By studying keys and key use in particular instances, we come upon those building topologies that other studies miss when generalising access to buildings as either material mechanisms[1] or social procedure[2].

In Defensible Space[3], Oscar Newman argued that many of the social problems associated with multi-storey housing estates in the US could be tackled if there was detailed analysis of how buildings were organised. In his study of New York housing estates, he scrutinised entrance lobbies of the buildings, summating that unsuccessful ones usually had too many spaces that were 'screened off elevator and letterbox areas' creating 'hidden double turns' [4] that were not visible from the street or the main entrance door. Such spaces prevented residents getting a view of what was happening or who might be lingering inside the lobby or in front of the building.

For Newman the question of access is a question of mutual control; in Newman's words 'natural visual and auditory monitoring of activities' [5] taking place in semi-public areas. Such control naturally exists in and is essential to the ordering of access: 'natural surveillance', he writes, is 'the ability to observe the public areas of one's residential environment and to feel continually that one is under observation by other residents while on the grounds of projects and within the public areas of building interiors' [6]. Natural surveillance is the foundational premise of the idea of defensible space. Newman introduces this concept without discussing it in further detail; taken for granted it is carried from page to page as an incontrovertible fact. With the social part of access thus immutably defined, stabilised and black-boxed, it is then inevitable that intervening in or remedying the problem of access must be framed as a material or technological matter respectively; a solution that lies in the hands of designers and architects.

Peter Bearman's stunning book Doormen [7] in contrast is an empirical investigation into how service personnel negotiate the complex world of the lobby in condominium buildings of New York. Bearman's interest is not in access per se but rather the work experiences of doormen and their relations with the building's well-off residents, and specifically the everyday encounter with social distance and distinction in American society. Different though Bearman's and Newman's approaches are, one parallel can be drawn between them.  Much as Newman introduced natural surveillance at the beginning of Defensible Space, Bearman introduces the lobby space in the introductory part of his book. Despite the fact that Bearman ponders the various 'personalities of buildings' and does suggest in passing that 'the physical appearance of the lobby […] shapes the structure of interactions between tenants and between tenants and doormen' [8], he puts these materially produced differences aside to focus on what he calls 'the generic nature of lobbies', conceiving of them as an 'unitary space' [9]. Herewith Bearman exhibits the material circumstances in which access is negotiated as having no organisational relations with the work of the doorman. There are commonalities in this analytical framework with the work of Irving Goffman [10] such that the ordering of access is understood as a social grammar in which the building itself and its material arrangement is, at most, a stage on which social actors play their roles.

It is not our aim to frame this discussion as a Bearman vs. Newman debate. It is very clear that Newman's approach involves a form of social reductionism; it is architects and urban designers that make good or bad urban spaces. Bearman, on the other hand, approaches access to buildings and the city as something that is shaped and construed in and through social interaction, which takes place in everyday life and in specific encounters. It is important not to play these studies off against each other, but to recognise that both operate with asymmetrical assumptions made about automatisms. Newman incorporates automatisms in social relations, Bearman in the built environment.

An alternative conception of access can be found in the writings of Bruno Latour [11]. Here access organisation figures as being socio-technically intertwined. According to Latour et al.[12], for example, a big fob on a hotel room key mediates an access programme: keys must be turned in at reception when leaving the building. The fob does so because it is too big to be carried around in pockets and handbags. Hotel guests would thus always be prompted that the key must be handed in at the hotel reception. This is Newman's world, where objects tell us what we can see and what we have to do. But Latour rejects such deterministic views when he reminds us that a material object such as a key fob is not involved in the making of access as an intermediary that would carry, mirror and impose rights, rules, and social sense. For him a key is a mediator, i.e. an object that makes and forms disciplinary associations. The hotel key fob involves guests (e.g. keys are not taken away; keys are ready at reception when needed for the next guests or service personal; hotel guests have to present themselves at reception when entering and leaving the building; and so on), but this does not mean that every hotel guest would automatically respond to such involvement. It means that the big fob links hotel guests and keys to each other in such a way that access becomes possible. As a mediator, a key is not carrying (out), but is involved in making a programme: 'the meaning [of the programme] is no longer simply transported by the medium but in part constituted, moved, recreated, modified, in short expressed and betrayed'[13]. Latour aims to conceive of access as something that is made and sometimes unmade through associations between technical and societal beings.

In our study on the Red Road concierges we take a clear step away from Newman's study of ready-made and defensible building access. We study access in the making not simply by equipping Bearman's doormen with Latourian keys, but by observing what happens to keys when they are embedded in naturally occurring work situations.