Enriching social work research through architectural multisensory methods: Strategies for connecting the built environment and human experience

Abstract

Scholars have called for greater emphasis on the physical environment to expand social work research, policy, and practice; however, there has been little focus on the role of the built environment. Redressing this gap in the literature, this methodological paper explicates how four multisensory research methods commonly used in architecture—sketch walks, photography, spatial visualization, and mapping—can be used in social work research to create a greater understanding of the complex, interconnected, and multidimensional nature of built environments in relationship to human experience. The methods explored in this paper provide social work researchers with a methodological conduit to explore the relationship between the built environment and vulnerable populations, understand and advocate for spatial justice, and participate knowledgeably in interdisciplinary policy realms involving the built environment and marginalized populations.

Keywords

Built environment multisensory methods arts-based methods visual methods architecture

Introduction

Social work’s trademark person-in-environment (PIE) framework emphasizes understanding how individual lives are shaped by multi-dimensional environmental contexts (Kemp et al., 1997). While the physical world is recognized as a critical element of the multi-layered PIE framework that impacts human meaning-making and experience, little has been written on how to move toward a greater understanding of the built environment within social work research. Addressing this gap in the literature, this methodological paper explicates how four multisensory research methods commonly used in architecture—sketch walks, photography, spatial visualization, and mapping—can be used in social work research to create a greater understanding of the complex, interconnected, and multidimensional nature of built environments in relationship to human experience.

The built environment and social work

PIE takes a holistic view that emphasizes how different levels of the environment affect individual experience and how individuals can exercise agency at different levels of their environment in their everyday lives (Kemp, 2010; Probst, 2013). While PIE, as a theoretical framework, is still widely taught in social work education (Kondrat, 2002; McKinnon, 2008), scholars argue that the emphasis on the social environment has overshadowed the physical realm (Burns, 2016, 2017; Ferguson, 2010; McKinnon, 2008; Saleebey, 2004; Zapf, 2009). These calls understand that the built environment is multidimensional and fluid in character, imbued with politics, gender, violence, inclusion, and exclusion (see for example: Burns, 2016; Grittner 2019; Grittner and Sitter, 2020; Burns, 2016; Dovey, 2009; Kemp, 2010; Massey, 2013; Mitchell, 2003). Understanding this mutually constructing relationship is an effective way to move from person-centered strategies toward an integrated understanding of the environment’s role as a “constitutive ingredient in individual and collective well-being” (Kemp, 2010: 139).

Calls for greater emphasis on the built environment are set against a backdrop of social work practice becoming less community based (Burns, 2016; Kemp, 2010). Home visits, which were once the heart of social work practice, are becoming less common as the field moves toward a greater clinical focus that emphasizes a person’s social environment (Pritzker and Applewhite, 2015; Rothman and Mizhari, 2014). This has created a gap in the field, as understanding the relationship between the built environment and vulnerable populations provides a window into everyday experiences of belonging, wellness, and identity (Kemp, 2010). Supporting this view, Akesson et al. (2017) assert that physical environments may influence a person’s wellbeing as much, if not more, than social environments; yet, social work scholarship continues to prioritize the social over the physical. Scholarship into the social determinants of health identifies that unequal environmental conditions impact the overall health and wellness of individuals (Dahlgren and Whitehead, 1991; Raphael, 2011), highlighting the interconnection between the built environment and health outcomes (Butterworth, 2000). Further, the environmental context of social work practice is featured in Jeyasingham’s (2016) research that explores how the office environments of child welfare social workers are interwoven with practice, and Ferguson’s (2010) scholarship that highlights the importance of understanding the environmental atmosphere of home during child welfare visits. Finally, Saleebey (2004) argues that changing everyday environments can be a conduit for instigating positive shifts in individual lives.

This growing body of social work research illustrates the potential disciplinary insights found by intentionally focusing on the built environment as part of the PIE framework. To accomplish this, social work requires research methodologies that explicate the interconnection between the built environment and human experience. The geographer Soja (2010) illustrates that the social sciences—including social work—traditionally focus on historical and social analysis while viewing the physical world as a backdrop unrelated to social justice. This hierarchical privileging has resulted in social work research overlooking the “socio-spatial dialectic” (Soja, 2010: 4), which understands that social processes and spatial contexts interact and mutually create each other to shape human experience and meaning (Dovey, 2009; Kemp, 2010). Our socio-spatial contexts are the culmination of deliberate design decisions shaped by social policy and overseen by architects in both creation and execution. The methods outlined in this paper provide social work research avenues for understanding and addressing the design of environments and their relationship with humanity.

This paper unfolds four multisensory research methods commonly used in architecture that offer a robust means of communicating and analyzing the built environment in connection with everyday lives: sketch walks, photography, spatial visualization, and mapping. These methods could also be categorized as visual, arts-based methods, but we conceptually align with Pink’s (2015) work on sensory methods that understand sensory divisions as a western construct. Sensing involves whole body perception; to visually or aurally record research environments involves all the senses in a holistic multisensory system. While some of these methods are not new to social work research (for example, Clark and Morriss’ (2017) review shows the growing use of visual methodologies in social work research over the last decade); for the most part, these methods have not been used within social work research to understand the built environment’s role in human activity and meaning-making. This paper contributes by highlighting how architecture uses these methods to explicate the built environment and, in doing so, open-up methodological avenues for social work to bring the built environment into its purview.

Background

Architecture: A brief introduction

Architecture is the envelope for our daily lives (Zumthor, 2006), creating our civil infrastructure, homes, and institutions and guiding where we dwell, work, and play. By definition, architecture is inherently spatial—its focus is on design and building (Bader, 2015). Although architecture is guided by three, sometimes competing, tenets: “architecture as art, as applied problem solving, and as promoter of social relevance with public accountability” (Meenaghan, 1984: 72), it is largely practiced as a professional discipline that focuses on balancing form and budget while overseeing technical requirements of the built environment (e.g. building envelope, structure, lighting, HVAC, etc.).

In North America, architecture requires a minimum of 10 years training, involving undergraduate and graduate school education, multi-year workplace internships, and licensing exams (Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, 2016). This rigid professional trajectory currently emphasizes technical skill building and professionalization above theory and critical awareness (Trefry and Watson, 2013). Similar to social work, professional accreditation and regulations lead the discipline. Architecture is sometimes criticized for lacking rich theoretical frameworks and perspectives that consider how users of the built environment experience and perceive their surroundings (Kattein, 2015; Trefry and Watson, 2013). Techniques used by architects to understand the built environment are notoriously difficult for non-spatial disciplines to access, and Mewburn (2009) observes that architectural knowledge is often tacit. This paper proposes how social work can incorporate and embrace the often unspoken disciplinary knowledge of architecture.

Architectural multisensory methods

Given the nature of architecture, the methods used are spatial and multisensory by default, as architects focus on designing spaces that take into consideration use of space and material atmosphere (Bader, 2015). The four architectural methods described in this paper are typically performed by architectural practitioners as part of the design process. To illustrate and expand the proposed methods, we include figures and examples taken from the first author’s architectural work.

Sketch walks

Typically, the first activity of any architecture project is sensorial immersion in a site through walking, which is combined with recording and interpretative fieldnotes. Walking to understand the built environment is synergistic with architectural activities. Architectural education advances De Certeau’s (1984) call for architects to set aside bird’s-eye views of the city and walk the streets because: “the ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below,’… whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write” (p. 93). Reflecting this understanding, sketch walks are a popular method within architecture for exploring and discerning the experience of a particular physical location (Alomar, 2016).

Architectural research illuminates the potential of walking as a method to understand human connection to the built environment. Rosenberg’s (2012) architectural research on walking through the city as a memorial act demonstrates how walking evokes location-specific meaning as it creates a connectivity with the surroundings and generates new perspectives. Walking allows researchers to experience the built environment directly and provides a lens into the experience of everyday life by communicating personal experiences of light, activity, traffic, noise, and the form of buildings (Papanicolaou, 2015). While these research examples utilize walking as the mobile modality, this method could also be used by persons using wheeled mobility devices to access their communities.

Sketching does not have to involve an expertise or skill in drawing. Quick impressions of the environment communicate the experience of surroundings and capture what the sketcher perceives as significant. Figure 1 demonstrates this practice in a series of one-minute timed sketches, created while walking a potential site for a laneway house in Calgary, Canada. The sketches were intended to seek, explore, and communicate the physical and atmospheric qualities of the laneway. Done by the first author in this example, they could be done by research participants or researchers as part of a walking interview to explore the research participants’ experience of their environmental context, such as supportive housing, healthcare facilities, or refugee resettlement camps.

Figure 1.

Series of one minute walking sketches.

Photography

Photography enjoys a “symbiotic relationship” (Bergera, 2016: 110) with architecture. Architects use photography to document and understand the material qualities of sites and the surrounding environmental contexts as well as to evaluate construction progress, communicate ideas, and analyze completed work. Architects employ photography to understand and record site-specific elements such as lighting, textures, materials, habitation, and temporality. Photography that explores the built environment can be employed in a multitude of ways, including photo-documentation, photo-elicitation, and photo-essay.

Photo-documentation

Taking photographs to answer a research question is a common architectural approach used to analyze patterns and details about the physical world. Photo-documentation can be undertaken by both researchers and by research participants in more community-based and participatory approaches (Rose, 2012).

Photo-documentation has been incorporated within various spatial and social contexts to explore socio-spatial relationships, including neighborhood gentrification (Suchar, 1997), and graffiti (Hansen and Flynn, 2015). Each of these research projects illustrates the potential for photo-documentation to inform scholarship surrounding the built environment and human experience. Suchar’s (1997) research on the gentrification of Lincoln Park in Chicago, USA, identifies the physical changes to residences over the course of a year, including:

additions to the fronts and backs of houses, the meaning of art work on front lawns, the significance of walls and gates erected around rehabbed or renovated houses, the incorporation of ‘antique’ features such as added stained glass, coach lamps, carved wooden doors, animal, religious, and mythological icons. (p. 41)

These elements embody the physical process of gentrification: expanding living quarters, inserting expensive decorative items, and building walls to protect property. The photographic data connects the built environment and identity formation among the residents through the gentrification process. Similarly, Hansen and Flynn’s (2015) longitudinal photo-documentation research studies a community conversation embedded in a singular wall layered with street art. The temporal photography of this wall manifests the socio-economics of the surrounding neighborhood, politics, and issues of consumerism and art, all inscribed on the physical surface of an urban wall. These architecturally focused research studies demonstrate a rich potential for photo-documentation to bring sharper focus on the built environment within social work research, an effective method of uncovering the built environment’s interconnection with class and identity.

Our own experience using participatory photo-documentation as part of a community development project seeking to address the lack of visible safe spaces for the LGBTQ2S+ community in Calgary, Canada, further speaks to these possibilities. This project sought to reterritorialize public space in Calgary by connecting LGBTQ2S+ voices to public spaces via commemoration and community-building. As part of this project, participants used photography to document areas of a heritage building that had been an active queer space for decades. This participatory photo documentation method allowed participants to consider their personal experiences of community spaces, activism, and identity (Figure 2). One participant reflected that the heritage building “felt like a safe place. The home of activism. So that common room feels like there is history in the walls … the home of courage, feminists, and gay activism” (Grittner, 2017). This method allowed participants to communicate the importance of safe activist spaces for marginalized communities and then mobilize this knowledge to plan a queer hub support center.

Figure 2.

Example of participatory photo-documentation.

Photo-elicitation

Another photographic approach aligned with architectural methods of understanding the built environment is photo-elicitation: incorporating photographs into research interviews (Rose, 2012). Clark and Morriss (2017) explain that photo-elicitation has gained popularity within social work research in the past decade, with participant-created materials being the most common form. In comparison, architectural approaches focus more on researcher-created elicitation materials, demonstrating that researcher-created photos can provide focus and insight on the built environment among research participants. Using researcher-produced photography—potentially produced through the related photo-documentation method—to elicit experiences and knowledge related to the built environment is a novel application of this method within social work.

Photo-elicitation produces a rich understanding of the built environment using researcher-produced photographs. Faggion and Furlan (2017) used photo-elicitation to investigate the cultural values entrenched in houses designed and built by Italian migrants in Brisbane, Australia. Material choices, the prevalent use of arches, and columns, as well as the spatial arrangement of both indoor and outdoor environments, were all strategies used to foster feelings of belonging, post-migration.

In a different process of photo-elicitation, Bendiner-Viani’s (2016) work explores the possibilities of researcher-created photography in neighborhood research using a “walk/make/talk” method. Bendiner-Viani (2016) took photographs during participant-lead tours of everyday places in Brooklyn, NY and Oakland, CA. The photographs were discussed with the participants in a follow-up meeting. As a method, researcher-created photography established enough distance that participants were able to articulate how aspects of their familiar, everyday neighborhood environment shaped their experience of the world. The photographs illustrated how the built environment of the neighborhood, including lighting, shape of buildings, trees, occupation of public space, contextual spatial occupancies, fencing, front stoops, quality of sunlight, color of buildings, location of freeways, and retail signage intersected with lived experience to construct neighborhood meaning and belonging. Bendiner-Viani’s photo-elicitation approach found that:

photographs can act as a means to hold on to some part of this everydayness long enough for one to engage in a dialogue regarding the processes of the everyday that, under most circumstances, are allowed little time for reflective attention. (p. 18)

Bendiner-Viani’s work demonstrates the potential for deeper understandings of ingrained connections to the built environment through photo-elicitation. Her use of photography prompted participants to shift perspectives of their everyday environments from the background to the forefront and consider how occupying these environments shape their daily experiences.

Photo-essays

Photo-essays combine writing with photographs, with the textual and visual elements receiving equal significance (Rose, 2012). Photo-essays are a common feature of architectural journals as a method of interpreting and observing the built environment as architects create photo-essays to analyze the built environment. Payne (2017) observes that photo-essays assist in understanding our environment as constantly streaming with a layering of “impressions, urban imagery, pictures of memories, and symbols” (p. 34). For example, Alkhalili’s (2012) photo-essay narrates themes of marginalization, exclusion, and resistance in Ramallah, Palestine, through the physical changes of a hole in a wall separating the city from a refugee camp. Clement (2015) explores processes of globalization and identity embedded in the endless sprawl of empty suburban McMansions in Sydney, Australia. He asserts that the ad hoc material choices of these homes are acts of passive resistance toward American acculturation; housing as social resistance. The variety of locations and subjects of these architectural photo-essays illustrate the versatility of photo-essays in elucidating the built environment and social processes.

Photo-essays can also be created by research participants, fusing architectural practices with social science methods. In one photographic-based research project, Kennelly and Watt (2012) use participant-created photo-journals to understand the place-impact of the 2012 Olympics in London, England, among youth experiencing poverty and precarious housing. The photo-journals revealed a much harsher critique of the Olympics than focus groups with the same participants. This difference in findings illuminates the possibility for divergent knowledge when participants are offered multisensory means of sharing their perspectives; multisensory methods are one avenue for ensuring marginalized voices are understood.

Photo-essays are a powerful tool for straddling the realms of the built environment’s materiality and lived experience, illustrated in O’Donoghue’s (2007) arts-based research with 10and 11-year-old males who employed photography and textual narrative to explore how masculinities are created and performed within school spaces. The use of participant-based photography in this research illustrates the connection between locale, gender, and violence in the visual and textual narrative of school environments. The boys’ photography connected their experiences to material textures and spatial forms, exemplified in one research participant’s reflections on the lived experience of schoolyard corners:

I took this photo because sometimes when people are messing and playing rough, they normally stick them in the corner and start pushing them into it. It’s kind of an uncomfortable space. Like James hangs out and he is really rough and he always hangs out here … It’s a hidden space kind of because it’s in a corner. None of the teachers walk around in the corners. (p. 67)

Here, O’Donoghue’s research shows how photo-essays can delve into the convergence of materiality and lived experience, as the coarse solidity and spatial morphology of the rough corners of a schoolyard intertwine with the secret nature and personal experience of “rough” masculine behavior.

Spatial visualization

As well as sketch walks and the use of photography, the third multisensory research method we propose is spatial visualization, the cornerstone of architectural methods. Architects think, produce, and problem-solve space through visualization, and the most common of which is drawing. One of the twentieth century’s most influential architects, Le Corbusier, argued that drawing allows a form of “intuitive communion” with the object or phenomenon under investigation (in Fraser and Henmi, 1993: 2). This stance highlights architecture’s prioritizing of drawing as a key means of understanding the built environment and, as the architect Yendo (2013) writes, is a powerful vehicle for communicating and exploring human experience: “the drawing is … a medium to cultivate and generate experiential phenomena … an edifice of one’s personal experiences” (p. 127). While architectural drawings generally require a level of technical expertise to produce, they can be incorporated within spatial collage (a purposeful composition of images, art, and spatial representation) as an effective means of tying together the built realm and lived experience.

Spatial collage as an innovative approach for built environment research is explored by Troiani and Carless (2015), whose methodological work shows the potential of integrating orthogonal drawings and collage as “a functional analysis of the space with a history of everyday life overlaid” (p. 278). Their research demonstrates how spatial collage can be used as an ethnographic method, fusing together architectural drawings, photography, and illustration in handmade collages to understand the relationship between identity and housing. These spatial collages explore and communicate the temporal, cultural, and social aspects of lived space. In a similar manner, Keddy’s (2009) research used experiential spatial collage with nurses to uncover their socio-spatial understanding of their physical workstations. In this work, spatial collage research uncovered the impact of the built environment on nursing practice and healthcare and identified searching, moving, and recovering as three major physical activities the healthcare built environment influences.

Figure 3 demonstrates our own use of collaged spatial visualization from architectural research fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa, which combines the measured orthogonal outline of a research participant’s home with a visual exploration of her lived space as well as the participant’s story of her primary design considerations. In this example, spatial visualization as a method allowed the participant to reflect and articulate her extensive interconnections between her spiritual life, designing her shelter, dwelling in her home, and her imagination surrounding death (Grittner, 2019). This research was part of a larger community case study that eventually informed gendered design recommendations for South Africa’s state housing program, recognizing that access to secure, affordable, gender-appropriate housing is critical to advancing social equity. In embracing multisensory architectural research methods, social work research has the potential to advise and advance social justice in areas that have been traditionally difficult for the discipline to access.

Figure 3.

Collaged spatial visualization from architectural research fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa.

Mapping

Our fourth and final proposed multisensory research method is mapping. Mapping connects the physical world (terrain, infrastructure, topography, etc.) with the social world, which can include population demographics, history, political territories, and multisensory experiences. How the physical and the social worlds are layered on a map create a unique understanding of individual sites, communities, and cities (Bordeleau and Bresler, 2010). Mapping is a core method of recording and analysis within architecture, used as an iterative process to document environments. Maps “[emerge] from a careful consideration of the questions asked and documented” (Bordeleau and Bresler, 2010: 52); for social work, these questions can be socio-spatial. Traditional cartography strives toward an objective representation of the physical world that commonly relies upon Geographic-Information System software to connect data with the physical environment. While this form of mapping as a method has growing scholarship within social work (Hillier, 2007; Kemp, 2010; Teixeira, 2018), other forms of mapping, such as arts-based creative mapping and body mapping offer new methodological avenues for socio-spatial social work research.

Creative mapping

Creative mapping combines arts-based techniques to connect more ephemeral elements such as emotions, personal stories, and atmospheres with the physical world. This form of mapping is effective in elucidating human experience and the environment and is popular within architectural research and practice. Powell (2010) advocates for this type of mapping as a key component of multisensory built environment research by analyzing four graduate student community-based mapping projects in El Chorrillo, Panama City, Panama. Students employed cognitive mapping, photography, and collage in combination with more traditional mapping, exploring the interrelationship between location, individuals, and experiences of poverty. Powell’s (2010) research found that the process of creative mapping cultivated an “embodied, sensory experience … Because of its ability to evoke the senses, maps highlight the involuted relationships between self and place and the ways in which self and place are mutually constitutive and relational” (p. 20). This speaks to the potential for creative mapping to powerfully connect location to lived experience and materiality. Student architectural researchers created these maps; social work research could expand this method and employ creative mapping processes with research participants.

Creative mapping was also employed as a method in Grittner's (2019) architectural research fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa. The map included here as Figure 4 explores the layering of social processes, built environment, and spatial morphology intertwined within a female-driven shelter initiative. It was composed of photography and drawings created by both the researcher and the research participants, which were layered over satellite imagery of the community area. Creating this map proved an effective research tool to conceptualize how the social and physical environments intertwined and co-created the other through the lens of gender, shelter, and community development (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Example of creative mapping from architectural research fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa.

Body mapping

Body mapping focuses on communicating visceral, embodied, multisensory experiences through a visual art process that explores and depicts elements of people’s bodies, stories, and their environments within the traced silhouette of their body (Gastaldo et al., 2012). Body maps are not a traditional architectural method; yet, they are an emerging method within architecture and urban planning with potential to inform social work research. In Sweet and Escalante’s (2015) research, body mapping is undertaken by female urban planners in New York City, Mexico City, and Barcelona to explore gender violence, safety, and fear in the built environment. The sensory experiences explored by this research method are particularly critical in relationship to marginalized populations, whose experiences in the urban environment remain largely silent within design and urban scholarship (Sweet and Escalante, 2015). Body map storytelling is a promising method of exploring the embodied relationship between the built environment and lived experience, providing a method for participants to “‘verbalise’ what one might not verbalise on the street” (Sweet and Escalante, 2015: 1836). How does walking down an urban street impact women’s embodied experiences of fear, isolation, and safety? What types of spaces emphasize these experiences and how are they internalized? Body map storytelling can assist in answering these types of questions that seek to uncover how encounters between the body and its physical context are experienced as well as the meaning that emerges from these connections.

In a similar vein, Vincent (2014) used body mapping to understand the exchange between bodies and environments within a social history museum. Vincent aimed to connect embodied experiences with socio-spatial contexts and understand how this relationship influences encounters between the body and its environment. In this pursuit, participants’ body maps became “personal geographies” (p. 375) that communicated key “people, things, and experiences” (p. 375) that participants saw as shaping their lives, while also articulating how each of these elements related to their environment (Vincent, 2014). For example, one participant’s body map reflected her experiences of transnationality and insider/outsider status. She identified her feet as implanted in rural Australia while the upper parts of her body—including her arms, mouth, and upper legs—expressed her global connections and identity as a first-generation immigrant. Body mapping connected the intangible and personal experiences of immigration to embodied encounters in the world.

In our own social work education and research, body mapping is an effective method for unfolding how bodies experience environment. As part of a doctoral qualitative methodologies class, the first author organized a body mapping exercise among both educators and students to explore body mapping as a socio-spatial elicitation tool. The participants journeyed together from the urban center to a farm located an hour outside of the city. Once at the farm, participants created body maps designed to express their experience of transitioning from an urban to a rural environment. None of the participants had previous visual arts experience but all reported that they had immediate visual and sensory responses to each body-mapping question. The questions built-off Vincent’s (2014) place-based body-mapping questions: “Where is your head? Where is your heart? Where do you stand? What lands do you see? How far can you reach?” (p. 373). As a group, they added the following questions: What do you hear? What is missing? Participants reported that body mapping allowed them to express and link aspects of their identities, bodies, and physical environments (Figure 5).

Figure 5.
Examples of body mapping done in a social work qualitative methodologies class in Calgary, AB.

Discussion

This methodological paper discussed how architectural multisensory methods and a greater emphasis on the built environment can inform and enhance social work research. It shows how four multisensory methods commonly used in architecture—sketch walks, photography, spatial visualization, and mapping—offer a robust and focused means of communicating and analyzing the built environment in relationship to everyday experience. It also argued that explicitly examining the built environment via these multisensory methods brings into focus the ambiance, details, and structure in which we all live but relegate unnoticed to the background. While social work researchers have previously utilized some of the methods we explore, they are a novel approach within the discipline for examining the physical world. In applying these methods to generate knowledge of the built environment, we hope the social work discipline can shift toward a greater understanding and curiosity of how the built environment and human experience interact. With this knowledge comes the possibility of advancing spatial justice for marginalized populations.

Architectural methods as a tool of empowerment

This paper provides useful tools for social work researchers to adopt and utilize in their own research to access the built environment and increase understanding of experience and wellbeing. Recognizing that social work researchers are committed to participatory-action research, we suggest that using these methods to study the built environment is also an opportunity to empower participants through research methods. Multisensory methods facilitate an embodied and active role for participants and offer contemplative and reflexive processes for empowered participation (Pink, 2017). They also allow research participants to consider and reflect their knowledge and experiences of the built environment in a manner more closely aligned with how we experience environments: embodied and sensorially immersed (Pink, 2015, 2017). For example, this paper demonstrated that in contrast with more traditional sit-down, interview-based methods that fit well within social work’s clinical mode of practice, walking interviews offer a means of understanding client experiences as they are situated in the routines of everyday life (Gardner, 2011; Kusenbach, 2003). Walking interviews have demonstrated to be particularly empowering for people in positions of marginality, such as research with older adults, persons with mobility limitations, and individuals with cognitive disabilities (Gardner, 2011; McClimens et al., 2014; Parent, 2016). We suggest that walking interviews, combined with the multisensory methods in this paper, can be co-constructed with participants as a means of working alongside marginalized populations to reflect, document, and analyze the role of the built environment in their everyday lives.

Spatial justice

Spatial justice involves seeking equitable distribution of resources, occupation, and opportunity in space as well as understanding the impact of space—constituted of the built environment—on processes of identity and experience (Soja, 2013). Research outside of social work illustrates the built environment’s complicity in social stigma and exclusion as well as identity formation. Architectural theorist Dovey’s (2009) research on informal settlements in Indonesia demonstrates the connection between the physical world and social change, in which housing ownership and social valorization are legitimized through investments in permanent forms of building materials: bamboo is upgraded to brick, concrete, and stucco in pursuit of secure land tenure and the identity of landowner. In a like manner, Prince’s (2014) research identifies the built environment as intertwined with youths’ identity creation, drawing upon theoretical concepts of place identity and social representations of place to understand the built environment’s relationship with self. This understanding of the role of the built environment in identity and belonging has been slow to infiltrate social work. The architectural multisensory methods proposed in this paper can assist social work researchers in understanding this mutually constituting relationship.

Spatial research reveals that the built environment creates social stigma. Scholarship on senior-housing finds that persons living in institutionalized assisted-living facilities experience higher levels of social stigma as opposed to residents in independent and assisted-living housing (Hrybyk et al., 2012). Imrie’s (2000) review of municipal policies and practices in the U.K. demonstrates how stigma and discrimination shape individuals with disabilities’ ability to move through the built environment, as policy makers’ views of disability dictate how the urban realm is designed and built. Similarly, Wassenber’s (2004) research with social housing residents in Chicago found that occupants of new mixed-income housing developments featuring high-quality design experienced less social stigma than residents living in affordable housing reflecting less capital investment. Together, this body of research establishes the significant connection between the built environment and social stigma. With the methods outlined in this paper, social work can join the growing interdisciplinary effort to address spatial justice.

Next steps: Increasing interdisciplinary collaboration

If social work incorporates architectural methods to further explore the built environment as part of its research and understanding, it will be able to robustly participate within interdisciplinary policy realms involving the built environment and marginalized populations. For example, understanding the built environment’s role in establishing, maintaining, and extending structural violence among marginalized populations (Mullaly, 2007) is key for social work’s participation in urban design policy at community and national levels. Marginalized groups that experience this form of structural violence include women, persons experiencing homelessness, Indigenous people, individuals who are incarcerated, people with disabilities, and people who identify as trans or gender non-conforming. Forms of the built environment particularly salient to possible interventions to counter structural violence include housing, schools, healthcare, and public transit infrastructure. Overall, in highlighting and understanding the role of the built environment, social work research can begin to advance urban policies that address these pervasive forms of structural violence that remain largely unaddressed by other disciplines.

By increasing its disciplinary understanding of the built environment and its interaction with human experience, social work will be well placed for increased collaboration with architecture and other spatial disciplines. Architectural voices are beginning to call for new modes of practice that are socially responsive and involved in community (Hunter, 2012; Kattein, 2015; Rhowbotham 2012; Trefy and Watson, 2013). Architectural practices such as the MASS Design Group in Boston, U.S.A are advocating for architecture that looks beyond form and toward participatory projects that transform and empower local communities (Mayhew, 2019). Interdisciplinary partnerships between social work and architecture support these possibilities, including the Urban Studio project in North Carolina (Nsonwu et al., 2010) and interdisciplinary community design charettes, which are an intensive idea generating, problem-solving, and planning session, at the University of Washington (Sutton and Kemp, 2006). Similarly, architecture is recognizing the benefits of socially engaged practice; incorporating architectural multisensory methods within social work research is an opportunity for interdisciplinary collaboration in a number of areas, including affordable housing, accessibility, gender-aware design of public spaces, the right to appropriate shelter, and wellness. Social work has an opportunity to lead and play a vital role in these types of collaborations and educational activities, bringing its unique disciplinary understanding of social justice and equity to decisions guiding the creation of our cities.

The built environment is intertwined with the lived experience and well-being of marginalized populations, providing a window into the structures of oppression that social work seeks to understand and disrupt. To instigate positive movement in these areas, social work research requires methods that facilitate comprehensive understanding and analysis of the relationship between the built environment and human experience. Toward this goal, we provide a blueprint of possibilities for incorporating architectural multisensory methods into social work research that we hope will spark possibilities and further methodological investigation.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Alison L Grittner

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