Abraham Akkerman

This chapter shows how masculine features came to dominate city-form from late antiquity to the present day. The dawn of modernity could be said to have been marked by the appeal for automation, uniformity and superscale. With admiration to these attributes in an ideal city resonates Thomas More’s Utopia, the early sixteenth-century bestselling fantasy novel on voyage to the southern hemisphere. Meantime, in the real environment of urban Europe, the feminine open space in the city, the market square, or the space adjacent to the city’s gate, had deteriorated onto becoming the site of public torture and spectacular executions of human beings, criminals and real or imagined enemies of the authority. The desecration of public space started probably in the Roman Republic but intensified during modernity. Special urban squares were designated for public beheadings by guillotine during the French Revolution, and public hangings ceased in Britain only in the second half of the nineteenth century. The masculine domination of urban space was accomplished during late modernity by less brutal but more prevalent, repeating attempts to impose automation, uniformity and superscale upon city-form, an architectural and urban-planning feat that Simone de Beauvoir had dubbed as the city without streets.

This chapter points to a feminine thread that runs through the unfolding of European Neolithic round enclosures into market places of antiquity and the Middle Ages, and into the public sphere of the Enlightenment. As ceremonial sites of public rituals of fertility and solstice renewal, the Neolithic and Bronze Age round enclosures were often the communal celebration of the female. As cities emerged through the Bronze Age, often in a centrifugal pattern around the market place, the conscious notion of a plan most likely emerged as well. It was Aristotle who stopped short from attaching feminine, Dionysian and masculine, Apollonian, features to urban streetscapes. The two sharply contrasting streetscapes that Aristotle addresses in the Politics, give city-form something of an organic flair. On the one hand there are the rigidly elegant and aligned streets reminiscent of the Apollonian disposition of calm and calculated foresight, and on the other hand, the chaotic, crooked streets in poverty-stricken precincts of the city, where Dionysian unpredictability matches the erratic, unplanned narrow lanes and alleyways. Both Cartesian rationalism and British empiricism are shown in this chapter as associated with urban streetscapes and planning. Two millennia after Aristotle, an inevitable question had been posed by Sigmund Freud: can the city be considered a psychical entity? In time, Freud’s question was to be treated affirmatively by Henri Lefebvre, touching on the notions of public sphere by Jürgen Habermas, and public surveillance by Michel Foucault. In interaction with minds, urban voids have been a feminine conduit to the public sphere of the Enlightenment, while in later modernity urban voids became the masculine medium of surveillance and the display of power, often at city squares.

This chapter addresses mainly the myths of the World Axle and the Eternal Return that had been evolving from prehistory to antiquity, and beyond, as associated with Jung’s gender concepts of Animus and Anima. Both myths were instrumental in the rise of primeval public space of the late Neolithic, expressed in Bronze Age round earthworks in Europe and in Paleo-Indian medicine wheels through the Great Plains of archaic North America. The most impressive among the emergent public spaces had been Stonehenge on the plains of Wiltshire, England, demonstrating the significance gender projection had attained in early astronomical observations and in the forging of round, public places. The alignment of these sites, thought to have been also grounds of fertility rituals, with seasonal sky patterns, the winter solstice in particular, correspond with the notion of renewal and birth. This is consistent with the later hieros gamos temple enactments of divine marriage between a priest and a priestess in many Bronze Age cultures. The feminine projection yielding the delineated oval open space had been matched by masculine prowess in the construction of shelter, later the fort and the fortress. The feminine oval place may have had its celestial source in the nightly revolution of the skies around the pole star, and in the periodic renewal of the year during the winter solstice, coevolving with the Myth of the Eternal Return. The vertical edifice, on the other hand, had been a largely masculine expression to the connection between the earth and the sky through a mythical axle of the world, the Axis mundi.

This concluding chapter distinguishes between the loss of place, as the masculinization of open spaces in the city, and placelessness, a primordial essence of the urban feminine and the urban subconscious. Synonymous to the notion of Terrain vague, introduced by Ignasi de Solà-Morales, placelessness is the raw authenticity of places of urban decay such as one described by Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1933 novel, Nausea. Urban decay, often a niche of a previously planned precinct which failed, keeps re-emerging in city-form no matter what intensity of regulatory imposition is forced upon the urban environment. Urban decay is an ongoing, repeating event, an expression mainly of the archetypal femininity of the Eternal Return. Along with the Axis mundi, largely communicating masculinity, both environmental gender archetypes have been distorted or banished altogether through late modernity. In his painting, The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh shows the nightly sky above the city dispersed with images of cup-and-ring marks and of the spiraling Ouroboros. The archetypal bond, or its late loss, between the built form and the sky is either celebrated or mourned in this painting. Though van Gogh’s intent may forever remain unresolved, the imagery of The Starry Night alludes to a closure of an epoch.

This chapter is an overall introduction to the topic of this monograph, namely, the relationship between the urban environment and consciousness. Walter Benjamin had introduced the notion of ongoing interaction between mind and the environment as an underlying theme of his vast collection of writings, known as the Arcades Project. The supposition of dynamic, indeterminate interaction between mind and city-form is explored here through the premise that since the Upper Paleolithic (c. 50 kya–2 kya) humans have projected femininity and masculinity upon their natural surroundings. Formative in the built environment of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age (c. 12,000 BP–5000 BP) were the archetypal myths of the Garden and the Citadel, the conceptual building blocks of built form that have coevolved in interaction with the built environment onto urban voids and volumes of the contemporary metropolis. In mobilizing considerations of the urban crowd and weather, Benjamin’s Arcades Project, and some of the contemporaneous work in psychoanalysis are the underpinnings for the notion of the environ/mental composite as a hybrid of minds, the built environment, demography and climate.

This book explores how the weather and city-form impact the mind, and how city-form and mind interact. It builds on Merleau-Ponty's contention that mind, the human body and the environment are intertwined in a singular composite, and on Walter Benjamin's suggestion that mind and city-form, in mutual interaction, through history, have set the course of civilization. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, urbanism, geography, history, and architecture, the book shows the association of existentialism with prevalence of mood disorder in Northern Europe at the close of Little Ice Age. It explains the implications of city-form and traces the role of the myths and allegories of urban design as well as the history of gender projection onto city-form. It shows how urbanization in Northern Europe provided easier access to shelter, yet resulted in sunlight deprivation, and yielded increasing incidence of depression and other mental disorder among the European middle-class. The book uses the examples of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Kafka, to show how walking through the streets, squares and other urban voids became the informal remedy to mood disorder, a prominent trait among founders of modern Existentialism. It concludes by describing how the connection of anguish and violence is relevant to winter depression in cities, in North America in particular.

This book expands on the thought of Walter Benjamin by exploring the notion of modern mind, pointing to the mutual and ongoing feedback between mind and city-form. Since the Neolithic Age, volumes and voids have been the founding constituents of built environments as projections of gender—as spatial allegories of the masculine and the feminine. While these allegories had been largely in balance throughout the early history of the city, increasingly during modernity, volume has overcome void in city-form. This volume investigates the pattern of Benjamin's thinking and extends it to the larger psycho-cultural and urban contexts of various time periods, pointing to environ/mental progression in the unfolding of modernity.

In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin introduced the idea of epochal and ongoing progression in interaction between mind and the built environment. Since early antiquity, the present study suggests, Benjamin’s notion has been manifest in metaphors of gender in city-form, whereby edifices and urban voids have represented masculinity and femininity, respectively. At the onset of interaction between mind and the built environment are prehistoric myths related to the human body and to the sky. During antiquity gender projection can be detected in western perceptions linking natural and built environments, commencing with Plato’s Atlantis and his Myth of Er, and later as a likely import of the Chinese yin-yang mythology. Culminating with the Age of Discovery, alongside advances in experiential awareness of the Earth’s sphericity, respective feminine and masculine earmarks can be detected in early modern perspicacity of the Earth’s southern and northern hemispheres. Our conceptions of natural and built environments inherently continue to contain gender traits. Yet urban voids, as the feminine face of city-form, have been severely understated in the built environment. Through design and configuration of urban voids, allegories of femininity in city-form ought to be celebrated, not discarded.

It is a matter of tacit consensus that rationalist adeptness in urban planning traces its foundations to the philosophy of the Renaissance thinker and mathematician René Descartes. This study suggests, in turn, that the planned urban environment of the Renaissance may have also led Descartes, and his intellectual peers, to tenets that became the foundations of modern philosophy and science. The geometric street pattern of the late middle ages and the Renaissance, the planned townscapes, street views and the formal garden design, appeared as parables for the perfection of the universe and the supremacy of critical reason. It is within this urban metaphor that Descartes's philosophical narrative betrays perceptual and conceptual impact from the contrast between convoluted medieval townscapes and the emerging harmonious street patterns where defined vistas and predictable clarity of street views were paramount. The geometrically delineated street views of the Renaissance new town became the spark that lit the philosopher's sagacity in reflecting upon the concept of "clear and distinct ideas." Past suggestions that Descartes was led to his philosophical breakthroughs through his discovery of co-ordinate geometry reinforce further the stance that Renaissance planning predisposed rationalist thought.

Urban void sometimes amplifies alienation within urban space, and thus leads the way to the human craving for authenticity. Juxtaposing urban void with the conventional notion of urban objects, furthermore, conforms to Nietzsche's distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian deportment. The Apollonian is at the founding of the Platonic myth of the Ideal City and its modern descendant, the myth of the Rational City. Modern urban planning has been object-directed and, consistent with the historical trend since the Renaissance, has become a constituent of a Neo-Platonic mythology that insists on forging a city as an urban technological artifact. Most existing urban parks and squares, as well as suburban gardens, within this approach, only augment the subordinate standing of urban voids. Yet the significance of urban void, as the unplanned place that represents the pre-rational, the genuine and the unadulterated, ought to lead to its re-introduction into city-form as a conduit for self-reflection and authenticity. Recognizing urban void for its significance may reintroduce an important Dionysian feature into city-form, leading to deliberate carving of authentic urban spaces.

The axiom of extensionality of set theory states that any two classes that have identical members are identical. Yet the class of persons age i at time t and the class of persons age i + 1 at t + l, both including same persons, possess different demographic attributes, and thus appear to be two different classes. The contradiction could be resolved by making a clear distinction between age groups and cohorts. Cohort is a multitude of individuals, which is constituted within a time interval, and endures throughout part of the time continuum. Age group, on the other hand, is only a reference term to which empirical measurement relates, as in birth or death rates. Accordingly, the two concepts, age group i at t, and age group i + 1 at t + 1, are different. The standard population growth model of Leslie and Lotka, however, does not support such a distinction in age groups. An alternative model, proposed recently, implies precisely such a distinction.

Mutual feedback between human-made environments and facets of thought throughout history has yielded two myths: the Garden and the Citadel. Both myths correspond to Jung’s feminine and masculine collective subconscious, as well as to Nietzsche’s premise of Apollonian and Dionysian impulses in art. Nietzsche’s premise suggests, furthermore, that the feminine myth of the Garden is time-bound whereas the masculine myth of the Citadel, or the Ideal City, constitutes a spatial deportment. Throughout history the two myths have continually molded the built environment and thought, but the myth of the Ideal City – from Plato to Descartes to modernity – came to dominate city-form and ensuing aspects of contemplation. This relationship seems to have shifted during the twentieth century. Intellectual dispositions have begun to be largely nurtured by an incongruous city-form emerging from the gap between the incessant promise for an automated, well-functioning city, on the one hand, and looming alienation, coupled with the factual, malfunctioning city, on the other hand. Urban decay, a persisting and time-bound urban event that is a byproduct of this configuration, suggests the ascent of the Garden myth in post-modern city-form.

Almost simultaneous emergence of Existentialism and Marxism at end of the Little Ice Age had coincided with rapid urbanization and prevalence of mood disorder in northern Europe. This historic configuration is cast against Relph’s notion of place in his critique of urban planning. During the LIA street walking had mitigated mood disorder triggered by sunlight deprivation of indoor spaces while, at the same time, it had also buoyed a place. It was the unplanned place in the open air—a dilapidated street corner in St. Petersburg or Romanesque streetscape of Old Copenhagen—that offered authenticity, cerebral restitution, and for ardent minds also discernment and acumen. Relph’s critique continues to be of pressing relevance to winter-cities designed for automotive access, and also for the interpretation it offers on the thought and events of the late LIA and following it.