Urban Aesthetics TOC

This article aims at showing how environmental aesthetics relates to the common environment, the ordinary environment that we discuss, share, and live in. Aesthetics has primarily been understood in relation to art and art history, but it has now been emancipated from this framework of interpretation. In the wake of John Dewey, aesthetics has become the problem of experience as ordinary sensitivity. One can even think that it is a question of adequately defining the world of sensitivity that rests on the faculty of perception: both the capacity to perceive and the concept of the perceptual commons that follows from this. The forms that are perceived could then very well be understood as those we have in common and that we discuss in questions of policy (formal commons). Arnold Berleant, in his essay "The Aesthetic Politics of Environment," explains: Such a vision brings us to the need for recognizing and shaping

This article aims at showing how environmental aesthetics relates to the common environment, the ordinary environment that we discuss, share, and live in. Aesthetics has primarily been understood in relation to art and art history, but it has now been emancipated from this framework of interpretation. In the wake of John Dewey, aesthetics has become the problem of experience as ordinary sensitivity. One can even think that it is a question of adequately defining the world of sensitivity that rests on the faculty of perception: both the capacity to perceive and the concept of the perceptual commons that follows from this. The forms that are perceived could then very well be understood as those we have in common and that we discuss in questions of policy (formal commons).

Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Philosophica. Ethica-Aesthetica-Practica

The title of this volume-Aesthetic Polarities: Urban Creativity and City Dwellingautomatically directs our attention to contrasts and disparities encountered in modern cities. Visual contrasts first come to mind: between what is neat, revitalized and frequently visited, and what is destroyed, degraded and forgotten. However, the articles in this volume address the issue of aesthetic polarization in a deeper perspective of the city's experience. They focus on everyday experience, including that which is stimulated by the engaged and radical activity of both residents, activists, researchers and artists representing various fields of art: urban planners, architects, multimedia artists. They present also various endeavors to combine the potential of urban creativity resulting from the historical and urban heritage with the continuity of experience and practice of living. At the same time these articles join the discussion on the inseparable pair of concepts of revitalization and participation which has been going on for several generations of authors, among which probably the hottest names are:

City & Society, 2020

The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together… It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word…This space does not always exist… No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; 'for what appears to all, this we call Being,' and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream, intimately and exclusively our own but without reality.

2015

2022

Urban Art: Creating the Urban With Art, 2018

Urban Art: Creating the Urban With Art, in: Urban Art: Creating the Urban With Art, Proceedings of the International Conference at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 15-16 July, 2016, eds. Ulrich Blanchè and Ilaria Hoppe, Lisbon 2018, pp. 10-12

2012

For now, you are nothing more or less than a flâneur. t's tempting to offer such luxurious counsel to readers of this issue, the third issue of Evental Aesthetics and our last for 2012. A flâneur is a sort of person that we are perhaps most likely to associate with Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's work does not explicitly feature in the pages that follow, but the approach to urban realms that he deemed characteristic of flâneurs might indeed be useful to those readers who journey from the heart of Manhattan to Singapore and Brazilian shantytowns, via Paris, the suburbs of Los Angeles, and Lagos, guided by our contributors. It might even seem that some wish for a bit of flânerie guided the editors to this theme, Art and the City. It might seem that our aim is to entice city-dwellers and visitors to take the time to wander urban spaces in search of nothing in particular, except perhaps the insightenlightening, disturbing, or both -that sometimes attends the experience of art, in this case art inspired or on offer by the city.

This study examines the complex relation between spatial experience and aesthetic experience. It is argued that spatial experience specifically in the context of everyday spaces makes it possible to experience them aesthetically as well. A wide selection of research ranging from environmental and philosophical aesthetics to architectural theory, psychology, human geography, and other relevant disciplines is employed in order to achieve a more detailed picture of how spatial experience is formed in the first place. This experience is described mainly in terms of phenomenology but is then related to other ways of understanding experiences and their prerequisites. Different notions of space and spatiality and a more comprehensive articulation of the relation of perception to spatial experience, sensory perception, and how senses contribute to spatial experience are in the focus of attention at the beginning of the study. Different experiential layers that can be distinguished within the space which is closest experienced are explored. Interaction with environment is discussed and the notion of preaesthetic is presented to clarify the relation between the two different types of experiences. Following this, the notion of preaesthetic is studied against eminent notions such as aesthetic attitude and aesthetic engagement that show elements that have traditionally been considered to either lead to or define aesthetic experiences. This study shows that the effect that spatial experience has on revealing aesthetic potentialities in everyday environments is far more complicated than has previously been understood. Due to its contingent qualities, spatial experience sometimes leads to "failed" aesthetic experiences even in situations where there is obvious aesthetic potentiality. Even though there are some overlapping qualities in spatial and aesthetic experiences, they cannot thus be equated, as has more or less been done in different branches studying the topics of art and architectural experiences, for example. In the final part of the study, some possible directions for future research are pointed out and the application possibilities of these new developments in aesthetic theory are presented by short case studies, in which a closer look is taken into a chosen set of urban everyday spaces.

EPFL Thesis, 2017

Recent turns in social sciences, namely the visual, qualitative, actorial or spatial turns, all indicate a rising interest in individuals. Since the aesthetic dimension always nourishes and informs individuals' spatialities and their decision-making processes, my research explores how the subjective realm of the aesthetic has proved itself able to generate conditions that lead to action, and consequently influence other dimensions of society, especially in the ethical, political or legal realms. My systemic approach is grounded in the relational theory of space, the phenomenological study of the imagination, and the theory of urbanity. Hence, I investigated both urbanity and beauty as some of the most intriguing and interesting emergent (and not resultant!) phenomena of the urban system; where urbanity belongs to its objective realm and beauty to its subjective realm. It is essential to recognize that humans, unlike the components that create the natural systems, are capable of a particular sort of action due to their imaginative capacities that allow them to overpass the actual perceived world. The aesthetic dimension directly involves the human imaginative consciousness, which in turn activates the realm of the virtual, i.e., the realm that which exists only in a latent state, and does not appear visibly (fr. ce qui n'est qu'en puissance). While engaged in aesthetic experience, humans exhibit a particular sort of intentionality through which they bring to mind what is not visible through what is present and perceived. By making use of their lived body, individuals are capable to engage in a particular sort of imaginative play through which memories of the past, anticipations of the future and the actualized perceived present are conjured together, informing one another. Since every human intentional experience is spatialized, I investigated a particular spatial structure through which aesthetic experience occurs as such. I called this structure aesthetic space. In the last chapter, I investigate more precisely the influence of the urban environment on the way in which individuals' aesthetic judgments evolve and mature. By considering the experience of modernity and the city as pivotal in the construction of individuals' aesthetic sensitivities, I explore the spatial component of aesthetic judgments on some particular cases. I also focus on the importance of the urban public space, the lifestyle change, as well as on the period of childhood, which appear to be critical to the (aesthetic) development of individuals.