To what extent do urban dwellers relate to their lived and imagined environment through aesthetic perceptions, and aspirations? This book approaches experiences of urban aesthetics not as an established framework, defined by imposed norms or legislations, but as the result of a continuous reflexive and proactive gaze, a complex and deep engagement of the mind, body and sensibilities. It uses empirical studies ranging from China, India to Western Europe. Three axes are privileged. The first considers urban everyday aesthetic experiences in the long-term as a historical production, from medieval Italy to a future imagined by science fiction. The second examines the impact of aestheticizing everyday material realities in neighbourhoods, and the tensions and conflicts these engender around urban commons. Finally, the third axis considers these relationships as aesthetic inequalities, exacerbated in a new age of urban development. The book combines local and transnational scales with an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together historians, sociologists, cultural geographers, anthropologists, architects and contemporary art curators. They illustrate the importance of combining different social science methods and functional perspectives to study such complex social and cultural realities as cities. This book will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of humanities and social sciences, cultural and urban studies, architecture and political geography.

Enkelt artikel fra bogen Urban space and urban conservation as an aesthetic problem c lectures presented at the international conference in Rome, 23rd-26th October 1997

How do people react to the visual character of their surroundings? What can planners do to improve the aesthetic quality of these surroundings? Too often in environmental design, visual quality--aesthetics--is misunderstood as only a minor concern, dependent on volatile taste and thus undefinable. Yet a substantial body of research indicates the importance of visual quality in the environment to the public and has uncovered systematic patterns of human response to visual attributes of the built environment. Efforts to understand environmental aesthetics have been undertaken by investigators from such diverse fields as landscape architecture, environmental psychology, geography, philosophy, architecture, and city planning. As a result the relevant information is scattered and not readily available to professionals and policy makers. The book brings together classic and new contributions by distinguished workers in different disciplines. It explores theory and data on preferences in the visual environment, and also addresses the practical application of aesthetic criteria in design, planning and public policy. Promising directions for future research are identified.

This book highlights the importance of outdoor thermal comfort for improving urban living quality in the context of urban planning and urban geometry design. It introduces readers to a range of assessment methods and applications of outdoor thermal comfort and addresses urban geometry and thermal environment at the neighbourhood scale using real-world examples and parametric studies. In addition, the subjective evaluations by urban dwellers and numerical modelling tools introduced in this book provide not only a comprehensive assessment of outdoor thermal comfort but also an integrated approach to using thermal comfort indicators as a standard in high-density cities. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable guide for urban climate researchers, urban planners, and designers, and policymakers pursuing more liveable urban environments.

This book explores ‘environmental forms’ in terms of their relationships to the socio-politico-ecological transformations currently in progress. Today, the environment is a central theme in political discourse, scientific work and everyday life. It is multi-dimensional: it is a living space, a socio-ecological system and a field of research and action. However, despite the presence and diversity of existing approaches, the ways in which policies address environmental issues remain mainly focused on control, highlighting the techno-ecological, managerial and curative dimensions of public actions. Although public action tends to instrumentalise the environment, the humanities and social sciences have initiated significant reflections in this field, proposing alternative ways of thinking about the environment in its multiple aspects and scales. As part of ‘another approach’ to the environment that mirrors contemporary developments, this book adopts a form-based approach which has been largely neglected by previous studies dealing with environmental themes. The analyses provided here will open up a new perspective on the relationships between people, aesthetics and environments, and are drawn from different schools of research, highlighting the huge potential of reading the environment through forms or, conversely, a reading of environmental forms.

The theme of the present volume concerns people' s response to the natural environment, considered at scales varying from that of a house hold plant to that of vast wilderness areas. Our decision to focus on this particular segment of the physical environment was prompted in part by the intrinsic interest in this subject on the part of a diverse group of sodal scientists and professionals-and of laypersons, for that matter and in part by the relative neglect of this topic in standard treatments of the environment-behavior field. It also serves to bring out once again the interdisdplinary nature of that field, and we are pleased to have been able to inc1ude representatives from geography, sodology, soda! ecology, and natural recreation among our contributors. We believe that this volume will serve a useful purpose in helping to integrate the find ings and concepts in this presently somewhat fragmented field, scat tered as they are over a very diverse array of publications representing a similarly varied group of spedalties. It is hoped that the result will be to stimulate future development of this area and to add a measure of in creased coherence to it. Volume 7 of our series will be devoted to the theme of elderly people and the environment, with M. Powell Lawton joining us as guest co-editor. The titles of the papers comprising Volume 7 are shown on page v. Irwin Altman J oachim F. Wohlwill ix Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This tenth volume in the series addresses an important topic of research, de sign, and policy in the environment and behavior field. Public places and spaces include a sweeping array of settings, including urban streets, plazas and squares, malls, parks, and other locales, and natural settings such as aquatic environments, national parks and forests, and wilderness areas. The impor tance of public settings is highlighted by difficult questions of access, control, and management; unique needs and problems of different users (including women, the handicapped, and various ethnic groups); and the dramatic re shaping of our public environments that has occurred and will continue to occur in the foreseeable future. The wide-ranging scope of the topic of public places and spaces demands the attention of many disciplines and researchers, designers, managers, and policymakers. As in previous volumes in the series, the authors in the present volume come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, research and design orientations, and affiliations. They have backgrounds in or are affiliated with such fields as architecture, geography, landscape architecture, natural re sources, psychology, sociology, and urban design. Many more disciplines ob viously contribute to our understanding and design of public places and spaces, so that the contributors to this volume reflect only a sample of the possibilities and present state of knowledge about public settings.

This issue of the 'philosophy of the city' includes articles by scholars on a range of human sciences, from media theory to aesthetics and architectural theory. Philosophy, social ontology, cultural anthropology, aesthetics, digital hermeneutics, media theory, cognitive science: these are just some of the disciplines that contribute to the philosophy of the city. This variety of approaches doesn't necessarily result in a chaotic mix. Many of the included forms of discourse belong to the same episteme, which means there are many connections and overlaps. This is true both in the literatures of reference and in the ways of answering the question of what 'the city' is. Secondly, the texts don't focus on the city itself, but on those who live in, design, imagine and think about it. Thirdly, because these texts create a place where different ideas can live together. This is like a city, where ideas change, are built on and then rebuilt. This is what Wittgenstein wrote about in his Philosophical Investigations.

Ecomedia: Key Issues is a comprehensive textbook introducing the burgeoning field of ecomedia studies to provide an overview of the interface between environmental issues and the media globally. Linking the world of media production, distribution, and consumption to environmental understandings, the book addresses ecological meanings encoded in media texts, the environmental impacts of media production, and the relationships between media and cultural perceptions of the environment. Each chapter introduces a distinct type of media, addressing it in a theoretical overview before engaging with specific case studies. In this way, the book provides an accessible introduction to each form of media as well as a sophisticated analysis of relevant cases. The book includes contributions from a combination of new voices and well-established media scholars from across the globe who examine the basic concepts and key issues of ecomedia studies. The concepts of "frames," "flow", and "convergence" structure a dynamic collection divided into three parts. The first part addresses traditional visual texts, such as comics, photography, and film. The second part of the book addresses traditional broadcast media, such as radio, and television, and the third part looks at new media, such as advertising, video games, the internet, and digital renderings of scientific data. In its breadth and scope, Ecomedia: Key Issues presents a unique survey of rich scholarship at the confluence of Media Studies and Environmental Studies. The book is written in an engaging and accessible style, with each chapter including case studies, discussion questions and suggestions for further reading.

Urban-oriented sensory analysis has a long tradition within the social sciences. However, in communication and cultural studies research, the sensorial orientation is still incipient. This publication is part of an ongoing call by Passeio, the platform for the study of art and urban culture of the Communication and Society Research Centre, for an organicist vision of the city, underlining the need to re-signify the role of the senses in the experience of everyday contemporary urban life. This book includes theoretical and/or empirical contributions from researchers in sociology, communication and cultural studies, who explore three fundamental questions: (a) the effects of the tourist era under the COVID-19 pandemic, (b) the role of music in the production of places and socialities; and (c) the importance of ambiances in the constitution of a carnal relationship with the city.