The refraction of space: A radical reversal of direction

Abstract

The field of spatial cognition began nearly fifty years ago. In the early years, Kevins Lynch's The Image of the City was an inspirational icon for many while Kenneth Boulding's The Image and E.C. Tolman's "Cognitive maps in rats and men" provided succinct but elementary philosophical and psychological groundings. The disciplinary roots of the field were disparate: architecture and landscape architecture, planning, psychology, geography, sociology, economics, and anthropology were the principal sources of scholars. If for the moment we take psychology as a benchmark for comparison, all of the other disciplines had some things in common in their approaches to spatial cognition. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.