A short text by Joseph Rykwert and Tony Atkin

To socialize space is arguably an elementary animal urge. A few species socialize by building - even very elaborately - they burrow mazes and dam streams, construct mountainous shelters from their secretions. Some of them - the bower-bird is notorious - use bright colours and shiny materials in their building. Even animals that build the most rudimentary shelters like most primates may use their excreta or skin odour as a socializing agent.

Human beings are different. It is not enough for us to socialize and to build; we need to know that we have done so. We also need constant reminders of, and reassurance in this knowledge, and we translate this need into a process of symbolizing, into distinguishing our place from the common ground. We come to settlement with a baggage of skills and of notions about the world and our place in it, and we try to mould settlement round them. The place we have settled will in turn modify, perhaps even transform, the notions we have brought to it.

Settlements are therefore structured by, and they embody, technical and symbolic systems. These are evident both in material and non-material aspects of place. Effective shelter and ecological balance are often preferred but not essential. People choose the most unlikely -- and often apparently unreasonable -- places to settle.

Many settlements mediate and record materially the transactions and negotiations with parts of our existence over which we have no control. They define the boundaries and the constituent places for our daily, communal existence. The organization and transformation of societies and of cultures are registered in the forms of settlement. Cultural memory is an accumulation of the patterns of operations, artifacts and the natural phenomena its inhabitants perform and encounter in a given place.

Many anthropologists have examined aspects of these problems, but only a few have centered their inquiries on them. For architects and planners, understanding these principles which have guided and informed past settlements might foster appreciation for the process by which people have created meaningful and complex places. In periods of rapid social and economic change such as ours, a concern might be how we can understand what happens when new techniques and approaches are introduced -- approaches that challenge or disrupt the world view incorporated in the forms of settlement.

Joseph Rykwert and Tony Atkin