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The Social Roles of Buildings New Series 65 Stockholm Studies in Sociology The Social Roles of Buildings New Series 65 The Social Roles of Buildings An Account of Materiality and Meaning in Urban Outcomes Lauren Dean ©Lauren Dean, Stockholm University 2017 ISBN 978-91-7649-602-2 (Print) ISBN 978-91-7649-603-9 (Digital) ISSN 0491-0885 Printed in Sweden by US-AB, Stockholm 2017 Distributor: Stockholm University Department of Sociology Cover Images by Lauren Dean For Santiago, New York, and Stockholm—the cities that have welcomed me home. Contents List of Illustrations ix I. INTRODUCTION 1 INTENTS 1 PUZZLES 4 BUILDING CONCEPTS 8 FOUNDATIONS 14 METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH 28 THE CASE 34 II: BUILDING URBAN TYPES 43 BUILDING TYPES: NAMES AND FORMS 43 RESIDENTIAL TYPOLOGY 49 URBANIZATION AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS 51 THE FRENCH CONNECTION 58 NAMES 63 URBAN FORMS 66 “WORKERS’ HOUSING” 73 CITÉS IN SANTIAGO 76 III: USES OF SPACE 80 URBAN SPACE AND EVERYDAY USE 80 CONTEMPORARY CITÉS 85 THE PATIO 87 DESCRIPTION OF CONDITIONS 90 DESCRIPTION OF USE 93 COMPARISONS OF USE 97 GATES: EXCLUSION AND EXCLUSIVITY 103 ON PRIVATE COLLECTIVE SPACES 108 BUILDING MEANING 112 IV: REUSE AND NEIGHBORHOOD TRANSFORMATION 114 URBAN NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE 114 BARRIO ITALIA 118 PUTTING UP A FRONT / MAINTAINING A FACADE 123 NARRATIVE OF NOSTALGIA 128 PATIO REUSE 134 PERFORMING THE PAST 138 REUSE AND CO-TRANSFORMATION 141 CONCLUSION: TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF BUILDINGS 144 ON THE SOCIAL ROLES OF BUILDINGS 144 FORM AND FUNCTION (AND USE) 145 FORM, MEANING, AND DEFINITION 146 NAMES 147 BUILDING METHODS FOR BUILDING THEORY 149 FUTURE RESEARCH 151 Appendix 153 METHODOLOGY: DETAILS, ETHICS, AND CONCERNS 153 SAMMANFATTNING/RESUMEN (TRANSLATED SUMMARIES) 173 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 175 WORKS CITED 178 List of Illustrations Relationship between Buildings and Society 29 Table of Analytical Levels 33 Cité Floor Plan (model) 35 Urban Block, Santiago (c. 1910) 36 Examples of Cité Exteriors: Gates 39 Examples of Cité Interiors: Patios 41 Urban Grid, City of Santiago (1894) 47 Conventillo, Santiago (c. 1917) 53 French Architectural Influence in Santiago 61 Earliest Known Cité in Santiago (c. 1891) 67 Examples of Cités in Contemporary Paris 69 Patio Floor Plan 93 Floor Plan Reused House 123 Traditional Conversions in Barrio Italia 125 New Conversions in Barrio Italia 126 Collective Use Patios 136 “Cités” in Barrio Italia 139 “Architecture is all too often imagined as if buildings do not—and should not—change. But change they do, and have always done.” -The Secret Lives of Buildings (Hollis 2009:13) I. Introduction Intents Buildings are integral to urban life. Cities are landscapes of built forms, encompassing neighborhoods of architectural ensembles and urban spaces delimited by walls. The material compositions of buildings affect our actions and understandings. We construct, use, define, and interpret them. But these are interactive processes. The material construction of new buildings can play a role in changes to the social landscape of a city. Buildings become markers of distinction, create new means of categorization, and fix geographical distributions. The use of a building both bounds and creates opportunities for practices. It materially divides and can also cohere. Reused buildings harbor prior functions in their facades and can provide visual evidence of the past to urban areas in flux. Through these interactions buildings gain new meanings and are redefined. In this dissertation, I find that buildings, as both a methodological tool and a research site, are valuable for understanding society. As a method, buildings allow access to various urban contexts. As a research site, the material and the social are integrated. Herein I will discuss the making of a building type—a continual process over time—wrapped up in the making of a city.1 The book Buildings and Society (King 1980b) opens with two questions: “What can we understand about a society by examining its buildings and physical environment? What can we understand about buildings and environments by examining the society in which they exist?” (p. 1). The chapters in King’s edited volume are written from the level of building types. That is, they do not explain how individual buildings come into existence in a society, but how new types arise. From this vantage point, we see that societies and buildings change together. I draw from King’s initial 1 My focus is on the urban for this case study. It is not that buildings don’t exist outside cities; it is that the city does not exist without buildings. 1 questions, but make a contemporary divergence. King and the other authors rest on the conclusion that society produces buildings, which in turn help to maintain existing structures—that is, buildings are produced to meet a social function and in carrying out that function they prop up modes of social organization, practices, or divisions of power. Buildings, in their view, maintain society. While I think that this can be the case, I also think that buildings play a role in helping to produce society, often in unintended or unexpected ways. In the 1980s this may have seemed a radical view but social science has continually moved in the last decades to pursue theoretical and empirical understandings of how objects (Appadurai 1986b; Dant 2005; Miller 1987; Mukerji 1994), non-humans (Callon 1993; Jerolmack 2013; Jerolmack and Tavory 2014; Latour 1991, 1992, 1993, 2005), or physicality and materiality in general (Gieryn 2002b; Low 2003, 2011; Molotch 2005; Pinch 2008, 2010; Pinch and Swedberg 2008) are constitutive of the social. Buildings and building types are particularly good for assessing how “things” affect social outcomes, changes, or processes because buildings are multivalent. Buildings have stated functions, are used by multiple actors and groups, take on cultural meanings, change definitions, and, as they lie in the realms of both utility and art, are interpreted through both practical and visual experience. Some of these claims could be made about designed goods in general. But, the main factor that makes them good for urban studies is that cities are comprised of buildings. If we are interested in how processes, changes, and outcomes unfold in urban life, I argue that we must look to buildings for some answers. The centerpiece of this dissertation is a case study of a building type that showcases roles buildings play in urban life, by following the same building type across history and levels of analysis in one city. The overarching case shows how a new building type is born in a society and what buildings do, as both materiality and meaning, to help bring about outcomes. Overall, it is a case of change. Through all parts of the process buildings and society are in continual construction. At the analytical levels of city, interactional space, and neighborhood, buildings and people interact through construction, use, and reuse, respectively. My intent herein is to analytically integrate the material and the social. In my empirical chapters, I look at urbanization, divisions and uses of space, and neighborhood change. These are things that 2 sociologists have long studied. The question I pose is: what are the buildings doing? If we can answer this, will we find that we have been missing something in our current analyses? The study of buildings offers a distinct perspective into urban environments, both methodologically and theoretically. To this end, the thesis concludes with thoughts on a tentative blueprint of concepts and methods for the sociological study of buildings. The three empirical chapters of the thesis present individual cases within the case. The first traces a process of late 19th century urbanization to show the entrance of new residential building types into a city and how the physical and social landscape is reshaped in the process, emphasizing how one urban form emerges and is defined. Intercontinental connections bring new architecture and new language, stabilizing the link between form and name in the city. The resulting spectrum of buildings within the type shows how the diversity of residents shapes material outcomes. As the new buildings become fixed in the urban landscape, so too do social categories. How buildings change definitions both between and within societies, as well as start to take on meanings, is explored. Once definitions and form are established, the following chapters explore the roles of the buildings in contemporary urban life. Photo analysis is employed to examine uses of shared space (a “patio”) in a residential building where buildings are theorized as material structures that contribute to patterned activities. It addresses how the building creates opportunities for observed everyday uses of private collective space. Using published comparison cases demonstrates that practices appear to differ between buildings of the same type when income of residents differs. It is hypothesized that opportunity is created not by the existence of the space per se, but by its gated enclosure, which separates the public street from the private space. The building is understood as a bound that simultaneously fosters interaction and exclusion. Activities in these spaces, over time, contribute to new cultural understandings of the building type, showing how use can generate meaning. The last empirical chapter examines the reuse of residential buildings for commercial purposes in one neighborhood. The goal is to illuminate roles buildings play in contemporary neighborhood transformations. Rather than 3 understanding transformation through reuse itself,
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