Método

conceptualisation of the substantive domain delimiting the discipline – here the social science of the inhabited built environment – identifies and informs which aspects to study. This creates an internal realism of sorts, which can be criticised for its practical adequacy.

Furthermore, how I conceptualise human being phenomenologic-ally (see Chapter 3) concurs to an extent with ‘direct realism’ or ‘direct awareness’. Direct awareness could be defined as the origin of our experi-ential knowledge:  what we self- referexperi-entially and experiexperi-entially know to be true. It thus forms part of the condition of human being and all associated causalities, but the knowledge within direct awareness cannot directly be recognised as empirical phenomena externally. In the case of the inhabited urban built environment, it could be said that we know cities to fulfil the expectation of social life in flux as it occupies its spa-tial form. A  deeper, emancipating understanding of the nature of the inhabited built environment depends on a practically adequate con-ceptualisation of it, rather than such situated understanding (see Sayer 1985, 1993). Thus, all of our knowledge cannot be reduced to experien-tial knowledge, but it would be misleading not to acknowledge its instru-mental position in everyday life.

Geography and archaeology

The substantive domain of the inhabited built environment places this research firmly between relevant academic disciplines. The following are especially worth mentioning: the spatiality of social life as studied in human geography and applied in planning; and the materiality of social life as studied in archaeology (and anthropology) and formally applied in architecture and urban design. In my pursuit to improve understanding and analysis, my first allegiance is to human geography and archaeology.

Roy Bhaskar’s realism was originally intended to ground both natural and social sciences. Its adaptations in social science logic-ally spurred on debates in human geography with Andrew Sayer as its most notable proponent (Sayer 1981, 1985, 1993; Layder 1988; Duncan & Savage 1989; Cox & Mair 1989; Lawson & Staeheli 1990, 1991; Chappell 1991; Pratt 1995; Yeung 1997). Critiques targeted postmodern and Marxist traditions in interest fields such as labour and capitalism, whilst methodological pointers typically took on the vestiges of traditional social scientific research, such as interviewing techniques (e.g. Pratt 1995). After over a decade of silent

existence, critical realism is making an open resurgence in geograph-ical theorising (e.g. Massey 2005; Jessop et al. 2008; M. Jones 2009).

Recently even old paradigmatic debates reappeared (Cox 2013a; and comments and reply:  Sayer 2013; Pratt 2013; Cox 2013b).¹ These debates do not contravene that, in social sciences in general, critical realist influences have become a mainstay (e.g. Archer 1995; Sayer 2000; Groff 2004; MIS Quarterly, 2013), while the renewed human geographical discussion highlights (Sayer 2013; Pratt 2013)  that there is still ample scope to produce knowledge through critical realist engagements.

In contrast to human geography and sociology, archaeology has steered clear of broader engagements with critical realism. Sandra Wallace’s (2011) Contradictions of Archaeological Theory appears a first notable exception. Human geographical discourse ties crit-ical realism to postmodernist critique, and to the development of social scientific methods and emancipatory knowledge (Sayer 1993, 2000; Pratt 1995; Yeung 1997). It seems too early to tell whether Wallace’s critical realist corrective of archaeological theory will spur on development distinct from relational, new material, and non- representational theory (cf. Alberti 2016), but it certainly presents an opportune match.

The archaeological discipline has been caught in post- modern (and possibly what is sometimes called ‘post- post- modern’) tribulations for a few decades, taking a relativist stance of acceptance (Fahlander 2012). This appears to have grown out of ‘processualist’ concerns with the particular. Communicating dispersed ideas without overarching epistemology was aptly dubbed ‘the tolerance trap’ by Wiseman (2011;

sensu Dervin 1993). Bintliff & Pearce’s (2011) poignant title alludes to a ‘death’ of theory, but actually shows how tolerance leads to the some-what uncritical embrace of theoretical eclecticism (see Vis 2012). So, archaeological theory and associated practice mirrors the situation of relativism and irrealism in the social sciences (Groff 2004; Byers 2012;

also Sayer 1993); indeed a time ripe for an intervention. In archaeology

1. This discussion instigated by Cox (2013a) is particular to scientific conduct from a capitalist perspective. Vis (2010) shows how prevalent assumptions about capital combined with the subjective motivation to act (economically) challenge mechanisms assumed by Cox (2013a) without his historical materialist explanations for change. The conception of the acting subject (Vis 2010) is much closer to premises in this research. In turn, the comparative aims pursued here have nothing to gain by adopting a prescriptive capitalist view of societies. Change is pro-pelled by the mismatch of expectation and outcome due to inescapable limited knowledge of reality (cf. Vis 2010), added to everyday resistance in subjective participation in society’s imposed spiel and accumulative experience of this (cf. Vis 2009), despite the deceptive con-formism of much human action.

the theoretical preoccupation with paradigmatic discourses and metaphysics (cf. Bentley & Maschner 2009b; Bintliff & Pearce 2011;

Fahlander 2012) is detaining the discussion on how we actually proceed to work with archaeological material sensu Smith’s (2011a) empirical theory. Wallace’s (2011) plea is welcome. She argues how archaeology can be opened to a more comprehensive alternative to counterproductive postmodern tendencies beyond their useful critiques (e.g. Sayer 1993;

Fahlander 2012) within a critical philosophy of science, which directly engages with empirical information.

Wallace’s (2011) efforts to correct archaeology’s position as a social science result from recognising archaeology’s fallacies and contradictions stemming from development in a split discipline: empir-ically bound with social interpretive aims. Deeper engagement with her philosophical critique will not serve the methodological programme of this research. Instead, I deem it more productive to explain how tenets of critical realism have facilitated the methodological development process.

Critical realism has proven itself to be particularly strong at con-structively bridging the divide between conceptual and empirical sci-entific conduct. This makes archaeology’s material nature a suitable fit for the operationalisation of critical realist notions of knowledge creation. Acknowledging that methodologically the inhabited built environment only serves as an object of study translated into a material record indeed supports the suggestion for archaeology’s return to its material foundations (Webmoor 2007), though care should be taken to not recreate the fallacies addressed by Wallace (2011).

Materiality

There have been long and avid debates on the nature of space in human geography and social sciences (e.g. Blaut 1961; Giddens 1984; Sayer 1985;

Granö 1997; Blake 2002; Jessop et  al. 2008; M.  Jones 2009), and more recently in the humanities (Arnade et  al. 2002; Griffiths 2013). Despite this, active engagement with its material properties – the matter that shapes space – is strangely subdued. Archaeology is the discipline with most struc-tural traction on the purview of materiality. However, its potential purchase to inform other disciplines of materiality’s importance in spatial debates is arguably crumbling under the influence of relational and imagined (con-structivist) approaches to thinking space (see Blake 2002). Materiality is not completely absent from human geography, however. This is shown by research concerned with ‘repopulating’ the world inhabited by humans

with the things in our everyday lives (e.g. Jackson 2000; Anderson &

Tolia- Kelly 2004).

It is easily recognised that giving material culture a structural pos-ition in social and cultural geography resonates well with archaeological adaptations of Actor Network Theory (ANT) into ‘symmetrical archae-ology’ (e.g. Webmoor & Witmore 2008).² ANT leads suggestions to take full account of a ‘more- than- human world’ to incorporate the technical intricacies of human life (e.g. Whatmore 2006). On a landscape scale, allowing a role for material features in the experience of landscape leads to subjective geographical research (e.g. Wylie 2005)  which almost replicates what has come to be known as ‘archaeological phenomen-ology’ (Tilley 1994). This relates to research on sensory responses and making sense of objects’ materiality in making place in human geog-raphy (e.g. Hetherington 2003). The affective dimension of the land-scape as restricting and enabling of movement across (designed) spaces with technological objects is studied with more pragmatic aims (e.g.

Bissell 2009). Usually, however, these approaches appear to rely on the nonhuman elements of the life- world to be encountered as already constituted objects (cf. Hinchcliffe 2003), despite claims towards a more dialectic understanding (e.g. Wylie 2005).

As Anderson & Tolia- Kelly (2004) show, geographers are clearly undecided and still debating the epistemological position of the material.

It is virtually always framed in immediately meaningful (i.e. produced, as in the Lefebvrian sense of space (Lefebvre 1991)) cultural and pol-itical perspectives. Meaningful production of space largely prevents the material from speaking for itself, despite acknowledging its ‘capacities and effects’. The integral perspective on materiality and what it does in the social (cf. Anderson & Tolia- Kelly 2004)  is a useful vantage point.

Yet, it achieves little beyond reacquainting geographical accounts with the mass or matter involved in human– nonhuman relational accounts of the world.

Amidst current attention on materiality in the form of connect-ivity and relations in performance, choreographical, embodiment and non- representational oriented geographies (see Anderson & Tolia- Kelly 2004; Anderson & Wylie 2009), Rose & Wylie (2006: 477) express an

2. Actor Network Theory, originating from Science and Technology Studies (STS), proposes that nonhuman objects can partake in social systems, which are envisaged as connected- up networks. It studies relations as simultaneously material (things) and semiotic (conceptual), hence symmetrical archaeology. While I  pursue a similar position, the conceptualisations in Chapters 4 and 5 are differently nuanced, as is my position on permitting nonhuman objects agency (see below).

opinion derived from landscape geographies which is arguably most sus-ceptible to an approach giving the material a more active voice.

[L]andscape is entanglement. [...] But we still have the feeling that, here, a certain topographical richness is being sacrificed for the sake of topological complexity. [...] And the result, it can be argued, is a sort of ontological overflattening. [...] To put this another way, we are left with a topology without topography – a surface without relief, contour, or morphology.

ANT adaptations in archaeology run that same risk of ‘ontological flattening’. Materiality has been criticised for being poorly defined and not taking the physical matter of materials into account at all (Ingold 2007). Archaeological discussions on materiality, and Ingold’s (2007, 2008a, 2008b) rather physically entangled proposals of the fluxes of which the world consists (cf. Rose & Wylie (2006) on human and non-human processes), lead to propositions for ontological mixtures on the one hand (Webmoor & Witmore 2008)  and the world as a meshwork (Ingold 2008a, 2008b, 2011) on the other. The logical extreme of these

‘worldviews’ makes it increasingly impossible to study any object or category. Things end up being defined as indistinguishable; mixtures and entanglements of one and the other. Yet, due to the nature of archaeology’s exclusively material evidence, the longstanding practice of landscape archaeology (see David & Thomas 2008) can never be com-pletely devoid of the material properties, geometry, substance, morph-ology, etc. These are inherently part of the topologies we draw from them. Contrary to cultural geography, archaeology cannot choose not to be an empirical science (cf. Anderson & Wylie 2009; Fletcher 2004).