Forms of Experienced Environments

Book excerpt: This book explores ‘environmental forms’ in terms of their relationships to the socio-politico-ecological transformations currently in progress. Today, the environment is a central theme in political discourse, scientific work and everyday life. It is multi-dimensional: it is a living space, a socio-ecological system and a field of research and action. However, despite the presence and diversity of existing approaches, the ways in which policies address environmental issues remain mainly focused on control, highlighting the techno-ecological, managerial and curative dimensions of public actions. Although public action tends to instrumentalise the environment, the humanities and social sciences have initiated significant reflections in this field, proposing alternative ways of thinking about the environment in its multiple aspects and scales. As part of ‘another approach’ to the environment that mirrors contemporary developments, this book adopts a form-based approach which has been largely neglected by previous studies dealing with environmental themes. The analyses provided here will open up a new perspective on the relationships between people, aesthetics and environments, and are drawn from different schools of research, highlighting the huge potential of reading the environment through forms or, conversely, a reading of environmental forms.