concreteadjacent

Concreteadjacent is a term used primarily in informal discussions and some technical notes to describe a relation between two concrete objects that are directly next to one another in physical space. It is a portmanteau of concrete and adjacent, and it lacks a universally accepted formal definition in established literature. In practice, writers use concreteadjacent to emphasize both tangibility and immediate proximity of elements within a space or model.

Possible senses of the term appear in different domains. In civil engineering and architecture, concreteadjacent can refer to two concrete elements that touch or share a boundary, such as adjacent sidewalk slabs or a slab and a curb, where adjacency affects joints, load transfer, and drainage. In computational geometry or robotics, it may describe adjacency between lattice cells or graph nodes that represent real-world, tangible objects and are directly neighboring in a spatial grid. In cognitive or design contexts, it can serve as a heuristic for considering how people perceive nearby physical objects.

Because it is not a standard term, definitions and emphasis vary by author. It is not synonymous with mathematical connectivity or graph-theoretic adjacency, which are defined independently of material tangibility. Users should clarify the intended sense when encountering concreteadjacent in mixed disciplines.

See also: adjacency, concreteness, spatial relation, connectivity.