Cinema and the ‘City of the Mind’: Using Motion Pictures to Explore Human-Environment Transactions in Planning Education.

Abstract

This chapter examines the pedagogical use of film in planning education, specifically as it relates to the teaching of environmental psychology. The intersections between film, theory, and pedagogy are important because film is herein invested with the power to represent – and more importantly interpret and challenge – our understandings of human-environment transactions. I further suggest that planning students may be undereducated in the nature of these transactions and that the medium of the motion picture – combined with the neglected body of theory represented by environmental psychology – offers an excellent synthesis to address this need.