Espacio público e introspección en Villavicencio: más allá del silencio urbano

Abstract

This paper addresses the relationship between public space and introspection, investigating what conditions the former must meet in order to facilitate the latter. In order to address the problems posed by the accelerated pace of life imposed by contemporary labour and consumption dynamics, the social imposition of spending all our time in productive terms, to the detriment of leisure time, and the serious mental health effects triggered by the confinement in homes by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has increased the problem. The word introspection emerges, understood as a process of self-observation and self-knowledge, of a universal character that serves people to distance themselves from the accelerated pace of life and contribute to their integral well-being at the level of the individual, as one of the new approaches that the public space should have to offer spaces for pause, reflection, awareness about the relationship of the self with oneself and with others. For the present work the term introspection will be handled in spatial terms in the understanding of the production of natural spaces that foster the conditions for this experience to take place, in that sense the concept is framed in biophilia as a process of urban thinking and atmospheres as a perceptual term that defines a space. All the above mentioned triggers in a sensory analysis of six public spaces of Villavicencio, Meta from components that aim to evaluate to what extent they induce introspection.