[revised by agnes]
Hi all,

There are three readings for class discussion tomorrow, all posted in the syllabus. It might seem like a lot, but they are all pretty easy reads so you can read quickly and catch what interests you.

1. Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values in Space and Place by Yi-Fu Tuan
: 20 pages, with a few diagrams, but should be a relatively fast read. He discusses how spatial divisions and values originate from the human body, and how space and experience of spaciousness affects how we perceive more abstract things like competence or freedom.

2. Selections from A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander
: 24 pages, you can read the intro to the book, and just skim the patterns. The book is an illustrated discussion of a pattern language derived from traditional architecture, with 253 unitary patterns written as a set of rules that are invoked by circumstances.

3. The Image of the Environment in The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch
: 14 pages, is the intro to Lynch's classic study on how users perceive and organize spatial information as they navigate through cities. In the same book Lynch also coined the words "imageability" and "wayfinding".

The optional reading is another chapter from Yi-Fu Tuan's book, Spatial Ability, Knowledge, and Place, examining humans' spatial navigation and knowledge (by looking at e.g. studies of how people learn their way through through unfamiliar mazes), and the perceptive transformation from "space" to "place". He also discusses of the impact of society and culture (geography, agricultural, marital, etc.) on the different development of spatial skills by giving historical examples.