Spaces, Places, Bodies and Education = Spazi, luoghi, corpi e educazione

In the preface of the Italian edition (2015) of Mallgrave’s Architecture and Embodiment (2013) pivotal book, Gallese argues that the body is the true protagonist of our faculty to appreciate the aesthetical characteristics of architectural artifacts. The subjectivity of our perspective is, primarily, situated in time and space, constituted by the potentialities of the body to move, and linked to the world through affective, emotional involvements. These experiences influence physiological parameters like blood pressure and respiratory rate as well as the sensorimotor relationship with the world interrelated, in turn, with embodied simulation and mirroring. A pioneering contribution to this vision, from the town planning standpoint, can be found in the epistemological break led by Kevin Lynch. His book The image of the city (1960) paved the way to a qualitative, subjective way of observing and living the urban space based on the perceptions of the city dwellers instead of the standardized, purely physical-infrastructural, way of measuring the space to plan the organization of the city. Furthermore, the Lynch’s vision has been largely used to build observation tools for participatory planning projects especially with children: a pristine way to enhance interdisciplinary - fully educational – projects. In some areas of Italy and Europe, the golden era coincided, undoubtably, with the two decades following the approbation of the Children’s Rights Convention. Roughly around the same time, the neurosciences began to disseminate the results of researches highlighting educational processes, already envisaged and developed by several disciplines (above all pedagogy, human movement, architecture, and town-planning), that allowed fruitful contaminations and the systematization of intuitions, only in some cases previously consolidated in systematic corpus of publications and long-established practices.