Establishing Boundaries: A Conceptualisation for the Comparative Social Study of Built Environment Configurations

It is readily acknowledged that the configuration of a built environment is shaped by the outer lines of the features it consists of. Yet, these boundary lines are not typically utilised in our theorisation of the built environment to further our social understanding of it. Studies of the built environment often originate in the study of cities: their most elaborate form. Rather than starting from conflated characterisations derived from urbanism, this paper presents a theory for studying built environment configurations by asking how they occur and how society is accommodated by them. This leads to two series of concepts (human being in the spatial world, and human being in the social world), which establish that boundary concepts are essential to the social study of built environment configurations, while they also retain the generality needed to enable comparative research.