The New Urban Aesthetic - Digital Experiences of Urban Change

The New Urban Aesthetic explores how cities worldwide are being transformed and reconfigured by the twin forces of digital technologies and 'urban branding' in the name of global capitalism. Both of these shifts entrain new sensory bodily experiences, and this digitally-mediated reconfiguration of what cities feel like is what this book terms the new urban aesthetic.

Focussing on major case-studies of urban change from London to Doha, the book explores how different kinds of digital mediation play a central role in urban transformation, from smart city phone apps, to social media interactions, to computer-generated visualisations. The book reveals how different versions of the new urban aesthetic organize different sensory experiences of temporality and spatiality - leading to a new understanding of the way we experience cities today.

The New Urban Aesthetic is essential reading for researchers and students in urban studies, architecture, digital studies, sociology, and human geography.

List of contents

Table 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

About the author

Mónica Montserrat Degen is Professor in Urban Cultural Sociology at Brunel University London, UK. She is the author of Sensing Cities (Routledge 2008), The Meta-city: Barcelona – Transformation of a Metropolis (with M. Garcia, Editorial Anthropos, Barcelona 2008) and Culture and Agency (with M. Miles, University of Plymouth Press 2010). She has published widely on urban experience, spatial politics, urban design and urban transformations in cities across the globe.Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences. She is the author of Feminism and Geography (Polity, 1993), Doing Family Photography (Ashgate, 2010) and Visual Methodologies (Sage, fifth edition 2022), as well as many papers on images, visualising technologies and ways of seeing in urban, domestic and archival spaces.

Summary

Shortlisted for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award 2023

The New Urban Aesthetic explores how cities worldwide are being transformed and reconfigured by the twin forces of digital technologies and ‘urban branding’ in the name of global capitalism. Both of these shifts entrain new sensory bodily experiences, and this digitally-mediated reconfiguration of what cities feel like is what this book terms the new urban aesthetic.

Focussing on major case-studies of urban change from London to Doha, the book explores how different kinds of digital mediation play a central role in urban transformation, from smart city phone apps, to social media interactions, to computer-generated visualisations. The book reveals how different versions of the new urban aesthetic organize different sensory experiences of temporality and spatiality – leading to a new understanding of the way we experience cities today.

The New Urban Aesthetic is essential reading for researchers and students in urban studies, architecture, digital studies, sociology, and human geography.

Foreword

Examines how digital technology is changing the way we create and experience life in the city.

Additional text

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.

Product details

• Authors: Monica Degen, Monica Montserrat Degen, Mónica Montserrat Degen, Gillian Rose
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 27.01.2022
• EAN: 9781350070837
• ISBN: 978-1-350-07083-7
• No. of pages: 192
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Art history; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; ARCHITECTURE / Urban & Land Use Planning, City & town planning - architectural aspects, City and town planning: architectural aspects