Reversal Effect

Definition

The reversal effect is Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson's name for what happens to spatial reference at the boundary: the discontinuity where the system "in effect reverses its mode of articulation of global experience out of local events." Outside boundaries, the settlement presents itself "as a continuous object by virtue of the spatial relations connecting the outsides of boundaries" — global experience is built from local movement through encounter probabilities. Inside boundaries, this reverses: interiors "are a series of – potentially at least – separate events, not a continuous system," and their global affiliations are transpatial — by analogy and difference, not continuity. The reversal's most counter-intuitive claim concerns scale: "Behind the boundary, the reference points of space do not become correspondingly smaller. On the contrary they expand through their primarily transpatial reference. As a consequence of the nature of the boundary, the most localised scale of spatial organisation tends to become the most global in its reference. The boundary refers to the principles of a culture." The room is thus not the small end of a spatial continuum but the place where the whole cultural order is locally realised: "what is realised in every interior is already a certain mode of organising experience, and a certain way of representing in space the idiosyncrasies of a cultural identity."

The concept demolishes the "continuum" assumption — that the same behavioural principles shape space hierarchically from room to city (Newman, Alexander, HMSO are the chapter's named carriers). The building performs the same reversal socially: "a building also localises the global world of strangers, by the same means as it globalises the local world of inhabitants" (see inhabitant-and-visitor).

Key Thinkers

• Bill Hillier & Julienne Hanson — the concept's authors: the reversal effect as the section's title concept and the theory's hinge between settlement analysis (alpha) and interior analysis (gamma) (The Social Logic of Space, 1984/2006).
• Georg Simmel — the boundary's paradoxical sociological character that Borden's thick-edge account carries into the wiki ("the 'boundary is not a spatial fact with sociological consequences but a sociological fact that is formed spatially'") — the reversal effect is that paradox given a systemic statement. Not yet paged (see log).
• Gaston Bachelard — the phenomenological analogue at the intimate scale: concentrated intimate space draws the dialectic's strength and "the most localised" image carries "interior immensity" — the reversal effect's poetic twin (see inside-outside-dialectic, intimate-immensity).

Related Concepts

• boundaries — the operator of the reversal: the boundary is what creates the disconnection that makes the interior's references transpatial.
• transpatial-solidarity — the social form the reversal generates: analogy and isolation instead of contiguity and encounter.
• interiority — the experiential content: what is realised in every interior is "a certain mode of organising experience, and a certain way of representing in space the idiosyncrasies of a cultural identity" — interiority as the local carrying of the global.
• inside-outside-dialectic — the division the reversal complicates: the transition from outside to inside is not a scale change but a mode change (encounter probabilities → domain of social knowledge).
• building-genotype — the design consequence: types bend the fundamental model, so the reversal is variable — a type's genotype sets how local structure refers to cultural principle.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Buildings and their Genotypes (Hillier & Hanson 1984/2006) — the concept's source: "The same drawing of boundaries that constructs a settlement as a continuous spatial aggregate… creates a set of discontinuous spaces on the insides of those cells… a series of discrete events" (p. 149); "There is no homogeneous continuum of spatial principles from the very large to the very small" (p. 149); "the most localised scale of spatial organisation tends to become the most global in its reference. The boundary refers to the principles of a culture" (p. 150); "In moving from outside to inside, we move from the arena of encounter probabilities to a domain of social knowledge" (pp. 149–150); "a building also localises the global world of strangers, by the same means as it globalises the local world of inhabitants" (p. 151).

Open Questions

• Does the reversal effect hold for the interiors the wiki knows best? The waiting room and the non-place (waiting-room, non-places) are interiors whose references seem thin and local rather than cultural — are supermodern interiors exceptions to the reversal, or their degenerate case (transpatial reference reduced to brand)?
• Bachelard's intimate immensity and Hillier and Hanson's reversal both claim the small interior carries the largest references — by imagination in one, by cultural principle in the other. Are these two mechanisms for one phenomenon, or rival accounts (lived image vs. social structure) of how interiors exceed their size?
• If "the boundary refers to the principles of a culture," what does the boundary of a dwelling refer to in a culture whose dwellings are mass-produced genotypes (building-genotype) — the culture's principles, or the producer's standard model? Does transpatial solidarity then explain conformism rather than identity?