The Hidden Geography of Everyday Life

The book is a peculiar one, dealing as it does with the environments (in the broadest sense) that surround us, act upon us, and shape out decision-making. It considers our lived environments at all scales, from the rooms we inhabit to the neighborhoods, cities, regions, nations, and eventually the world in which we live. For the most part it deals with spatial scales up to and including the city. Its peculiarity stems from the perspective it takes, which is that there is no such thing as a shared objective environmental reality in which we live. Perception and cognition play such a dominant role in human behaviour that what we see as our urban world necessarily differs for everyone depending on their learned concepts and constructs, their intellectual level, and their cultural, social, economic, and biological context. The book ranges widely across disciplines as it attempts to explain just how it is that we humans, or at least our brains, create the urban world we take for granted and how the environments that comprise it change and evolve and morph across our lives. To do this it uses what we know from physics, biology, chemistry, and their various sub-disciplines: neuroscience, biochemistry, perception, and cognition. The hope is that in illustrating just how our remarkable brains do it, we can illuminate some the unknowns about the environments we shape, yet take for granted.