Key Information
About the content
How do we understand the notion of space? How have urbanisation, mobility, digital spaces, and globalization changed the way we perceive it? This course aims to help you feel comfortable with the notion of space. The simplest way to understand it is to connect your daily life, your perceptions and your practices to the concepts of contact and remoteness. In SpaceX, we will explore together the city, urbanisation, urbanity, and urbanism, the individual actor in a globalising World, the emerging digital spatialities, the space-time couple, and the complex relation between societies and bio-physical worlds. Moreover, we will see that cartography is a powerful tool. By the end of the course, we will enable you 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. In each of the nine sessions, a recognised specialist will be filmed in a particular place—a ‘thinking place’—throughout the World, to help us simultaneously inhabit and understand space.
Syllabus
- A greater understanding of space as perception and daily-life practice.
- How to read and draw maps to gain a better understanding of space and spatiality.
- How space is a useful tool to address digital worlds, urbanisation, and globalisation.
- How geography connects social sciences.
- An overview of important spatial agency and spatial justice topics and issues.
Instructors
Jacques Lévy
Professor
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
Farzaneh Bahrami
Boris Beaude
Professor
Lausanne University
Barbara Laurent-Lucchetti
Ogier Maitre
Hélène Noizet
Professor
Paris 1
Patrick Poncet
Independent Researcher
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
Content Designer
The École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, English: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) is a research university in Lausanne, Switzerland, that specialises in physical sciences and engineering.
One of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, the school was founded by the Swiss Federal Government with the stated mission to:
Educate engineers and scientists to the highest international standing
Be a national center of excellence in science and technology
Provide a hub for interaction between the scientific community and the industry
EPFL is considered one of the most prestigious universities in the world for engineering and sciences, ranking 17th overall and 10th in engineering in the 2015 QS World University Rankings; 34th overall and 12th in engineering in the 2015 Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
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