Aesthetics of City

B a c k g r o u n d. The aim of the paper is to compare the vernacular gardening within urban landscapes in Ukraine and Slovakia through its ability to enhance resident engagement and reduce levels of indifference and alienation. M e t h o d s. I apply Lehtinen's idea of urban aesthetics as a compromise, highlighting the significance of engaging with city imperfections to achieve urban harmony, as well as Jackson and von Bonsdorff offer contrasting perspectives on the landscape concept and urban environment, respectively. Cureton introduces the concept of "vernacular landscape," while Macauley emphasizes the embodied experience of walking in the city. Fenner's insights on gardens enrich the discussion by highlighting their historical resonance and aesthetic allure. Additionally, the text explores the interdisciplinary approach to analyzing vernacular gardens, drawing on concepts from Foucault and Heidegger to provide a comprehensive understanding of their sociocultural and aesthetic significance within urban landscapes. R e s u l t s. Vernacular gardens in Kyiv's Rusanivka microdistrict play significant role in intertwining private and public spaces through the lens of care. Amidst the backdrop of war in Ukraine, these gardens symbolize resilience and resistance. Contrasting vernacular gardening practices in Kyiv and Prešov , it highlights their distinct characteristics reflective of their urban landscapes, with Kyiv gardens representing individual initiatives against Soviet traditions and Prešov gardens seamlessly integrating into the urban fabric with a focus on post-Socialist architecture and individual creativity. C o n c l u s i o n s. The study of vernacular elements of the urban landscape, in particular-the vernacular garden and the practice of vernacular gardening, implemented through a combination of different approaches and disciplines: urban, negative and phenomenological aesthetics, cultural anthropology and cultural studies around the landscape, vernacular landscape and cityscape, as well as practical interview methods and walking the combination of different approaches made it possible to define a vernacular garden precisely as a place created by a creative subject within the urban landscape. It acquires the status of a heterotopia and a place that allows you to get involved in the urban environment, identify with it and feel its atmosphere.

ITALIAN ABSTRACT: L’estetica urbana è al centro del dibattito internazionale già da alcuni decenni, tuttavia in Italia manca ancora uno studio su questo argomento, infatti i pochi saggi su temi analoghi non adottano una prospettiva filosofica. Il volume mira a colmare questa lacuna affrontando l’estetica urbana attraverso due paradigmi interpretativi, che talvolta nel libro vengono intrecciati: i concetti di atmosfera e di artificazione.
La nozione di “atmosfera” nasce in seno alla nuova fenomenologia tedesca di Hermann Schmitz ed è declinata verso l’estetica dal filosofo Gernot Böhme che la considera un paradigma privilegiato per indagare gli spazi emozionali, intesi come frutto di relazioni affettive tra il soggetto percipiente e l’oggetto percepito. Pertanto l’estetica delle atmosfere si rivela uno strumento teorico utile per la progettazione architettonica e urbana. Le atmosfere degli ambienti privati e pubblici saranno analizzate attraverso casi di studio focalizzati sullo spazio domestico, sullo spazio dei libri (biblioteche e librerie) e sugli ambienti sacri. Tali analisi spesso si muoveranno tra spazi reali e immaginari, poiché secondo Boehme l’estetica delle atmosfere ha una matrice retorica e trova un caso esemplare nelle descrizioni letterarie.
Nell’estetica urbana il concetto di atmosfera si relaziona produttivamente con quello di artificazione che, in senso lato, indica “la trasformazione di qualcosa che non è arte in arte”. Intrecciando diversi concetti di artificazione (quello delle sociologhe francesi Natalie Heinich e Roberta Shapiro; quello elaborato dai teorici dell’Everyday Aesthetics Thomas Leddy, Yuriko Saito, Ossi Naukkarinen e quello dell’etologa Ellen Dissanayke), l’arificazione sarà qui intesa come un processo e un “fare arte” in senso collettivo. Questo “fare arte insieme” ha spesso come risultato quello di modificare non solo gli ambienti che vengono “artificati”, ma anche i soggetti coinvolti nel processo trasformativo, pertanto l’artificazione acquista il valore di strumento di trasformazione sociale e urbana. Tale fenomeno sarà analizzato attraverso alcuni esempi incentrati sui processi artistici collettivi messi in pratica nelle case private durante il lockdown, nelle carceri e nelle periferie urbane degradate che vengono sempre più spesso decorati con murales. Tuttavia, nei vari esempi considerati, la trasformazione non si traduce in un processo finalizzato alla produzione di opere d’arte o in un abbellimento puramente esteriore, ma in un “fare arte” collettivo che determina cambiamenti sociali.
Il volume pur raccogliendo alcuni saggi già pubblicati (per lo più in inglese) in altre sedi editoriali, li rielabora alla luce del filo conduttore volto a tenere insieme due paradigmi teorici che non erano mai stati accostati e che invece possono offrire una chiave di lettura inusitata e originale per l’estetica urbana.
Pur mantenendo il rigore scientifico e argomentativo dei testi originari, il volume mira a presentare i concetti di atmosfera e artificazione in forma semplice e chiara anche grazie al ricorso ai casi di studio, in modo da rendere il volume accessibile non solo alla comunità scientifica, ma anche agli studenti universitari e ai lettori non specialisti.

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Urban aesthetics has been at the center of the international debate for several decades, yet in Italy, there is still a lack of study on this subject. The few essays on similar topics do not adopt a philosophical perspective. This volume aims to fill this gap by addressing urban aesthetics through two interpretive paradigms, which are sometimes intertwined in the book: the concepts of atmosphere and artification.
The notion of "atmosphere" emerges within the new German phenomenology of Hermann Schmitz and is applied to aesthetics by the philosopher Gernot Böhme, who considers it a privileged paradigm for investigating emotional spaces, understood as the result of affective relationships between the perceiving subject and the perceived object. Therefore, the aesthetics of atmospheres proves to be a useful theoretical tool for architectural and urban design. The atmospheres of private and public environments will be analyzed through case studies focused on domestic space, spaces of books (libraries and bookstores), and sacred ambiance. These analyses often move between real and imaginary spaces because, according to Böhme, the aesthetics of atmospheres has a rhetorical matrix and finds an exemplary case in literary descriptions.
In urban aesthetics, the concept of atmosphere is productively related to that of artification, which, in a broad sense, indicates "the transformation of something that is not art into art." By interweaving different concepts of artification (those of the French sociologists Natalie Heinich and Roberta Shapiro, those developed by the theorists of Everyday Aesthetics Thomas Leddy, Yuriko Saito, Ossi Naukkarinen, and that of the ethologist Ellen Dissanayke), artification is understood here as a collective process and "making art" in a collective sense. This "making art together" often results in not only modifying the environments that are "artified" but also the individuals involved in the transformative process. Therefore, artification takes on the value of a tool for social and urban transformation. This phenomenon will be analyzed through examples focusing on collective artistic processes carried out in private homes during the lockdown, in prisons, and in deteriorated urban peripheries that are increasingly decorated with murals. However, in the various examples considered, transformation does not translate into a process aimed at producing works of art or purely external embellishment but rather into a collective "making art" that determines social changes.
While the volume collects some essays already published (mostly in English), it reworks them in light of the guiding thread aimed at bringing together two theoretical paradigms that had never been juxtaposed before and that can instead offer an unusual and original interpretation for urban aesthetics.
While maintaining the scientific and argumentative rigor of the original texts, the volume aims to present the concepts of atmosphere and artification in a simple and clear form, also thanks to the use of case studies, in order to make the volume accessible not only to the scientific community but also to university students and non-specialist readers.

The paper focuses on an analysis of the aesthetic appeal of suffering in the visual arts and literature with special regard to the problem of self-harm and its visual representation. The text is based on the assumption that suffering is part of our everyday life. However, the way it is expressed may lead to something that is not everyday – it is addressed to others – to try to change their perceptions and actions. On the contrary, self-torture or self-sacrifice is, in principle, considered to be uncommon, and their temporal domain is rather non-everydayness. This non-everydayness has attracted some attention from the days of Attis, through Christ, to the ear of van Gogh. Although self-harm and self-torture may and often have in principle a hidden and intimate character, they are nevertheless addressed to a certain audience that is supposed to see them and whom they affect. The paper considers selected reasons for the aesthetic appeal of (self-) suffering and focuses on the visual rh...

Urban regeneration has become a frequently and widely used urban transformation strategy in many cities since the beginning of the 1990s. A number of urban regeneration projects have been implemented in declining city centres, old-industrial and harbour sites, and the working-class residential areas and undermined historical heritage sites of cities. The rise and mushrooming of such projects all over the world however brings about the questions related to their success level. This thesis aims to assess the success level of urban regeneration projects according to the measurable (qualitative and quantitative) features of integrated planning approaches. It seeks to develop a model to examine the success level of urban regeneration projects in physical, environmental, economic and social terms. Using case study as a research method, the research focuses on the on-going ‘Rehabilitation of the Fener and Balat Districts Programme’ in the Istanbul Historical Peninsula, and tries to answer ...

The city does not exist. The city is a fiction, an abstraction rooted in history and mythology. For how can we identify it? However it is identified or defined, the city is an environment of experience before it is anything else. Urban experience, in fact, is perhaps one of the most important and powerful of the complex dimensions that constitute the city, whatever it may be. I call this talk "Distant Cities" because I want to inquire into urban experience from a different, perhaps unfamiliar direction, urban experience as encountered from the outside, from a distance, as it were. How is the city seen and understood not by its inhabitants but by an outsider who may occasionally enter into the urban sphere for visits of limited duration? The question of urban experience is as complex, intricate, and elusive as its material condition, the city. Here we encounter massiveness – the physical mass of the urban conglomerate of skyscrapers, institutional edifices, commercial monol...

Turkey has a rich cultural heritage and traditional houses. However, this heritage is under the danger of extinction due to several reasons. On of the most important reason is not being able to make simple repair and maintenance of these buildings. Actually, to leave this heritage to future generations the most effective and low cost method for conserving traditional buildings is the simple repair and maintenance. In Turkey, the responsibility and authority of simple repair and maintenance is delegated to local administrations by the law of Conservation of Cultural and Natural Heritage no 2863 amended by law no 5226. According to this law Conservation Implementation Control and Education Bureaus (KUDEB) is the responsible organ in municipalities for simple repair and maintenance. In this thesis, in the light of current regulations KUDEB’s tasks in simple repair and maintenance together with functioning points. Later, a model was proposed regarding the functioning and financing of si...

Il concetto di quotidianità assume oggi rilevanza crescente nel dibattito scientifico, sia nel contesto dell'estetica filosofica che dell'estetica cosiddetta applicata. Questo volume mira a far luce su alcune delle questioni chiave che emergono nelle discussioni relative all'estetica e alla filosofia della vita quotidiana, esaminando il retroterra metodologico di questo settore di ricerca e le sue intersezioni con ambiti affini, e fornendo al contempo esempi della sua possibile applicazione a specifici casi-studio. La raccolta include venti saggi di autori internazionali organizzati intorno a quattro aree tematiche nel campo dell'estetica del quotidiano: (1) Ambiente, (2) il corpo, (3) arte e pratiche culturali, e (4) metodologia. Tra le tematiche in oggetto vi è la somaestetica, la nozione di partecipazione estetica, le arti performative, l'estetica della moda e degli ornamenti, l'architettura, l'estetica dell'ambiente e della città.

The paper focuses on an analysis of the aesthetic appeal of suffering in the visual arts and literature with special regard to the problem of self-harm and its visual representation. The text is based on the assumption that suffering is part of our everyday life. However, the way it is expressed may lead to something that is not everyday – it is addressed to others – to try to change their perceptions and actions. On the contrary, self-torture or self-sacrifice is, in principle, considered to be uncommon, and their temporal domain is rather non-everydayness. This non-everydayness has attracted some attention from the days of Attis, through Christ, to the ear of van Gogh. Although self-harm and self-torture may and often have in principle a hidden and intimate character, they are nevertheless addressed to a certain audience that is supposed to see them and whom they affect. The paper considers selected reasons for the aesthetic appeal of (self-) suffering and focuses on the visual rh...

The notion of everydayness is currently gaining momentum in scientific discourses, in both philosophical and applied aesthetics. This volume aims to shed light on some of the key issues that are involved in discussions about the aesthetics and the philosophy of everyday life, taking into account the field’s methodological background and intersections with cognate research areas, and providing examples of its contemporary application to specific case studies. The collection brings together twenty essays organised around four main thematic areas in the field of everyday aesthetics: (1) Environment, (2) The Body, (3) Art and Cultural Practices, and (4) Methodology. The covered topics include, but are not limited to, somaesthetics, aesthetic engagement, the performing arts, aesthetics of fashion and adornments, architecture, environmental and urban aesthetics.

Yirminci yüzyılın sonlarına doğru küreselleşmenin de etkisiyle şehirler büyük bir değişim içerisine girmiştir. Nüfus artışı sonucunda çarpık yapılaşma estetik anlayışın kaybolmasına ve şehirlerin beton yığını haline dönüşmelerine yol açmıştır. Şehir estetiği toplumun nefes almasını sağlayan, bölge değerlerine sahip çıkan ve şehrin karmaşık yapısını düzenli hale getiren günümüzün sosyal bir ihtiyacı olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Türkiye’deki şehir estetiği anlayışında belirli bir standardın, sınırlamanın ve denetimin olmadığı veya eksik olduğu görülmektedir. Diğer ülkelerdeki yapılaşmalar da incelendiğinde şehir estetiğinin belirli bir plan dâhilinde gelişen bir anlayış olduğu ortadadır. Bu çalışma sonucunda elde edilecek verilerle Türkiye için şehir estetiği önerilerinin geliştirilmesi amaçlanmıştır. Doğru planlama ve uygulamalarla Türkiye’de şehir estetiği olgusunun geliştirilebileceği ve belirli standartlarla denetimi sağlanabileceği anlaşılmaktadır.

In present-day collaborative urban planning processes the status of experiential and locally based qualitative arguments is somewhat controversial and problematic: from the viewpoint of residents and other local stakeholders preserving the concrete values and meanings of nearby environment is crucial, whereas the planning officials and commercial actors often regard such local interests as a mere hindrance to common-good land use projects and to achieving important strategical goals and large-scale benefits. In the context of urban infill development, the situation is particularly challenging, as the fierce opposition and numerous appeals by locals are seriously hindering and even paralyzing various infill projects.

In this paper I ask whether the described tangled confrontations could be managed via an alternative or complementary way to comprehend the complex and conflict sensitive circumstances of planning projects. The proposed approach is based the concept of “trading zone” by Peter Galison. Taking certain potential deficiencies and limitations of Galison’s view into account, I proceed by developing further applications of the concept in the field of urban planning, particularly with regard to a distinct branch of experiential arguments – the questions of environmental and urban aesthetics.

The proposed “aesthetic trading zone” aims at outlining the necessary prerequisites for mutually meaningful collaboration that would enable the handling of controversial yet significant aesthetic issues without the demand for a deep consensus about every particular environmental aesthetic value and meaning. Such idea of “urban aesthetics as a trading zone” refers to the possibility of a thin consensus, which means acknowledging the disagreements and a certain value pluralism, while at the same time paying respect to the viewpoints of the others and, above all, treating them as legitimate trading partners.

The city does not exist.  The city is a fiction, an abstraction rooted in history and mythology.  For how can we identify it?  However it is identified or defined, the city is an environment of experience before it is anything else.  Urban experience, in fact, is perhaps one of the most important and powerful of the complex dimensions that constitute the city, whatever it may be. 

I call this talk "Distant Cities" because I want to inquire into urban experience from a different, perhaps unfamiliar direction, urban experience as encountered from the outside, from a distance, as it were.  How is the city seen and understood not by its inhabitants but by an outsider who may occasionally enter into the urban sphere for visits of limited duration?

The question of urban experience is as complex, intricate, and elusive as its material condition, the city.  Here we encounter massiveness – the physical mass of the urban conglomerate of skyscrapers, institutional edifices, commercial monoliths; urban regions, districts, and neighborhoods.  We not only encounter massiveness; we face spatial extent, as the urban consumption of the landscape spreads across whole geographical regions, such as the megalopolis of the eastern seaboard of the United States stretching from Boston to Washington or the amoeba-like spread of construction across huge distances and often overlapping state lines, as in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis urban conglomerates.

Moreover, we encounter social mass, as well, in teeming populations with their associations and organizations both formal and informal, official and subversive.  And, related to this, mass culture is replete with the mass marketing and consumption of goods, entertainment, and anything that can be controlled and on which a value can be placed.  Consumption also overwhelms the ambient environmental resources that, until recently, people took for granted, such as air, water, quiet (the absence of intrusive sound), and even in cities of a human scale, visual space and easy distance.  This is more than mass culture; it is more a mass world.  How can we understand this world?

From this uncommon external perspective on urban experience, I want to consider what it can tell us about the possibilities of an aesthetic of urbanism.  In particular, I want to recover the humane and civilizing possibilities of the city.  This leads me finally to an unabashed sketch of how a responsible environment might be now understood.