WINTER-CITIES AND MOOD DISORDER: OBSERVATIONS FROM EUROPEAN CITY-FORM AT THE END OF LITTLE ICE AGE

Abstract

1. Introduction In The morphology of (1925) Carl O. Sauer had introduced the notion of cultural landscape as the imposition of culture upon nature. Defined by the shared myths, beliefs and behavioral standards, Sauer's cultural landscape is manifest in human intervention in natural landscape. Technology, as one of the more important aspects of culture, has been changing our lived space, primarily through considerations of expediency related to the human body, while bodily experiences have been changing accordingly and, in turn, have often driven advances of technological change. Landscapes modified by human action, as an aspect of culture, thus impact culture itself, whereby the feedback interaction between culture and landscape as a progression in time, defines much of the history of civilization. In a later geographic inquiry extending Sauer's notion into psychoanalytic aspects of landscape, David Lowenthal had pointed to environmental causes to behavior as well as judgment (Lowenthal 1994). Calls for the emphasis of phenomenology of lived experience as a primary humanistic concern in geography have been made in recent years from several quarters (e.g. Simonsen 2013). A decade after Sauer's essay Walter Benjamin, considered still today the foremost exponent of humanism in urban thought, put forward the notion of continuous and mutual impact between the built environment and humans within it. In his psychoanalytic survey of urban edifices and spaces of Paris and Berlin in the early twentieth century, the Arcades Project (1933/1999), Benjamin argued that the composite of city and the minds within it ought to be seen as a force behind the rise of modernity. While Benjamin's Arcades Project addressed the interaction between the urban environment and minds within it, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, some thirty years later, in his phenomenology of lived space focused on the link between the built environment and the body (1962:440). Yi-fu Tuan, more recently, made a note of a cerebral impact reflected in geomantic myth in the East, as a projection of generic pattern of parts reflected in a larger whole within the environment (Tuan 2001: 100). And without the need to draw on simplistic views of environmental determinism, Gilbert LaFreniere has provided a comprehensive overview of the history of environmental change as it had influenced the emergence, as well as the decline of civilizations, not to mention the reverse impact of modernity on the environment (2008:41-72, 261-300). In an inadvertent affirmation of the more specific outlook of mind-city interaction, Erwin Panofsky (1957) showed that a factual impact of the built environment upon mind is evident in the case of Gothic architecture and scholastic thought. Panofsky's observation relates not only to the architecture of gothic edifices as the source of impact upon mind, but mainly also to the structure of monastic spaces, i.e. to the logic and expediency in the configuration of buildings, and voids within and between buildings. Panofsky's example, however, is important for yet another reason: high scholasticism marks the eve of the Little Ice Age (LIA) in northern Europe. A less-known, but well-documented example of city-form impact upon mind, during the LIA in northern Europe, is the case of early application of geometry to scientific reasoning, by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) in Prague. Based on astronomical observations of the orbit of Mars made by his mentor, the astronomer Tycho Brahe, Kepler made a discovery that modified the Copernican conjecture of planetary motion round the sun, confirming its fundamentals. But prior to his discovery, for years Kepler was unsuccessful in fitting circular circumference, as assumed by Copernicus, or any other curve to the planetary orbit of Mars round the Sun. It was only in 1608 that it dawned on him that the orbit is elliptical, and Tycho's observational record had confirmed this. …