding of place forms through the lens ofsocial practice theoriesCitation for published version:Calafiore, A & Boella, G 2017, Towards an understanding of place forms through the lens of social practicetheories. in Proceedings of the Joint Ontology Workshops 2017. vol. 2050, CEUR Workshop Proceedings,CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org).Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordPublished In:Proceedings of the Joint Ontology Workshops 2017General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 27. Oct. 2022September 2017Towards an understanding of Place Formsthrough the lens of Social PracticeTheoriesAlessia CALAFIORE a,band Guido BOELLA aa Department of Computer Science, University of Turin, Italyb SnT, University of Luxembourg, LuxembourgAbstract. What follow aims at contributing to the recognition of place forms fromthe interaction between spaces and human activities. We will discuss the use ofsocial practice theories to frame the reality as social construction and to describethe emergence of place forms.Keywords. place forms, social practice theories, socio-spatial systems, multilevelmodeling1. IntroductionThe increasing complexity in governing the urban environment, more and more animatedby the ambition of realizing an interconnected and smart city, calls for the replacementof the traditional notion of eucliedean space, based on topological relation, with the con-cept of relational place, emerging from the interaction between subjects and objects1in 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 space2and focused on the multiple and dynamic meanings of place, which emerge from peoplethrough their behavior. It means that places cannot be seen as containers but they areactive drivers for actions and production of knowledge; therefore, place forms are notmere manifestation of an underlying structure, but they come into existence as a resultof the complexity of human behavior also in unexpected ways. Moreover, to take intoaccount how social relations and spatial relations intersect, combine and, sometimes,conflict, it is crucial to recognize the different viewpoints about place meanings comingfrom different social groups, aggregating the way subjects play power in acting. Amongpost-structuralist geography, the non-representational theory by Thrift [14], introducedthe idea of the per f ormativity of place, addressed through spaces of embodiment. In hisview, limits to representation derive from our embodiment in space (and time). Recog-1The interactivity, rather than the relationship, between subjects and objects is made possible also by theexistence and spreading of agentive objects in the Internet of Things paradigm2Aiming at representing a well-ordered and topographical space implies to concentrate on mechanism inthe euclidean spatiality, as it was for geographer influenced by structuralism i.e. Low and Urry, rather than onpeople and behaviorSeptember 2017nizing embodiment implies to take into account the multiplicity of relations that connecthumans 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 alsoin 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 forattributing perceptual meanings to the environment. However, the collective, rather thanindividual, 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 hisstudies [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 identifya behavior setting. As a consequence of behavioral settings evidences, he suggested thatthe environment, independently from any individual experiences, is structured and or-dered, therefore, in his view there are identifiable structures that influence behavior in apredictable way. Barker’s theory of behavior settings, from the perspective of ecologicalpsychology, fills with evidences the idea of place as a relational concept developed inpost-structuralist geography, so as an entity which emerges from the interaction betweenobjects and subjects through collective behavior. However, post-structuralists refused theidea of predictable behavior even though they recognized the importance of perceivingthe environment as a first step to conceptualize places. To recognize place forms it maybe helpful attempting to bridge these two disciplinary approaches, underlining the roleof 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 spontaneousor directly addressed by the way spaces are planned and built. In both cases place formsor settings emerge as an entity other that subject and object 4, from the relation of thetwo of them; however, understanding how they emerge in relation to who are the actorsperforming some spatial behavior could make more evident the non neutrality of urbandevelopment in socio cultural terms and led us to predict space uses non only on the basisof 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 torecognize and contextualize place forms in the socio− spatial environment. To do thiswe looked into social practice theories.2. Social Practice TheoriesThe social reality has generally been described as placed in a continuum that goes fromthe individualistic view to the idea of a social totality. The individualistic view is ex-3Even if they did not accept the idea of deterministic mechanisms behind structures existence, many of themreference Foucaultian idea of architecture and spatial organization as a political mean, nonetheless having inmind the possibility people react to an overimposed structure.4the existence of a third entity is also mentioned in [4].September 2017pressed 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 merelyas 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 practicesas 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 websof agents coordinate themselves with their milieus [11]. This has opened up alternativeperspectives to the interpretation of social order where not only patterns of behavior aremeaningful but it is also crucial to recognize the certain way of understanding, wantingand 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 knowledgewhich 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 thegeneral 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 butto social practices themselves [10]. Here we focus particularly in understanding socialpractices composed by actions which take place in some location. Schatzki [11] definesdifferent types of settings of action as medium of sociality when the lives of participantsin 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 ornot. In Tuomela [15] the core sense of a social practice is summarized as a repeatedlyperformed collective social action (CSA) because of a certain shared we-attitude, wherethe we-attitude must be a primary reason for the repeated activity, one without which theagents would not take part in it.Starting from social practices theories mentioned above, we can say that actionsconstituting a social practice can be performed in a single or multiple localized settings ina routinized way and the agents in performing the action bring their social group identitygiven by a shared we attitude.3. Conceptualizing Social Practices with a multi-level Ontological Approach: apreliminary ProposalFrom 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. Anaction and a social practice cannot be defined the same way since, as we have seen inthe 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 canbe ascribed to a specific social collective of agents. Therefore, instances of a class ofSeptember 2017Figure 1. A powertype pattern for modeling Social Practicesocial practice should refer to a particular subtype of the class of action. It is known thattraditional semantics of instantiation do not allow a model element influencing anythingother 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 linkconcepts expressed in multiple levels. A powertype, indeed, is a type whose instances aresubtype of another type. Powertype and subtype are thus related indirectly through theentities 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 speciesclassification [1, 5, 7]. In these cases it is generally recognized the problem of treatingspecies 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 practicedepends on performed actions, but it has its own properties that are not the same ofthe action properties. For instance, the action of running can be subtyped by differentagent’s intentionality such as the agonisticRunning whose agent wants to compete or therunningAsHobby; the agonisticRunning as social practice instance has properties whichdiffer from the agonisticRunning instance of the subtype of action, starting from whoperforms it, that, in the former, is a collective of agents while in the latter is an individualagent. 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 modelingsocial practice is shown. Social practices have different properties than actions, such ashasSocialCollective, hasSocialTime and hasGeneralLocation. The hasSocialCollective5It 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 2017property is resulted from the unification criteria which allows the subtyping relation, inthe example represented in Figure 1 it is the praying of Muslims expressing a specificway of performing the action of praying; the hasSocialTime property is referred to thetemporal distribution of the action instances of the same subtype and can be seen asexpression of the probability of the action, which is related to the social practice, oc-curence; finally, the hasGeneralLocation property aggregate the geographical presenceof 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 socialpractices as powertypes raise the issue of which kind of collective entity a powertype isas it is extensively discussed in Guizzardi et al. [5]. Their approach provides an ontolog-ical interpretation of powertype as variable embodiement, rather than abstract universalor mereological sum, which exist in time, can bear modal properties and can qualitativelychange while remaining numerically the same [5].4. ConclusionsModeling social practices is a preliminary task to shape place forms as the result of theintersection between the spatial and the social systems. In recent years, the incredibleincrease in numbers of applications aimed at collecting geo data, the spread of sensorsin the cities and the Internet of Things gives us the opportunity to apply theories of thesocial 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 bea very short survey of the theoretical perspectives on socio-spatial systems which haveled us to focus on social practice theories as the way places are socially constructed. It isaimed at opening up discussions about the modeling possibilities to represent geo socialphenomena from crowdsourced data on human activities in the urban environment.References[1] Colin Atkinson and Thomas Kühne. The essence of multilevel metamodeling. In UML 2001 The UnifiedModeling Language. Modeling Languages, Concepts, and Tools, pages 19–33. Springer, 2001.[2] Roger G Barker. Explorations in ecological psychology. The Psychology of social situations: selectedreadings, page 271, 1981.[3] Luca Cardelli. Structural subtyping and the notion of power type. In Proceedings of the 15th ACMSIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages, pages 70–79. ACM, 1988.[4] Roberto Casati and Achille C Varzi. Parts and places: The structures of spatial representation. MitPress, 1999.[5] Giancarlo Guizzardi, João Paulo A Almeida, Nicola Guarino, and Victorio A Carvalho. Towards anontological analysis of powertypes. In International Workshop on Formal Ontologies for Artificial In-telligence (FOFAI 2015), 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence(IJCAI 2015),Buenos Aires, 2015.[6] Harry Heft. Ecological psychology in context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the legacy of WilliamJames’s radical empiricism. Psychology Press, 2015.[7] Brian Henderson-Sellers and Cesar Gonzalez-Perez. Connecting powertypes and stereotypes. Journalof Object Technology, 2005.[8] Henri Lefebvre. The production of space, volume 142. Oxford Blackwell, 1991.[9] James J Odell. Power types. Journal of Object-Oriented Programming, 7(2):8, 1994.[10] Andreas Reckwitz. Toward a theory of social practices a development in culturalist theorizing. Europeanjournal of social theory, 5(2):243–263, 2002.September 2017[11] Theodore R Schatzki. Social practices: A Wittgensteinian approach to human activity and the social.Cambridge University Press, 1996.[12] Edward W Soja. Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. Verso,1989.[13] Nigel Thrift. Steps to an ecology of place. Human geography today, pages 295–322, 1999.[14] Nigel Thrift. Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. Routledge, 2008.[15] Raimo Tuomela. The philosophy of social practices: A collective acceptance view. Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2002.

Towards an understanding of place forms through the lens of social practice theories

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Towards an understanding of place forms through the lens of social practice theories

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