Aesthetics and the City

Aesthetics and the City engages aesthetics to explore the role of the city in urban experience. Drawing on diverse theories and global case studies, this edited collection examines how aesthetics relates to how cities and urban spaces are perceived, organised, and transformed. This book celebrates and ponders the wide diversity of aesthetic approaches within urban studies, noting that the way aesthetics is understood impacts what can be understood about cities and the urban order more generally. In its most general sense, aesthetics refers to our sensuous relation to the world. It invariably figures in how we make sense of the city and ourselves-bound to how urban life is experienced imaginatively, materially, socially, culturally, and politically. In an era where scholars have expressed concern at epistemological city-centrism, aesthetics is proposed as a versatile concept through which the centrality of the city to urban thought can be assessed. The book also explores how aesthetics intersects with a range of tangential concepts including power, the political, art, and affect. Ultimately it makes the case that this diverse ensemble of approaches to aesthetics can enable scholars to understand the city and its enduring relevance to urban thought. This book focuses on the concepts of "aesthetics" and "the city" and will appeal to scholars and students in urban studies, human geography, planning, politics, and sociology.

Joe Blakey is a Political Geographer at the University of Manchester, UK, interested in conceptualising and understanding political change, aesthetics, and environmental knowledge politics. His research is driven by the need to understand the depoliticisation of marginalised voices and perspectives, and how knowledge about the environment is produced, contested, and mobilised in response to the global climate and ecological crises. Amy Barron is a Social and Cultural Geographer at the University of Manchester, UK, interested in the lived experience of urban differences, inequalities, and social categories. These themes are often explored through the lenses of age, ageing, and the life-course.

Preface - Joe Blakey and Amy Barron; 1. Introduction: Making Sense of the City - Joe Blakey and Amy Barron; 2. Perspectives from Philosophical and Applied Urban Aesthetics - Sanna Lehtinen; 3. Urban Aesthetics and Power: Branding Sensory Conviviality in London and Barcelona - Mónica Degen and Beatriz Guijarro Turégano; 4. Aesthetics as Sensory Experience and the Embodied Practice of Bicycle Delivery Work - Josh Widera; 5. Writing the City Clean: Sketching Conflictual Aesthetics of Street Art in Linz, Austria - Friederike Landau-Donnelly and Stefanie Fridrik; 6. The Post-Race City: Borders, Freedom, and Imagination - Günter Gassner; 7. The Walls of Berlin and Cairo: A Spatial Mnemonic Model - Taher Abdel-Ghani, Yara Mohamed and Amr Ibrahim; 8. Rancière, Aesthetics, and the Politics of the City-Scale - Joe Blakey; 9. Cities and The Sixth Sense: The Aesthetics of Experimental Urbanisms - Julian Brigstocke; 10. Sensing the "Public" in Public Wall Art in Bangalore - Salila Vanka; 11. Conclusion: What Next? Future Directions for Aesthetics and the City - Amy Barron and Joe Blakey; Index