![]() Taking into account Huizinga’s ideas, you can argue that, fundamentally, the act of playing a game is the act of delineating a boundary that separates the mundane world from a mystical, created one - a world that is governed by rules different from everyday life. the In the 1940s, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga published his ideas about the “magic circle” a “consecrated spot” where play occurs (“the arena, the card-table… the tennis court”). Spatial design is so important to us, that its principles transcend even the physical world of architecture and enter the fictional realm, especially that of games. In other words, we are biologically programmed to be highly sensitive to space, place, and location. They assert that the erection of what Michael Smith describes as “constructions that are much larger than they need to be for utilitarian purposes,” both a) parallels threat displays in the animal kingdom, signifying the might of the builders, and b) exploits our natural sensitivity for “bigness” to instill feelings of awe. In fact, psychologists Yannick Joye and Jan Verpooten do just that, taking a Darwinian approach to analyzing the role of monumental architecture. In fact, if we take into account humankind’s original role as both a predator and a prey species among the vast savannahs of Africa, it isn’t hard to posit that a powerful awareness of space and place is intrinsic to our humanity. Smith argues that empires such as the Aztecs, with their neatly orthogonal capital city of Tenochtitlan, used city planning both to reinforce the cosmological beliefs of the Aztec religion, and to legitimize the political authority of the empire among the people. Humans have been engineering the social and psychological affordances of architecture and urban planning for centuries. They can be made to promote certain pathways, encourage specific behaviours, even elicit emotional reactions. She is working on two biography projects that orbit around her primary interest: the lives of ordinary people and their intersection with waste, pollutants, and toxicities.French philosopher Guy Debord talked about the idea of the dérive, a mode of travel where the journey itself is more important than the destination, where travelers “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” But to think of dérive as a kind of random stroll dominated by chance encounters would be to miss Debord’s essential point: spaces, by virtue of being inhabited or shaped by humankind, possess their own “psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.” Spaces can be designed. ![]() For 2022–2023, she will be a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, and at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. Her writing has appeared in the Boston Globe, Freeman’s, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. ![]() Mill Town was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and top book pick for the Chicago Tribune, Literary Hub, Kirkus Reviews, Oprah magazine, People, Newsweek, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others. ![]() Mill Town won the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Maine Literary Award for nonfiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize for best first book in any genre. Kerri Arsenault is co-founder of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University, contributing editor at Orion magazine, a book critic who has served on the National Book Critics Circle board, and author of the bestselling book, Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, an investigative memoir about family and environmental legacies.
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