Lecture: Ideas, evolution, diversity, and urban geography
15 January 2021 12:45 till 13:45 - Location: ONLINE - By: Communication BK | Add to my calendar
On 15 January, the lecture 'Ideas, evolution, diversity, and urban geography' takes place, with speaker Dan Baciu (Assistant Professor, Theory of Architecture and Digital Culture). This lecture is part of the Friday lunch lecture series of the Department of Architecture.
Ideas are more than you think. Take the example of an architectural company: the company is not the paper and drawing utensils, and it is not the computers and printing machines because none of these items can design and build by itself. Furthermore, the company is not the people because the people can all come and go; yet, the company does not cease to exist when the employees are at home. An architectural company is an idea. Lawyers call it a legal fiction. But this fiction has a geographical footprint and an impact onto the physical environment. Ideas and fictions populate our minds, but they also shape our environments. In the lecture ‘Ideas, Evolution, Diversity, and Urban Geography’, I explain a new approach towards studying ideas. I show that the unit of evolutionary selection in human culture is not the isolated idea, but the group of interrelated ideas, and I present a new digital tool through which groups of ideas and their diversity can be studied in geographical space.