The City And The Senses

How do we experience a city in terms of the senses? What are the inter-relations between human experience and behaviour in urban space? This volume examines these questions in the context of European urban culture between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the institutions and ideologies relating to the range of sensual experience and its interpretation. Spanning pre-industrial and modern cities in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, it enables the reader to establish major contrasts and continuities in what is still an evolving urban experience. Divided into sections corresponding to the five senses: noise, vision, taste, touch and smell, each sections allows for comparisons which act as reminders that the experience of the city was a multi-sensual one, and that these experiences were as much intellectual as physical in their nature.

The papers collected in this volume discuss the sensory dimension of cityscapes, with focus on touch and smell. Both have been traditionally considered "lower senses" and thus unworthy of being cultivated - objects of social prohibitions and targets of suppressing strategies in modern architecture and city planning. The book brings together approaches from anthropology, aesthetics, the theory of architecture, art and design research, psychophysiology, ethology, analytic chemistry, etc. (Series: Austria: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Interdisziplinar - Vol. 4)

The essays in this volume take an interdisciplinary and wide ranging look at urban history through the five senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. By spanning pre-industrial and modern cities it enables the reader to establish major contrasts and continuities in what is still an evolving urban experience.

Offers an innovative, interdisciplinary approach which opens up new ways of understanding urban culture and space. The author approaches the city as essentially a 'material' place where people live, work, and participate in social practices within historical limits set not by sensory experience or cultural meanings but material social conditions.

How do we experience a city in terms of the senses? What are the inter-relations between human experience and behaviour in urban space? This volume examines these questions in the context of European urban culture between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the institutions and ideologies relating to the range of sensual experience and its interpretation. Spanning pre-industrial and modern cities in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, it enables the reader to establish major contrasts and continuities in what is still an evolving urban experience. Divided into sections corresponding to the five senses: noise, vision, taste, touch and smell, each sections allows for comparisons which act as reminders that the experience of the city was a multi-sensual one, and that these experiences were as much intellectual as physical in their nature.

Urban-oriented sensory analysis has a long tradition within the social sciences. However, in communication and cultural studies research, the sensorial orientation is still incipient. This publication is part of an ongoing call by Passeio, the platform for the study of art and urban culture of the Communication and Society Research Centre, for an organicist vision of the city, underlining the need to re-signify the role of the senses in the experience of everyday contemporary urban life. This book includes theoretical and/or empirical contributions from researchers in sociology, communication and cultural studies, who explore three fundamental questions: (a) the effects of the tourist era under the COVID-19 pandemic, (b) the role of music in the production of places and socialities; and (c) the importance of ambiances in the constitution of a carnal relationship with the city.

From its first designation as temporary capital in 1138, the city of Hangzhou (then called Lin’an) was deemed representative of the diminished empire of the Song (960–1279), in all its contradictory aspects. The exquisite beauty of the city confirmed its destiny to become an imperial residence, but it also portended its fatal corruption. The wealth and ease of Hangzhou epitomized the vigor of the southern empire as well as its oblivious decadence. The city was paramount and feeble, aweinspiring and threatened, the most admired city in the civilized world and a disgrace to the dynastic founders. Rather than perpetuating the debate about the merit of these polemical judgments, the contributors of Senses of the City treat them as expressions of their historical moment, revealing of ideological conviction or aesthetic preference, rather than of historical truth. By reading the sources as expressions of individual experience and political conviction, the contributors defy the impassioned rhetoric of past generations in order to recover the solid ground of historical evidence. Leading scholars of the field, including Beverly Bossler, Stephen West, and Martin Powers have produced essays that relate changes in literary convention to shifts in territorial boundaries, and analyze writing, painting, dance, and music as means by which individual literati placed themselves in time and space. The contributors reestablish the historical connections between writing and meaningful action, between text and world, between the sources and their own words, and between the page and the senses. Their efforts to retrieve the sounds, sights, and smells of Hangzhou from Southern Song texts replicate, in reverse direction, the attempts of twelfth and thirteenthcentury authors to devise effective tropes and suitable genres that would preserve their living impressions of the city in writing.

Offers an innovative, interdisciplinary approach which opens up new ways of understanding urban culture and space. The author approaches the city as essentially a 'material' place where people live, work, and participate in social practices within historical limits set not by sensory experience or cultural meanings but material social conditions.