Dr. Scott’s presentation is called “All Roads Lead to the Heart-Center: A Study of a City’s Circulation System“
A city’s road network system is the circulatory system of the built environment. In fact, city planning vocabulary literally describes a city’s road system as its circulation element, where access is often provided by a major arterial or a local bypass. Thinking of the city’s networks of roads, streets, and highways in this way makes me wonder where might be the heart-center to where all this circulation leads? My talk for this year’s Mythologium is a blending of the physical nature of a city’s circulation with a psychological approach of finding one’s own heart-center. Using examples from my own hometown of San Diego, CA, I hope to lead the audience down a road toward finding the heart-centers in the places and cities they hold close to the heart.
About Dr. Scott
Bob holds a BA in Cultural Geography and, after 30 years in the city planning profession, received his MA and PhD in Mythology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology. In his 2022 dissertation, entitled “Encountering San Diego: A City Planner’s Search for a City’s Soul,” Bob examined how geography, history, and the mythic imagination, by way of archetype, metaphor, and image, inform a city’s soul and spirit of place. Through the primary lenses of depth, archetypal, and ecopsychologies, Bob’s approach to city planning implies a reinterpretation (or revisioning) of how a planner might assess the making of a city by cultivating a psychological vision for how one might engage more fully and more symbolically with the cityscape.