Abstract/Summary

Building adaptation has traditionally focused on design-stage improvements to physical attributes, overlooking the complex socio-material processes through which spatial changes unfold after construction. This research reconceptualises building adaptation as ‘space enactment’—examining how heterogeneous networks of human and non-human actors participate in ongoing spatial transformation, particularly in public buildings where diverse users engage in varied adaptation practices with different capacities for implementing changes. Mobilising Actor-Network Theory’s (ANT) socio-material lens, this study employed ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews to investigate space enactment processes in a public building. Three scenarios emerged from the data: daily, planned, and emergency adaptations, each demonstrating different networking features. The research followed actors through these processes, using ANT’s four moments of translation— problematisation, interessement, enrolment, and mobilisation—to analyse how networks form, stabilise, or fail across different scenarios. The findings reveal that human actors perform shifting roles as initiator, approver, assessor, executor, and installer within dynamic networks, whilst non-human actors participate actively through informational (notices), configurational (facilities), and procedural mechanisms. The analysis demonstrates how power emerges relationally through networking processes rather than being possessed by individual actors, with different scenarios generating distinct translation dynamics whilst sharing common networking principles. This research contributes a fundamental reconceptualisation of space enactment as continuous socio-material becoming rather than discrete interventions, providing new analytical frameworks for understanding spatial transformation in organisational contexts whilst advancing building studies and sociomaterial literature.