What Could Go Wrong: Anxiety and Urban Design

Abstract

This article explores the influence of Enlightenment philosophy on contemporary environmental concepts and urban design. The authors examine how Enlightenment ideas have contributed to shaping human relationships with the environment since the Baroque era. They emphasize that the Enlightenment contributed significantly to the rationalization and optimization of urban space, displacing anxiety and fear.

The focus is on how eighteenth-century philosophers and their followers laid the foundation for environmental consciousness, leading to a rethinking of human interaction with nature in the twentieth century. The text examines the concept of responsibility that emerged during the Enlightenment and its influence on the contemporary environmental agenda.

It compares different historical periods when alternative models of interaction with nature could have become dominant but eventually succumbed to the rational approach of the Enlightenment.

The study emphasizes the changes in the perception of time and space that emerged under the influence of the Enlightenment and their significance for contemporary environmental discourse and urbanism.