Beyond the Drawing: Ethnography and Architecture as Contested Narratives of the Human Experience of Dwelling

Abstract

This study interrogates the interplay between architectural practice and ethnographic inquiry to elucidate human spatial experience across time and culture. Employing a mixed-methods design that integrates computational bibliometric analysis with thematic coding of international academic literature, the research identifies six thematic domains—memory, pedagogy, urban injustice, institutional care, domesticity, and vernacular epistemes. These domains reveal how ethnographic methods, though increasingly incorporated in architectural discourse, are frequently relegated to an instrumental role focused on design optimisation rather than the critical examination of cultural practices and power structures. The findings underscore that architecture functions as both a technical and cultural medium, simultaneously shaping and reflecting human behaviour and social relations. By foregrounding ethnography as a tool for capturing situated, embodied knowledge, the study advocates for a reconceptualisation of architectural practice that embraces reflexivity, inclusiveness, and contextual sensitivity. In doing so, it contributes to interdisciplinary debates central to anthropology, challenging established epistemological hierarchies and highlighting the potential for transformative, culturally informed spatial design.

1. Introduction

Ethnography has made a significant contribution to the advancement of social research by offering a deep lens into human behaviour and the cultural contexts in which it unfolds. Its principal strength lies in its capacity to examine complex social phenomena through immersive fieldwork and the triangulation of multiple data collection techniques (Brennan et al., 2015; Vesa & Vaara, 2014). This methodology has proven highly versatile, finding application in disciplines as diverse as nutrition, public health, inter-business services, and organisational studies (Morse, 2016; Watson, 2012). A key reason for this breadth is its ability to grasp subjective meanings, social situations, and even institutional dynamics (Morse, 2016; Watson, 2012). In recent decades, ethnography has incorporated a range of emerging techniques—such as autoethnography, videoethnography, and virtual ethnography—that have substantially expanded its reach (Vesa & Vaara, 2014). Although time-intensive, its value lies in its potential to generate knowledge that not only informs policy or intervention but also contributes to theoretical development (Comer et al., 1996; Ottrey et al., 2018).

Nonetheless, ethnographic research faces a series of methodological challenges requiring careful navigation. Reflexivity and critical awareness of the researcher’s positionality are essential in mitigating bias (Hoolachan, 2016; Montero-Sieburth, 2020; Wadams & Park, 2018). Ethnographers are also advised to deploy forms of methodological “impression management” to navigate complex research environments (Gengler & Ezzell, 2018). Ethical issues intensify when working with vulnerable populations, making the autonomy of participants and researcher integrity non-negotiable (Portacolone et al., 2019). One way to address issues of representation is by incorporating intersectional frameworks, enabling participant voices and cultivating what some have termed a “negative capability”—that is, a tolerance for ambiguity and openness to complexity (Mahalingam & Rabelo, 2013). Building trust and managing fieldwork tensions are fundamental tasks of the ethnographer (Jachyra et al., 2015), and some have even proposed that researchers adopt hybrid roles—such as that of community facilitator—in order to more faithfully represent the studied environment (Hutchinson, 2012). This literature review seeks to valorise the use of ethnography in the investigation of habitat, with a particular emphasis on the disciplinary practices of architecture and urbanism, where understanding social space is key to reimagining its use.

Architectural research faces its own, sometimes self-imposed, set of constraints. These include the risk of disconnection from industry needs (Ostwald, 2017), financial limitations impacting the development of physical spaces (Yuli et al., 2023), and interdisciplinary frictions that hinder sustainable collaboration (Jin, 2024). The COVID-19 pandemic further challenged pedagogical and design paradigms (Milovanović et al., 2020), while the safeguarding of vernacular architectures in a globalised world poses singular difficulties (Pardo, 2023). The development of immersive technologies is constrained by digital infrastructure gaps, algorithmic opacity, and platform incompatibilities (Prabhakaran et al., 2022). Even in specific areas such as daylight simulation, persistent issues with model validation against users’ subjective perceptions persist—issues that ethnography can help to mitigate (Nazari & Matusiak, 2024). At the pedagogical level, practice-based research encounters barriers rooted in institutional cultures within architecture schools (Ellis et al., 2016), particularly concerning the integration of methods and strategies from other disciplines into the design process.

Against this challenging backdrop, the relationship between architecture and ethnography emerges as a potentially enriching exchange. Anthropological approaches can broaden architectural understanding by incorporating the users’ perspectives and the cultural contexts in which buildings are situated (Askland et al., 2014; Stender, 2017). Through techniques such as semantic ethnography, architects can access cultural representations that inform more inclusive spatial designs (Cranz et al., 2014). Studies of vernacular architecture and traditional building processes reveal how culture and space are co-produced (Ara & Rashid, 2016; Vellinga, 2017). Ethnography also offers insight into how architectural form intersects with processes of heritage-making (Del Mármol, 2017) and how materiality influences social identity (Copertino, 2014). Even from a historical angle, archival ethnography opens new avenues for understanding corporate architecture as a cultural artefact (Decker, 2014). Ethnographic research methodologies provide architecture with a crucial means to deepen the understanding of spatial experience and meaning beyond purely functional or aesthetic interpretations. Brennan-Horley et al. (2010) contended that the use of mixed-method ethnographic approaches—combining observational mapping, interviews, and participatory techniques—reveals both expected and unexpected patterns of spatial behaviour that are frequently overlooked by conventional architectural analysis. Similarly, Jensen et al. (2019) showed that such methods elucidate how users select spaces based on immediate needs, convenience, and the perceived control over their environment, thereby offering insights essential to user-centred design.

Moreover, Menezes and Smaniotto Costa (2024) emphasised the critical potential of collaborative ethnography within placemaking processes, showing that the co-production of knowledge between stakeholders and researchers fosters spatial interventions more attuned to local experiences and aspirations. In a complementary vein, Mounajjed et al. (2007) argued that ethnographic interventions can actively reconfigure users’ engagement with space, encouraging a shift from passive occupation to exploratory behaviour, thus uncovering latent forms of agency that traditional design approaches often miss.

In the context of educational environments, Samura illustrated that campus spaces can simultaneously foster or undermine student belonging, depending on how design mediates social dynamics (Samura, 2018). This finding underscores the necessity of ethnographic sensitivity in addressing the affective dimensions of spatial experience. Similarly, Pantidi identified legibility, legitimacy, and a sense of ownership as crucial factors influencing the successful appropriation of innovative learning spaces, thereby reinforcing the importance of user perceptions in architectural design (Pantidi, 2013).

Likewise, Suprapti et al. provided compelling evidence that ethnographic immersion can uncover culturally specific spatial practices, such as the notions of “charity space” and “social intensive space” in Islamic contexts, thus challenging the often implicit universality assumed in architectural discourse (Suprapti et al., 2010). Saify used an ethnographic analysis to develop housing solutions tailored to cultural and climatic contexts (Saifi, 2024). Similarly, Yuli et al. showed its usefulness in designing educational institutions such as pesantren in Islamic settings (Yuli et al., 2023) and guiding neighbourhood upgrading programmes (Daneshyar & Keynoush, 2023). As Zallio and Clarkson showed, ethnography has also played a key role in inclusive design practices (Zallio & Clarkson, 2021) and, as Farmer presented, ethnography has been used to grasp local contexts for water reuse projects (Farmer, 2025). This approach has helped strengthen the link between designers and place, fostering belonging and spiritual engagement in public space, as presented by Sliwinska (2019). Vanni and Crosby have practiced place-based methodologies that combine ethnography and human geography, which facilitated transdisciplinary architectural research (Vanni & Crosby, 2023). Furthermore, Tutt and Pink presented evidence of its practical value for the realm of construction management, too, where ethnography provides tools to understand the social complexities that affect the built environment (Tutt & Pink, 2019). Cranz’s Ethnography for Designers offers a structured, pragmatic framework to bridge architecture and ethnography, enabling designers to respond more sensitively to users’ cultural meanings while preserving creative agency (Cranz et al., 2014).

To promote active collaboration between the fields of architecture and ethnography, this study conducts a systematic review aimed at constructing conceptual and methodological bridges between the two disciplines. It employs a mixed-methods approach, combining computational bibliometric analysis with qualitative thematic interpretation, underpinned by a critical and interpretive epistemology. The principal aim is to examine how the architectural field has incorporated ethnography as a methodological, discursive, and epistemological instrument. Two specific objectives guided the inquiry: (i) to map the evolution, thematic structures, and key actors at the intersection of architecture and ethnography through an R-assisted bibliometric analysis using the bibliometrix package; and (ii) to interpret the meanings and applications of ethnography within architectural research through a thematic analysis of abstracts retrieved from Web of Science.

This manuscript focuses on examining how ethnographic methodologies have been incorporated into architectural research and practice, with particular attention to the epistemological tensions that arise in this process. The aim is to interrogate the extent to which ethnography acts merely as a supportive technique for architectural design or, alternatively, as a critical practice capable of challenging and reshaping disciplinary foundations. To achieve this, two specific objectives were pursued: first, to map the evolution, thematic structures, and key actors in the field through a bibliometric analysis of Web of Science records; second, to conduct a qualitative thematic analysis of abstracts to interpret the ways ethnography is deployed within architectural discourse. The guiding research question asks the following question: In what ways has the architectural field integrated ethnographic methodologies, and to what extent do these integrations reinforce or challenge existing epistemic hierarchies? The main argument developed in the discussion is that although ethnography is increasingly present in architectural research, it is predominantly instrumentalised within a project-driven logic, yet critical and disruptive uses of ethnography persist, offering possibilities for a more reflexive and politically conscious architectural practice.

The principal findings show that although the relationship between the two disciplines has grown consistently since 2000, it remains epistemically asymmetrical: ethnography is frequently instrumentalised as a technique subordinate to design, without altering the epistemological foundations of architecture. This finding has significant disciplinary implications: it calls into question architecture’s oft-proclaimed interdisciplinarity and signals the need for more reflexive, critical, and situated practices. Among the limitations acknowledged are the exclusive use of Web of Science and the dependence on specific search terms, which narrow the thematic and geographic scope of the corpus analysed.

The authors declare the following positionality: they are researchers situated within the field of urban studies, with a specific focus on socio-spatial processes and a commitment to applying critical theory in the interpretation of their findings. Both are affiliated with a School of Architecture, where they teach primarily within the Master’s Programme in Socio-Spatial Practices—a programme expressly designed to foster expanded dialogues between architecture and other disciplines, and vice versa. Their scholarly work is underpinned by a reflexive, interdisciplinary approach that seeks not merely to analyse spatial phenomena, but to interrogate the epistemological frameworks through which such phenomena are traditionally understood and represented.

2. Materials and Methods

The aim of this research is to understand how the disciplinary field of architecture has incorporated ethnographic approaches into its investigative and design practices, through a systematic analysis of scholarly literature indexed in Web of Science. This question was addressed using a dual methodological strategy: on the one hand, computer-assisted bibliometric techniques were employed using the bibliometrix package in R; on the other, a detailed thematic analysis of collected abstracts was carried out, grounded in the principles of reflexive qualitative inquiry. The combination of both approaches seeks not only to map the quantitative development of the field but also to produce a critical interpretation of the meanings and uses that ethnography has acquired within contemporary architectural discourse.

The sample was built through a systematic search in Web of Science, using the terms “architect*” and “ethnogra*” in the article topics (title, abstract, and keywords). This strategy yielded a corpus representative of the intersection between the two notions, without being limited to specific journals or disciplinary domains, thereby ensuring broad thematic coverage. However, this inclusion criterion entails certain limitations: by relying exclusively on topical fields, relevant works that do not explicitly use these terms, or literature published in other languages or not indexed in WoS, were excluded—thereby restricting the geographical and epistemic scope of the sample.

Epistemologically, the study is framed within an interpretive and critical perspective, which conceives of bibliometrics not as a neutral technique but as an analytical device whose assumptions must be interrogated. Ontologically, it assumes that research practices—such as the reviewed articles—do not merely reflect an objective “state of the art” but rather constitute discursive interventions that shape the very field they describe. In this sense, the quantitative analysis of networks, keywords, and co-occurrences is not intended to exhaust the meaning of the texts but rather to provide an initial relational cartography upon which more profound interpretations can be constructed through thematic analysis. Following an extensive review of the available literature, we determined that the breadth and depth of the material gathered were sufficient to support a qualitative thematic analysis. The corpus includes studies from a wide range of global contexts, particularly from North America, Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia, and, while numerous thematic clusters were identified, particular attention is now also given to the underexplored relationship between dwelling practices and ecological concerns linked to environmental preservation.

The bibliometric analysis revealed a sustained growth in academic output at the intersection of architecture and ethnography, with a notable increase from 2010 and a peak in 2024. This expansion may be read as evidence of architecture’s increasing openness to situated, participatory, and critical methodologies. However, the co-occurrence analysis of keywords revealed an asymmetric thematic structure: three well-defined clusters indicate that architecture occupies an epistemically dominant position, while ethnography is relegated to a supportive technique, and design emerges as an instrumental application. This thematic-discursive hierarchy raises doubts about the genuinely interdisciplinary nature of the field.

A correspondence factor analysis confirmed this reading. Even terms that appear critical or dissenting (such as politics, anthropology, and care) are absorbed within a single disciplinary cluster, suggesting that ethnography functions more as a source of data than as an epistemological horizon. The resulting semantic topography indicates a methodological colonisation of ethnography by architecture—integrated without disrupting the projectual foundations of the discipline. This finding calls for a critical reading of interdisciplinary discourse, understood here less as symmetric integration and more as epistemic asymmetry.

The geographical dimension of the analysis further revealed a sharp concentration of knowledge production in institutions of the Global North, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, which dominate the academic production, circulation, and validation of ethnographic research in architecture. This centralisation suggests a pattern of epistemic colonialism, in which contexts of the Global South are observed, represented, and analysed by hegemonic academic centres. Such a pattern raises urgent questions about knowledge ownership, the representation of otherness, and the need for reflexive and collaborative methodologies.

Thematic trend analysis by period reveals a technoscientific drift in the field: ethnography is increasingly used to enhance interface design, user-centred processes, or digital interaction systems, displacing its critical tradition in favour of a functional logic. This shift poses a significant theoretical challenge: can ethnography survive its instrumentalisation without losing its critical force? What remains of situated knowledge when it becomes a tool for optimising user experience?

In parallel, the thematic analysis of abstracts enabled a finer qualitative reading of the corpus. Using an initial coding process assisted by semantic modelling techniques (TF-IDF and NMF), latent clusters were identified and later refined into six thematic axes: embodied temporalities; situated pedagogies; urban injustice; institutional care; domesticity and subjectivity; and vernacular epistemologies. Each axis was defined not only by its associated keywords but also by its epistemic orientation and the type of relationship it establishes between ethnography and architecture. For instance, in the first axis, ethnography mediates between memory and built form; in the second, it functions as a pedagogical tool to decentre project authority.

This analysis revealed a clear bifurcation in how ethnography is employed in architecture: on one hand, as a critical device that makes visible injustices, subaltern knowledges, and unrepresented subjectivities; on the other, as a functional technique aimed at improving products, processes, or experiences. This tension is not a minor contradiction but the very nerve centre of contemporary methodological debate: what kind of architecture results when ethnography is adopted? One that is more just and situated, or merely more efficient and market-adapted?

To operationalise the concepts of epistemic asymmetry and methodological subordination, both qualitative and quantitative indicators were developed. First, a lexicosemantic analysis using bibliometrix identified the frequency of terms associated with critical anthropological frameworks versus those linked to technical-design approaches. Second, disciplinary hierarchy was assessed via the nodal position of keywords within co-occurrence networks: if ethnography appeared as a peripheral node linked to instrumental verbs (“apply”, “optimise”), it was interpreted as subordinated. Finally, the stated aims within abstracts were analysed: studies that confined ethnography to “data collection” were categorised as instrumentalised, whereas those that linked it to “challenging disciplinary foundations” were deemed critical.

In addition to employing ethnographic methodologies, this study explicitly recognises the conceptual contributions of ethnology, cultural anthropology, and sociology to the investigation of architectural practices. These disciplines provide critical frameworks for understanding spatial experience as culturally constructed and historically situated, rather than as a purely formal or functional phenomenon. Thus, the analytical strategy integrates not only the technical tools of ethnography—such as observational mapping and participatory techniques—but also the interpretative perspectives offered by ethnology and cultural anthropology, which foreground diverse epistemologies, value systems, and social structures. This interdisciplinary approach ensures a more reflexive and situated reading of spatial practices, extending beyond the limits of traditional architectural theory.

The authors declare the following positionality: they are researchers situated within the field of urban studies, with a specific focus on socio-spatial processes and a commitment to applying critical theory in the interpretation of their findings. Both are affiliated with a School of Architecture, where they teach primarily within the Master’s Programme in Socio-Spatial Practices—a programme expressly designed to foster expanded dialogues between architecture and other disciplines, and vice versa. Their scholarly work is underpinned by a reflexive, interdisciplinary approach that seeks not merely to analyse spatial phenomena but also to interrogate the epistemological frameworks through which such phenomena are traditionally understood and represented.

A methodological limitation of this study must be acknowledged. The analysis was based exclusively on peer-reviewed journal articles indexed in the Web of Science database and did not incorporate books or monographs. This decision was made to ensure methodological consistency, reproducibility, and the applicability of computational bibliometric techniques, which rely on structured metadata typically absent from monographic sources. Furthermore, journal articles often reflect more recent and dynamic debates, offering a valuable snapshot of the contemporary evolution of academic discourse at the intersection of architecture and ethnography. However, it must be recognised that many seminal contributions to the field—particularly those engaging with critical ethnographic theory and alternative epistemologies—have been published in book form. As such, certain influential frameworks and case studies were necessarily excluded from this review. Future research could address this gap by developing complementary methodologies capable of systematically incorporating book-based scholarship, thereby providing a more comprehensive and historically situated understanding of the field. While this methodological choice ensured coherence and analytic precision, it is acknowledged that a fuller account of the field would require future studies to systematically incorporate book-length contributions alongside journal articles.

3. Results

3.1. Bibliometric Analysis

The findings of this study are first presented through a purely descriptive lens, using computer-assisted bibliometric methods.

The steady rise in academic production since 2000, with a notable acceleration from 2010 and a peak in 2024 (193 documents), is illustrated in Figure 1. This level of productivity suggests that the relationship between architecture and ethnography is not a passing trend, but rather undergoing a process of consolidation, as indicated by an annual growth rate of 6.29%. This figure substantiates the growing interest in ethnographic methodologies within architectural research, opening the door to interpret this expansion through frameworks such as disciplinary reflexivity, the participatory turn, or postcolonial critique in contemporary architecture (Boano & Kelling, 2013; Butcher et al., 2022; Cociña et al., 2022; Jenkins et al., 2010; Khan, 2023; Miessen, 2011; Putri, 2020; Santos, 2016).

Three macro-thematic clusters were identified through keyword co-occurrence and thematic mapping (Figure 2): (1) architecture as the epistemic core, (2) ethnography as a methodological domain, and (3) architectural design as an instrumentalised field. This structure confirms the existence of a genuinely convergent interdisciplinary field. However, rather than a symmetrical integration, it reflects an asymmetrical relationship in which architecture dominates and instrumentalises ethnography to better understand spatial configurations from the perspective of those who inhabit them. This thematic-relational arrangement is crucial for interrogating architecture’s so-called “epistemic openness” and exposes the limits of ethnography as a transformative disciplinary force.

The instrumental and limited use of ethnography is reinforced by the results of the factorial analysis (Figure 3), where all terms—even those seemingly oppositional to the architectural discourse such as politics, anthropology, identity, or care—are absorbed into a single disciplinary cluster. They are reinterpreted within an architectural gaze. In other words, this evidence suggests that architecture uses ethnography primarily to understand itself, rather than to engage in a genuine interdisciplinary dialogue. Such semantic homogeneity points not to epistemological transformation, but to methodological co-optation: ethnography becomes a data-extraction tool for design projects, without altering the founding logic of architecture as a project-based discipline. This insight compels a critical reconsideration of the very notion of “interdisciplinarity”. It also indicates the need to move beyond quantitative bibliometric aggregation and undertake a more nuanced qualitative analysis to grasp the complexity of this claim.

The unequal geographical distribution of the knowledge studied is dominated by institutions in the Global North, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, which concentrate authorship, citations, and academic impact. This pattern suggests an epistemic appropriation of ethnographic knowledge applied to cultural contexts in the global South but published and validated by Northern academic centres. Such a finding is crucial for initiating a critical analysis of epistemic colonialism and the extractive role ethnography can play within architecture when not accompanied by situated reflexivity. Ethnographic work is resource-intensive and depends on close engagement with communities. In terms of resources, it demands time away from the studio, prolonged fieldwork, immersive methods, and sustained observation—all of which are more readily available in the Global North. Conversely, case studies often take place in the global South, especially in Africa and Asia. The potential condition of academic extractivism through ethnographic practices emerges as a viable hypothesis for future research.

In reviewing the geographical scope of the literature, it is evident that the dominance of contributions from the United States and Great Britain not only reflects a Global North concentration but also reveals a significant bias towards culturally Western epistemologies. This cultural framing shapes much of the discourse around spatial practices and architectural theory, often marginalising alternative ways of knowing. Moreover, the data include material from Southeast Asia, necessitating a more accurate recognition of a North–Southeast divide rather than a simplistic North–South binary. Acknowledging this complexity is crucial to resist the epistemological homogenisation that risks overlooking the diverse and situated understandings of dwelling practices across different world regions.

The thematic drift towards technoscientific domains is evidenced by the rising frequency and persistence of terms such as human–computer interaction (Figure 4), knowledge management, product design, and user interfaces among trending topics. This indicates that ethnography, rather than consolidating its role as a dense mode of understanding dwelling and spatial experience, is being redirected towards functioning as an interface between users and systems, following the logic of user-centred design. This shift can be interpreted as a form of functional colonisation of ethnography by computational design—a phenomenon that merits further theorisation from the perspective of critical reflections on the instrumentalisation of situated knowledge.

3.2. Content Analysis

The content analysis presented here was developed on the basis of abstracts retrieved from the Web of Science literature. This process involved iterative reading and re-reading of the abstracts to attain a comprehensive understanding of their content. It began with (i) familiarisation with the corpus, followed by (ii) AI-assisted coding to generate a cross-referenced matrix of terms and factorisations, enabling the identification of latent analytical clusters. These stages aimed to code the dataset holistically, organising it by categories and approaches. The third step involved (iii) theme identification, which resulted in six thematic groups: archaeology, ritual, and temporality; pedagogy and cognitive practices; urban life and politics; health and institutional spaces; domesticity and everyday life; and heritage and vernacularity. These groups were subsequently subjected to (iv) review and refinement, exploring intersections and specificities, leading to step (v): the naming of themes guided by questions: Is ethnography used to decentre architecture’s authority over spatial analysis? Is ethnography adapted to enhance its functionality? Is it deployed critically to reveal spatial injustices? Finally, (vi) an analytical narrative was constructed to synthesise the findings and articulate new questions and avenues for inquiry.

The thematic analysis commenced with an immersive reading of the entire corpus of abstracts retrieved using the keywords architect and ethnogra in the Web of Science database. This first step did not aim to code, but to absorb the spectrum, tone, and recurrent conceptual patterns within the texts. Its purpose was to cultivate an informed and reflexive sensitivity to the material before imposing any analytical framework.

From the outset, a striking heterogeneity in how ethnography is invoked becomes evident. Some texts adopt a full methodological commitment rooted in participant observation, situated knowledge, and the co-production of meaning—hallmarks of interpretive and critical traditions in anthropology and sociology. Others, however, reference ethnography more loosely or instrumentally, using the term primarily to legitimise qualitative data collection or participatory techniques in architectural or design projects. This disparity suggests that “ethnography” functions as a boundary object: a concept that circulates across disciplinary contexts with differing meanings yet retains sufficient coherence to sustain interdisciplinary communication.

Geographically, the corpus spans both the Global North and South, with notable attention to Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Yet the narrative voice and theoretical references are predominantly shaped by Anglo-European academia. Many abstracts are embedded within institutional research frameworks—universities, heritage organisations, or healthcare systems—where the relationship between researcher and subject is mediated by disciplinary authority and institutional objectives. Narratively, abstracts vary: some offer descriptive case study accounts (e.g., community heritage projects or design workshops), others emphasise methodological reflection (such as in autoethnography or digital ethnography), while a few adopt a distinctly critical register, aiming to destabilise architectural conventions through attention to marginalised lifeworlds or forms of structural violence.

This initial reading indicates that ethnography has entered architectural discourse, but across a spectrum ranging from superficial borrowing—as if on epistemic credit—to cases demonstrating a genuine epistemological commitment. It is this spectrum that the thematic analysis seeks to elucidate.

• Cluster 1: “Practices and Preservation”—[architectural, traditional, forms, practices, preserved]

This cluster anchors abstracts focused on the conservation of traditional architectural knowledge, where ethnography serves as an immersive method for exploring local practices of construction, use, and spatial transmission. Architectural here refers not to formal theory but to lived practice, observed from ethnographic proximity. Forms and preserved highlight heritage concerns, while traditional and practices situate the research in non-hegemonic, often rural or non-Western contexts. Ethnography is not merely observational, but a gateway to situated systems of knowledge that engage with architecture on epistemological terms.

• Cluster 2: “Ethnography of Policy and Care”—[policies, friendly, manchester, creative, critical]

This cluster gathers abstracts engaging with urban policy and institutional care environments (e.g., dementia-friendly settings). Keywords like policies and friendly indicate an applied focus, but creative and critical suggest ethnographic methodologies that extend into reflective and performative modes, such as the go-along technique. Manchester points to specific case studies, while critical signals a theoretical inflection, possibly inspired by Critical Urban Studies. Ethnography here operates as a tool for problematising spatial public policies shaped by affect, care, and power.

• Cluster 3: “Digital Ethnographies”—[youtube, streams, digital, interactions, researchers]

Centred on digitally mediated forms of interaction, this group studies platforms such as YouTube and other social media. Researchers implies a meta-reflection on the role of the ethnographer in digital environments. Digital ethnography emerges as a distinct method capable of capturing real-time performativities (streams), presences, and the reconfiguration of architectural space via interfaces. The architectural dimension is not always physical but experienced as a collective, technological interface.

• Cluster 4: “Urban Political Economies”—[political, economies, mumbai, planning, methods]

This cluster focuses on critical approaches to the city as a political object, emphasising urban planning and spatial economies. Mumbai serves as a concrete case, pointing to Global South contexts where planning intersects with inequality and resistance. Political and economies indicate a theoretical grounding in thinkers like David Harvey or Henri Lefebvre, while methods suggest a reflexivity regarding ethnographic tools. Here, ethnography is a method for rendering visible the political dimensions of infrastructure and urban habitation.

• Cluster 5: “Learning Vernacular”—[education, role, fieldwork, portugal, vernacular]

This cluster explores pedagogical experiences centred on vernacular architecture. Education and role underscore a concern with training architects to be sensitive to cultural contexts, often through fieldwork. Portugal signals a location, while the semantic core—vernacular—points to learning from the everyday, from unarchitected spaces and ancestral practices. Ethnography is both method and pedagogy here: it involves immersion, recognition, and co-learning.

• Cluster 6: “Pandemic Meetings and Disruptions”—[comparative, lockdowns, meeting, pandemic, study]

This final cluster gathers texts addressing contemporary transformations linked to the pandemic context. Meeting architecture and comparative study examine how communication and spatial arrangements have been reorganised under COVID-19. Lockdowns and pandemic introduce a historical contingency, reshaping both empirical fields and methodological strategies. Ethnography serves to understand how living, working, and meeting mutate under exceptional conditions.

As the analysis progressed from initial semantic grouping to a more interpretatively rich thematic coding, the analytical reading of abstracts enabled the identification of co-occurrence patterns and conceptual affinities that transcend surface-level terminology. The following six transversal themes emerged, reordering the discursive field through a more theoretical and critical logic:

• Archaeology, Ritual and Temporality

This thematic axis brings together texts that treat architecture as a repository of material temporalities, ritual spaces, and archaeological practices of reading the past. Terms such as archaeology, ritual, history, forms, and preserved appear across abstracts that articulate ethnography with historical systems of signification. Ethnography here approximates archival work, symbolic reading, and mediation between past and present. The architecture is not approached in functional terms, but as a cultural practice of memory. The underlying question becomes: How can we critically inhabit the temporal strata inscribed in architecture? To critically inhabit the temporal strata inscribed in architectur” means to engage reflexively with the historical and cultural layers embedded in built forms, treating architecture as a living archive of memory rather than a purely functional object.

• Pedagogy and Cognitive Practice

This thematic group gathers studies in which ethnography is mobilised as a tool for learning, situated observation, and pedagogical transformation within architectural education. Keywords such as education, students, fieldwork, cognitive, and learning are interconnected in abstracts that explore immersive didactic experiences. These works question the place of experiential knowledge in the architect’s training: can ethnography form part of a curriculum that not only teaches design, but also how to read the social? This axis highlights a pedagogical ethnography oriented towards developing epistemic and affective sensitivity to context.

• Urban Life, Infrastructure, and Politics

This axis includes research on cities, inequality, and spatial expressions of power. Terms such as politics, city, space, planning, infrastructure, and Mumbai converge around an ethnographic critique of urbanisation, dispossession, and governance. These studies approach architecture as a device that either reproduces or contests urban orders. Ethnography is here a tool for denaturalising space, allowing us to see how urban life is experienced, resisted, and negotiated by diverse bodies. A guiding question for this cluster might be how is politics embodied in infrastructure?

• Health and Institutional Spatiality

This group brings together studies focused on institutional care settings, particularly in the design of spaces for individuals with disabilities or specific conditions (e.g., dementia). Terms like health, care, friendly, institution, clinical, and well-being appear in abstracts using ethnography to understand how architecture may enable or inhibit care. The emphasis lies not only in spatial configuration, but in how it is experienced through bodily, affective, and organisational trajectories. Recurrent questions include how is care lived in space? What can ethnography offer in redesigning these experiences?

• Domesticity and Everyday Architecture

This axis is anchored in terms such as home, people, identity, life, residents, and living, pointing to an ethnographic reading of the everyday and the domestic as sites of class, gender, generational, and affective negotiations. Studies here focus on social housing, vernacular spaces, and non-normative dwelling practices. Ethnography reveals the gap between architectural intention and lived appropriation. Common questions include how is architecture transformed into experience? What modes of subjectivation emerge from dwelling?

• Heritage and Vernacular Epistemes

This theme gathers texts that approach architecture as a living archive of collective knowledges, often associated with vernacular, indigenous, or postcolonial contexts. Terms like vernacular, cultural anthropology, heritage, tradition, intangible, and memory define a field where architecture is entangled with alternative epistemologies. Ethnography functions here as a sensitive mediation that grants access to forms of knowledge not inscribed in academic writing or technical codes. This axis poses a critique of disciplinary universality: what might architecture learn from non-hegemonic ways of producing, knowing, and transmitting space?

These six thematic axes enable a shift from a technical segmentation of the corpus towards a critical understanding of the discursive functions of ethnography in contemporary architecture. Each theme operates as an entry point into a regime of problems, actors, and perspectives. The next stage involved reviewing and refining the themes, assessing their internal coherence and external distinctiveness. This phase aimed to avoid redundancies, false dualisms, or artificial segmentations. AI assistance was employed to reduce errors and clean results, searching for inconsistencies and applying synthesis. AI proved especially useful in contrasting themes, identifying zones of overlap, epistemic tensions, or conceptual continuities, allowing for the reorganisation, fusion, or subdivision of the initially defined axes.

The first significant observation concerns the overlap between Heritage and Vernacular Epistemes and Archaeology, Ritual, and Temporality. Both deal with the symbolic and temporal dimension of architecture, referencing notions such as memory, ritual, tradition, and material history. Their difference lies in orientation: the former stems from epistemology (modes of knowing) and the latter from the architectural object and its formal archaeology. However, many abstracts articulate both. For instance, studies on Andean vernacular housing or “ritual dwelling” in indigenous contexts combine historical reconstruction with critical engagement with local knowledge. The analytical decision was to retain both axes while noting that they exist on a continuum between material archive (archaeology) and living knowledge (episteme).

A second case concerns the intersection between Urban Life, Infrastructure, and Politics and Health and Institutional Spatiality. Though one focuses on cities and the other on clinical or care environments, both examine how spatial configurations embody power relations. Terms like planning, infrastructure, clinic, institution, and agency are spread across both, with some abstracts (e.g., on dementia-friendly urban environments) falling in between. Here, rather than fusion, the relation is conceived as a hinge: institutional space is part of the urban fabric, and ethnography tracks how the micro (the body, the experience) is inseparable from the macro (urban politics, infrastructure). Thus, both axes are retained but interpreted as a shared methodological convergence.

A third convergence arises between Pedagogy and Cognitive Practice and Domesticity and Everyday Architecture, centred on the idea of learning from the everyday. In both thematic axes, ethnography serves as a means of recognising the complexity of lived experience—whether in the formation of the architect or in the ordinary lives of users. This affinity reveals a shared rejection of normativity: the architecture student is trained to “see” the everyday, just as ethnographic analysis of domestic life exposes modes of inhabitation unanticipated by formal design paradigms. However, their objects and audiences differ, warranting their separate analytical treatment, albeit with a methodological note: both approaches regard ethnography as a tool for “unlearning” the assumptions of the modernist project—understood here as the ideology of spatial rationalism, functional zoning, and universalist design principles promoted by the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) movement in the early to mid-twentieth century. Where the text elsewhere discusses present-day phenomena, the term “contemporary” will be used to more accurately refer to current issues and contexts.

Lastly, an asymmetry of centrality is noted: the themes Design and Technological Mediation and Digital Ethnographies were not retained among the six main interpretative themes. While lexically prominent (interaction design, interfaces, and digital), they lacked the argumentative density across abstracts to justify analytical robustness. Their frequency does not equate to epistemic centrality. As such, they are treated as transversal subthemes—conditions of possibility or technical supports for other topics, but not standalone analytical fields.

The next stage of the content analysis involved assigning each theme a clear conceptual name and a definition summarising its object, epistemological orientation, and the role of ethnography. These names are designed to be both precise and evocative, capturing the critical dimensions of the debates and offering an intelligible cartography of the field:

• Embodied Temporalities: Archaeology, Ritual, and Architecture as Living Memory

This theme addresses architecture as a temporal artefact, a ritual support, and an embodied archive of collective knowledge. Ethnography grants access to symbolic practices, inherited gestures, and ancestral technologies embedded in built forms, shifting the focus from design as formal production to space as cultural inscription.

• Situated Pedagogies: Ethnography as Cognitive and Formative Practice

This axis explores how ethnography enters architectural education to destabilise normative knowledge and cultivate a situated, reflexive gaze. Through fieldwork and engagement with vernacular contexts, students learn not only techniques but new ways of seeing, listening, and cohabiting with complexity.

• Urban Injustices: Everyday Life, Infrastructure, and Spatial Power

Here, ethnography operates as a critical lens revealing how cities materialise unequal power relations. Studies on planning, displacement, and access to land demonstrate how infrastructure functions as political technology, with ethnographic inquiry restoring voice to marginalised urban actors.

• Care and Institutional Devices: Ethnographies of Spatial Well-being

This group focuses on how design affects autonomy, comfort, and dignity in institutional settings such as hospitals, care homes, and schools. Ethnography traces the everyday paths, adaptations, and vulnerabilities of users, framing design as an ethical rather than purely functional gesture.

• Dwelling and Subjectivity: Everyday Architectures

This theme examines how domestic practices and everyday inhabitation reshape space beyond architects’ control. Ethnography reveals transformations, subversions, and adaptations that challenge abstract notions of “user”, presenting instead the embodied realities of living subjects.

• Vernacular Epistemologies: Local Knowledges and Architecture as Translation

This axis highlights architecture as collective, situated knowledge, often uncodified in technical language. Ethnography here functions as a mode of translation, engaging indigenous, rural, and popular epistemologies to challenge expert-centric design frameworks.

Each of these themes delineates fields of tension: between design and lived experience, technical knowledge and embodied understanding, formal order and everyday practice. In all cases, ethnography emerges not as a neutral technique but as a methodological intervention that unsettles the disciplinary certainties of architecture.

The thematic analysis reveals a significant heterogeneity at the intersection of ethnography and architecture. While all texts share a methodological ambition to promote situated inquiry, they vary in their deployment. The six themes identified—spanning heritage practices, infrastructural disputes, pedagogical transformations, care environments, domestic life, and the production of local knowledge—allow for a critical cartography of these articulations.

Embodied temporalities underscore architecture as a material archive entangled with memory and ritual, moving analysis beyond technical design language. Situated pedagogies foreground ethnography’s transformative role in architectural education, cultivating a reflexive and affective engagement with spatial environments. Urban injustices make visible the political dimensions of urban space, while the theme of care reveals how institutional environments either support or inhibit well-being. Dwelling and subjectivity highlight the everyday re-significations of the built environment, and vernacular epistemologies contest the dominance of disciplinary knowledge by foregrounding alternative modes of producing and inhabiting space.

4. Discussion

The findings of this research reveal a profound paradox at the contemporary intersection of architecture and ethnography. On one hand, bibliometric data point to a steady increase in publications that bring both concepts into dialogue, suggesting a growing methodological openness within the architectural field. However, this quantitative expansion does not necessarily reflect a symmetrical epistemic recognition. Ethnography, although present, is predominantly integrated as an auxiliary methodological tool, subordinated to the projective goals of architecture. This instrumental use—evident in both co-occurrence analysis and the semantic organisation of clusters—confirms what parts of the literature have termed the “methodological colonisation” of the social sciences by applied disciplines (Morse, 2016; Watson, 2012). In this sense, the interdisciplinarity often invoked appears more as a rhetoric of integration than a genuine transformation of disciplinary hierarchies.

This displacement can be partially explained by architecture’s epistemologically dominant status as a project-based discipline. As thematic co-occurrence suggests, architecture acts as the organising centre of meaning, while ethnography is reduced to a supportive function, incapable of altering architecture’s conceptual foundations. This asymmetry sits uneasily with the principles of critical ethnography, which have historically aimed to expose power relations, destabilise hegemonic knowledge, and co-produce situated epistemologies (Brennan et al., 2015; Vesa & Vaara, 2014). In other words, ethnography’s transformative potential is eroded when absorbed as a technical tool within an unexamined projective framework.

The findings align closely with and extend the arguments developed in the reviewed literature. The paper confirms earlier claims, such as those of Brennan-Horley et al. (2010) and Jensen et al. (2019), that ethnographic methodologies reveal nuanced, often overlooked dimensions of spatial practice, highlighting that users’ needs and spatial behaviours cannot be fully captured through traditional architectural analysis alone. Similarly, the emphasis placed by Menezes and Smaniotto Costa (2024) on collaborative ethnography as a means to foster spatial interventions more attuned to lived realities finds further resonance in the study’s identification of critical thematic axes such as Situated Pedagogies and Vernacular Epistemologies.

Moreover, the paper substantively builds on Mounajjed et al.’s (2007) insight that ethnographic interventions can reconfigure spatial engagement, demonstrating through thematic cluster analysis how ethnography operates either as a transformative or an instrumental force. The acknowledgment of urban injustices, care spaces, and domestic subjectivities directly responds to the literature highlighting the political, affective, and embodied nature of spatial experiences, as illustrated in the works of Samura (2018), Pantidi (2013), and Suprapti et al. (2010).

Where the paper decisively advances the field is in its explicit critique of epistemic asymmetry and its articulation of how ethnography risks being subsumed into a technocratic and extractive model within architecture—a concern only partially addressed in earlier studies. By framing ethnography as a contested epistemological intervention rather than a merely supportive tool, and by invoking decolonial critiques aligned with Mignolo, the paper not only synthesises existing scholarship but also pushes the literature towards a more politically and theoretically robust position. It ultimately demands a shift from rhetorical interdisciplinarity towards a critical reconfiguration of the architecture–ethnography relationship.

The geographic concentration of knowledge—dominated by institutions in the Global North—reinforces this dynamic, producing a pattern of epistemic appropriation in which situated knowledges from the Global South are translated, validated, and circulated by Anglo-Saxon academic centres. This distribution is not merely logistical or bibliographic; it reflects a form of knowledge colonialism, where ethnography risks becoming an extractive technology rather than a dialogical mediation. Critique of epistemic colonialism must therefore not be an appendix to methodological analysis, but the very core of any reflection on the architecture–ethnography relationship. The question of who produces, validates, and disseminates knowledge remains central to understanding the tension between representation and appropriation.

The technoscientific drift observed in thematic trends further compounds this issue. The increasing prominence of terms such as user interfaces, knowledge management, or human–computer interaction indicates a reorientation towards logics of efficiency and optimisation, typical of computational design. This functionalist turn recasts ethnography as a translation interface between users and systems, rather than a critical practice of interrogating dwelling. Against this trend, an urgent theoretical reflection arises: can critical ethnography survive in a disciplinary context that privileges immediate applicability over deep problematisation? What remains of situated knowledge once it is reduced to a design tool?

However, the thematic analysis of abstracts offers a more nuanced reading. Unlike the bibliometric maps, the qualitative study reveals significant discursive heterogeneity, in which ethnography is not always subordinated or instrumentalised. The six identified thematic axes—from embodied temporalities to vernacular epistemologies—demonstrate forms of articulation in which ethnography retains its critical and destabilising vocation. In these instances, ethnography is not merely one method among others, but an epistemological practice that interrogates the very foundations of architecture: its temporality, pedagogy, normativity, and exclusions.

What thus emerges is a bifurcation in how ethnography enters architecture: one line oriented towards improving processes and products—making them more inclusive, efficient, or user-sensitive—and another directed towards critiquing spatial order, exposing subaltern modes of inhabiting, and producing alternative knowledges. This bifurcation does not imply a contradiction but rather demands an analytical distinction: ethnography as service versus ethnography as critique. The former accommodates architectural ends without transforming them; the latter interrogates and, potentially, displaces them.

The identification of epistemic colonialism reveals a structural pattern in which the production and validation of ethnographic–architectural knowledge is concentrated in institutions of the Global North, replicating dynamics of intellectual extraction. For instance, studies on vernacular architecture in the Global South are frequently published by authors affiliated with Anglophone universities, omitting local authorship and translating ancestral knowledge into Eurocentric theoretical frameworks. This not only renders communities invisible as epistemic agents but also reduces their practices to “exotic cases” for academic consumption. Urgent questions arise: how can ethnography avoid becoming a vehicle of cultural appropriation? What institutional mechanisms might ensure equitable co-authorship and epistemological consent protocols? The debate must move beyond decolonial rhetoric to embrace concrete practices—such as the establishment of community-managed open repositories, the implementation of collaborative authorship protocols, and the restructuring of editorial review processes to ensure geographical diversity and epistemic inclusivity on scientific boards. Only through such mechanisms can the extractive logic that sustains North–South asymmetries begin to be dismantled. This necessity aligns with the critical interventions of Walter Mignolo (W. Mignolo, 2020; W. D. Mignolo, 1992a, 1992b), who demonstrated that coloniality operates not merely through material domination but through the cartographic, linguistic, and cognitive appropriation of space and memory. As Mignolo argues, the colonial matrix of power was historically entrenched through the re-mapping of territories and the silencing of indigenous epistemologies, a dynamic that continues to shape knowledge production today. Thus, decolonising architectural and ethnographic research demands more than diversification; it calls for a radical interrogation of the spatial, linguistic, and epistemological foundations upon which scholarly legitimacy has been constructed. Only by confronting these structural inheritances can a genuinely decolonial, reflexive, and pluriversal mode of architectural and spatial inquiry emerge.

In sum, this research challenges the relationship between architecture and ethnography beyond the commonplaces of interdisciplinarity. At stake is not merely the adoption of new methodologies, but the possibility of rethinking architecture as a field shaped by epistemic, social, and political conflicts. Ethnography, as a tool for situated knowledge, can serve as a catalyst for a more reflexive, just, and open architectural practice. However, this potential depends on resisting methodological domestication and affirming its critical capacity. It is not a matter of designing with ethnography, but of allowing ethnography to unmake the very assumptions of design.

5. Conclusions

This study demonstrates that the relationship between architecture and ethnography is marked by a deep and persistent asymmetry. While the growth in academic production signals increasing methodological openness, the evidence suggests that ethnography is often integrated as a subordinate technique, serving architectural design rather than transforming its epistemological foundations. Bibliometric and thematic analyses alike reveal that ethnography is primarily instrumentalised within an architectural framework, confirming a broader dynamic of epistemic colonialism in which situated knowledges are appropriated by institutions of the Global North.

However, qualitative thematic analysis highlights significant countercurrents. Six interpretative axes—embodied temporalities, situated pedagogies, urban injustices, care environments, domestic subjectivities, and vernacular epistemologies—reveal areas where ethnography retains its critical potential. These fields expose the political, affective, and cultural dimensions of spatial practices often effaced by architectural formalism. Ethnography here functions not merely as a tool for optimisation but rather as a practice capable of unsettling dominant spatial orders and foregrounding alternative ways of knowing and dwelling.

A crucial distinction therefore emerges: between the instrumental use of ethnography to enhance design processes and the deployment of ethnography as a critical epistemological intervention. The former reinforces architectural hegemony; the latter opens a space for a more reflexive, dialogical, and politically conscious practice. Within this contested terrain, Architectural Ethnography appears as a nascent but promising field, offering a framework to rethink the disciplinary boundaries and power structures shaping architectural knowledge production. In this scenario, a distinction must be drawn between ethnography subordinated to design aims and ethnography as a critical tool capable of questioning spatial order—thus opening the possibility for a more dialogical and politically conscious architecture. For instance, ethnographic research that reveals how informal settlements resist imposed urban grids, or studies that document how indigenous spatial practices challenge dominant zoning regulations, illustrate ethnography’s capacity to uncover alternative spatial rationalities. Similarly, investigations into the everyday adaptations of institutional spaces, such as hospitals or schools, demonstrate how users reconfigure spatial prescriptions, exposing the contingent and negotiated nature of architectural order. These examples show how ethnography can move beyond functional support to act as a catalyst for rethinking architectural norms.

As a final reflection intended to trigger further discussion, this study highlights the delicate balance between ethnography as a critical practice and as a tool for improving architectural design. Ethnographic inquiry should not be confined solely to exposing spatial injustices or enhancing user-centred design, but rather understood as capable of achieving both aims simultaneously. An illustrative example is found in ethnographic research on informal housing, where investigations reveal systemic inequalities while also informing participatory upgrading processes that challenge and reshape dominant urban models. In this sense, the study positions ethnography as both a methodological and a political practice, capable of bridging critique and professional engagement, and ultimately enriching the transformative potential of architecture.