Built environment, causality and urban planning

Abstract

Informed by critical realist philosophy of science, this paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the issue of causality within urban and planning research. The concept of causality dominating within certain influential disciplinary and philosophical traditions is difficult to reconcile with research into influences of the built environment on human actions. This paper promotes a conceptualizing of causality in terms of generative mechanisms operating in different combinations in normally non-closed systems, and discusses in what sense the built environment can be said to exert causal influences on human actions. In order to integrate knowledge about causal influences at the level of the individual and at the city level, a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods is recommended.

Keywords:

• Built environment
• causality
• tendencies
• critical realism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Sebastian Peters, Tim Richardson and the three anonymous referees for valuable comments on previous versions of this article.

Notes

1. The authors referred to below as examples of such rejection or disinterest may not have meant their explicit or implicit denial of built environment causality seriously. But some of their statements nevertheless say so, taken literally, and these arguments can be (and have sometimes been) used to discredit research and planning focusing on the influences of the built environment on human actions.

2. I.e. understanding the meaning of action from the actor's point of view.

3. Ironically, the hermeneuticist tradition seems to have adopted the classical positivist notion of causality, which, according to Comte, rejects concerns with the “intimate nature” of causal relationships as well as the “essential mode” by which they have been produced. Instead, research should, according to classical positivism, focus on “constant relations of succession or similitude” (Comte, 1835). This positivist understanding may have paved the way for the denial of the concept of causality in the hermeneutic tradition.

4. A secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary phenomenon.

5. Personal e-mail communication May 8, 2012.

6. When developing his structuration theory, Giddens admittedly drew explicitly on Hagerstrand’s time-geography, which strongly emphasizes the constraints on human actions set by spatial contexts. However, Giddens criticized Hägerstrand’s theory for recapitulating the dualism of action and structure (Van Schaik, 2009, p. 53). Giddens was influenced by Janelle’s theory of space-time convergence, and this may have led him to downplay the time lag between the influences of structures on agency and agents’ subsequent reproduction, modification or change of the structures in question.

7. Foucault’s discussions of how the layout of built structures such as prisons and asylums can discipline the behaviour of inmates obviously imply that built environments are assumed to exert influence on humans and social life. His broad concept of dispositif (Foucault, 1980) includes architectural forms and arguably also the built environment generally, but the causal status of the built environment as such is, to my knowledge, not discussed in Foucault’s writings.

8. There might seem to be a danger of reification here. However, the continuing existence of social structures depends upon activity. Although the structure has been there from the beginning, it is only there in the end if we continue to use or maintain it (Bhaskar, 1993).

9. Some other authors, such as Østerberg (1974), explicitly distinguish between social structures and material structures.

10. The critical realist concept of four-planar social being is thus fundamentally different from the “nature-blindness” of traditional sociology (Benton, 2001; Dunlap & Catton, 1983) as well as the one-dimensional “Homo oeconomicus” of neoclassical economics (Archer, 2000).

11. An analogy with medical research may help illustrate this point. Although smoking disposes for lung cancer, not all smokers actually develop this disease. Smokers are still more likely than non-smokers to get lung cancer, and more so the more they smoke.