Chapter 12/ Yi-Fu Tuan

Chapter 12
Physical Setting and Urban Life Styles

Yi-Fu Tuan nicely summarizes the evolution of environment and life styles around the globe. It is interesting to think about our life styles as the sum of our various economic, social, commonplace activities and the spatial patterns they create which in turn influence the patterning of our activities. I look back to my upbringing in Slovakia and my own spatial patterns which require, as Tuan mentions, architectural forms and material settings. Spatial patterns that now help me understand my life style, including my attitude to the world with the evidence of acts and the physical circumstances in which they might have had occurred.
I grew up walking everywhere. Distances were short and the public transportation was easy to use. Most people used their cars only if they needed to leave the city. When I moved to the United States I experienced a tremendous shift in the balance between walking and other means of locomotion. I tried to fight it by walking one and a half hours to school every day. I would never encounter another pedestrian on my walks and due to too much attention and heckling I eventually gave up.
Tuan provides an interesting timeline of this shift in balance from the Middle Ages up to present. In the Middle Ages pedestrians from all social groups mingled together in the crowded lanes. From the 17th century onward there was less mingling of the social orders due to increasing use of carriages by the wealthy. At the beginning of the Victorian era, pedestrians still dominated the street scene. Tuan compares the past to the streets in contemporary Los Angeles, where vehicles cause congestion while the sidewalks are relatively bare or even missing in some sections.
It is sad to think that many people’s perceptions of the external surroundings are based on the view from their car. Ever since I moved to Columbus, I have been taking walks to register the space around me. I am interested in exploring the ordinary, the everyday. What happens and recurs everyday: the banal, the common, the obvious, the background noise, the habitual. I want to be able to speak of these ‘common things’, to track them down, to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them speak of what is, of what we are. It is interesting to think about the Situationist International and psychogeography in this context as well. How are we to understand psychogeography as the study of specific effects of the geographical environment on our emotions and behavior if most of us don’t even experience it first hand?