Framing built environment change through materials, agency and influence

Abstract

Place-keeping urges design and management professionals to collaborate towards sustaining quality places for users. However, local life, maintenance and contextual aspects contribute to places changing in unexpected manners. The current place-keeping conceptualisation focuses on the organisations behind space provision and management, leaving a knowledge gap in tying their work to the material dynamics of places’ built environments. This article translates the Actor Network Theory (ANT) approach to analyse formal and informal built environment changes, seeking to understand specific actors that affect change in an environment beyond formal institutions. The approach focuses upon the action mechanisms behind, contributing to and preventing specific material changes, holding the potential to reflectively inform practice.A case excerpt is analysed to illustrate the proposed ANT methodology. It reconstructs the changes to a hedge line and related repercussions upon the life and management of an urban residential space in Oslo. The analysis demonstrates how maintenance, use and material adjacencies affect built environment change, together with how relationships to external agendas, adjacent programming, municipal budgeting and climatic forces can limit spatial management’s response capabilities.The ANT approach can contribute the following to place evaluation and place-keeping thought:•Understanding change in the built environment as the output of multiple, heterogeneous factors;•Recognizing that intentional and unintentional actions contribute to place changes;•Tracing place dynamics across established boundaries of discipline, property and responsibility;•Re-conceptualizing place-keeping based on the mechanisms that a place’s perceivable, material quality.This article offers a perspective of understanding place use and spatial management work through the mitigating agency materials have upon practice. Offering an adaptable framework for reflective place evaluation and a material-focused re-conceptualisation of place-keeping, this article encourages relational research into the mechanisms that link spatial management and use dynamics.