JACQUES LEVY: Hello, I'm Jacques Levy.
This course has been designed by our team, Choros,
within the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, EPFL.
Exploring human space.
In this course, we would like to talk about space with you, about our space.
The word space alone used without any objective seems very abstract.
When talking about time, Augustine used to say
that he knew what it was as long as nobody asked him
what it was, because as soon as somebody did it appeared
he couldn't grasp its sense anymore.
I think the same can be said about space.
Space is it clear term insofar as weren't not expected to explain it
or explicated it.
The first aim of this course is to try and help you feel
comfortable with the notion of space.
Firstly, space is about distances.
The simplest way to understand it is to connect
your daily life, your perceptions, and practices to the concepts of contact
and remoteness.
You will easily realize that space is omnipresent in your life.
This is a concrete meaning of a now or most consensual
expression, the geographic turn.
Space matters and we try to show you how much it does.
After this first step, we'll be able to move forward and analyze
the different ways in which space and geography as an approach
to human spaces can be useful tools to understand social worlds and societies.
This is the second goal of the course, showing
the pervasiveness and the strength of space and spatialities
in social processes.
In this perspective, we will explore together
the city, urbanization, urbanity, and urbanism, the individual actor
in a globalizing world, the emerging digital spatialities, the space time
couple, and the complex relation between societies and biophysical worlds.
The geographic turn also irrigates, and as a result,
affects the overall social theories.
In these theories, many scientific and public controversies
have to do with space.
We'll help you comprehend and analyze them.
Not so bad, is it?
However, this course has a third objective.
We'd like to give you a hand with addressing space on your own
when the course is over.
We'd like to help you make can use the right classes to observe, describe,
explain, and understand spatial realities.
We'll see, for example, that cartography is a powerful tool,
and our aim is to enable you, by the end of the course,
to not only read, but also draw your own maps.
Finally, the issues of action on space through spatial agency and spatial
justice will be addressed.
Here, again, we'll consider you not only as consumers of knowledge,
but also as potential actors.
The course will be developed over nine sessions,
but don't expect mere video recordings of lectures.
First of all, I won't be alone.
In each of the nine units, a recognized specialist
of fundamental or applied research in social sciences of space
will intervene.
They will be filmed in a particular place
throughout the world, a thinking place, which
has a special significance for their intellectual itinerary.
Moreover, three talented scholars will be
entrusted with three of our sessions.
They will provide you with a framework and their knowledge of specific fields.
In any case, I will act as your guide.
This journey will, however, get you neither
into the interstellar void nor in the strange inner landscape of your body.
Welcome aboard to this space odyssey throughout
our ordinary and extraordinary geographical worlds.