Overview

Shortlisted for the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award 2023 Cities 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 particular urban places. The book identifies three versions of the new urban aesthetic: glamorous, flowing, and dramatic. It shows how each of these organize sensory experiences through particular distributions of temporality and spatiality. As well as exploring the importance of sensory constellations in our digitally mediated cities, the book also offers ways to investigate their fragility and potential for subversion. The New Urban Aesthetic is essential reading for researchers and students in urban studies, architecture, digital studies, sociology, and human geography.

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9781350283510

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At 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 *

Author Information

Mónica Montserrat Degen is Professor in Urban Cultural Sociology at Brunel University London, UK. Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford, UK.

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