Daniel Koch

KTH Royal Institute of Technology | KTH · School of Architecture and the Built Environment (ABE)

This article discusses extended implications of Lefebvre's The Production of Space in the context of contemporary global neoliberalism, by focus on its presence in architectural space as lived space and spatial practice. The main discussion concerns Lefebvre's concepts of abstract space, in relation to Felix Guattari's three ecologies, and the Aris...

The 20th century saw significant transformations in the way cities and other settlements were planned and developed; these transformations were visible not only in architecture and urban form but also in the theoretical and conceptual models, modes of operation, and challenges these fields faced. At the same time, a remarkable consistency can be ob...

This article engages with the role of what one might tentatively call “secondary” urban spaces, in that while they are public, they are not the most vibrant, populated, or active places. These are not the spaces envisioned in many project illustrations. They are not full of people and activity. They are however a crucial part of a wider texture of...

Museum architecture and curatorial exhibition designs structure the experiences and social relations associated with museum visits. Such experiences and relations are generated and qualified by movement. While patterns of movement and social relations in museums are richly studied in configurational research and museum studies respectively, qualita...

That there are challenges translating the "smart city" to rural contexts is alreadyestablished, as is discourse on whom the "smart city" is for. ln an era of suddenchange, and in locations of noticeable demographic transformation, some of thesechallenges become particularly noticeable. Sometimes—at least in popular mediaand discourse—understood as...

Morphological studies of buildings have long emphasized the analysis of their enduring spatial configuration. However, with the growing contemporary demand for building resilience, frequent reconfiguration is necessary, often involving the introduction of lighter, more flexible elements or the remodeling of permanent structures. Drawing from exhibi...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant changes in day-today mobility patterns. Much research has revealed the socioeconomic disparities in travel behavior during the pandemic, focusing on the differences between different socioeconomic groups. By contrast, relatively little research has been done to explore the potentially different responses to...

The prevailing implementation and usage of contemporary lighting technologies and design practices in cities have created over-illuminated built environments. Recent studies indicate that exposure to electric lighting effects formed through spatial characteristics has visual, physiological, and behavioural effects on both humans and non-humans, suc...

[ENG] The Duved Project for Local Communities 2. 0 aims to investigate models for how rural areas can be developed, and to some extent to stand as a model for future societies in broader perspectives. An ambitious, broad, and complex goal, to say the least. In this work, the project's work track digitalization has been confronted with and processed...

Este artigo discute a interação entre leiautes espaciais efêmeros e perenes que, embora observáveis em diversos tipos edilícios, são particularmente evidentes em espaços expositivos, e propõe três modelos descritivos – complexo, genérico e específico – capazes de capturar e relacionar suas possibilidades máximas, mínimas e intermédias de desempenho...

Recent empirical research has confirmed the importance of green infrastructure and outdoor recreation to urban people’s well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, only a few studies provide cross-city analyses. We analyse outdoor recreation behaviour across four Nordic cities ranging from metropolitan areas to a middle-sized city. We collect...

Modeling spaces and their relationships is at the core of syntactic analysis, including reach analysis. In a syntactic model, two spaces can be described as close together or far apart based on the directional distance between them. In this study, we compare three different ways of measuring directional distance—namely, by number of steps, by numbe...

Syntactic analysis focuses analyzing space from a general perspective, where connections of ‘visibility and access’ are analyzed through different geometrical abstractions. In universal design research, the point of origin is that what is ‘visible’ or ‘accessible’ is different for different people depending on for example age or disability. This pa...

This research report is in Swedish and presents findings from a research project on universal design from a systems perspective. This perspective includes “systems” in several aspects: planning systems, political systems, organizations, social systems, and spatial systems. The focus is on planning systems and spatial systems, addressing chal- lenge...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, physical distancing, mobility restrictions and self-isolation measures were implemented around the world as the primary intervention to prevent the virus from spreading. Urban life has undergone sweeping changes, with people using spaces in new ways. Stockholm is a particularly relevant case of this phenomenon since mo...

As a showcase for ideal urban visions, Olympic Villages encompass the utopian disposition of the Olympic Games. More precisely, Olympic Villages could be understood as a heterotopia, a theorization that stems from an analysis of their historical, conceptual, and spatial evolution over the course of the Summer Olympic Games. Against this backdrop, w...

PST is an open source tool for performing spatial analyses. It combines the space syntax description of the urban environment with conventional descriptions of attraction into a combined accessibility analysis tool. It is currently available as a plugin for QGIS, an open source GIS software. Earlier PST versions are also available as a plugin for t...

Here, I engage with architecture from a perspective related to Judith Butler’s discussion of performativity as structures-in-the making. The relation of local, spatial situatedness to the extended structuring of social relations is of particular interest. This needs to be done with care since, as Nick Kaye notes, architectural space is not a precis...

During the Corona pandemic, extensive interventions have been introduced to limit the spread of Covid-19. Authorities, companies, and organisations introduce comprehensive restrictions. To capture new routines, we launched a web questionnaire (PPGIS) including maps in three cities in Sweden; Stockholm, Uppsala and Gothenburg. From the first month r...

During the Corona pandemic, extensive interventions have been introduced to limit the spread of Covid-19. Authorities, companies, and organisations introduce comprehensive restrictions. To capture new routines, we launched a web questionnaire (PPGIS) including maps in three cities in Sweden; Stockholm, Uppsala and Gothenburg. From the first month r...

Under Coronapandemin införs omfattande restriktioner och många åtgärder sätts in i syfte att förhindra smittspridning av Covid-19. Myndigheter, företag och organisationer introducerar en lång rad förändringar såsom distansarbete, distansundervisning, uppmaning om att endast göra nödvändiga resor med kollektivtrafiken men också att praktisera social...

PST is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. The GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to...

Space syntax has established itself as a significant field of research into architectural and urban phenomena through the analysis of spatial configuration. Analyses that predominantly consist of variations on modelling spatial configurations as systems of axial lines, segments, convex spaces or isovists with further refinements. This analysis buil...

One aspect of how cities are arranged and configured, from structures of communication networks to land division, programme distribution, and location of functions, monuments, and other urban objects is directly related to questions of power and representation. While sometimes more explicitly discussed regarding buildings or historical cities, as b...

In analyses of affordances and opportunities in different neighbourhoods it is found that access to public buildings and a well-functioning public space are of outmost importance. This is found to be especially important in neighbourhoods having a population with fewer resources, areas often discussed in terms as 'deprived' or 'excluded', concepts...

This paper proposes and explains a type of diagrams which share some of the characteristics distinctive of axial maps, while also differing substantially in some other aspects. A main discussion in Space Syntax is the capacity of different diagrammatic representations to describe relevant morphological characteristics of space: convex maps or visib...

PST is a spatial analysis software that combines the Space Syntax description of the urban environment with conventional descriptions of attraction into the combined accessibility analysis tool. The zip file contains Tutorials and training datasets. For the complete documentation, download PST Documentation. PST is free software: you can redistr...

Forskningsprojektet Gränssnitt Gottsunda syftar till att öka förståelsen för hur förutsättningar i byggnader och städer får betydelse för sociala processer som i sin tur formar och reproducerar samhället. Centrala frågor i det här projektet berör segregation, utanförskap och ojämna livsvillkor samt hur dessa är kopplade till stadens resurser, till...

Avsikten med det här kapitlet är att reflektera kring två teman - makt och rumsstruktur - på ett sätt som underlättar för planeringspraktiken att ta sig an relationer mellan dessa teman. Området är brett och komplext och också komplicerat; eftersom makt till övervägande del är en social praktik låter den sig inte på ett enkelt sätt avläsas i rumsst...

This chapter reflects on how the “social” comes into being and how it relates toquestions of architecture and urban environments. My aim is not to identify what “the social” is but to introduce and discuss a few aspects that seem important for grasping its full complexity. In a sense, the chapter is a response to recent tendencies in practice aswel...

In his 2018 Stockholm prize winner lecture, Goldstein highlighted the need for Problem-Oriented Policing to be not only effective but also fair. Contributing to the development of POP, this study examines how a wider perspective on problem-solving generally, and scoping in particular, can be adopted to address some of the growing challenges in 21st...

I februari i år rapporterade Handelns Utredningsinstitut (HUI) att det i Sverige fanns planer på 2,2 miljoner nya kvadratmeter köpcentrum – något som var en nedgång från tidigare beräknade 2,6 miljoner. Av dessa förväntades i 2017 års rapportering 1,1 miljoner stå klara 2020. Detta i ett land som redan har bland de högsta antalet kvadratmeter köpce...

This chapter focuses on crime prevention in relation to architecture as a discipline and as built material environment. It discusses earlier research and presents developments from the EU project ‘Resilient Infrastructure and Building Security’ (RIBS). In the chapter, we insist on the term ‘architecture’ (instead of the ostensibly more neutral term...

Bodies are both present and thoroughly gendered in commercial environments – and, by extension, in public space. Such gendered presence is addressed in studies of both the historical evolution and current conditions of consumption and public space alike, which show that it takes many, varied forms.[1] Where much discourse on bodies in such spaces t...

Flooding is one of the most destructive natural disasters which have rapidly been growing in frequency and intensity all over the world. In this view, assessment of the resilience of the city against such disturbances is of high necessity in order to significantly mitigate the disaster effects of flooding on the city structures and the human lives....

This article takes as its point of departure that any question concerning architecture, in a broad sense, has cultural and aesthetic implications, whether directly concerned with them or focused on social, technical, functional or other concerns. From such an outset, so does spatial configuration. However, while questions of aesthetics have been ad...

As cities are growing the need for complementary sub centres increases, both in order to distribute amenities and to make resources more accessible for citizens, as well as to relieve the pressure on the city core. Such planning strategy, a kind of decentralized concentration, has been seen as a mean for holding back urban sprawl in Stockholm. Late...

As cities are growing the need for complementary sub centres increases, both in order to distribute amenities and to make resources more accessible for citizens, as well as to relieve the pressure on the city core. Such planning strategy, a kind of decentralized concentration, has been seen as a mean for holding back urban sprawl in Stockholm. Late...

This paper addresses how 'culture' is or can be present in a city, where culture is understood in a wide sense as cultural activities and output of creative activity as well as partaking in or making use of the same. The main line of argument is that this requires consideration of how to work with configurational analysis, which has implications fo...

In the wake of climate change and its impact on increasing the number and intensity of oods, adaptability of cities to and resistance against the ood hazard is critical to retain functionality of the cities. Vulnerability of urban infrastructure and its resilience to ooding from di erent points of view have been important and worth investigating fo...

The influence of products and urban structures on citizens’ security has been explored and exploited across civilisations. Rarely, though, has the research in this field been as vibrant as now. Examples of research and development work can be found in many disciplines and on various scales. They concern the design of street furniture to prevent bic...

Resilience defined as the capacity of a system to manage impacts, keep its efficiency and continue its development has been scrutinized by researchers from different points of view over the past decades. Due to the prominence of resilience in urban planning, this paper intends to find out how the spatial structure of cities deals with disturbances,...

I den här texten avser jag diskutera stadsbyggnad som å ena sidan den byggda staden, och å andra sidan vår förståelse av och föreställningar om densamma. Utgångspunkten är att städer utgör försök hantera de ofta konfliktfyllda och motstridiga behov och processer som pågår i våra samhällen, och samtidigt tar form genom att vi försöker materialisera...

Various forms of material, empirical, or observation-based research has grown in importance over the last decade in both architec- ture and urban design research, in parallel to an increasingly data-driven research utilising an increasing amount and availability of GIS data, tracking technologies, GPS records, and ICT tools. Assemblage theory and A...

In light of the urgent threats presented by climate change and rapid urbanisation, interest in ‘smart city systems’ is mounting. In contrast to scholarship that poses ‘smartness’ as something that needs to be added to cities, recent developments in spatial morphology research pursue a view of the built fabric of cities as an extension of the cognit...

Jämlika livsvillkor och stadsbyggande - inspel till pågående översiktsplanearbete. Del av Stockholms stads arbete med Kommissionen för ett socialt hållbart Stockholm. Januari 2016.

Kulturnärvaro - inspel till boende och livsmiljö, är en del av Stockholms stads arbete med Kommissionen för ett socialt hållbart Stockholm.

Forskarrapport inom Boende och stadsmiljö, del av kommissionen för ett socialt hållbart Stockholm

This essay is a reflection on how the ‘social’ comes into being, and how it relates to questions of architecture and urban environments. Taking its departure from a statement in The Social Logic of Space, where it is said spatial configuration affects social relations in how it structures patterns of movement, encounter and avoidance, it develops o...

Background: As dynamic systems rivers and cities have been in interaction under changing relations over time, and the morphology of many cities has risen through a long and steady struggle between the city functions and the river system flowing inside. This makes river cities an interesting case to study how the presence of geographical features in...

In recent decades libraries have been challenged in many ways, perhaps most pointedly by the digital revolution. This is, however, not the first time – a series of booms in library architecture emerging rather when knowledge ideals are challenged than established allows us to discuss library architecture more clearly as investigations into what kno...

Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society comprises 13 chapters by 15 authors intended as an invitation – as well as a provocation – to the fields in which the authors of the volume work. The aim is to develop a complex and nuanced discussion on media technologies to address both conceptual foundations and research practi...

In the Social Logic of Space it is stated that spatial configuration affects social relations in how it structures patterns of movement, encounter and avoidance. Since then, a lot of space syntax research has investigated these phenomena to provide empirical support and to refine the understanding of mechanisms and relations. However, most of this...

Correlations between pedestrian movement and connectivity of streets have been frequently found in numerous studies. The configuration of the street network and its relation to observed movement patterns found in space syntax research is, of course, a significant part from them. With an attempt to further investigate the relation between urban form...

The call for this themed issue formulates an interesting proposition, one that is a common conception – that people’s behaviour and, accordingly, the use of buildings is changing – and that this leads to the emer- gence of new building typologies. More specifically, it claims that ‘the reality of what is happening inside buildings nowadays is much...

The way architecture articulates social, cultural, political, and organizational values as well as character and identity through manipulation of visibility, permeability and the relation them in-between has been discussed by many researchers. Consistent methodologies that focus on this specific split are however unusual, and it tends to be handled...

One of the early concepts of space syntax, from the Social Logic of Space, is architecture seen as an interface. This is sometimes interpreted as on one hand a singular transition between ‘private’ and ‘public’, or more gradually as a transition from ‘public’ urban space towards more and more private space on the other. Methodologically, the latter...

In many fields connected to architecture and urban design, the term ‘resilience’ has grown common and tends to stand for a variety of different things. What this paper intends to do is to work with the term under a rather basic understanding – that of systems capable of performing even after being altered. Specifically, this means the extent to whi...

Convex maps were first introduced by Hillier and Hanson in “The social logic of space”, and have since become a standard diagram of space syntax, particularly in the analysis of interior of buildings. Despite of their extensive use, the computer generation of convex maps turns out to be quite difficult. An algorithmic description of the process wou...

In an often quoted sentence of his 1976 book “The Architecture of Form”, Lionel March drew a clear distinction between science, interested in extant forms, and design, which initiates novel forms. The theories, methods, measures and diagrams of space syntax have often developed following this first more scientific scheme, and they have been concern...

Visibility analysis is one of the key methods in space syntax theory that discusses visual information conveyed to observers from any location in space that is potentially directly visible for the observer without any obstruction. Visibility – simply defined as what we can see – not only affects the spatial function of buildings, but also has visua...

Academia has a long tradition of structuring itself around academic subjects, often epitomized through architectural manifestations such as individual buildings and whole campi. These materializations serve as sites of research and education, but also serve to describe the university as whole as well as its institutional parts, their definitions an...

Finding relations between configuration and activity of the level found in cities in strongly programmed buildings have challenged research for a long time. With increasing clarity, it has shown to have to do with how and where activity takes place. Compared to cities and large public complexes, workplaces are more centred around specific locations...

This paper argues that one of the main problems of finding consistent and valuable relations between workflow, organization, and spatial configurations lies not in the lack of relations or dominancy of programme, but in underdeveloped descriptions of activity and programme in a specific sense: the programmes and activities studied have been describ...

Fashion and identity are deeply intertwined with one another and in situated performativity, entailing not only individuals but atmospheres and relations to others and the Other. Something drawn upon by fashion retail, perhaps most noticeably through mannequins (living or dolls). Comparatively, fashion museums can be argued to have difficulties evo...

Healthcare buildings are of great specific and general interest for architectural research as they are decidedly spatial at the same time as they are highly programmed, a type of architecture that has consistently challenged research to find clear relations between design solutions and performance or use. This paper argues that one of the main prob...

Denna skrift vänder sig till dem som arbetar i vården och de som arbetar med att utforma vårdens miljöer. Syftet är att vara ett stöd i situationer då förändringar och nybyggnader av vårdavdelningar diskuteras. Avsikten är att stödja interna diskusioner kring vad som är önskade förhållanden – vad som skall lyftas fram i beställningen av det som byg...

In 2005, Morris B. Holbrook published a paper in Marketing Letters entitled “The Role of Ordinary Evaluations in the Market for Popular Culture: Do Consumers Have Good ‘Taste’?”. Although this paper referred to tastes in movie consumption, examining the relation between ”expert judgement” and ”popular taste”, it has much relevance to rethinking the...

The description of the spatial entities used in space syntax is growingly taking on a direct cognitive character, where for example axial lines are often equated to ‘lines of movement’, convex spaces to ‘spaces of being’, and isovists to ‘visual fields’. While developments of these have served to deepen our understanding of spatial configuration in...

Architecture can be understood as deliberate elaborations of physical forms and configurations into socially and culturally meaningful objects, enabling activities and programmes as well as communicating ideas andvalues. It can be argued that part of this elaboration is that of staging, and that of the treatment of differences of visibility and per...

The question of what differentiates architecture and building has been raised many times in Architecture Theory, with various responses or explanations - usually under the precondition that architecture is something more. It is one of the core questions of architecture theory. Inherent in the discussion seems to be how architecture becomes socially...

Spatial Positioning Tool (SPOT) is an isovist-based spatial analysis software written in Java that works as a stand-alone program. SPOT differs from regular Space syntax software as it can produce integration graphs and intervisibility graphs from a selection of positions. SPOT was originally developed for a series of field studies on building inte...

Universitet och högskolor förknippas liksom många andra institutioner och verksamheter i vårt samhälle i så hög grad med sina byggnader att verksamheter och byggnader kan vara svåra att skilja från varandra. Det vi kan ana är att människor alltid använt byggandet för att etablera och upprätthålla både samhälleliga funktioner och mer vardagliga sede...

In his last project the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre aimed to develop rhythmanalysis. This was an attempt to understand the pulse and life of the city combining the strengths of the overview of the urban choreography as seen from a window with the intense experiences of living down in the streets. Rhythmanalysis is about acknowledging the tens...

The question of what differentiates architecture and building has been raised many times in Architecture Theory, with various responses or explanations – usually under the precondition that architecture is something more. It is one of the core questions of architecture theory. Inherent in the discussion seems to be how architecture becomes socially...

In a recent research project regarding the layout, commodity distribution and performativity of department stores, one of the most important findings was the way in which commodity distribution did not follow the layman's retail theories of attractor goods and impulse buys, but rather quite directly resembled something else: namely a nuanced but cl...

Direkt innanför entrén till Åhléns fanns i november 2005 fyrtioåtta(dam)ben klädda i strumpbyxor eller nätstrumpor. FrånKlarabergsleden, innanför glasväggarna, sågs kosmetikmärken som Shiseido, Dior, Givenchy, Roc och Estée Lauder, medan det man möttes av innanför huvudentrén var Biotherm och Lancôme, som övergick i Chanel, Kanebo och Guerlain. Någ...

Stadsbyggnad och samhällsplanering är som framgår av förordet inget neutralt område utan en praktik och ett kunskapsområde med stora implikationer för människors vardagsliv liksom för samhället i stort. Det handlar om att få platser att fungera bra för dem som bor, arbetar eller på annat sätt är involverade i platsen, och där i samman­hanget ’funge...

Spatial and material form, the tools and modes of architects, participate in shaping our lives in many ways which are not detirminate but strongly influential. One of the ways in which it does this is by spatial configuration - that is, the setup of relations between spaces - which responds to and describes social relations as well as potentials, p...

Far from passive containers or neutral fields where particular objects are to be desired, bought, and sold, department stores constitute spaces formative for both shopping behaviour and culture. In the constantly changing environment, in an interplay between retail strategies and responses to customer behaviour, a negotiation is going on of what an...

Alla som har flyttat är nog medvetna om att när man väl sorterar tillbaks böckerna i bokhyllan på det nya stället så står de inte längre likadant. Kanske är de helt omsorterade. Nya grupperingar dyker upp, gamla försvinner, slås ihop, delas, eller får ingå i större grupperingar. Likadant kan hända när vi köpt ett antal nya böcker – böckerna vi har...

Of the French theorists of his generation Jean Baudrillard was perhaps the one most concerned with consumption and the effects of mass production and advertising on contemporary culture. He was one of the major contributors to the establishment of the term consumer society, a term that has grown increasingly relevant in a society such as our “Weste...

The most common way to model space syntax is to use an even distribution of lines or isovists. In positioning analysis, an uneven distribution of isovists is used in order to integrate social structures into the spatial analysis. These models can be used to analyse spaces highly influenced by social or cultural organisations. In offices, organisati...

The idea of working with spatial scales is not new, neither in architecture theory in general nor within space syntax theory - as can be seen in e.g. Hillier (1996) and Read and Budiarto (2003). What this paper attempts, is to make such a discussion and such knowledge more concrete - to begin to find out how, in configurative systems, spatial scale...

That architecture carries meaning is hardly a contested issue. Neither that this is largely through representing or implying social relations or structures. How is a more discussed issue. The plethora of theories around this is rich, including theoreticians such as Foucault, Lefebvre and Bourdieu. These theories set up a description of these relati...