Emmanuel Quartey

Studying cities to learn about minds: some possible implications of space syntax for spatial cognition

Came across this intriguing proposition over the course of my senior essay research - that the way a city is shaped influences the way it functions, and vice versa. I haven’t read the paper, but it seems like something that someone might find immediately useful.

Abstract: What can we learn of the human mind by examining its products? The city is a case in point. Since the beginning of cities human ideas about them have been dominated by geometric ideas, and the real history of cities has always oscillated between the geometric and the ‘organic’… Here I argue … that all cities, the organic as well as the geometric, are pervasively ordered by geometric intuition, so that neither the forms of the cities nor their functioning can be understood without insight into their distinctive and pervasive emergent geometrical forms.