Sense of Place

This chapter explores the work of earlier architects and urbanists (those concerned with human perception of and our emotional relationship with public space) and discusses how it applies to current research in the human experience of place. And that while designers await prescriptive advice to come from this research, we might look back to their insights, which already appear to be borne out by the emerging science. It is divided into five parts:

‘Memory, Emotion, Meaning: Sense of Place in History’—is a condensed history of thought from the ancients through the Renaissance, Age of Enlightenment, Age of Romanticism, Age of Industry and modernism.

‘The Role of the Body/Brain’—reviews the 1970s reassessment of modernism by geographers and phenomenologists.

‘Embodied Cognition’—introduces the emerging Age of Biology neuroscience.

‘Those That Have Come Before Us’—cites the 1890-2010 work of researchers, theorists and urbanists that today’s designers should heed.

‘Design Methodologies for City Form’—briefly alludes to strategies like typology, armature, serial vision and the contrast of free space vs. figural space.

The chapter concludes that public space should be conceived of as a theater for human events, that neuroscience is revealing some age-old truths about how sense of place is formed and operates, and that the human-focused design lessons of earlier generations (for decades ignored or marginalized in design schools) continue to be valid.