EPFLx: Exploring Humans’ Space: An Introduction to Geographicity

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.