Man’s relationship to his environment is a function of his sensory apparatus plus how this apparatus is conditioned to respond. Today, one’s unconscious picture of one’s self—the life one leads, the minute-to-minute process of existence—is constructed from the bits and pieces of sensory feedback in a largely manufactured environment. A review of the immediate receptors reveals first that Americans who live urban and suburban lives have less and less opportunity for active experiences of either their bodies or the spaces they occupy. Our urban spaces provide little excitement or visual variation and virtually no opportunity to build a kinesthetic repertoire of spatial experiences. It would appear that many people are kinesthetically deprived and even cramped. In addition, the automobile is carrying the process of alienation from both the body and the environment one step further. One has the feeling that the automobile is at war with the city and possibly mankind itself. Two additional sensory capacities, the great sensitivity of the skin to changes in head and texture, not only act to notify the individual of emotional changes in others but feed back to him information of a particularly personal nature from his environment.
Man’s sense of space is closely related to his sense of self, which is an intimate transaction with his environment. Man can be viewed as having visual, kinesthetic, tactile and thermal aspects of his self which may be either inhibited or encouraged to develop by his environment.
— Edward T. Hall. The Hidden Dimension: An anthropologist examines man’s use of space in public and in private. 1969.
