Altman develops a relational theory of privacy, personal space and territoriality centred on regulation rather than fixed distance or possession. Privacy appears as a dynamic process through which individuals and groups manage desired levels of social access, producing changing boundaries between openness and closure. Territorial behaviour similarly becomes a mechanism for organising control, attachment and interaction rather than merely defending bounded property. The work’s conceptual strength lies in treating boundaries as adjustable social-environmental operations. Methodologically, this encourages analysis of entrances, exclusions, signals, spatial arrangements and behavioural conventions as components of an ongoing regulatory system. Altman’s approach bridges environmental psychology with architecture, urban studies and institutional analysis because it makes access itself a structured variable. The resulting framework is especially powerful wherever visibility, exposure, membership and exclusion are spatially or procedurally organised, revealing that boundaries do not simply separate domains but actively produce the conditions under which relations become possible.