Introduction and Summary
It was Herbert Spencer who in the second half of the nineteenth century introduced the idea that the environment and organisms within it are in an ongoing evolutionary feedback (Spencer 1864: 82–93; Pearce 2010). Less than a century later, Walter Benjamin, most likely unaware of Spencer’s work, had addressed the seemingly narrower scope of feedback of minds interacting with their built environment in the rise of modernity. The context of Benjamin’s notion of interaction between minds and the built environment ought to be seen as encompassing also climate, or weather, and demography, or the crowd. Thus modernity, as an intellectual achievement epitomized by the scientific revolution and the rise of the public sphere, is perceived here also within the twofold framework of climate and demography. The climatic event spanning much of modernity is known as the Little Ice Age while, on the other hand, late modernity had been marked by the demographic transition event of the gradual and uneven drop in fertility and mortality in human populations. Both climate and demography have been intertwined within the urban environment. Late modernity has been marked by climate change induced, at least partially, by ‘heat islands’ of intense urbanization since the nineteenth century, caused by human populations. Gradually urbanizing throughout history, humans during late modernity have escalated their urban habitat, expanding it into sprawling metropolitan areas throughout much of the world today.
The demographic context of modernity has been mainly that of the urban crowd, a human multitude continually redefining the use of urban space, particularly urban niches seen as public spaces. The urban crowd, and the associated notion of the stranger, signify culmination in a demographic process that has been ingrained within the unfolding of civilization, as well as within the history of climate. Civilization is the latest stage in the evolution of anatomically modern humans who emerged between 300,000 and 200,000 BP. The history and prehistory of civilization can be perceived as set between two demographic transitions, about 12,000 years apart: one, the Neolithic Demographic Transition (NDT) defined by transition to sedentarism, agriculture and domestication of animals, accompanied by higher fertility (Bocquet-Appel 2008), and the other, the modern demographic transition consisting in the unequal transformation of fertility and mortality, from high to low (Caldwell 2006: 157–216).
The NDT, also referred to as the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, began about 12,000 BP, at the onset of the Neolithic, the last stage of the Stone Age which started about 3.4 million BP. The Neolithic was sparked by the Holocene, the current climatic and geological era that started c. 12,000 BP, marking the end of the Last Glacial Period on Earth, c. 115,000 BP to 12,000 BP. The coterminous onset of the Neolithic, the NDT and the Holocene, is no coincidence. As climate warmed, human nomadic hunters of game and gatherers of fruits and vegetables inaugurated domestication of animals and land cultivation for the domestication of plants. The human production of food crops and domestication of animals had led to improved nutrition and higher fertility and came to play a key role in the history of civilization. The storing of grains, and the particular use of donkeys and horses for work in agriculture and construction, was behind the rise of first urbanized civilizations during the Bronze Age: the Harappan of the Indus Valley, fourth to second century BCE, and Sumer of southern Mesopotamia, fourth to third century BCE.
A considerable role in the unfolding of interaction between anatomically modern humans and the environment played gender awareness. Discernment of gender and of human aging is the founding tenet at the base of demography. Gender and aging are also the manifest features of constancy and change, respectively, that had left their imprints on the perception of humans in the midst of their kin. The awareness of two mutually exclusive gender types, the male and the female, had led the archaic men and women to an archetypal gender myth, through which they explained to themselves the founding and the working of the universe. Such acumen had led, in turn, to the projection of gender traits upon human interpretation of the environment, and upon the founding of human-built environments.
The projection of gender upon built environments has been through two foundational features, void and volume. Voids had defined primordial public or communal spaces within the early built environment: the round enclosure of fertility rites and renewal ceremonies of the Neolithic, that is, designed voids constituting largely feminine projection upon the environment. The masculine projection had been manifest during the Neolithic and the later Bronze Age, initially in the placement and configuration of standing stones, and later in the construction of edifices, particularly then defensive features of human settlements such as walls and ramparts, along with forts and citadels. Literary documentation of the archetypal projection of gender upon the environment had been the narrative of the Garden and the Citadel, while during modernity an ardent account of environmental gender projection came in ‘The Castle in the Forest,’ a chapter of Carl Jung’s Red Book (1913/2009).
1.1 Modernity: Walter Benjamin on Mind and the Urban Environment
Modernity has been usually viewed as an alignment of social and cultural norms that had gradually evolved through the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Coming to a close in the second half of the twentieth century, modernity’s dawn has been variously assigned across periods ranging from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. The variance in the definition has been bound to differing assignment of significance to events that had led to scientific and technological progress, transition to capitalism or advance toward new social arrangements, intensifying urbanization and the nation-state. While such specifics constitute less than a unanimous agreement, there is little dispute that processes that had marked the greater thrust of modernity, were profoundly accentuated by the rationalism of René Descartes in Holland, France and Germany; the astronomy of John Kepler in Austria and Bohemia and the physics of Galileo Galilei in the north of Italy, all within the first decades of the seventeenth century.
Modernity’s sequel that came on the heels of these developments was largely confined to the two inhabited continental masses delineating the northern Atlantic, mainly Europe, north of the Alps and west of the Carpathian Mountains and the eastern seaboard of North America. The case to argue is that the philosophy and thought of modernity that have emerged from within this geographic region, have been significantly influenced by its environment, while in turn, they shaped—for better or worse—the human impact cast on the very same environment as well as beyond it.
The stance of a dynamic and intrinsically indeterminist mind-environment feedback may have been stated first by the physician Julien Offroy de La Mettrie in his L’Homme Machine (1748/1994):
[W]ho knows if the reason for man’s existence might not lie in this very existence itself? Perhaps he was cast by chance into a tiny corner of the earth, knowing neither how or why […] (La Mettrie 1748/1994: 54)
La Mettrie’s embrace of indeterminism and chance in situating humans in the world had come as a contrarian viewpoint to environmental determinism, a prevalent belief during the Enlightenment, associating mentalities with climate or with geographic latitude. Environmental determinism gained momentum in early modernity thanks to Charles de Montesquieu who, in The Spirit of the Laws (1749/1949), put forward statements that became mainstream standard in the mid-eighteenth century. Associating climate with behavior and mindset Montesquieu claimed to explain some legislation of the West Indies as “arising from the laziness of the climate” (Montesquieu 1749/1949: 226). With such disposition Montesquieu set the ground to further similar pernicious arguments, universally considered today as not only questionable but also deplorable. It is due to the implicit bigotry as well as a methodically simplistic view claiming causal impact of climate and geography upon the makeup of people’s character, that by the end of the twentieth-century environmental determinism has been largely rejected, in the discipline of geography in particular (Peet 1985). At the turn of the twenty-first century, a revival of sorts of environmental determinism steered clear of earlier claims pursuing impact of the environment upon human cognition and focused on the force of environmental factors upon cultures and civilizations (Diamond 1999: 53–66).
The present study is an attempt to redress the controversial notion of relation between mind and the environment, specifically focusing upon the built environment , and pointing to a context that is entirely indeterministic. Mind-city interaction has been pursued by philosophers and geographers sporadic...