Bodies In The Streets The Somaesthetics Of City Life

Thirteen original essays explore the qualities and challenges of urban life (in Europe, Asia, and the Americas) from a variety of disciplinary perspectives that illustrate the aesthetic, cultural, and political roles of bodies in the city streets.

Written by an impressive group of international scholars, this collection's ten essays explore key issues and forms of design, from ancient life ideals to the new media, displaying how creative design always revolves around the soma, the living, sentient body.

This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches - somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny - may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment. It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours - evocative objects designed at once to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, and imaginative pages not only enables a window into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture. In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body.

This book is about skateboard video and experimental ways of thinking about cities. It makes a provocative argument to consider skate video as an archive of the city from below. Here ‘below’ has a dual meaning. First, below refers to an unofficial archive, a subaltern history of urban space. Second, below refers to the angle from which skateboarders and filmers gaze upon, capture, and consume the city—from the ground up. Since taking to the streets in the early 1980s, skateboarding has been captured on film, video tape and digital memory cards, edited into consumable forms and circulated around the world. Videos are objects amenable to ethnographic analysis while also archiving exercises in urban ethnography by their creators. I advocate for taking skate video seriously as a (fragile) archive of the urban backstage, collective memory across time and space, creative urban practice, urban encounters (people-to-people and people-to-object/s), and the globalization of a subculture at once delinquent and magnificent.

The contributors to Somaesthetics and Sport explore our embodied experiences of watching and playing sport, including sport’s beauty; the place of exercise in our sense of living a good life; and how we cope with pain and suffering.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of forces shaping urban renewal and the sustainable and inclusive transformation of contemporary cities. It discusses temporariness and uncertainty of citizenship, participation, and inclusion, as well as the energy and digital transformation, merging different perspectives, such as the social, philosophical, economic, and architectural ones. Based on revised and extended contributions to the International Congress “TEMPORARY: Citizenship, Architecture and City", held virtually on November 20-21, 2022, from the University of Bologna, this book offers extensive information and a thought-provoking reading to researchers in architecture, anthropology, social and environmental policy, as well as to professionals and policy makers involved in planning the city of the future.

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. DOI: 10.13134/978-80-555-2778-9

In African Somaesthetics: Cultures, Feminisms, Politics, Catherine F. Botha brings together original research on the body in African cultures, interrogating the possible contribution of a somaesthetic approach in the context of colonization, decolonization, and globalization in Africa.