How does your environment shape how you see and use the world around you?

Much of the work that I have been doing recently has concentrated on various facets of this question:

• Inventing Berlin asks how street names and monuments communicate who should feel like they belong in the urban landscape,
• A revised version of my essay for the Hacking Urban Furniture project examines the normative aspects of street furniture and how that shapes how we use public space, and
• My new role as lead expert for the URBACT action planning network “Gendered Landscapes” will explore the gendered aspects of urban planning and urban life.

To get academic for a minute, there is a social constructionist assumption at the core of all three of these works: the environment shapes the subject, in particular when aspects of the environment become banal, invisible, or taken for granted.

The environment around us is not simply the process of natural, environmental forces. Especially in cities, the environment which…