Publication details
Město v mysli
| Title in English | The City in Mind |
|---|---|
| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | One of the reason why people travel to various cities and places all over the world is the ability to evoke emotions. Because of that, we can call cities as „factories of emotions“, geographically fixed emotional states. Cities mirror emotional states of the creators and inhabitants as well as they evoke appropriate emotions among visitors. But there is another so far unanswered question: Do cities function this way also in a case of cognition? In other words, do cities stimulate reason and cognitive functions similar way as they evoke emotions? In this talk I am going to offer a positive answer. Based on the extended mind theory I claim that interaction between human mind and cities is not just on emotional level, but also on rational level. According to this theory, that has occupied attention of philosophers for many years and currently architects are paying an attention to it too, human minds and architecture come to reciprocal interaction, so an urban environment is shaped by cognitive functions of inhabitants and then this environment shapes human minds. The way we think is thus partly affected by the city we live in. We can even say that under some circumstances some parts of cities become literally parts of our minds and our thinking. This fact brings many serious consequences for various disciplines, from aesthetics and psychology to architecture and civil engineering, and for living in cities as such. |
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