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Towards an Urban AestheticsThe Aesthetics of Human EnvironmentsEdited by Arnold Berleant and Alien Carlson

Broadview Press, 2007

Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual ArtsBy Giuliana Bruno

MIT Press, 2007

Reviewed by Aleksandra Kaminska

Urban aesthetics challenges us to take into accountperception, movement, and affect while also includingfamiliar problems of use and form. The Aesthetics ofHuman Environments, a collection of essays edited byArnold Berleant and Alien Carlson, presents the rangeand inclusiveness of urban aesthetics and offers excitingpossibilities for the field. But it is through contributionslike the book Public Intimac)' by Giuliana Bruno that westart to see the real potential of this ecological approach;by suggesting that we turn inwards to understand ourenvironments, Bruno offers an insightful way of thinkingthrough the relationship between built form and experi­ence. Using this aesthetic frame raises new kinds ofquestions through which to address urban design andassess conviviality and the role of public space, andorganizes the experience of the city as emerging from acombination of public and private engagements.

Human Environments is a follow-up to the editors'The Aesthetics of the Natural Environments1 and is dividedinto three broad themes: Architecture and the City;Special Places and the Home; and Landscapes, Gardensand the Countryside. The editors define environmentalaesthetics as a discipline that brings together variousmethodologies for understanding the aesthetics of space,including quantitative approaches that try to literallymeasure visual beauty, qualitative analyses that aspire todetermine the value of visual and non-visual aestheticcharacteristics, and phenomenological tools for interpreting

the active nature ofperception. In this encompassing view,environmental aesthetics "concerns the appreciativeengagement of humans as parts of total environmentcomplexes, where intrinsic experiences ofsensory qualitiesand immediate meanings predominate."Z To consider acity aesthetically is to not only judge its buildings andarchitecture, litter and noise, but also to include historicaland social elements as part of its total sensory package.The editors are calling for aesthetics to be integral in theplanning processes of urban spaces, proposing, perhapstoo eagerly, that to do so "is to put the city in the serviceof the values and goals that we associate with the fullmeaning of civilization."3 While some contributionssuggest that developing the aesthetic qualities of a cityresults in its appreciation, others argue that "appreciation"is itself a problematic notion because it is vague anddifficult to define and justifY. The question of what itmeans to appreciate a city is indeed one of the challengesof urban aesthetics.

The idea of appreciation is especially relevant in thedebate on treating the city as a work of art. In "OnAesthetically Appreciating Human Environments,"Carlson contrasts two ways of defining urban aesthetics.The first is what he calls the"designer landscape approach,"which is primarily concerned with environments that havebeen purposefully designed for aesthetic contemplation.We often treat architecture in this way, but, Carlsonargues, we should not confine ourselves to the aesthetics

Aleksandra Kaminska

(and rhetoric) of art to make sense of our architectureand our spaces; rather we should use the ecologicalframework of environmental aesthetics. He offers themethod of"functional fit" as an alternative, which treatsthe city as a system that must be assessed on the efficiencyof its different components to work together, and wherethe appreciation of human environments is based on"the functions they perform."4 New elements mustgrow organically from the existing system, ultimatelyachieving an "ambience of everything being and lookingright or appropriate, an ambience of it looking as itshould."5 Unfortunately, to have things look "as theyshould" is not the most satisfactory guideline for shaping acity. This kind of ambiguity plagues Human Environments.

In her essay "Urban Richness and the Art ofBuilding" Pauline von Bonsdorff suggests, like Carlson,that to understand architecture we must look beyond thesurface of buildings to consider the functions they fulfillboth within a culture and as elements of the environment.She anchors her ideal urban aesthetic on "human, natural,social, cultural, historical, and political"6 diversity;however, she offers that there should also be "an attunementof elements so that they do not conflict aggressively"such that "an aesthetic goal of building might be torespect variety and to create or support the overallcharacter and individuality of the place."7 Since vonBonsdorff also argues that "beauty and harmony areworthwhile goals"8 for urban aesthetics, we might beginto question whether her assumptions about the limits ofdiversity and her definitions of conflict, beauty, andharmony as applied to the city can in fact be taken atface value. Through the work ofJane Jacobs and others,there has developed an agreement that diversity of use ina city is desirable, but there is more hesitation and confusionwhen discussing forms or smfaces. Sometimes architecturalstatements are praised but often they are criticized,resulting in this "attunement of elements" which createsa compromised, comfortable, and measured variety. Acity such as Toronto, which is often accused of "messyurbanism," can be perplexing. It forces its citizens torethink what the "right kind" of diversity is and challengespreconceptions about whether conflict (and even chaos)is necessarily undesirable. The question of an aesthetic ofdiversity is more nuanced than what von Bonsdorffpresents here.

Thomas Leddy inadvertently also tackles the questionof diversity in "Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities:Neat, Messy, Clean, Dirty." Leddy offers some insightfulexplanations and implications of the messy and the clean,tracing their histories and applications from artwork to

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rooms, and suggests that "messiness and clutter are notnecessarily negative aesthetic qualities ... although theyare usually cast in that role.,,9 It seems implausible toexpect that when speaking of our cities we would all agreeon not only what constitutes the messy and the clean, but,more importantly, on which is desirable. Both these contri­butions imply that spaces, and in this case the city, can bemanipulated to achieve beauty and harmony (howeverthese might be defined). They assume that we have controlof the city, and yet the urban space is often preciselyintriguing and exciting because, as a dynamic system, it isusually out of our individual hands.

In "Walking in the City," David Macauley takes alook at the experience of the pedestrian. Much of it willbe well-trodden territory for readers familiar with urbanliterature or the work of psychogeographers, for example,but Macauley nonetheless provides a useful overview ofthe many elements of the urban walk, from the problemof the car and the contested spaces of sidewalks andparking lots, to questions of rhythm and horizon. Again,as with much of Human Environments, the author skirtsaround established theory, and therefore the essay lackscontext and grounding. But here, as throughout thevolume, the insight comes from making connectionsamong the separate contributions. A reference to a 1959Massachusetts Institute of Technology study on theexperience ofwalking is particularly interesting in regardto our attitudes towards aesthetic diversity in the city.This study suggests that on a walk people most rememberthe breaks or gaps in spaces of continuity but also that"walkers are constantly searching for or injecting orderinto their surroundings so as to make sense of theirdisparate impressions and to join their perceptions into acoherent picture,"10 often even finding imaginarysimilarities to create this coherence. There is perhaps ameaningful correlation to be made between our memoryof the ruptures within spaces of coherence and our desirefor homogeneity, uniformity, "cleanliness," and order.When we consider a juxtaposed, disjointed, or "messy"architectural environment, it is almost simplistic to dismissthis aesthetic entirely based on unjustified negativeconnotations of an aesthetic of incoherence. To clarifYthese ideas, it would be useful to elaborate on whatexactly is meant by an imaginary coherence (especiallysince coherence is as problematic a concept as diversity).Many would argue that beauty in fact often emergesfrom "messy" urban collages and may wonder whathappened to postmodern idea(l)s if we still judge citieswith the expectation of uniformity and continuity. And,to perhaps stretch the point slightly, if we consider

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monuments, public squares, or other architecturallandmarks as abnormalities, gaps, and ruptures ofcoherence(and therefore as discontinuities), then how does thedisruptive (aesthetic) nature of these sites play on theirfrequent role as spaces where we experience a sense ofplace, identity, and cOlnmunity? These are the kinds ofquestions that appear between the lines of Human

Environments and that leave the reader wishing theauthors had explored their ideas in more depth and withmore awareness of their place within larger fields andmodes of inquiry.

From contributions examining the built environment,the collection moves to essays concerned with sensoryexperience. In "Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic," Berleantuses the concepts of perceptual awareness and bodilyconsciousness to study the relationship between peopleand place and the ways that sensory perception createsreciprocity between the city and its inhabitants.Ultimately, Berleant argues, "the aesthetics of the city isan aesthetic of engagement,"ll in which the consciousbody is in constant conversation with the environment.Although these are all crucial concerns for developingthe project of urban aesthetics, it is perplexing thatBerleant fails to reference Maurice Merleau-Ponty'sexistential phenomenology, which is centered on theseproblems ofbodily and sensory perception, or to referenceother scholars who have explored some of these issues atlength. These omissions leave the reader wishing for amore careful elaboration of these processes of perception.

Ytj6 Sepanmaa suggests that each city has a sense­identity, or that, put differently, the identity of a city"depends in part on the dominant sense."12 Although wemay associate a city with a sense (the author suggests, forexample, that Venice is a sound city because of thecharacteristic sound of the water in the canals combinedwith the absence of cars), we still experience the city asa multi-sensory environment, something akin to RichardWagner's total work of art, Gesamtkunstwerk, which is"intended for all of the senses simultaneously."13While the comparison is fruitful, Sepanmaa warns thatenvironment is not art and that we should not treatthem in the same way. To experience and perceive acity with all senses could be oj/er stimulating, whichmight teach us something about how to achieve, orhow to conceive of, a balanced urban aesthetic.Sepanmaa also emphasizes the active process of aestheticexperience, describing it as a "doing and action, beingtogether with others" and reminds us, as Berleant did,that it is "the presence of people that brings thesespaces to life."14

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The motorway is an interesting space taken up byboth collections. In "The View £i·om the Road and thePicturesque" in Human Environments, Malcolm Andrewsfinds that these corridors and the cars we use to movethrough them reveal the problematic nature of thelandscape, and suggests that we can mediate landscapesthrough real or invisible frames and pictures. He usesroad signs on France's motorvvays, depicting historiclocations or events, as a case study to discuss the picto­rialization, or the constructed visual composition, oflandscapes. The motorway attempts to neutralize andflatten the "physical roughness" of the natural landscapeit traverses. The speed of the car augments this visualstimulation, transforming the landscape into a spectaclethat is literally framed through the car windows, creatingwhat Edward Dimendberg has called the highway ascinema. 15 Andrews updates Marc Auge's notion ofnon-places, suggesting that the motof\vay has ratherbecome a domesticated space, a familiar hallway alongwhich pictures hang, pictures that function as divisionsbetween the viewer and the (unfamiliar) landscape. ForAndrews then, the motorway is a site of visible juxtaposi­tions between the known and the unknown. LikeDimendberg, Giuliana Bruno might compare thismotorway experience to cinema or to being in a museum.But for Bruno, it is not only the mediation and contrastsof the landscape that are important, but the particularity ofthe drive down the motOlway as an example ofmovement.In Public Intimacy, a collection of the author's previouslypublished essays, Bruno places movement, both physicaland psychic, as a cornerstone ofher project. On the motor­way movement frames experience, so that walking ratherthan driving along a motorway could be disconcerting andconfusing. Although one cause for this disorientationwould be our expectation to be gliding through space atfast speeds, we would also experience tllls disorientationbecause we are used to a different sort of movementbetween exterior and internal space, between the publicand the intimate, a movement which results in a differentaffective experience. And although juxtaposition andmovement both try to explain relationships between dif­ferent states or sites, the first is focused on form and sur­face, while the latter adds human presence into the equa­tion. Indeed, Bruno looks beyond the visible and gives ustools for thinking ofspaces not as external to us, but as tiedto our psyches and to the topographies of our emotionalterrains. Other contributors in Human Environments alsotry to integrate experience as an important element of theaesthetic, but Bruno reveals these relationships betweenself and environment more directly and convincingly.

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Bruno traces this movement from exterior to interiorexperience within the histories of film spectatorship andmuseum-going and argues that this passage "is not onlyenacted on the walls of the museum, and in curatorialpractices that have absorbed a cinematic itinerary, but isstaged, structurally, on the smface of the architecturalpremise itself."16 If the movie house and the museumare architectures of geopsychical movement, then itbecolues possible to consider what inferences could bemade on the architectures of the urban landscape bytreating the city as a museum or cinema. If we remindourselves that the consumer of architectural spaces was aprototype for the film spectator,17 then architecturalexperience regains some of its complexity. Rather thanbeing a seemingly static structure, architecture is a medium,Bruno suggests, that must be experienced in motion,where space "is a practice that engages psychic change inrelation to movement."18 People who live in cities mayknow this instinctively, and may argue that often the bestway to explore a city is on foot, not only for the freedomit provides in terms ofphysical movement, but also for themore "authentic" aesthetic appreciation it enables andthe more direct "interfacing of affect and place"19 itprovides. Movement allows the city dweller to conceiveof urban spaces such as the square or the park as transitory,as moments of stillness or reprieve, as welcome pauses orchallenging disruptions. But if architecture is shapedthrough interactions in time and space and reveals itselfin movement, does the same apply to spaces in general?Perhaps it is not through dwelling in a space that it canbe appreciated fully, but rather in passing through, treatingarchitectural space not as permanent and fixed but asfluid, changing, and responsive. This distinctionbetween architectural and spatial appreciation remindsus of some of the concerns of Human Environments,such as the assertion that the built form is only oneelement of the aesthetic qualities of a city.

Cinema remains foundational to Bruno's work, butthis collection brings together her writings on a varietyof other visual media, fi·om installation art to the spectacleof the anatomy lesson. Architecture, urban design, andinteractive art installations are for Bruno all similar inthat they work with ideas of movement through space,20to the extent that Bruno suggests that artists and architectsspeak the same language since they both conceive ofenvironments through which viewers move both physicallyand imaginatively.21 The movement from exterior tointerior experience in public space is something Brunoterms public intimacy. She deems the spaces of the moviehouse and the museum as public, though in many ways

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these are in fact private and enclosed spaces carefullydesigned to allow for personal experience within aconununity of strangers. Nevertheless, if the representationof spaces through the images hanging or projected in amuseum or cinema stimulates internal journeys, then thespaces thenlselves ought to provoke the same effects andbe intimately tied with personal emotion and psychicexperience. If in fact the urban landscape is "a work ofthe mind" composed "of the memories, the attention, theimagination, and the affects of the inhabitant-passengerswho have traversed it:'22 then do the formal features ofa space take a backseat to the personal and affective wayspeople respond to certain places? Architectural elementsare often manipulated to focus public perceptions or createcertain types of engagements. If the internal journey isthe apex of urban experience, what makes a space public,in the sense that it stimulates a collective desire for externalinteractions and journeys, while also allowing for ourneed or desire for privacy to be overcome by the publicambience of a space? And although stepping outdoors tonavigate the city has become our most pervasive exampleof public intimacy, perhaps we can characterize successfulpublic spaces as sites of release in which we shed thecloak of privacy by an aesthetic provocation into publicity.

Human Environments and Public Intimacy are twobooks that show the range of scholarship concernedwith the city. The development of an aesthetics inHuman Environments hinges on the appreciation offorms, structure, and function. This ecological approachto the city shows promise, but, as presented here, fallsshort. Many of the essays skim the surface of complexissues. The contributors take on topics that are oftenaddressed in research on cities, and yet their backgrounds­half are affiliated with philosophy departments-providethem with a perspective that seems removed, for betteror worse, from the entanglements of the field of urbanstudies. The essays in this volume tend to leave the readercurious rather than committed and ultinutely fail to pro­vide concrete tools for moving forward the study of cityspace and urban experience; instead, these pieces skirtaround established or developing theoretical approachesand never truly engage with or contextualize the meritsofparticular perspectives within current debates. There isno clear sense of purpose in these captured moments,which are often read as loose observations or impressionsrather than analytic and grounded explorations. HumanEnvironments doesn't ever quite make it clear where such anappreciation of the city, through its smells or architecturalforms, its messiness or elements of beauty, takes us, orindeed, what makes its approach unique. And yet it does

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provide interesting and useful insights that merit attentionin the ongoing discussion on the urban environment. Abook such as Bruno's Public Intimacy is illuminating inco~unction with Human Environments. Bruno perhapsunwittingly contributes to the development of an urbanaesthetics by moving beyond the often unsatisfyingconcept of appreciation with a thoughtful articulation ofthe interconnections and extensions between space andaffect. She adds movement to experience, integratesaffect and perception with the dynamism of the city­the city as both a built and living form-and uses hercinematic framework to provide one possible way ofgrounding the project of urban aesthetics. Together,Human Environments and Public Intimacy suggest thepossibilities of a careful combination of an environmentalapproach with affect and movement, and hint at thepotential of urban aesthetics as a useful method fordemystifying experiences of city life, but also for evaluatingurban space and unfolding the intricacies of personal andpublic engagements with our cities.

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NOTES

Arnold Berleant and AlIen Carlson, eds., The Aesthetics of

Natural EnfJironments (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004).

2 The Aesthetics of Human Environmenrs, 16.

3 Ibid., 19.

4 Carlson, "On Aesthetically Appreciating HumanEnvironments;' in ibid., 61.

5 Ibid., 53.

6 Pauline von Bonsdorff, "Urban Richness and the Art ofBuilding," in ibid., 71.7 Ibid., 72.

8 Ibid.

9 Thomas Leddy, "Everyday Surface Aesthetic Qualities:Neat, Messy, Clean, Dirty," in ibid., 167.

10 David Macauley, "Walking in the City," in ibid., 112.

11 Berleant, "Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic," in ibid., 90.

12 Ytjo Sepanmaa,"Multi-sensoriness and the City;' in ibid., 92.13 Ibid., 95.

14 Ibid., 97.

15 Malcom Andrews, "The View from the Road and thePicturesque," in ibid., 279.

16 Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the

Visual Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 29.17 Ibid., 20.

18 Ibid., 66.

19 Ibid., 39.

20 Ibid., 46.

21 Ibid.,70.

22 Ibid,70.