Connected Communities Symposium
University of Dundee, Monday 12 September 2011

The aim of this project is to investigate our perception that architecture's relationship to subjects commonly involved in the consideration of community (or communities) is noticeable by its absence. We have described it as a lacuna.

The disciplines we have in mind include anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology and sociology; we define architecture as the spatial environment. In the accounts by these disciplines of architecture's role in our material culture, it generally figures by its absence.

Marshall McLuhan has said that a fish only learns what water is when it is beached and so it may be the fate of the ambient environment to be consigned to the background. Nevertheless our project implicitly argues for the reintroduction of architecture to a central position in approaches to issues of the built environment. Architecture is the art and practice of forming space, and the built environment is ineluctably spatial. Our impression is that other disciplines' consideration of a built environment tends to miss its essential characteristics as space, form, physical organisation; in other words they tend to miss its overall intelligibility.

When one approaches questions of well-being in communities this failure to see the link between social and spatial formations becomes critical.