ABSTRACT
By considering that the immediacy of situations is precisely the temporal-spatial realm within which the practice of architecture and urban design takes place on a daily basis—in the framework of the various social contacts involved in projecting, planning, and designing urban elements from scratch—I argue that Erving Goffman’s sociology of physical space bears two conceptual contributions, particularly for architects and urban designers. These inputs underlie the argumentative structure of a former critical review of mine about Goffman’s sociology of space originally conceived for social-scientific debate. Goffman’s hexadimensional sociological conception of space first shows that the daily professional interaction of architects and urban designers involuntarily bears a crucial spatial dimension that should not be ignored in favor of socially inclusive and just projects, plans, and designs. Second, physical space is only one spatial element among various others symbolically mobilized by human beings in their daily situations of interaction. Goffman suggests that physical space may simultaneously be a setting, a conditioning, a sign, and an idiom of social interaction. An awareness of this circumstance may help architects and urban designers not to essentialize the projected, planned, and designed physical space as “telling its own tale,” and hence to deliver socially better enrooted projects, plans, and designs.
