Aesthetics beyond the Arts by Arnold Berleant

Author:Arnold Berleant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

Urban Experience from the Outside

Two aspects to grasping the city as experienced from outside can be represented by the two theatrical masques of comedy and tragedy. For the city is a stage on which both comedy and tragedy are not acted out but lived out. On the one hand, the city as encountered by a visitor may be a place of fascination and excitement, stimulating in the unexpected variety of its buildings, districts, social scenes, and cultural places and events. This masque of the city will reflect the distinctive geography of its site, which determines in large part the patterns of movement that take place. When cities are located in hilly regions, such as San Francisco, within sight of mountains, like Seattle and Geneva, on a harbor along the coast, like Helsinki and Toronto, or combining all these features, such as Rio de Janeiro, its geographical conditions exercise a powerful presence and impart a distinctive quality to the experience that may be most striking to the visitor from away.

Other features may characterize an urban environment: the monumental architecture of government and institutional buildings, the cultural ethos conveyed by the city’s history as a key location in the region, or the vast quantity of art, artifacts, and literature collected in its museums and libraries. The complex concentration and diversity of its inhabitants also encourages the distinctive social life that emerges in an urban setting: the contributions of its various cultural communities through concerts, exhibitions, festivals, sporting events, and civic ceremonies. These offer rich opportunities for entertainment and leisure time activities, such as the enjoyment of its parks and gardens, panoramic views from bridges and towers, the curiosities that unfold while strolling along a street of shops, a historic district, or a characteristic neighborhood; its clubs and theaters; details such as personal embellishments to an apartment entrance or a private home and garden; and even passing delight in the reflection of lights on the watery surface of a harbor. Cities offer many distinctive occasions for enrichment and pleasure, in addition to economic and professional opportunities. They are also places of hope, opportunity, and romance. This is the optimistic side of the city, a source of its powerful magnetism.

Yet just as the borderline between excitement and fear may be hard to discern, danger lurks around the corner. Threats of violence to one’s body from moving vehicles and muggings seem omnipresent yet are unexpected when they appear. There are also the more subtle threats to one’s personhood from the uninterested, sometimes even hostile crowds of jostling pedestrians that submerge one into anonymity, and from the breach of personal space in the petty thievery and household burglaries that are common occurrences. Intrusions come from the oppressive scale of skyscrapers, while unwalkable distances belittle and overpower the body at the same time as invisible clouds of vehicular exhaust and the incessant roar of traffic envelop it in a sensory miasma. To these must be added the unsettling confusion of a strange neighborhood to the visitor who may be unfamiliar with its streets and unskilled in its manners and customs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.