Bodies Under the Weather: Selective Permeability, Political Affordances and Architectural Hostility
Abstract
The built environment implicitly regulates bodily movement, whether through decorative curbs marking areas as private or lighting accentuating pimples to drive youths away. Drawing on my own observational research and empirical studies, I argue tacit boundaries such as these are harsher for people under the weather in the threefold sense of suffering from inclement conditions, ill-health and oppressive social climates. Inasmuch as design filters people in these ways, space is “selectively permeable.” I pursue these lines through Shusterman’s somaesthetics and Gibson’s affordance theory. A tenet in somaesthetics is that culture, mind, body and values are codependent. Gibson’s framework likewise holds that body, values and environment are codefined. An icy stairway, for example, may afford falling to the infirmed and look threatening to them more than it does to the healthy, who therefore value it differently. The same pattern occurs in cultural-political environments: a woman may see an urban setting as more threatening than a man because it places her at greater bodily risk, just as citizens in an authoritarian society may face more danger than tourists, experiencing things accordingly. That agents face objectively different obstacles in the same environment allows for selectively permeable design and it makes affordances political.
