Description
Book SynopsisShortlisted for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award 2023Cities are key sites for the reproduction of global capitalism, and urban branding is central to this transformative dynamic. In the 21st century, cities are also being profoundly reconfigured by the deployment of many kinds of digital technologies. Both of these shifts entrain sensory bodily experiences. This digitally mediated reconfiguration of what cities feel like is what this book terms
the new urban aesthetic.The book focuses on three examples of urban change in which digital technologies of different kinds were central: a large scale urban redevelopment in Doha, the retrofitting of Milton Keynes to become a smart city, and the cultural regeneration of Smithfield Market into the Culture Mile in London. Each case study focusses on a different kind of digital mediation, including the computer-generated images created to sell new urban developments, smart city phone apps, and Instagram posts about part
Trade ReviewAt last, a much-needed contribution to the smart cities genre that finally captures the sensorial essence of our everyday encounters with digital technologies and data in cities, which are all about how our embodied capacities are aligned and redistributed to feel, anticipate, desire, labour, and move. * Agnieszka Leszczynski, Associate Professor, Western University, USA *
This book provides an essential and critical analysis of people’s encounters with cities under the influence of branding strategies and computer-generated imagery. Degen and Rose animate the theme of urban aesthetics for any citizen attentive to the stories we tell about our cities. * Richard Coyne, Professor of Architectural Computing, the University of Edinburgh, UK *
In
The New Urban Aesthetic, Degen and Rose explore the emerging interface between digital transformations of urban spaces and multi-sensory geographies. This richly-researched book provides a wealth of insights into how contemporary cities are experienced, navigated and also marketed within an increasingly global digital realm. * Matthew Gandy, Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge, UK and author of Natura urbana: ecological constellations in urban space *
Table of ContentsTable of Contents List of Figures List of Tables Preface 1: Introducing the New Urban Aesthetic 1. Setting the scene 2. The urban: materialities and imaginaries 3. The aesthetic: sensations and staging 4. The digital: devices and data 5. Differentiation and power relations 6. Case studies, methods and evidence 7. Conclusion
2: The New Urban Aesthetic: A Conceptual Framework 1. Introduction 2. Branding cities, shaping experiences 3. Urban experiencing and digital mediations 4. Aesthetics: produced, conceived, perceived, lived 5. The new urban aesthetic, difference and power 6. Conclusion
3: The Conceived Aesthetics of Urban Redevelopment: The Case of Msheireb Downtown, Qatar (co-authored with Clare Melhuish) 1. Introduction 2. The case study: introducing Msheireb Downtown 3. Spatialising urban glamour: ‘something one wants on the cover of a magazine’ 4. The temporalities of urban glamour: ‘the key to the image is that you are telling a story’ 5. The conceived new urban aesthetic: when glamour goes wrong 6. Conclusion: texturising glamour
4: The Perceived Aesthetics Of Digital Urbanism: Feeling Digital Embodiment In Smart Milton Keynes 1. Introduction 2. The case study: Milton Keynes, smart city 3. Conceiving smart cities: storytelling about smart MK 4. Perceiving the new urban aesthetic in a smart city: the flow of bodies and/as data 5. Appified sensations in smart MK 6. Perceiving the new urban aesthetic of flow, again 7. Conclusion: texturising flow
5: The Lived Aesthetic of Urban Social Media: Anticipating the Culture Mile’s Future 1. Introduction 2. The case study: The Culture Mile, Smithfield Market and anticipatory urbanism 3. Instagram as an expressive infrastructure for branding 4. Dramatising the Culture Mile: the Culture Mile branding strategy on Instagram 5. The lived experiencing of Smithfield with Instagram 6. Conclusion: texturizing drama
6: The New Urban Aesthetic and its Power 1. Introduction 2. Power and the new urban aesthetic: differentiating and distributing 3. Storytelling and the new urban aesthetic 4. Animating the new urban aesthetic 5. Seamfulness: seeing aesthetic labour 6. Conclusion
7: Conclusion: The Differentiation and Potentialities of the New Urban Aesthetic 1. Introduction 2. The new urban aesthetic: reprise 3. The limits of the new urban aesthetic 4. Other new aesthetics of cities 5. Afterword
References Index
