Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Our landscapes are not just the lands that we may or may not occupy, but the places that are important to us, that figure in memories of the past, in our sense of the history of our landscape, our consciousness of well-being and belonging in our present landscape and our vision of its future. Citizens seems to live in exile in their own cities because of the imposibility to know how to feel the space around them, and this inability to identify themselves with their enviroment makes us to wonder about how the relations and connections between the human and his/her hábitat works. In this paper, we analyze the concept of space to understand what are the basis of its poetic and what are the laws that accomplish this aesthetic thought. Finally we propose walking as a best practice to perform a semiotic reading of the place and also as a critical tool for looking around, feeling, and reading the landscape.