Inhabitant and Visitor

Definition

The inhabitant–visitor interface is Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson's abstract model of the building's social work. Every building constructs a three-part social order: inhabitants, visitors and strangers. "An inhabitant is, if not a permanent occupant of the cell, at least an individual whose social existence is mapped into the category of space within that cell: more an inhabitant of the social knowledge defined by the cell than of the cell itself" — the inhabitant is "a categoric concept, and therefore a transpatial entity," defined by "special access to and control of the category of space created by the boundary," not by physical residence. With strangers the effect is opposite: every building "selects from the set of possible strangers a subset of 'visitors' who are persons who may enter the building temporarily, but may not control it" — "Pupils in a school, patients in a hospital, guests in a house, and prisoners in a prison all fall within this category of being more than strangers, in that they have a legitimate reason to cross the boundary of a building, but less than inhabitants, in that they have no control over that building and their social individuality is not mapped into the structure of space within that building."

The building's double operation follows: "A building also localises the global world of strangers, by the same means as it globalises the local world of inhabitants. It realises a categoric order locally, then uses the boundary to interface this categoric order with the rest of the social world." The building type ("genotype") is precisely a bending of this interface (see building-genotype).

The concept gives the wiki's boundary and privacy discussions their sharpest analytic form: privacy is not a wall but a position in the inhabitant–visitor–stranger interface — control over the category of space that others may enter without controlling (see privacy, boundaries).

Key Thinkers

• Bill Hillier & Julienne Hanson — the concept's authors: inhabitant, visitor and stranger as the building's constructed social positions, interfaced through boundary and permeability (The Social Logic of Space, 1984/2006).
• Shirley Ardener — the sibling account of controlled entry: the club/theatre/nation-state's "set of rules to determine how its boundary shall be crossed and who shall occupy that space," policed by gate-keepers — the visitor category given a rules-and-gate-keepers grammar (see partition-of-space).
• Tony Bennett — the museum's instructed visitor (the exhibitionary complex, via Stokes-Rees) as the visitor position's most orchestrated institutional form; not yet paged (see log). See exhibitionary-complex.

Related Concepts

• transpatial-solidarity — the inhabitant's ontological status: a "transpatial entity… mapped into the local bounded space of the cell" — inhabitants belong to the category, not the room.
• boundaries — the instrument: the boundary both creates the category of space and administers who enters it and on what terms.
• privacy — the experiential stake: privacy as the inhabitant's control of the category against the visitor's temporary legitimate entry.
• building-genotype — the design variable: building types are characteristic bendings of the inhabitant–visitor interface.
• territory — the analogue at the territorial scale: control and access as the spatial positions' content.
• exhibitionary-complex — the museum's visitor regime: directed routes and ritualized crossing as the visitor position's most orchestrated form.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Buildings and their Genotypes (Hillier & Hanson 1984/2006) — the concept's source: the inhabitant as "more an inhabitant of the social knowledge defined by the cell than of the cell itself" (p. 151); the visitor category — "Pupils in a school, patients in a hospital, guests in a house, and prisoners in a prison" (p. 151); the double operation ("localises the global world of strangers… globalises the local world of inhabitants," p. 151); the abstract definition of the building as "a certain ordering of categories, to which is added a certain system of controls, the two conjointly constructing an interface between the inhabitants of the social knowledge embedded in the categories and the visitors whose relations with them are controlled by the building" (pp. 151–152).
• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the house-scale interface and its postwar degradation: the front/back door system — the back door as "the informal or utilitarian entrance to the home, with direct access to the kitchen and informal areas," the origin of "'back door guests' for the household's closest friends" (p. 87); the interface's collapse ("New house designs have generally eliminated the back door concept, largely due to the standard practice of attaching the garage directly to the house; the back door was transformed into an interior door between the house and garage," p. 87); the routing determinism — "people, subject to human nature, will take the most direct route between two points, which means they will go through the garage unless an alternative is presented" (p. 92); and the designed repair — the "friend's entrance," the breezeway, entry-prominence rules, and driveway/door legibility for visitors (pp. 74–75, 92). Where Hillier & Hanson theorize the interface at the plan's syntactic level, Wentling specifies its smallest devices: which door the guest takes, and whether the building makes the right one legible (see porch, privacy, architectural-determinism).

Open Questions

• The visitor category is strikingly inclusive — guests with pupils, patients with prisoners. Does the abstraction hide a distribution of power inside the visitor category (the guest may leave, the prisoner may not), and does the wiki's gendered-interior cluster (gender-and-the-interior) require a fourth position — the inhabitant who is treated as a visitor in her own interior?
• Ardener's gate-keeper enforces crossing rules at the threshold; Hillier and Hanson's interface fixes positions in the social order. Are these the same apparatus at two scales (door and plan) or two theories (rule-following vs. category-mapping)?
• If the inhabitant is "an inhabitant of the social knowledge defined by the cell," what happens to inhabitance in the interiors of transition (waiting-room, liminality) — the room whose occupant is neither inhabitant nor visitor but a body in suspension?