CAPITULO IV: CONCLUSIONES Y RECOMENDACIONES
4.2. Recomendaciones
This temporal priority of the persistence of affordance of boundaries thus paves the way to an expression of mereological causality (see Smith & Varzi 1997, 2000) in which boundaries as constituent elements of the surrounding built environment (cf. Abbott’s (1995) neighbourhood system as a constitu-tive context) let specific aggregates emerge. ‘Objects and processes can each be conceived as being put together or assembled out of (respectively: spa-tial and temporal) proper parts’ (Smith 2001: 3). My aim is not to categorise the emergent entities with increasing aggregate specificity and complexity.
Instead, my aim is to reveal and understand how assembled entities cohere as affective and affording patterns. Assemblages consist of built boundaries that manifest a pattern of consistency in the relational and fuzzy inter-actional differentiations structured by their spatial- material properties.
The material presence of built boundaries thus forms a basis for the study of the specific socio- spatial phenomena implied by inhabiting and developing a built environment. Material presence occurs in the assembled constellations of emergent entities on a fluid scale of the experience of time- space specific local inhabitation. Our understanding of the socio- spatial significance of built boundaries depends on their affordances to persist materially, because, being emplaced, perceptive and experiential, we have no choice but to interact upon encounter. Such significance is not exclusive to initially secluded entities, but also applies to the encounter of larger-scale coherent entities aggregating persistent affordance.
Abbott (1995: 873) raises the suggestion that entities have the ability to ‘do’ social action. Action, then, can be seen ‘as any ability to create an effect on the rest of the social process that goes beyond effects that are merely transmitted through the causing entity from else-where’. While such definition of action corrupts the more precise one of purposeful action by Von Mises (1998), accepting the effect of any perceived or experienced and conceived entity as real is in concordance with the critical realist reading of causal powers. Causal power can be of a different order in aggregate or emergent constellations than its sep-arate constituents. The interactive effects of the materialised presence of (aggregate) entities (sensu Wallace’s (2011) agency without intent) are pivotal for the social study of the full boundary composition of built environment configurations.
Fiat and bona fide boundaries
This chapter emphasises that historically and socio- culturally particular boundaries are not an explicit target of methodological development.
Instead, it maintains a focus on the physical characteristics of boundaries that can be readily perceived and experienced. Ultimately, to translate boundary concepts into analytical units, the protean nature of boundary as a term referring interchangeably to lines, edges, barriers, divisions, etc. needs to be overcome. Such translation must clearly distinguish what boundaries are in terms of observable information (spatial data) on the physical properties of built environments. Although I never concealed my focus on boundaries as an empirical phenomenon, how I explained their constitution will not ward off misunderstandings on an ideational level entirely. In order to definitively disentangle the empirical and ideational boundary concepts in my treatment of boundaries so far, I introduce Smith & Varzi’s (1997, 2000; further elaborated by Smith 2001; see also Vis 2014a) distinction between fiat and bona fide boundaries. Employing this scheme will help achieve an effective operationalisation of boundary concepts in research practice.
Essentially the opposing definition of fiat and bona fide boundaries is remarkably simple. However, this basic idea may get complicated, mostly in the way it affects subsequent concepts for research. Bona fide boundaries are those distinctions that are based on spatial discontinuity (e.g. holes, fissures, slits) or qualitative (physical) heterogeneity (e.g.
material constitution, texture, electric charge). Fiat boundaries are those distinctions that are based on differentiation without association with spatial discontinuity or qualitative (physical) heterogeneity. That means conceptual or imagined differentiations, such as national borders and sacred ground. Recognition of this fundamental difference completes the opposition instantaneously. It applies equally to inner and outer bound-aries,5 which in theory does not limit their use to any distinction (Smith &
Varzi 1997, 2000; Smith 2001).
Both fiat and bona fide boundaries may form entities, or, in Smith &
Varzi’s (2000) terms: objects. Adapting their examples, bona fide objects could be a body, ball or cheese, whereas fiat objects could be a property, a hemisphere or the North Sea. For the latter, the North Sea, it is apparent that along the coastal lines fiat and bona fide boundaries coincide. One should add though that the lines delimiting the North Sea on maps are entirely fiat. Although one may argue these lines represent the physical
5. In the present (material) context, it seems counterproductive and inaccurate to introduce a difference between inner and outer boundaries, because how can it a priori be defined what can be regarded as entities, which may then contain or allow for inner distinctions to be made?
However, once put in a processual perspective it becomes acceptable that when an entity is established (e.g. a hut), inner distinctions of its parts could be made (e.g. eating and sleeping zones). Since the physical properties of the entity’s surface continue, distinguishing one zone from the other would introduce an inner (fiat) boundary.
distinction between land and sea, we know that the tides are in constant movement. Therefore, no coastline can ever be truly represented by a static boundary. Instead, as some maps will do, it would gain accuracy by depicting the zone of fluctuating encroachment (cf. fuzziness). It should be noted that most fiat boundaries do not exclusively depend on human fiat, but (as phenomenological experience suggests) involve the under-lying material properties of a phenomenon also. Bona fide objects cannot also depend on fiat boundaries. Fig. 4.1 depicts how the basic distinction between bona fide and fiat boundaries works.
Smith & Varzi (2000) further distinguish between individual fiat boundaries and social fiat boundaries. The first kind pertains to the arbi-trary choice made on the basis of individual perception and conception, and often results from a single act at a given time. This arbitrary choice can also be determined by e.g. a type of measurement or mathematical calculation (e.g. centre of mass of celestial bodies or the equator). Social fiat boundaries are dependent on the perception of the participating human beings (cf. Chapter 3 on institutional projects and systems) for the arbitrary choice of setting the boundary. In addition, Smith & Varzi recognise the more abstract social fiat boundaries that are imposed, and therefore appear relatively detached from causal change (e.g. many policy driven and political borders).
Finally, it can be logically reasoned that bona fide objects are all connected (in the continuum of the physical spatial world), whereas fiat objects may be scattered. Simultaneously, some of the scattered fiat objects may be unified in fiat objects of a higher order, e.g. island groups. It is useful to note these further distinctions as they can readily be connected to the preceding theorising in this chapter and Chapter 3.
Fiat boundary Bona fidebounda ry
Fig. 4.1 A representation of the difference between bona fide and fiat boundaries.
The difference between the discrete (physical) distinction of bona fide boundaries, represented by the solid line of the circle, and the ideational distinction of fiat boundaries, represented by the dotted line, which indicates what we agree distinguishes the upper from the lower half. Note, how-ever, that fiat boundaries can also occur in dissociation from bona fide boundaries.
Moreover, it should be noted that none of these distinctions changes the first definitions of fiat and bona fide boundaries: a boundary refers to a physical distinction or it does not. As data on urban form and spatial layout contained in the complex composition of the built environment results from documenting and measuring observed physical differences, this philosophical assessment of boundary concepts is highly beneficial for coming to terms with the how and what of the empirical reality our data truly represent.
Next, we delve further into the implications for the concrete empir-ical world. Because bona fide boundaries are material, i.e. they have div-isible bulk or mass, they necessarily occupy space. They must be part of the entities, bona fide objects, which are circumscribed by them. That means that bona fide objects ineluctably comprise their own bound-aries, whereas the environment they are embedded in is open (cf. Ingold 2008a). Bona fide objects thus have open complements.
Holes and tunnels, however, are notable examples of where this seems to work the other way around. These are called negative objects (Smith 2001). Where a void occurs in the surrounding material surface, the resulting bona fide object is defined from the outside by the bona fide boundary of its ‘host’ (Smith & Varzi 2000; Smith 2001). Negative objects cannot be true bona fide objects, as they need fiat boundaries to completely circumscribe them as an entity. That is, the entranceways are not bounded by (observable or experiential) bona fide boundaries but ascribed to them by human fiat (Smith 2001). Here fiat, for example, separates the air filling a hole from the air outside, or an otherwise con-tiguous ground surface (this idea is taken forward in Chapters 5 and 7 with ‘virtual boundaries’).
Accepting the open complements of bona fide objects does not imply that when a bona fide object is divided (by fluxes or transforma-tive interaction) it leaves one part open and the other closed (because it comprises the boundary). Instead, the extant outer boundary of the bona fide object is progressively deformed and becomes two surfaces (one for each now separate bona fide object) (Smith & Varzi 2000).
Recapitulating, boundaries as sites of difference are a way of better understanding differentiation: the recognition that something is not something else. The process of differentiation works continuously, through all concepts, perceptions and experiences coming forth from inhabiting the concrete, socio- spatial world. The physical properties of the spatial world lead to differentiation according to bona fide bound-aries. In getting to know the world we have the capacity to project divisive fiat boundary conceptions onto and next to those physical differences.
Except for recognising our fellow human beings as physically present entities, most differentiations in the social world are fiat boundaries, i.e. arbitrary, ideational decisions, while in the concrete inhabited world many of the fiat distinctions make use of underlying physical differences.
Following from the time- geographical principles of Hägerstrand (1975, 1976) I already argued that the same spatial location cannot be occupied twice. This logically means that bona fide boundaries cannot coin-cide, as is indeed acknowledged by Smith & Varzi (2000: 416). However,
‘fiat boundaries, because they are not possessed of divisible bulk, do not occupy (fill out) the space where they are located; hence they can be per-fectly co- located one with another’. This notion is crucial for understanding how the concepts come about that devise our built environment data.