Smooth and Striated Space

Definition

Smooth and striated space is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's central spatial distinction from A Thousand Plateaus: striated space is metric, gridded, organized by the State apparatus and the orthogonal — a space of boundaries, measures, and fixed points; smooth space is open, heterogeneous, filled by intensities and nomadic movement — "a space of affects, more than one of properties." The two always interpenetrate: "there are always two kinds of space: 'smooth and striated space — nomad space and sedentary space — the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus' — are not of the same nature," yet any composition is "always a mixture." For architecture, the distinction provides a vocabulary for the difference between the planned, orthogonal city (striated) and informal, drifting, or emergent spaces (smooth). "What defines the multiplicity is the AND… between the elements" — space as relation, not container.

Key Thinkers

• Gilles Deleuze (with Félix Guattari) — developed the distinction in A Thousand Plateaus; smooth space as the space of the nomad war machine, striated as the space of the State.
• Ian Buchanan — applies the distinction to the postmodern city in Deleuze and Space.
• Kim Dovey — the distinction's principal urbanist-applier and its most systematic architectural tester: "tools for thought" applied to Melbourne suburbs, the Yogyakarta kampung ("everywhere striated but profoundly smooth"), the injecting laneways of Smith Street, the Koolhaas buildings, the Melbourne courthouses and Bangkok's Ban Panthom — with the methodological rules (not types but properties; the mixture thesis; the depth-gradient) and the anti-orientalist caveat drawn from the application itself (2010).

Related Concepts

• Deterritorialisation — the process that frees flows from striated territorial codes; deterritorialisation produces smooth space, reterritorialisation produces striated.
• Warped Space — Vidler's account of the Deleuzian spatial roster.
• Heterotopia — Foucault's "other spaces" as pockets of smoothness within striated social space.
• Dérive — the Situationist practice of movement through smooth space against the striated order of the productivist city.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Deleuze and Space
• Warped Space
• The Discrete Turn: A Reconsideration of Architecture's Ontology
• Territory and inhabitation (Campos 2018) — the interior-design counterpart of nomadic space: "Territory evolves from a fixed place to a nomadic system of occupation"; Titlecase's "permanently nomadic plan for a single space"; Tailored's components that "move, aggregate, stack, and disperse… regardless of location" — the striated place (room, lease, address) held constant while occupation moves smoothly across it, and territory staked at furniture scale rather than by State-style metric grids. See territorial-transience.
• Topology and interiority: Folding space inside (Voordouw 2018) — smoothness's architectural price: the topological surface's "continual smoothness" and Cache's ground whose "grip is reduced to a minimum. The stairway becomes a ramp and the ground falls away" — the smooth space of the landscape-continuum inhabited "as ground," where "the emphasis is on continuity of the landscape, a smoothness, with a notable reciprocal influence of the environment on building." Voordouw's audit adds the interior-architectural cost the distinction's celebrants omit: smoothness without striation is continuity without enclosure — "the continuity of the surface prevents the (programmatic) definition of the interior and the porosity prevents its (spatial) enclosure." See topology, topological-interiority.
• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the distinction's everyday register: the smooth side given in Wise's space-thesis — "Space is in continual motion, composed of vectors, speeds. It is 'the simultaneous co-existence of social interrelations at all geographical scales, from the intimacy of the house-hold to the wide space of transglobal connections'" (Massey quoted, p. 392) — smooth space as the life-world's own composition, "flooded by the variant radiance of the milieus" (p. 392); the striated side given in the static marker: "The marker (wall, road, line, border, post, sign) is static, dull, and cold" (p. 392) — the State-apparatus's lines as marks awaiting life; and the mixture thesis stated in Morris's formula: "An open system integrates closure 'as one of its local conditions' (closure enables, without preceding, 'the outside'): and closure and openness are two phases in a single process" (quoted p. 393) — "always a mixture" resolved as two phases of one process in the home's becoming ("a becoming within an always already territorialized space," p. 395). See milieu, home, territory.
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the distinction's operationalization across seven built cases, and the wiki's fullest account of the pair as method rather than metaphor: "These are not different types of space so much as spatial properties… Every real place is a mixture of the two in a reciprocal relation where they are constantly 'enfolded' into each other" (p. 22); "all progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space" (D&G quoted, p. 22); the place-corollary ("The wholesale identification of place with being, stability and striation… is a narrow, self-deceptive and insular view," p. 23); the depth-gradient as the pair's urban law — Bangkok: "the forms of striation become weaker, and urban space becomes smoother, as one moves deeper into the neighbourhood" (p. 182); the kampung formula "everywhere striated but profoundly smooth" (p. 96); the courthouse law ("As one travels deeper and higher along these public-access paths to the courtroom, space becomes more striated," p. 136); the injecting zones as "smooth spaces without the strict territorial controls of the stricter and more striated streetscapes: 'cracks in the existing order'" (p. 146); the Educatorium's fold "of smooth folding into striation" (p. 114); the enclosed network — "permeable and open places of supply encounter… rigidly enclosed on their boundaries" (malls, gated estates, p. 20) — and the panopticon reversal: "Ban Panthom does the opposite – a deeper realm of relatively free circulation (for locals) and high levels of social capital becomes relatively invisible and protected from state control" (p. 182). See spatial-segmentarity, informal-urbanism, loose-parts, porosity.
• source-notes/dubbeldam-2006-thing-shapes

Open Questions

• Does smooth space offer a critical resource against the parametric/striated city of neoliberalism, or — as Spencer charges — is the smooth/striated vocabulary itself absorbed into "architectural Deleuzism" and made to serve the very parametric logic it was meant to critique?
• Is the distinction analytically useful for studying actually-existing cities, or does it risk a crude binary that obscures the complexity of urban spatial production?
• Dovey's casework answers the second question affirmatively but exposes a new one: the depth-gradient means smoothness and striation are positional (relative to entry, jurisdiction, tenure) rather than intrinsic. Can the pair be measured — and does the enclosed network (smooth inside, striated boundary) break the binary altogether?
• Dovey's smoothness is ambivalent (the injecting zone's smoothness is "safety becomes danger"; the kampung's smoothness is tenure insecurity), while Voordouw's smoothness is enclosure's failure and Spencer's is governance's tool. Is there one concept here — or a family of smoothnesses that the mixture thesis flattens?