Communication, Space, and Design

This book looks at how our worldview shapes our relations to and conceptions of space and place, and how our spaces and designs impact our communication practices. By asserting that our spaces and designs are increasingly promoting various expressions of separation, this book contends that this separation turns makes us more private. We find this increasing inwardness, for example, in the rise of gated-communities, exclusionary suburbs, and hyper-suburbs. Ultimately, the book asks how our spaces and designs impact our understanding and embodying of democracy, civility, and justice. It also explores how this inward turn limits our sense of obligation to the world and each other by undermining our ability to develop the communicational resiliency and moral sophistication that comes with through public interactions.