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Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Arnold Berleant
Arnold Berleant*
Affiliation:
Long Island University
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Extract

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For most people the city, particularly the industrial city, is the antithesis of the aesthetic. While there may be sections that have their charm, trucks and automobiles have conquered the urban streets and pedestrians scurry before them like vanquished before a victor. Gardens and parks are occasional oases amidst the stone desert of concrete and asphalt, but the dominating features of urban experience remain mechanical and electronic noise, trash, monolithic skyscrapers, and moving vehicles. The personal and intimate are swallowed up in mass structure and mass culture. And the human place—precarious and threatened.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 34 , Issue 136 , December 1986 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 Lewis Mumford, The City in History, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961, pp. 124, 191-193; Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1974, ch. 11, esp. p. 152.

2 Cf. R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World, New York, Knopf, 1977.

3 Cf. my essay, "Aesthetic Participation and the Urban Environment", in Urban Resources, I, 4 (Summer 1984), 37-42.

4 J.B. Jackson gives a most instructive account of the use of the theater and drama metaphors for describing landscapes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Cf. "Landscape as Theater", Landscape 23, no. 1 (1979), 3-7.

5 An earlier essay develops some different aspects of the urban aesthetic. See A. Berleant, "Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology", Diogenes, 103 (Fall 1978), 1-28.