Organising family life: An analysis of the spatial organisation of people and activities in the household

Abstract

How cultural patterns are reflected on domestic space has been vastly discussed in space syntax literature. The genotype analogy was developed with the underlying notion that the configurational properties of architectural function reflect patterns of use and activity that are culturally structured. The paper will further investigate this question by looking at how the domestic space is able to organise activities, and therefore individuals and groups, through the spatial division and determination of architectural function. It will examine a series of interpretative inquiries on the way families perceived and used the domestic space, which were developed in the 1970s in Portugal with the explicit aim of relating spatial attributes with the way space was used. This was not achieved at the time, and the results presented in the published documents were not able to take space into consideration. The paper focuses on two questions which were proposed at the time as being major in how relationships within the family reflect the ongoing transformation of society as a whole: the patterns of use of women in relation to the rest of the family, and of parents in relation to children. Exploratory data analysis will be used to understand where domestic activities take place in the house according to configurational properties and other spatial attributes of the apartment plans, as well as patterns of space use by different family members across several households.