Body subjecti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJfpa9vv9pg

This presentation considers how the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) contributes to an understanding of architecture and place experience via his emphasis on the lived body. The focus is on architect Thomas Thiis-Evensen's " architectural archetypes " and architectural theorist Bill Hillier's " space syntax. " The presentation highlights three claims: First, that Thiis-Evensen provides a language for locating unself-conscious, visceral aspects of buildings & architectural meaning (Merleau-Ponty's perception and phenomenal field); second, that Hilllier illustrates how the spatiality of place—i.e., pathway configuration— supports or inhibits particular actions & routines of lived bodies as they come together or remain apart spatially (Merleau-Ponty's body-subject and intercorporeality); and, third, that both Thiis-Evensen & Hillier illustrate ways via architecture and place whereby pre-reflective bodily awareness and actions play an important role in the lifeworld (Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the lived body as intentional but pre-reflective agent).

In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy to explore environmental embodiment-the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the body in its prereflective perceptual presence engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially its architectural and environmental aspects. First, I consider Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of perception, which he understands as the immediate givenness of the world founded in bodily sensibility. Second, I consider the architectural and environmental significance of what Merleau-Ponty calls body-subject-pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. I focus on the taken-for-granted sensibility of body-subject to manifest in extended ways over time and space. I ask how routine actions and behaviors of individuals coming together regularly can transform an environment into a place with a unique dynamic and character-a lived situation I term place ballet. For both perception and body-subject, I examine how qualities of the physical and designable worldfor example, materiality, form, and spatiality-contribute to the lived body's engagement with and actions in the world. I end by arguing that Merleau-Ponty offers an essential perspective for understanding the importance of place and lived emplacement in human life, but this perspective must be extended by considering how places change over time via generative processes that enliven or undermine places and lived emplacement.

This book presents a phenomenology of EVERYDAY ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIENCE--The sum total of peoples’ firsthand involvements with their everyday places, spaces, and environments. Through a phenomenological explication of some 1,500 personal observations provided by “environmental experience groups,” the author identifies three overarching themes—movement, rest, and encounter—that appear to mark the essential lived core of everyday environmental experience.

The section on MOVEMENT examines the habitual nature of everyday environmental behaviors and argues, after French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), that the lived foundation of these behaviors is the body as preconscious but intelligent subject (“body-subject”). The section on REST explores people’s attachment to place and gives particular attention to at-homeness and positive affective relationships with places and environments.

The book’s third section on ENCOUNTER considers the multifaceted ways in which people make or do not make attentive contact with their surroundings and explores such modes of awareness as obliviousness, noticing, watching, and more intense encounters.

In the book’s concluding section, the author examines the lived relationships and interconnections among movement, rest, and encounter and argues that their threefold structure offers one simple but integrated way to envision human environmental experience conceptually and to think about design and policy implications practically.

This presentation makes use of a passage from novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body and to consider what the related phenomenological concepts of place, environmental embodiment, and immersion-in-world might offer research in situated cognition.

Key words: body-subject, lifeworld, lived body, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, place, situated cognition

Esta comunicación presenta las reflexiones teóricas acerca de la sostenibilidad psicosocial de las ciudades. Se analizan los factores que hacen psicosocialmente insostenibles las ciudades y aquellos que, por el contrario, promueven la habitabilidad de las mismas: en particular, ...

Salama, A. M. (2013). Urban Diversity Under the Microscope: A Brief Examination of Public Open Spaces in the City of Doha. B’Here Annual Review-Qatar 2013, Arab Communication Consult, Beirut, Lebanon, PP.126-129.


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With their socio-physical, socio-economic, socio-cultural, and socio-political presence, cities have always been highly differentiated spaces expressive of heterogeneity, diversity of activities, entertainment, excitement and pleasure. They have been - and still are - melting pots for the formulation of and experimentation with new philosophies and religious and social practices. They produce, reproduce, represent, and convey much of what counts today as culture, knowledge, and politics. This article presents a brief examination of public open spaces, Doha, Qatar.

Besides “items of interest” and “citations received,” this issue includes: • Environmental psychologist Claudia Mausner’s review of urban designer Vikas Mehta’s The Street (Routledge, 2013), which incorporates an innovative observational study of sidewalk behaviors in three urban neighborhoods in the Boston metropolitan region. • Phenomenological psychologist Christopher Aanstoos’s “Building Home Together,” a reflection on how a phenomenological perspective can help to envision designing one’s home. “Can we,” writes Aanstoos, “imagine our experience of living in a home well enough to be guided in its design by a phenomenology of that imaginal experience?” • Contemplative craftsman Jeff Ediger’s “If Dwell is a Verb, ‘Chair’ is ‘to Sit’,” an essay in which Ediger presents three “imaginal vignettes” that explore the lived nature of sitting. Having created architecture, Ediger asks, “do we then forget how to dwell? For instance, we sit. We therefore build chairs. Having built the chair,...

Besides “items of interest” and “citations received,” this issue includes: • Environmental psychologist Claudia Mausner’s review of urban designer Vikas Mehta’s The Street (Routledge, 2013), which incorporates an innovative observational study of sidewalk behaviors in three urban neighborhoods in the Boston metropolitan region. • Phenomenological psychologist Christopher Aanstoos’s “Building Home Together,” a reflection on how a phenomenological perspective can help to envision designing one’s home. “Can we,” writes Aanstoos, “imagine our experience of living in a home well enough to be guided in its design by a phenomenology of that imaginal experience?” • Contemplative craftsman Jeff Ediger’s “If Dwell is a Verb, ‘Chair’ is ‘to Sit’,” an essay in which Ediger presents three “imaginal vignettes” that explore the lived nature of sitting. Having created architecture, Ediger asks, “do we then forget how to dwell? For instance, we sit. We therefore build chairs. Having built the chair,...

"Press overview:
How did the American people come to develop a moral association with this land, such that their very experience of nationhood was rooted in, and their republican virtues depended upon, that land? And what is happening now as the exclusivity of that moral linkage between people and land becomes ever more attenuated? In Place and Belonging in America, David Jacobson addresses the evolving relationship between geography and citizenship in the United States since the nation's origins.

Americans have commonly assumed that only a people rooted in a bounded territory could safeguard republican virtues. But, as Jacobson argues, in the contemporary world of transnational identities, multiple loyalties, and permeable borders, the notion of a singular territorial identity has lost its resonance. The United States has come to represent a diverse quilt of cultures with varying ties to the land. These developments have transformed the character of American politics to one in which the courts take a much larger role in mediating civic life. An expanding web of legal rights enables individuals and groups to pursue their own cultural and social ends, in contrast to the civic republican practice of an active citizenry legislating its collective life.

In the first part of his sweeping study, Jacobson considers the origins of the uniquely American sense of place, exploring such components as the Puritans and their religious vision of the New World; the early Republic and agrarian virtue as extolled in the writings of Thomas Jefferson; the nationalization of place during the Civil War; and the creation of post-Civil War monuments and, later, the national park system. The second part of Place and Belonging in America concerns the contemporary United States and its more complex interactions between space and citizenship. Here Jacobson looks at the multicultural landscape as represented by the 1991 act of Congress that changed the name of the Custer Battlefield National Monument to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument and the subsequent construction of a memorial honoring the Indian participants in the battle; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He also reflects upon changing patterns of immigration and settlement. At once far-reaching and detailed, Place and Belonging in America offers a though-provoking new perspective on the myriad, often spiritual connections between territoriality, national identity, and civic culture."

Reviews:
Jacobson's lucid and insightful analysis is multilayered and interdisciplinary. Along with deft historical interpretation and incisive sociological investigation, he integrates discussions on politics, philosophy, literature, and religion, highlighting their roles in revealing American's evolving sense of place and identity.
(Virginia Quarterly Review )

Paying keen attention to interpretation, textuality, and the social uses of landscape, Jacobson's study engages questions that make it a must read.
(Susan Kollin, Journal of American History )

A thoughtful overview of major events and changes to the American linkages of place and identity to the landscape.
(William G. Holt, Contemporary Sociology )

Modeling the best of interdisciplinary scholarship, David Jacobson demonstrates the ways in which American representations of self, the human, and consciousness are interwoven with shifting American conceptualizations of time, place, and civic life. Grounded in historical analysis, philosophical in tone, and shaped largely by insights derived from the social sciences, Place and Belonging in America recalls Jonathan Edwards's eighteenth-century reflections on the beauty of history as much as the most slashing postmodern depictions of historical irony. This is an impressive work of synthesis, a beautifully-written book that deserves a wide audience.
(John Corrigan, Edwin Scott Gaustad Professor of Religion and Professor of History, Florida State University, author of Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century )

This well-written and well-researched book addresses a topic of particular interest to a variety of disciplines: the symbolic representation of space. Its specific concern is the shifting understanding and experience of 'place' in the history of the United States. In addressing this specific concern, the author has drawn upon material from the disciplines of law, history, art, and architecture. David Jacobson has moved into new areas from those covered in his previous book, and Place and Belonging in America places that earlier, good work in a conceptually richer context.
(Stephen Grosby, Clemson University )

Place and Belonging in America should provoke reflection on the importance of issues such as immigration, geographic mobility, and globalization for the viability of politics, properly understood.
(Jeremy Beer, Perspectives on Political Science )

Besides “items of interest” and “citations received,” this issue includes: • Environmental psychologist Claudia Mausner’s review of urban designer Vikas Mehta’s The Street (Routledge, 2013), which incorporates an innovative observational study of sidewalk behaviors in three urban neighborhoods in the Boston metropolitan region. • Phenomenological psychologist Christopher Aanstoos’s “Building Home Together,” a reflection on how a phenomenological perspective can help to envision designing one’s home. “Can we,” writes Aanstoos, “imagine our experience of living in a home well enough to be guided in its design by a phenomenology of that imaginal experience?” • Contemplative craftsman Jeff Ediger’s “If Dwell is a Verb, ‘Chair’ is ‘to Sit’,” an essay in which Ediger presents three “imaginal vignettes” that explore the lived nature of sitting. Having created architecture, Ediger asks, “do we then forget how to dwell? For instance, we sit. We therefore build chairs. Having built the chair,...

Besides “items of interest” and “citations received,” this issue includes: • Environmental psychologist Claudia Mausner’s review of urban designer Vikas Mehta’s The Street (Routledge, 2013), which incorporates an innovative observational study of sidewalk behaviors in three urban neighborhoods in the Boston metropolitan region. • Phenomenological psychologist Christopher Aanstoos’s “Building Home Together,” a reflection on how a phenomenological perspective can help to envision designing one’s home. “Can we,” writes Aanstoos, “imagine our experience of living in a home well enough to be guided in its design by a phenomenology of that imaginal experience?” • Contemplative craftsman Jeff Ediger’s “If Dwell is a Verb, ‘Chair’ is ‘to Sit’,” an essay in which Ediger presents three “imaginal vignettes” that explore the lived nature of sitting. Having created architecture, Ediger asks, “do we then forget how to dwell? For instance, we sit. We therefore build chairs. Having built the chair,...

Besides “items of interest” and “citations received,” this issue includes: • Environmental psychologist Claudia Mausner’s review of urban designer Vikas Mehta’s The Street (Routledge, 2013), which incorporates an innovative observational study of sidewalk behaviors in three urban neighborhoods in the Boston metropolitan region. • Phenomenological psychologist Christopher Aanstoos’s “Building Home Together,” a reflection on how a phenomenological perspective can help to envision designing one’s home. “Can we,” writes Aanstoos, “imagine our experience of living in a home well enough to be guided in its design by a phenomenology of that imaginal experience?” • Contemplative craftsman Jeff Ediger’s “If Dwell is a Verb, ‘Chair’ is ‘to Sit’,” an essay in which Ediger presents three “imaginal vignettes” that explore the lived nature of sitting. Having created architecture, Ediger asks, “do we then forget how to dwell? For instance, we sit. We therefore build chairs. Having built the chair,...