Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to Daniel Sui and to two anonymous referees of this Journal for their valuable comments on the earlier versions of this study.
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Akkerman, A. Gender myth and the mind-city composite: from Plato’s Atlantis to Walter Benjamin’s philosophical urbanism. GeoJournal 78, 727–741 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-012-9462-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-012-9462-x
Keywords
- Walter Benjamin and phenomenology of the city
- Plato and Aristotle
- St. Thomas More and Tomasso Campanella
- Femininity–masculinity, yin-yang and feng shui
- Gender myth in discernment of northern versus southern hemisphere
- Gender myth in discernment of edifices versus urban voids
- Interaction of mind and environment