Urban aestheticization processes

Abstract

This chapter focuses on cityscapes, city image, urban experience and aestheticization processes. These themes were addressed by David Frisby in his detailed analysis of Georg Simmel’s writings on the money economy, the expanding metropolis and aesthetics. Simmel also examined the city as a work of art and the landscape. Frisby builds on these insights, as well as the immersive street life of the modern city influenced by Simmel’s ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ essay, to develop the notions of the cityscape and the streetscape. Simmel’s work, then, helps us consider two main forms of experiencing the city. The first is the cityscape considered as an adjunct of the landscape, in which a significant vista of the city is considered from a distance: the cityscape is effectively the urban landscape. The second is more directly located in the life of the city, the cityscape perceived from within the streetscape: the melee of signs, sounds, shocks and shifting impressions of street life. The chapter concludes with a discussion of urban infrastructure and mediascapes and their relationship to the continual process of formation of the city image.