Space of Flows

Definition

"Space of flows" is the name Iain Borden gives to his reconceptualisation of spatiality: "more anthropologically-minded historians and theorists are now reconceptualising architecture as what I call a 'space of flows' – not as objects, but as the interrelation between things, spaces, individuals and ideas." The phrase names architecture as process and relation rather than artefact: "Architecture is both produced and reproduced, designed and experienced. It is a medium not a message, a system of power relations not a force, a flow not a line." Borden derives the position from a lineage he names explicitly — anthropologist Marc Augé, urban geographers Edward Soja and David Harvey, historian Michel Foucault, "and, in particular, the philosopher Henri Lefebvre" — against two reductive views: architecture as "solely… the product of design intention, from which social effects simply follow," and the 'second nature' view of space as "simply the artificial replacement for Nature," which offers only Soja's "illusion of opacity," by which "spatiality is reduced to physical objects and forms."

The concept's evidence is Adrian Forty's observation (on the 'Strangely Familiar' project) that architecture "is not made just once, but is made and remade over and over again each time it is represented through another medium, each time its surroundings change, each time different people experience it," and Tschumi's that architecture "could not be dissociated from the events that 'happened' in it." Within the wiki, the concept is Borden's urban answer to the question the Space page holds open between its competing accounts (existential, political, poetic): spatiality as force — the third option that neither container nor object-conceptions allow. Caution: Borden coins the phrase independently of Manuel Castells's homonymous "space of flows" of the network society (not yet paged — see log); the architectural flow of people-events and the informational flow of networks are distinct, if convergent, diagnoses.

The Castells register (via Soja 2000). The homonym's other line is now documented in the wiki through Soja's cartography: Castells's space of flows is "the historical emergence of the space of flows, superseding the meaning of the space of places" — "the deployment of the functional logic of power-holding organizations in asymmetrical networks of exchanges which do not depend on the characteristics of any specific locale" (The Informational City, 1989, quoted p. 214 of Soja), culminating in the aphorism "People live in places, power rules through flows" (p. 214). Soja's critique of the same: the overly dichotomized flows/places pair "comes too close to producing its own iron cages of interpretation," requiring Lefebvre's rejoinder that "two terms are never enough … there is always an Other" (p. 215) — the glocal hybridizations of Appadurai's scapes, Storper's territorialization, and the recombinant spatialities of resistance. The two flows — Borden's people-event flow and Castells's power-network flow — thus meet in Soja's synthesis as distinct diagnoses requiring a third term.

Key Thinkers

• Iain Borden — the concept's author: the 'space of flows' as the alternative to object-spatiality, demonstrated through the blue screen and Broadgate.
• Henri Lefebvre — "in particular": The Production of Space's 'second nature' and socially produced space are the concept's ground.
• Georg Simmel — the boundary corollary: the "sociological fact that is formed spatially" — social elements forming space between them.
• Marc Augé — the non-place as the flow's contemporary site: "a turning back on the self" in transit.
• Bernard Tschumi — the architectural programme: "the most persistent architect here" — architecture dissociable from neither events nor movement.
• David Harvey & Edward Soja — the urban-geographic lineage (Soja also supplying the negative pole: the "illusion of opacity").

Related Concepts

• space — the umbrella concept: the flow is a fourth account alongside the existential, political, and poetic ones.
• thick-edge — the concept's boundary-application: where flow is negotiated, the edge is a zone, not a line.
• boundaries — the formed-between elements: boundaries as socio-spatial facts, not physical ones.
• neoliberal-metropolis — the political-economy of the flow: Broadgate as the post-'Big Bang' financial centre's internalised flows of suits, guards and cameras.
• everyday-life — the lived content of the flow: "all forms of inhabitation," from motorcycle couriers to the homeless sleeping in a portico.
• non-places — the flow's supermodern site: concourse, plaza, mall — "those spaces at once public and private."
• appropriation — the flow from below: the homeless "recompos[ing] a niche space from layers of clothes, cardboard and classical architecture."
• panopticon — the flow's control-form: self-surveillance installed in the seconds of passage.
• warped-space — the contemporary flow-space's other architectural theorisation (Vidler), to be reconciled with Borden's.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the founding source: the critique of design-intention and object-spatiality (p. 50), the definition "not as objects, but as the interrelation between things, spaces, individuals and ideas" (p. 50), and the Tschumi/Forty evidence (p. 50).

• Architectural purgatory (Morey & Alkanoglu 2018) — the vehicular register: the constant stream of movement ("Today's constant stream of movement finds humanity constantly moving through the interiors of the world"), the homogenized destination-city ("only identified by their highway exit numbers"), and the flow's self-questioning: "If connectivity is no longer based on proximity, is a car needed for relevance or transport?… what is the benefit of community, neighborhoods, or towns?" See constant-interior.

• Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — the human-flow register: "At a time when ideas, people, and products move around the globe at unprecedented speeds and scales, interior architecture theory is called on to explore questions and practices that extend beyond the comfortable and the familiar." Where Borden's flow is the interrelation of things, spaces, individuals, and ideas, Hadjiyanni names the flow's human content — refugees, new immigrants, minorities, trafficked youth, the undocumented — and asks what the flow does to the fixed interior: "What are the implications of 'falling between' for interiors, which are fixed spatialities, bounded by walls, floors, and ceilings?" The flow's interior consequence is the global construct: the interior whose culture, identity, and belonging are negotiated across borders rather than given at a place. See global-constructs, transbodied-space.

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the Castells register: the space of flows vs. the space of places ("People live in places, power rules through flows," p. 214); the critique of the binary's "iron cages" via Lefebvre's "there is always an Other" (p. 215); the glocal recomposition of flows and places (glocalization, Appadurai's scapes, Storper's territorialization); and the cyberspatial urban nexus — "Even when 'surfing the Net' or 'cruising the Web,' we remain in a persistent urban nexus (restructured, to be sure) of space, knowledge, and power" (p. 336). See glocalization, global-city.

Open Questions

• Is Borden's flow the same flow as Castells's "space of flows," or do the architectural (people-events) and informational (network) flows require different politics?
• How does "a system of power relations not a force" interact with the wiki's Power and Space debate — is the flow power's medium (Foucault's canalization) or its counter-form (de Certeau's tactics)?
• If architecture "is made and remade… each time different people experience it" (Forty), what remains of the designed object's authority — and how does the flow-thesis relate to the wiki's authorship cluster (authorship)?
• Can the flow-thesis be reconciled with phenomenological space (space, Bachelard) — is the "betweenness of place" Borden invokes at Broadgate a flow-term or an existential one?