Imagining Cities: Feeling the City

Jordan Lacey, Urban Roar: A Psychophysical Approach to the Design of Affective Environments (2022)

This work argues for the existence of 'autonomous affectivities' that roar beneath the din of the urban, seeking the attention of us humans so captured by the environments of our own making. In hearing the urban roar, it is the mythic intention of this book to discover ways in which we can work with the intensities of more-than-human forces to vitalize our cities. The book explores methods by which artists, particularly those sound artists involved in fieldwork practices, might encounter and translate autonomous affectivities between different environments. Of particular interest is Jung's concept of synchronicity and its relationship to artistic creation – as experience, flow and catalyst – in manifesting autonomous affectivities into diverse and affective environments. The book makes use of both theoretical and practical approaches: from a study of scholarship through which it is argued that an autonomous affectivity is equivalent to an archetype (via Jung) and an essence (via Deleuze's reading of Spinoza), to theoretical considerations of the situated body in everyday contexts, to practical study of an artistic research experiment designed to reveal and index autonomous affectivities encountered during fieldwork practices, for the purpose of influencing urban design interventions. In this fresh analysis, Lacey reveals the possibilities in urban environments.

Karl Bell (ed.), Supernatural Cities: Enchantment, Anxiety, and Spectrality (2019)

Far from being a static or eroding cultural inheritance from the past, the supernatural has continually been appropriated and updated to accommodate and express social, cultural, economic and environmental anxieties. Since the Enlightenment, supernatural beliefs and practices have largely been derided as ignorant and un-modern - even anti-modern - and cities, being the ultimate symbol of progress and rationality, have not been thought to harbour magic. Scholars have long assumed that the world of the supernatural withered under the impact of urbanisation; yet, as numerous books, films and T.V. series from Hellboy to Being Human to the Harry Potter franchise show, contemporary culture remains fascinated by urban-based legends and fantasy. This collection seeks to spur interest in the urban supernatural and argues for its prevalence, importance and vitality by presenting a rich cultural history of the complex relationship between supernatural beliefs and practices, imagination and storytelling, and urbanisation. Grouped around themes of enchantment, anxiety and spectrality, it explores urban supernatural cultures on five continents between the late eighteenth century and the present day. The book advances a ground-breaking exploration of the communal and cultural function of urban supernatural ideas, demonstrating howthey have continually been appropriated and updated to express and accommodate socio-cultural, economic and environmental anxieties and needs. Drawing together a diverse range of academic approaches, with contributions from historians, geographers, anthropologists, folklorists and literary scholars, it makes an important contribution to our understanding of how urban environments, both past and present, inform our imaginations, cultural insecurities and spatial fears.

Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography, rev. ed. (2018)

In recent years the term "psychogeography" has been used to illustrate a bewildering array of ideas from ley lines and the occult, to urban walking and political radicalism. But where does it come from and what exactly does it mean? This book examines the origins of psychogeography in the Paris of the 1950s, exploring the theoretical background and its political application in the work of Guy Debord and the Situationists. Psychogeography continues to find retrospective validation in much earlier traditions, from the visionary writing of William Blake and Thomas De Quincey to the rise of the flâneur and the avant-garde experimentation of the Surrealists. These precursors to psychogeography are discussed here alongside their modern counterparts, for today these ideas hold greater currency than ever through the popularity of writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Patrick Keiller. From the urban wanderer to the armchair traveller, psychogeography provides us with new ways of experiencing our environment, transforming the familiar streets of our everyday experience into something new and unexpected. Merlin Coverley conducts the reader through this process, providing an explanation of the terms involved and an analysis of the key figures and their works.

Jeff Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, 2nd ed. (2018)

The first edition of Place and Experience established Jeff Malpas as one of the leading philosophers and thinkers of place and space and provided a creative and refreshing alternative to prevailing post-structuralist and postmodern theories of place. It is a foundational and ground-breaking book in its attempt to lay out a sustained and rigorous account of place and its significance. The main argument of Place and Experience has three strands: first, that human being is inextricably bound to place; second, that place encompasses subjectivity and objectivity, being reducible to neither but foundational to both; and third that place, which is distinct from, but also related to space and time, is methodologically and ontologically fundamental. The development of this argument involves considerations concerning the nature of place and its relation to space and time; the character of that mode of philosophical investigation that is oriented to place and that is referred to as ‘philosophical topography’; the nature of subjectivity and objectivity as inter-related concepts that also connect with intersubjectivity; and the way place is tied to memory, identity, and the self. Malpas draws on a rich array of writers and philosophers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Proust, Heidegger and Donald Davidson. This second edition is revised throughout, including a new chapter on place and technological modernity, especially the seeming loss of place in the contemporary world, and a new Foreword by Edward Casey. It also includes a new set of additional features, such as illustrations, annotated further reading, and a glossary, which make this second edition more useful to teachers and students alike.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (2009)

Capital has managed to overcome the dualism of body and soul by establishing a workforce in which everything we mean by the Soul — language, creativity, affects — is mobilized for its own benefit. Industrial production put to work bodies, muscles, and arms. Now, in the sphere of digital technology and cyberculture, exploitation involves the mind, language, and emotions in order to generate value — while our bodies disappear in front of our computer screens. In this, his newest book, Franco “Bifo” Berardi — key member of the Italian Autonomist movement and a close associate of Félix Guattari — addresses these new forms of estrangement. In the philosophical landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, the Hegelian concept of alienation was used to define the harnessing of subjectivity. The estrangement of workers from their labor, the feeling of alienation they experienced, and their refusal to submit to it became the bases for a human community that remained autonomous from capital. But today a new condition of alienation has taken root in which workers commonly and voluntarily work overtime, the population is tethered to cell phones and Blackberries, debt has become a postmodern form of slavery, and antidepressants are commonly used to meet the unending pressure of production. As a result, the conditions for community have run aground and new philosophical categories are needed. This book is a clarion call for a new collective effort to reclaim happiness.

Karin Bijsterveld, Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture, and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (2008)

Since the late nineteenth century, the sounds of technology have been the subject of complaints, regulation, and legislation. By the early 1900s, antinoise leagues in Western Europe and North America had formed to fight noise from factories, steam trains, automobiles, and gramophones, with campaigns featuring conferences, exhibitions, and “silence weeks.” And, as Karin Bijsterveld points out in Mechanical Sound, public discussion of noise has never died down and continues today. In this book, Bijsterveld examines the persistence of noise on the public agenda, looking at four episodes of noise and the public response to it in Europe and the United States between 1875 and 1975: industrial noise, traffic noise, noise from neighborhood radios and gramophones, and aircraft noise. She also looks at a twentieth-century counterpoint to complaints about noise: the celebration of mechanical sound in avant-garde music composed between the two world wars. Bijsterveld argues that the rise of noise from new technology combined with overlapping noise regulations created what she calls a “paradox of control.” Experts and politicians promised to control some noise, but left other noise problems up to citizens. Aircraft noise, for example, measured in formulas understandable only by specialists, was subject to public regulation; the sounds of noisy neighborhoods were the responsibility of residents themselves.

Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (2007)

Traversing a varied and enchanting landscape with forays into the fields of geography, art, architecture, design, cartography and film, Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion, winner of the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz award for “the world’s best book on the moving image”, is a highly original endeavor to map a cultural history of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative montage of words and pictures she emphasizes that “sight” and “site” but also “motion” and “emotion” are irrevocably connected. In so doing, she touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Annette Messagem: the film-making of Peter Greenaway and Michaelangelo Antonioni; the origins of the movie palace and its precursors, and on her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, Bruno opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.

Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006)

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry. Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear — and those that do not — as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. This work points queer theory in bold new directions.

Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999)

In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, director of UCLA's Brain and Creativity Institute, presents "the first truly compelling neurobiological account of the self...a remarkable work of intellectual daring" (Nature). Widley praised for his innovative scientific thinking and elegant writing, Antonio Damasio, the international bestselling author of Descartes' Error achieves an understanding of consciousness by asking and answering profound questions: How is it we know what we know? How is it that our conscious and private minds have a sense of self? In this groundbreaking book, Damasio — a renowned and revered scientist and clinician who spent decades following amnesiacs down hospital corridors, waiting for comatose patients to awaken, and devising ingenious research using PET scans to piece together the great puzzle of consciousness — explores the biological roots of sentient awareness and its role in survival. Consciousness is the feeling of what happens-our mind noticing the body's reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life. Linking body and emotion in an arresting and original study of what it is to be human, The Feeling of What Happens "will change your experience of yourself" (The New York Times).

James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (1996)

At first it appears that nothing could be easier than seeing. We just focus our eyes and take in whatever is before us. This ability seems detached, efficient and rational - as if the eyes were competent machines telling us everything about the world without distorting it in any way. But those ideas are just illusions, James Elkins argues, and he suggests that seeing is undependable, inconsistent and cauthg up in the threads of the unconscious. Blindness is not the opposite of vision, but its constant companion, and even the foundation of seeing itself. Using drawings, paintings, diagrams and photographs to illustrate his points, Elkins raises intriguing questions and offers astonishing perceptions about the nature of vision.

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (1996)

First published in 1996, The Eyes of the Skin has become a classic of architectural theory. It asks the far-reaching question why, when there are five senses, has one single sense – sight – become so predominant in architectural culture and design? With the ascendancy of the digital and the all-pervasive use of the image electronically, it is a subject that has become all the more pressing and topical since the first edition’s publication in the mid-1990s. Juhani Pallasmaa argues that the suppression of the other four sensory realms has led to the overall impoverishment of our built environment, often diminishing the emphasis on the spatial experience of a building and architecture’s ability to inspire, engage and be wholly life enhancing. For every student studying Pallasmaa’s classic text for the first time, The Eyes of the Skin is a revelation. It compellingly provides a totally fresh insight into architectural culture. This third edition meets readers’ desire for a further understanding of the context of Pallasmaa’s thinking by providing a new essay by architectural author and educator Peter MacKeith. This text combines both a biographical portrait of Pallasmaa and an outline of his architectural thinking, its origins and its relationship to the wider context of Nordic and European thought, past and present. The focus of the essay is on the fundamental humanity, insight and sensitivity of Pallasmaa’s approach to architecture, bringing him closer to the reader. This is illustrated by Pallasmaa’s sketches and photographs of his own work. The new edition also provides a foreword by the internationally renowned architect Steven Holl and a revised introduction by Pallasmaa himself.

Steve Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space, and Subjectivity (1996)

Over the last century, psychoanalysis has transformed the ways in which we think about our relationships with others. Psychoanalytic concepts and methods, such as the unconscious and dream analysis, have greatly impacted on social, cultural and political theory. Reinterpreting the ways in which Geography has explored people's mental maps and their deepest feelings about places, The Body and the City outlines a new cartography of the subject. The author maps key coordinates of meaning, identity and power across the sites of body and city. Exploring a wide range of critical thinking, particularly the work of Lefebvre, Freud and Lacan, he analyses the dialectic between the individual and the external world to present a pathbreaking psychoanalysis of space.

Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (1983)

In essays covering everything from art and common sense to charisma and constructions of the self, the eminent cultural anthropologist and author of The Interpretation of Cultures deepens our understanding of human societies through the intimacies of "local knowledge." A companion volume to The Interpretation of Cultures, this book continues Geertz's exploration of the meaning of culture and the importance of shared cultural symbolism. With a new introduction by the author.

R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977)

The soundscape--a term coined by the author--is our sonic environment, the ever-present array of noises with which we all live. Beginning with the primordial sounds of nature, we have experienced an ever-increasing complexity of our sonic surroundings. As civilization develops, new noises rise up around us: from the creaking wheel, the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer, and the distant chugging of steam trains to the “sound imperialism” of airports, city streets, and factories. The author contends that we now suffer from an overabundance of acoustic information and a proportionate diminishing of our ability to hear the nuances and subtleties of sound. Our task, he maintains, is to listen, analyze, and make distinctions. As a society we have become more aware of the toxic wastes that can enter our bodies through the air we breathe and the water we drink. In fact, the pollution of our sonic environment is no less real. Schafer emphasizes the importance of discerning the sounds that enrich and feed us and using them to create healthier environments. To this end, he explains how to classify sounds, appreciating their beauty or ugliness, and provides exercises and “soundwalks” to help us become more discriminating and sensitive to the sounds around us. This book is a pioneering exploration of our acoustic environment, past and present, and an attempt to imagine what it might become in the future.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977)

A study of the ways in which people feel and think about space, how they form attachments to home, neighborhood, and nation, and how feelings about space and place are affected by the sense of time.“Since it is the breadth and universality of his argument that concerns Yi-Fu Tuan, experience is defined as ‘all the modes by which a person knows and constructs reality,’ and examples are taken with equal ease from non-literate cultures, from ancient and modern oriental and western civilizations, from novels, poetry, anthropology, psychology, and theology. The result is a remarkable synthesis, which reflects well the subtleties of experience and yet avoids the pitfalls of arbitrary classification and facile generalization. For these reasons, and for its general tone and erudition and humanism, this book will surely be one that will endure when the current flurry of academic interest in environmental experience abates.” --Canadian Geographer

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)

Since its initial publication in 1958, The Poetics of Space has been a muse to philosophers, architects, writers, psychologists, critics, and readers alike. The rare work of irresistibly inviting philosophy, Bachelard’s seminal work brims with quiet revelations and stirring, mysterious imagery. This lyrical journey takes as its premise the emergence of the poetic image and finds an ideal metaphor in the intimate spaces of our homes. Guiding us through a stream of meditations on poetry, art, and the blooming of consciousness itself, Bachelard examines the domestic places that shape and hold our dreams and memories. Houses and rooms; cellars and attics; drawers, chests, and wardrobes; nests and shells; nooks and corners: No space is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. In Bachelard’s enchanting spaces, “We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” This new edition features a foreword by Mark Z. Danielewski, whose bestselling novel House of Leaves drew inspiration from Bachelard’s writings, and an introduction by internationally renowned philosopher Richard Kearney who explains the book’s enduring importance and its role within Bachelard’s remarkable career.