Borderlands : Changes for peripheries
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Date
2010
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AESOP
Abstract
The first known concept of land goes back to the time of the Egyptians, who believed it to be flat and floating on water. Later on, other civilisations raised similar concepts. In Babylon the priests described the universe as an oyster with water above and below, the whole sustained by a solid sky like a closed and round room. The Mesopotamian concept foresaw an ocean that surrounded flat land; it was forbidden for navigation and punishment for those who ignored this was to fall into the abyss. Later still, around the 8th century B.C. the Greeks imagined land as a flat and round disk held up by columns. Anaximander of Miletus saw the world in the form of a cylindrical column surrounded by air that floated at the core of the universe without support and couldn’t fall because it was right in the centre. What is clear is the absence of fear of early civilisations to raise some abysmal edges – very difficult to justify – but with a persuasive and frightening force, highlighting the predominance of specific interests over rationality.
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Book of proceedings: Urban change : The prospect of transformation
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