NEW 'Living Cities' Talks Series: 'The New Urban Aesthetics. Digital Experiences of Urban Change'
The event will be followed by drinks.
To attend, please register here.
With author Gillian Rose (School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford)
Convened by Perig Pitrou (MFO).
This event will focus on the book The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2022: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/new-urban-aesthetic-9781350070837/.
Cities are key sites for the reproduction of global capitalism, and urban branding is central to this transformative dynamic. Cities are also being profoundly reconfigured by the use of many kinds of digital technologies. Both of these shifts entrain sensory bodily experiences. This digitally mediated shift in what cities feel like is what this book terms 'the new urban aesthetic'. While discussions about the politics of 'place branding', 'the experience economy' and 'urban atmospheres' are relevant to the book's arguments, the book also offers a distinctive conceptual framework for understanding the new urban aesthetic which puts various kinds of differentiation at its core: it looks at different cities, different kinds of digital technologies, and in particular different kinds of sensory experiencing. The latter is especially important as a way of thinking about the power dynamics articulated through different versions of the new urban aesthetic.
One of the book's authors – Gillian Rose – will present the book, and also say something about her more recent work on how digital visualising technologies are bringing cities to different kinds of life.
Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Find out more about her work here https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/grose.html and follow her on Twitter @ProfGillian. She is also trying to restart her blog here.
About the 'Living Cities' Talks Series:
Considering the ecological challenges of urban planning projects, contemporary societies must invent new ways of coexisting with non-human life forms and improving the living conditions of humans, while integrating them more harmoniously into natural environments. While establishing a dialogue with the medical sciences, natural sciences and engineering sciences, the humanities and social sciences provide fundamental insights into the technical and social dynamics at work in the way cities are built and inhabited.
By inviting researchers engaged in a reflection on the multiple scales of relations between Life and Cities, the "Living Cities" Talks Series aims to identify the main problems which need to be solved to learn how to better inhabit our planet.
