Spatial Segmentarity

Stub note: created at the Becoming Places ingest; requires fuller treatment as further segmentarity sources are ingested.

Definition

Spatial segmentarity names the socio-spatial division of life into segments — rooms, thresholds, corridors, jurisdictions — and its power-effects, from Deleuze & Guattari's account of segmentarity ("We are segmented from all around and in every direction. The human being is a segmentary animal… The house is segmented according to its rooms' assigned purposes; streets, according to the order of the city; the factory according to the nature of the work," quoted in Dovey 2010, p. 18) as adapted to the built environment by Kim Dovey. Three primary forms: binary segmentation (divisions of class, gender, age, race — "Gated communities, squatter settlements and wealthy nations are class-based"; "Male toilets, girls' schools and men's clubs involve gender segmentarity"); circular segmentation (nested hierarchy — "the room is encircled in turn by the house, neighbourhood, city and nation"); linear segmentation (progression through sequences — "preschool > primary > secondary > university"; "the choreographed sequence of the blockbuster art exhibit… and airline travel"). All are "geared to micropractices of power": binary segments "ensure there is no place for hybridity"; concentric segments make "the bank branch… resonate with headquarters as the police station… with the state"; linear segments "stabilize sequences of identity formation, stimulate consumption and construct a sense of awe" (pp. 18–19).

Rigid and supple segmentarities are "inseparable and overlapping" — the bureaucracy's rigid compartments coexist with "a bureaucratic perversion, a permanent inventiveness or creativity practiced even against administrative regulations" (D&G quoted, p. 19). Spatially, "spatial segmentarity is a form of striation and in general terms linear and branching structures are more striated while permeable networks are more smooth" (p. 22). Dovey's method couples segmentarity to spatial syntax: the line, fan and net diagrams; the depth/shallowness gradient ("Domestic space is often structured along age… and gender divisions in its deeper segments"); the finding that "the syntax of disciplinary institutions (prison, hospital, asylum, school and factory) locates subjects under surveillance deep within the structure" (p. 109). The concept's edge-case is the enclosed network — "permeable and open places of supply encounter that are rigidly enclosed on their boundaries" (open-plan offices, shopping malls, gated estates, p. 20) — smoothness inside, striation at the perimeter.

Key Thinkers

• Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari — the source concept (A Thousand Plateaus, "1887 of the Segments"): rigid vs supple segmentarity; the state as concentric resonance.
• Kim Dovey — the built-environment application: the three segmentation types and their power-effects; the coupling to spatial syntax (line/fan/net; depth); the segmentarity audits of Koolhaas's buildings and the Melbourne courthouses.
• Bill Hillier & Julienne Hanson — the analytical instrument: spatial syntax's genotypes, "clusters of spatial segments structured in certain formations with syntactic rules of sequence and adjacency" (p. 105); depth and ringiness as the measures of control.
• Pierre Bourdieu — the concept's sociological twin: the habitus as the lived, embodied form of the same divisions ("For Bourdieu the habitus is a rigid and limiting structure, perhaps even a paradigmatic case of striated space," p. 33).

Related Concepts

• smooth-and-striated-space — segmentarity as striation in operation; the depth-gradient as the striation gradient (Bangkok: "the forms of striation become weaker, and urban space becomes smoother, as one moves deeper," p. 182).
• building-genotype — the syntax-side: genotypes as the reproducible segment-structures of institutions.
• assemblage — the segment's container: segments as the territorialized, coded side of assemblages.
• habitus — the embodied segmentarity: divisions of space and time internalized as dispositions.
• boundaries — the segment's edge: boundaries as the instruments of binary, circular and linear division.
• power — segmentarity's stake: "geared to micropractices of power"; the courtroom's "rigid segmentarity of space is the framework for the rigid distinctions… between reason and unreason, truth and falsehood" (p. 136).
• inhabitant-and-visitor — the interface Hillier & Hanson theorize: depth as the mediator between inhabitants and visitors.
• panopticon — the deep-space diagram: disciplinary surveillance located in the structure's depths.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's founding source: the three segmentation types and their micropractices of power (pp. 18–19); supple/rigid (p. 19); the enclosed network (p. 20); the state-as-tree vs town-as-network (p. 21); segmentarity-as-striation (p. 22); the syntax coupling and the Koolhaas audits (Ch. 7, pp. 103–124); the courthouse's segregated-access determinism and the courtroom's strict segmentarity (Ch. 8, pp. 134–136); the depth-gradient of Bangkok (Ch. 11).
• Buildings and their Genotypes (Hillier & Hanson 1984/2006) — the syntax apparatus Dovey adapts: permeability patterns, ringiness, the inhabitant–visitor interface.
• Foucault for Architects (Fontana-Giusti) — the disciplinary distribution of people in space that segmentarity formalizes.

Open Questions

• Dovey notes the mismatch honestly: Deleuze and Guattari "want to identify segmentarity with the latter side of the smooth/striated, rhizome/tree conceptual oppositions," yet "a networked spatial structure is fundamental to the enabling of such flows" (p. 108) — the net is both rhizomatic and striated. Is segmentarity a subset of striation or a distinct analytic with its own logic?
• The enclosed network (mall, gated estate, Beacon Cove) is the concept's sharpest built finding: smooth interior + rigid boundary. Does it also describe the wiki's privatised-public-space and atrium-hotel cases — and does the enclosed network have a counter-form (the open boundary with segmented interior)?
• Can segmentarity be designed for becoming — the courthouse chapter's search for "an architecture that can legitimate… democracy… without reduction to… the bureaucratic non-place" (p. 138) suggests the problem is real; is there a supple-segmentarity design programme?