Bounded Choices

Definition

Bounded choices is Hadjiyanni's name for the condition in which agency survives but its exercise is foreclosed by the built environment: "People have agency and choose which aspects of their lives to change and how. In many cases, though, choices can be bounded by limitations brought forward by the built environment, and people may find themselves without the choice to appropriate their homes to support their way of life, facing undue stress and feelings of disconnect." The concept originates in her 2007 study of Somali women constructing difference in Minnesota housing ("Bounded Choices – Somali Women Constructing Difference in Minnesota Housing") — the veiled woman whose housing "choice" is bounded before she arrives.

The concept is the interior-cluster's sharpest limit-case for appropriation: where Berger's and Brooker's inhabitation-appropriation assumes the inhabitant can thicken space, bounded choices names the inhabitant who wants to appropriate and cannot — the home that cannot host the washing ritual, the extended family, the sex-segregated socializing, the cherished tradition. It converts the appropriation cluster's political question (Kinney's "direction of the appropriation in relation to perceived distributions of power") into a design question: what in the built environment bounds the choice, and who built it that way?

Key Thinkers

• Tasoulla Hadjiyanni — the concept's author: from the 2007 Somali-women study to the Reader chapter's general thesis; "Bounded Choices" is also the name of her own 2007 article.
• The veiled Somali women of Minnesota housing — the concept's human content: their examples of "the challenges faced by veiled Somali women" anchor the concept (cited in the chapter's notes); not yet paged (see log).

Related Concepts

• Appropriation — the foreclosed act: Berger's appropriation as interior architecture's mode, here denied to bounded inhabitants; the concept's political counter-case.
• Capabilities Approach — the concept's theoretical frame: choice and freedom as "a set of opportunities, or substantial freedoms" — bounded choices are the contracture of those freedoms by the built environment.
• Culturally Sensitive Design — the programme that answers bounded choice: flexibility and adaptability recognizing the multiplicity of meaning-construction.
• Dwelling — the bounded home against the supportive one: dwelling when the environment does not "recede into the background" because it cannot host the occupant's way of life.
• Gender and the Interior — the concept's gendered content: Somali women's veiling, gender-segregated socializing, and the housing constraints that shape them.
• Housing — the concept's material site: affordable housing as the constraint's carrier (mold-prone bathrooms; menial low-paying jobs limiting "their choices of where and how to live").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — the founding source: the agency-then-bounded-choices thesis; "without the choice to appropriate their homes to support their way of life, facing undue stress and feelings of disconnect"; the Hmong, Somali, Mexican, Ojibwe, and African American interview base; the income-inequality context (over one-third of Mexicans below the poverty level vs 13% of the U.S. total).

Open Questions

• Where exactly is the boundary of a bounded choice — in the plan (no room for the ritual), the material (mold-prone surfaces), the tenure (no right to modify), or the economics (poverty limiting "their choices of where and how to live")? The chapter names all four without ranking them.
• Berger's appropriation and Hadjiyanni's bounded choices together imply a right to appropriate — is there a spatial-rights theory implicit here (cf. Teston's "access to design as a basic human right"), and what would it demand of housing policy?
• Is bounded choice a condition of poverty, of design, or of the category "refugee housing" itself — would unbounded choice even be possible within affordability constraints, or does the concept name a structural, not a designable, condition?
• How does bounded choice relate to Madigan & Munro's "constrained but not determined" builder's home ("This constrains but it does not determine the way in which the house is used") — is Hadjiyanni describing the same relation with the constraint-ratio turned up to foreclosure?