The view from the shore: a legal geography of the bay

“But even as I try to apply sweeping reductive principles to the manner in which buildings and cities affect us, I can still sometimes feel the trembling legs of the six-year-old version of me, reminding me that reducing the meaning of a piece of architecture to a set of equations will always cause us to miss out on answers to some of the most important questions.” Colin Ellard (2015) Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life, Bellevue Literary Press: NY, p.254. Writing as an environmental psychologist Colin Ellard presents a different take on “psychogeography”. In a parallel coining, he eschue’s the heavy philosophical baggage of European psychogeography, and uses the term instead as a way to popularise his empirical psychological research into place attachment and place effects. But ultimately he reaches a similar place to the continentals: namely that places have an affective realm and resonance which is more visceral and whole than any attempt to depict a place…