Welcoming atmospheres and interdictory spaces: The loud and silent politics of social work architecture

Attention to social work architecture in social work literature

Attention to place and environment has roots in the early social work, exemplified by the mapping of the community workers at Jane Addams House and the attention to environment in Richmond (Akesson et al., 2017; Bryant & Williams, 2020). It has been argued that until recently attention to space and place in social work research has been scant or has focused on the psychosocial relation between place and individual and tended to prioritize the individual in the relation between environment and people (Akesson et al., 2017; Kemp, 2011; Ratliff et al., 2023). Others have argued for a re-turn to geographical imagination, space, and place in social work research since 2018 (Andrews, 2020, Bryant & Williams, 2020; Saravia et al., 2024). Saravia et al. (2024) evidence in their literature review of social work research a “spatial turn.” They map out how attention to spatial terms differs between regions, and that environment and place has received most attention within the last 5 years, while space and territory have received less attention. Differences in the present debate in social work research are thus not only related to the relative weight given to different spatial dimensions; environment, place (community), and territory, but also in terms of the theoretical concepts and traditions used to investigate how space matters.

A German branch of social work research (Sozial räume) integrates critical geographical concepts from Harvey and Lefebvre, community work approaches, and critical social psychology from Vygotsky (Spatscheck, 2019). The strength is here the focus on how space becomes active part of both everyday activities, organizations, and planning, and that people come to acquire place and environment through their activities, tools, and actions when coping with its conditioning of life. Understanding the spatial expressions of advanced marginality is pregnant in the body of work relying on the trialectic of Bourdieu (Cummins, 2016; Wacquant, 2022). In focus here is the analysis of how urban neighborhoods are relationally constructed, how structurally informed marginalization results in practices of relegation, sustained by political tools. Despite highlighting interrelations and interdependencies between the symbolic, social, and physical space this body of work tends to focus on hierarchizing space and controlling elements of nearness and distance. Attempts to root social work in spatial justice and thus challenge existing systems has been based on Foucault's notion of heterotopia (Ratliff et al., 2023) and in Foucault's notions of disciplining and normalizing relations of power (Gilbert & Powell, 2010; Parton, 2008). This perspective is useful in highlighting the discursive constructions of social work architecture, and the diffuse conduct of power through social work architecture constituting both professionals and citizens. However, analyses of how things never work out as planned—not even attempts to mold materiality, places, and architecture—are few. Thus, it is in our view important to highlight the historical role of social work practice beyond surveillance and control and promote a proactive and critical approach for social work practice (Fallov, 2023; Fallov et al., 2017).

Building on mobile methods, Ferguson (2016) has analyzed the importance of non-human actors when analyzing social work practices in the home, and how social workers navigate and have a part in producing atmospheres. Similarly, Andrews (2020) and Andrews and Duff (2019) argue for the importance of applying post-humanist approaches to gain a better understanding of the assemblages involved in social work, their outcomes, and the enabling spaces important to both social work and health research. In social work literature, actor network theory is mostly recognized as offering an analytical framework for understanding complex social changes associated with the introduction of technological innovations (see, e.g., Aasback, 2022; Ballantyne, 2015; Jørgensen & Nissen, 2022). Tørrisplass and Breimo (2019) combine institutional ethnography and actor network theory in a study of deinstitutionalization processes and policies of residential care facilities for unaccompanied refugee minors. This combination, they argue, enable analytical focus on the significance of materiality starting with people's experiences and everyday life. Jeyasingham (2018, 2020) has combined Lefebvre with actor network theory perspectives to analyze how social workers contribute to neighborhood production through the symbolic constructions of the places they work, and more recently analyzing how agile social work in office spaces are influenced by new public management.

Taking point of departure in this promising work and the current debates on how to conceptualize the role of social work architecture, we want in the present article to engage in a dialogue between critical geography and actor network theory. Despite their internal differences, we believe this dialogue affords a conceptualization of social work architecture that approach human experience as important but does not give it privilege. It allows us to move beyond questions of nearness and distance, mere locality, and beyond an understanding of space and place as mere containers in which social work takes place. This dialogue, we believe, move toward a framework that includes the relational, historical, material, symbolic, discursive, affective, and political dimensions of social work architecture. We agree with critical geographical perspectives highlighting how structural powers produce social work architecture and that social work has an active role in this production (Harvey, 2013; Lefebvre, 1991, 1996). Hence, we approach social work as a practice that constantly aim to proactively change and mediate in these structural powers. We want to understand how social work architecture becomes agents (Latour, 2005) in webs of relations performing and contesting politics and social work. Thus, the aim of this conversation between critical geographical and pragmatic perspectives is to highlight the silent and sometimes loud political work performed by places, localities, and architecture of social workspaces where the social worker meets the citizen.

We engage the two perspectives in dialogue via an analysis of two empirical examples from the Danish context of social work. The examples are from two different job center departments specialized in young people with no employment, education, or training, and who experience additional problems such as a criminal history and verdicts, various diagnoses, and drug addiction. The young people are in contact with many and different institutions and hence spaces, places, and architectural settings such as criminal courts and prisons, psychiatric ward, and rehab facilities. Their primary and first contact, however, is with the job centers. This attests to a continuation of a Danish offensive workfare strategy rearticulated with the social-democratic and universalistic welfare model (Torfing, 1999) emphasizing activation and the role of job centers. The idea of activation can be defined as the principle that benefit entitlement depends on one's participation in some kind of activity such as unpaid work, job training, upskilling, and job search activities (Andersen & Larsen, 2024). While the content of the activation idea has endured and remained the same during the last 30 years, it has changed from a neo-liberal ideological and hence politically contestable claim to a seemingly unquestionable technical objective spanning the political ideological spectrum and sheltered from substantial critique. We suggest that workfare and the activation idea work through very different practices and in very different places, spaces, and architectural environments, which we argue are part and parcel of the governance and implementation structures.

Our analysis is structured around two main observations. The first empirical example illustrates an architectural design meant to generate an atmosphere of openness and approachability. The second empirical example illustrates how concerns with security and establishing authority are shaped by architectural design and how social workers negotiate such concerns when interacting with young unemployed and vulnerable citizens. Thus, the two examples cover very different architectural designs directed by the same overall rationality related to the active labor market policies. Social work architecture, in other words, frames interaction and shapes roles by fostering employability as well as educational and labor market activity among unemployed young people.

We start by outlining how the role of social work architecture has been understood theoretically pinpointing what we see as potentials and shortcomings in both critical geographical perspectives’ focus on structures and relationships of power and actor network theory's disdain for research guided by morals or political principles. Then we shortly outline our methodology, followed by the two main empirical sections. An exploration is not a set path. We do not claim in this article to come up with a unified model of the role of social work architecture in social work practice, but to start a discussion in social work research of the importance of reflecting on how it matters.

The production and enactment of social work architecture according to critical geography and actor network theory

According to critical political economic geography, places and the design of urban (and rural) spaces are not a result of neutral naturally emergent processes and phenomena (Harvey, 2013; Lefebvre, 1991). Places and the architectural design of the welfare state is a result of the struggle between different groups and by their relations to the ever changing and variant forms of capitalism. For Harvey, spatial barriers are overcome not only to gain competitive advantage for growth. Spaces are important in organizing social relations; shaping access/barring access, the appropriation of spaces and places institutionalizing particular forms of use, spatial dominance by particular groups and classes excluding other representations and appropriations of spaces and places (Harvey, 1990). Harvey argues, for example, how the uneven development of cities is shaped by the creative destruction left in the wake of the reinvestment of surplus and the facilitating state aiming to attract investments and entrepreneurs, which either displace the less powerful, or capitalize on their authentic branding of place (Harvey, 2006, 2013). Social work architecture is thus the historical product of how different groups and classes have differential access to promote their idea of order, strategies, and codifications of the good life which condition and are in constant struggle with the lived life in places (Lefebvre, 1996). Lefebvre argues, moreover, that welfare planners and professionals decide, plan, and act in relation to governmental rationalities forgetting the human factor. He sees, for example, big social housing estates as shaped by ideas of habitat that are conducive to the reproduction of labor, but which overlooks the importance of the plasticity of how people inhabit and thus habiting as everyday activity (Lefebvre, 1996). While there is a tendency in the critical geographical perspectives to stay with how totalizing capitalist structures condition, shape, and produce places, there is with Lefebvre an attention to how lived spaces always will escape orderings and the representations and codifications of place by those in power (Lefebvre, 2003). It is a perspective that allows us to insist on the dialectical relation between, on the one hand, the production and codification of social work spaces by the contemporary relations of capitalism and, on the other hand, social work's role in promoting the right to the city for the displaced, excluded, and marginalized and in supporting spatial representations by citizens challenging rationalist or entrepreneurial visions and promoting a more just city.

Here actor network theory provides interesting, promising, and at times difficult routes for our exploration. Law (2008, p. 141) gives a succinct introductory description of actor network theory, which we restructure and paraphrase here for the sake of elaboration and clarity. First, actor network theory treats everything in the social and natural worlds as continuously generated effects of the webs of relations within which they are located. It assumes that nothing has reality or form outside the enactment of those relations. This is sometimes called relationism designating a departure from relativism, constructivism, and essentialism and implying a flat ontology in which everything belongs to the same ontological realm. The consequences are profound. Instead of assuming that space, safety, community, and trusting relations exist in themselves and somehow interact and impact one another, actor network theory holds that all these entities are network effects. Space, politics, community, and so forth emerge as possible results from networks in action and none have an a priori upper hand (Latour, 2005). Spaces of social work are swarming with logics. Sometimes they struggle bitterly, but at other times differences co-exist. Reception counters can be simultaneously friendly, welcoming, and suspicious and controlling (Jensen, 2001). Residential care facilities can be a home and an institution at the same time (Tørrisplass & Breimo, 2019). Second, since everything has reality and form due to the enactment of the web of relations, actor network theory's main objective is to study, explore, and characterize the webs of relations, how they are enacted in practice and how they are stabilized or destabilized. Given the treacherousness and indeterminacy of any relation, actor network theory is interested in how networks consolidate through continuous network ordering, often referred to also as processes of translation (Law, 1992). As Latour and Yaneva (2017) remind us, buildings too are moving modulators. They are not static but always on the move, in flight, transformed by its users, modified by what goes on inside and outside, as well as by renovations adulterating and transforming them beyond recognition. Simultaneously, they regulate engagement, redirect users’ attention, concentrate and distribute flows of actors. Third, actor network theory is a disparate family of sensibilities and methods of analysis. Rather than offering a coherent theory, it provides an open conceptual repository that have been deployed and developed by various scholars conducting empirical studies of the enactment of such things as electric vehicles, music, anemia, organizations, cheese, childbirth, and blood pressure in the brain (Mol, 2010). This means that actor network theory not only provides a rich and empirically sensitive vocabulary but also that it is open for new conceptual elaborations. To sum up, actor network theory provides a perspective of and a vocabulary for exploring how subjects, roles, materiality, architecture, and politics co-constitutively are enacted in relational networks. This perspective considers materials, technologies, and things, which have become “reified in a series of sedimented enactments” (Law, 2002, p. 96) and hence invisible to us, as full-blown actors that are both enacted and enacting at the same time.

In what follows, we operationalize the critical geographical and actor network theory perspectives as complementary despite their internal disputes (see, e.g., the disputes between Brenner and the assembling perspectives; Brenner, 2009; Farias & Blok, 2016). These disputes revolve around the question of what critique and the political are and how to understand structures or predetermined social relations, such as class. With political work here, we signify the oeuvre that goes into inhabiting the architectural designs and materiality of social workspaces, and how such an oeuvre builds on conflictual relations—albeit often displaced out of sight (Lefebvre, 2003). Moreover, by engaging in dialogue with the actor network theory perspective we highlight how politics is also about drawing out the emergent character and ambivalences that stem from connections and relations between social work practice and architectural design, emphasizing how they might lead to other practices, roles, and interactions with citizens than intended (Farias & Blok, 2016). However, we have found both perspectives to have both potentials and shortcomings.

To get the grips of how social work architecture matters for social work, we need to understand the nestedness of social work practices in capitalist relations and approach them as result and part of power struggles and structural conditions. Social workers are conditioned in their everyday practices, deliberations, and decisions by political rationales (the workfare and activation ideology) and their materialization in places and in architecture (part of the governance and implementation structures that condition how these ideas are put into practice). The difference between the critical geographical and the actor network theory perspectives comes down to how we should explain and approach this nestedness. The critical geographical approach focusses on and explores the consequences of totalizing ideologies, social structures, and discourses encroaching and enveloping local practices. According to Latour (2005), the critical approach presumes a rift between the local and the global or the micro and the macro. While we do not see this as a necessary consequence or prerequisite for the critical approach, we do share the concern that the global or the macro tend to reign supreme and that the critical geographical perspective risks neglecting the nuances, agency, performance, and variance of how place matters. While not denying the existence of capitalism or neo-liberalism, actor network theory reverses the explanation and shows us the dynamics of conflict, dilemmas in practice, disagreement, and all the painstaking work it takes to reach order and stability—if they materializes at all (Latour, 2005). However, actor network theory offers no judgment on what it all means. We risk losing our bearings, since actor network theory lacks and even disdains anything resembling moral or political principles from which to make sense of it all (Winner, 1993). In a pragmatic spirit, we argue that the two perspectives can be deployed together in an exploration of how structural relations and conditions are destabilized and filled with ambiguities when we follow actually ongoing social work.

An enabling environment and welcoming atmosphere framing equal worth and normalization

In this example, the social workers emphasize the importance of the physical layout and design of the offices for establishing relationships with the young people (Figures 1 to 3).

[Figure 1] The job centre department is located in a large orange building. It looks like a renovated warehouse. Later, I am told that it is an old printing building. From the outside, it looks like a cultural site rather than a municipal unit. To one side is a public park. I am told that they use the proximity of the park to go on walks with the young people, to get out in neutral surroundings. It is in proximity to a concert hall and a community centre and shares a car park with a food production facility, which is just behind. With the raw factory in the backyard, the strong orange slightly artistic building, and a view of the half-demolished silos by the harbour, I think gentrification. The job centre occupies the ground floor. You feel very welcome. Not because there is necessarily anyone there to receive you when entering. There are always one or two social workers in the house. However often, most of the social workers are out of office visiting the young people or accompanying them to various appointments. But because the rooms are welcoming. [Figure 2] There is a large room in the middle of the house, which functions as a common waiting room. Here there is a couch made of old black painted wooden pallets with large pillows, table football, a PC, and orange “high school” lockers. [Figure 3] There are no closed doors. It seems cosy, colourful, and creative. I later find out that it is one of the employees who has been responsible for furnishing and decorating the house with old furniture, which has been restored and repainted. You don’t get the impression of a place for petty officials.

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Figure 1.

Building 1 (picture taken by Author 2).

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Figure 2.

Interior design (picture taken by Author 2).

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Figure 3.

Table soccer table (picture taken by Author 2).

The open doors, sofa, and table soccer is part of a deliberate design to generate the job center department as an enabling place that facilitate particular forms of agency and capacities of the unemployed young people (Duff, 2011). It is an enabling place because the welcoming design allows for trustful associations with the social workers that potentially enhance the social resources of the young unemployed people. Moreover, the welcoming atmosphere is designed to transmit the dynamic power of affective resources to interaction between social workers and young unemployed instilling feelings of playfulness and action.

Like artifacts and technologies, architecture is designed for specific purposes, and it prescribes action through its design. It prescribes a certain usage, define users and usage, the space in which users move, the ways in which users interact, and it provide a key with which users may interpret usage (Akrich, 1992). Architecture allows or incites social workers and clients to do some things while it disallows or makes other actions less probable and, by shaping practice, it structures what it means to be a social worker and client as well as the relations in between. Designers and architects—in this example, one of the social workers—define actors with specific tastes, competences, qualities, motives, and aspirations and inscribe these visions into the architectural design. In turn, the design provides a script for the social workers and the young people; a framework for interpretation and action within the context in which they are supposed to act. As such, architecture actively shapes subjectivity and objectivity and the ways in which we are present in the world (Verbeek, 2005). In the above example, the design is intended to support and materialize certain staff–client relations and values including equal worth, engagement, proximity, and confidentiality. Moreover, it provides a script and a framework for interpreting the room as well as one's place in it. The soccer table, the lounge area with the home-made sofa, and the lockers associate this place with hip youth culture rather than social problems. It provides the young clients with an interpretative scheme in which they can understand and frame themselves as any other cool youngster. It allows the young people to think of themselves as normal kids rather than clients subject to workfare measures and it supports the social workers relating to the young people as such, helping them focusing on their resources and motives for changes rather than their problems. This is also supported by posts on a bulletin board and posters. For example, a poster reads “See me as a regular person with problems that need fixing.” Another post quotes Nietzsche “In every real man, a child is hidden that wants to play” emphasizing the common human potential for transforming ourselves by overcoming the barriers imposed upon us and finding our true selves. As such, the architecture and designs support a hegemonic activation discourse emphasizing activity over passivity, the future over the past, and potentials over problems (Nissen et al., 2018).

No matter how strong the architectural script is, and no matter how discursively well-founded it is, it is not deterministic. In practice, architectural scripts are always de-scribed (Akrich, 1992). Social workers and the young clients interpret the architecture from different positions and with different lived experiences and always in context. Thus, although it looks like a place to hang out, it is also a place where the young people's future directions are shaped and decided upon, and it is a place where the authority to decide on such matters are unequally distributed among social workers and the young people. The architecturally envisioned and scripted subject may not necessarily align with people's self-perception. Because of limitations in the study, we can only speculate how the young people actually de-scribe this space. Steeped in lived experience and in need of support and help, there is a risk that young people feel marginalized and alienated when faced with an architectural script of the “normal” active and individually responsible young person who, by the very virtue of being a human being, are able to transform oneself. In relation to this, research suggests that intensified normalization, individual responsibilization, and neglecting of problems can fall heavy on young people in need and in vulnerable positions, if they are expected to deliver more than is fair, or they are able to (Nissen et al., 2018). The social workers, on their part, reflect on dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion, normalization and alienation, and how to practice equal worth between unequal positions. One social worker relayed that they should avoid “meeting on our turf” and elaborated “if you peel off the institutional, e.g. by meeting on a bench in the park, it is easier to overcome, ignore, or minimize the fact that the young person and the social worker are not equally positioned and thus focus on their equal worth” (Observation notes).

Interdictory spaces

The architecture exemplified above illustrates a reasoned design attempting to negate unequal power relations, signaling openness, equal worth, and normality. The example which follows illustrates architecture designed to control access, emphasizing security and assuming and reproducing distrustful relations between social workers and clients (Figures 4 to 6).

[Figure 4] Today, I will be joining and talking with social worker and case manager Rebecca. Rebecca's office is in a downtown four-story grey concrete building. A small entrance hall has three doors: a toilet door, a door to the stairwell that is locked, and a double door that leads to a lobby. [Figure 5]. In the lobby, there is a digital queue number system, round tables with self-service computers, chairs along the walls, and a front desk with front line personnel expediting clients. Under normal circumstances, case managers are only accessible through the front desk. Provided you have an appointment, you draw a number, wait in line, are expedited by the front-line personnel, and only then picked up by your case manager. Rebecca has told me to call her directly and wait for her in the entrance hall. She unlocks and opens the door leading to the stairwell from the inside and invites me in. The stairwell leads to the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd floor, where the case managers’ offices are located. We reach Rebecca's floor, unlock, and enter through yet another door. There is a long, wide, and bright corridor with offices on both sides. The individual offices are quite small. They are connected two by two via an escape route and under the desk there is an alarm button [Figure 6]. I ask about the locked doors, the escape route, and the alarm button. Rebecca says that she thinks the escape route and the alarm button are necessary precautions since there are many and very different people with various issues in the building and that their work can stir up emotions. Later, when asked what is most important to her work, she explains that trust in and care for the young people are crucial, that it is paramount to nurture the relationship with them, that the case workers must be open-minded and accepting, treat the young people respectfully, recognise them as full and equal human beings and “give them the experience that they are not just yet another number in the line.” (Observation notes and interview)

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Figure 4.

Building 2 (picture taken by Author 2).

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Figure 5.

Access secured (picture taken by Author 2).

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Figure 6.

Escape alarm under desk (picture taken by Author 2).

Modern welfare architecture as the one represented in the above observation notes is from a critical geographical perspective a symbol of the institutionalization of space by the welfare state designed with functional purposes in mind (Lefebvre, 2009). In this instance, it is the implementation of elements of active labor market policies in which the state as representative of interests of the ruling classes tackle social problems and build the capacities of the unemployed deemed unable to find their own way into the labor market. At the same time, the example represents the welfare side of the proliferation of what Flusty (2001) have termed “interdictory spaces” meant to filter and repel would be users. Interdictory spaces function to systematically exclude those judged unsuitable or even threatening. They have spread through privatized and consumer spaces to exclude unwanted and threatening others from the privileged consumers. But the interdictory spaces similarly spread in government buildings and administrative complexes. In the example, they work through locked doors and filtering pathways separating employees from the young people needing their assistance. Flusty's point is that interdictory spaces have become a mainstay in the urban environment to an extent that they have become naturalized and unthreatening to our daily lives so that we hardly notice them (Flusty, 2001). Thus, there is nothing new in job center departments filtering users and barring immediate access to social workers. Similar designs are everywhere we encounter the welfare state or want to transgress spaces of authority. We no longer notice the security cameras in the corner, the double doors, and we negotiate the number systems giving us particular slots or mark out waiting time for assistance. Where interdictory spaces in some instances simply bar access, for example in the shape of walls separating neighborhoods or locked gates, interdictory spaces in this type of welfare architecture are meant to facilitate access to authorities—as long as we leave our differences at the door and act in an appropriate manner. Thus, as we learn from Rebecca, security measures can be activated through alarm buttons if citizens that become angry with decisions made by the social workers behave in a threatening way. In that way, interdictory spaces ascribe codes of conduct that are incorporated in our daily practices and navigation of places (McFarlane, 2011) and at the same time proscribe what is deemed inappropriate.

The queue number system, the self-service computers, the waiting chairs, the front desk, and so forth can be understood as plug-ins (Latour, 2005—who on this point is deeply indebted to Foucault) that do not negatively constrain or limit subjectivity, but positively creates the young people as bureaucratic clients. In principle, they can resist this subjectivity by refraining from subscribing to the design, for example by jumping the queue. However, this comes at the price of potential exclusion. If the young people want help, they have little option but to subscribe to the subjectivity of the bureaucratic client. Such designs similarly focus the productiveness of the social workers, as they know help is nearby and do not have to worry about their own bodily safety when performing their bureaucratic functions. The apparent banality and everydayness push the socio-spatial injustices and social dysfunctions of interdictory spaces into the realm of the inconceivable (Flusty, 2001). Thus, we can hardly imagine other ways of designing spaces or making architectural layouts that both perform essential bureaucratic functions while protecting frontline personnel. However, we might need to reflect upon whether the interdictory spaces reinforce unwanted emotional responses by installing inhuman codes of conduct. The loud politics of this kind of architecture exist side by side with the silent politics of the previous example, and this ambivalence in job center rationality expresses itself in the way that Rebecca without noting any contradictions refer to both trust and security as values in her work.

Such ambivalence and contradictions are apparent, moreover, in the way Rebecca and her colleagues use the building and their interconnected offices. On the one hand, Rebecca subscribes to the architecture of security and bureaucracy and adds to the enactment of herself as a professional authority and the young people as clients. Thus, under normal circumstances, she will be accessible only through the bureaucratic process supported by the design of the building. On the other hand, Rebecca and her colleague next door use the connecting door not only as an escape route but also, and even more so, as a means of allowing sparring and collegial reflection in the busy practice of the everyday with heavy caseloads. Thus, escape routes support both safety and collegial teamwork, and the social workers navigate the design in a manner that makes them appear with authority and instill bureaucratic order and at the same time appear in a trustworthy manner for the young unemployed people. From this perspective, the interdictory space is a multi-stable space in a pluriverse (Latour & Yaneva, 2017). It facilitates professional practice, collegial collaboration, bureaucracy, and safety, while offering various subjectivities and subject relations. Sometimes, however, Rebecca and her colleagues unsubscribe, temporarily at least, to the design of the building simply by leaving and meeting with the young people elsewhere. During a wrap-up interview concluding an intense day of fieldwork, Rebecca explains:

It [the young people's aspirations, desires, and concerns] sometimes comes quietly in these informal conversations that we actually have a lot… when we meet informally. When it's not here [in the office]. When we meet at home or if we meet out in the city or if we go for a walk or take a drive. (Interview with Rebecca)

Limitations of the study

As stated in the methodological section, data drawn upon in this article was not collated to show how social work architecture matter, but in order to analyze how social work practice builds upon and generates views on human beings. However, we will argue that social work architecture: place, materiality, and designs condition and enact views on human beings in social work. Since neither critical geography nor actor network theory grant people's experiences privilege, we have primarily chosen observation data from the data set to investigate this argument. Where appropriate, we have included interview data to develop the analysis. However, interview data focused on the social workers’ perspectives and allow limited knowledge of how the young people themselves react to or experience the architectural design and materiality of the social work locations they interact with. This is a clear limitation of the study. However, the aim is to start an empirically based theoretical conversation of how to understand the loud and silent politics of social work architecture rather than encapsulating the entirety of possible ways that social work architecture shape social work interactions with vulnerable young people.