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PHILOSOPHY MUSIC |
Arnold Berleant
1. Focusing on the issue The question of urban experience is as complex, intricate, and elusive as its material condition: the city. There is massiveness here in the physical presence of the urban mix of skyscrapers, institutional edifices, and commercial monoliths. We not only encounter massiveness; we face spatial extent in a broad array of neighborhoods, districts, and spreading urbanized surrounding countryside. The last of these is a relatively recent phenomenon, as the urban consumption of the landscape spreads across whole geographical regions, such as the megalopolis of the eastern seaboard of the United States that stretches from Boston to Washington, or the amoeba-like spread of construction across huge distances, sometimes overlapping state lines, as in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis urban conglomerates. Moreover, we face social mass, too, in teeming populations with their associations and organizations both formal and informal, official and subversive. And, related to this is the emergence of mass culture, replete with the mass marketing and mass consumption of goods, of entertainment, of anything that can be controlled and sold. Consumption also overwhelms the ambient environmental conditions that, visual space and distance easily traversed. This is more than mass culture; it is more a mass world. How can we understand this world? Several matters need to be clarified before we can go further. One is the temptation to speak of urban architecture and design and of urban society as separate subjects. To do so would be to commit a common but fundamental error, for the city is constituted of an irreducible complexity of factors, forces, and activities that are inseparable from their physical, geographical, and cultural setting. While it is customary in scientific inquiry to break complex things down into their component parts and focus research on those constituent elements, this often has limited explanatory value when these parts are recombined. This procedure may be illuminating and it may also provide considerable ability to control and direct those things, but their recombination never constitutes the whole with which we began. Only by recognizing the indissolubility of complex wholes and working within them can we attain a larger perspective and a truer understanding of our social, indeed our human world. In place of external measurements we have the apprehension of participants; in place of discrete objects we have complex entities often with a discernible identity but with no sharp boundaries. Environmental design and urban life are inseparable. 2. Where is the city? We seem to harbor a medieval image of a city: a definitely bounded built environment set off from its surroundings by sharp edges like invisible walls. This image is totally unreal. The contemporary city has no perceptible boundary but is rather a node in a pervasive and seemingly endless industrialized landscape. And most of its inhabitants rarely leave that landscape. Not only is the common idea of a city misleading as a physical entity, it is also linguistically misleading. 'City' denotes no object, no entity, no discernible thing. Rather the word represents a collection of politically, socially, and architecturally different regions grouped around an historical center: Or it may denote an identity that is defined politically but with no corresponding distant physical correlate. Early neighborhood districts, suburban developments, industrial parks, and satellite communities are ordinarily the most prominent areas, as the city seeps into the surrounding region with ever decreasing density so that we seem hardly to leave it as it blends into an industrialized so-called countryside dotted with metal quonset structures, sand mines, and discarded machinery. Such a broad urbanized landscape has no clear identity, and this is emphasized even more by the usual blandness of its architecture. The same block-like skyscrapers, with a futile effort to distinguish one from another with a superficial touch of innovation, stand at its commercial center, but mostly anonymous boxes of no clear vintage and lesser distinction fill its industrial and commercial zones. And of course the commercial life of the modern city has become dominated by chain stores, big box stores and global corporations, whose signs and logos are everywhere. One sees the same brand names decorating every American city and many of them appearing in unlikely places: MacDonald's in Moscow, Beijing and Helsinki; Coca Cola advertising pavilions on Chilean beaches. Gertrude Stein expressed this loss of regional identity with poetic prescience several generations ago when she said about her hometown of Oakland, California, "There is no there there."[1] The city, in fact, does not exist. It is a fiction, an abstraction rooted in history and mythology. For how can we identify it? The usual way is to contrast the city with the countryside, which suggests some kind of division between physical regions, perhaps even a boundary. But as we have noted, city boundaries are, at best, a historical phenomenon. The vestiges of city walls that still remain in some old cities stand as archaeological remnants and function only as tourist attractions. And, of course, this juxtaposition of city and countryside identifies the city with its concrete manifestation rather than with its life. What actually exists now? Farmland once surrounding the city has been transformed into either commercial or industrial sprawl composed of shopping malls and industrial parks, when it is not faceless, placeless suburbia gradually dribbling off into the ruburbs and the abandoned fields and woods of former agricultural lands. The distinctiveness of the city is no longer something that becomes evident by contrast with the countryside for, as we have noted, there is no countryside. The signs of urbanization are virtually everywhere except in remote backwaters far out of reach. What exists on the ground are urban accretions with little coherence and no clear identity apart from the sentimental histories promulgated by tourist boards and the local attractions boasted of by chambers of commerce. Encountered from the ground up, the city is a bundle of experiences of a built environment always known through limited parts. There are urban neighborhoods, urban zones, urban regions that have grown by accretion and are loosely assembled into an ununified complex. There are clusters of relatively small, separate political entities sometimes called boroughs, suburbs, villages, and towns around a core that once was its commercial center. In actuality, the city is rather a particular kind of environment built from materials obtained or derived from the natural world and embodying the same perceptual elements as other environments, but it is almost wholly designed and controlled by human agency. And although the city is a distinctively human environment, it is nevertheless an integral part of the geography of its region, its larger environment from which it usually has only indistinct borders and with which it has numerous and complex reciprocal relationships. . The city is thus not a coherent whole, a bounded, circumscribed entity, but an urban context, fragmentary but with multiple nodes and perspectives. The idea of a city is an ideal only, an ideal that comes from the word that names it and from its history. It is not an entity that we experience. From a human vantage point, the city is an environment of experience before it is anything else. Urban experience, in fact, is perhaps one of the most important and powerful of the complex dimensions that constitute the city, whatever it may be. Even here it is misleading to speak of cities at all, for 'city' connotes some "thing" that is discrete and objective, and presumably, therefore, can become the object of study of the diverse fields of architecture, design, sociology, geography, economics, political science, and history. And when we speak of urban experience, we do not refer to a psychological condition or a purely subjective event. Urban experience must be understood as an indissoluble complex, no part of which can be grasped in isolation. Like any kind of experience, it takes place in a context of physical, social, and cultural circumstances that are as important to that experience as the human participant Another aspect of this inquiry needs to be made clear. In contrast with the study of the city, most investigation into urban experience, is, like the material city, taken as a complex but distinct and separate object. It is a psychological or a cognitive object, something assembled through cumulative bodily sensation and action that is physical in its embodiment in architecture and design and social in the forms and functioning of its political, economic and cultural organizations. As I pointed out at the beginning of this essay, such fragmentation is deeply misleading. In contrast to these divisive approaches, I should like to inquire into the experience of the city as a condition of participatory engagement that constitutes part of a single cohesive yet complex physical, social, and cultural environment. The obvious way of beginning an examination of urban experience would be to proceed as if from within, that is, with the experience of the participants, the inhabitants of urban regions. This would, of course, be revealing, but it is not the only perspective on urban experience. I should like to approach it here from a different direction. I call this essay "Distant Cities" because I want to inquire into urban experience from a perhaps unexpected direction, urban experience as encountered from the outside, from a distance, as it were. Such experience may be increasingly unfamiliar as an ever larger proportion of the world's population resides in cities. (The United Nations Population Fund has predicted that by 2007 a majority of the world's population will live in cities.[2]) How is the city seen and understood not by its inhabitants but by one who encounters it from without and who may occasionally enter into the urban sphere for visits of limited duration? 3. Urban experience from the outside There are, I think, two sides to grasping the city as experienced from outside. Indeed, these sides 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 merely acted out but lived daily. 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 reflects the distinctive geography of its site, a condition that 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, Washington and Geneva, Switzerland; on a harbor along the coast, like Helsinki and Toronto; or combining such features, such as Rio de Janeiro, these geographical conditions exercise a powerful presence and impart a distinctive quality to the experience and perhaps most striking to the visitor from away. There are other features of an urban environment: the monumental architecture of government and institutional buildings, the ethos conveyed by the city's history as a key location in the region, and the vast quantity of art, artifacts, and literature collected in its museums and libraries. The complex concentration and diversity of inhabitants also encourages a 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 are complemented by the richness of the various 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; 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 opportunities 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 but are still usually unexpected when they occur. 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 the petty thievery and household burglaries that are common occurrences, as well as from the oppressive scale of skyscrapers and unwalkable distances that overpower and dwarf the body, and the unseen clouds of vehicular exhaust and the incessant roar of traffic and machinery that envelop one in a sensory miasma. To these must be added the unsettling confusion of a strange neighborhood or city to those who are unfamiliar with its streets and unskilled in dealing with its manners and customs. All these traits, both comic and tragic, are familiar to the city dweller but they are all the more intense and unsettling to the outsider who suffers what Wordsworth called the "blank confusion" and frustration encountered especially by strangers.[3] An urban dweller may grow accustomed to the combination of exhilaration and fearfulness that is a familiar part of city life, but these are more intrusive and intense to the visitor. The masques of comedy and tragedy symbolize the normative urban experiences that excite strong feelings of attraction or repulsion, those two poles that natural philosophy has long attributed to matter. While significant, they hardly represent all urban experience, but they are expecially vivid to the outsider coming to the city for a brief time, when nothing seems normal. The urban dweller inhabits the far larger and extensive neutral ground of the regular, habitual, unremarkable course of the daily routine that is normal, natural, and comfortable from familarity. For most inhabitants, the urban condition is simply taken for granted but for the visitor everything is vividly present. From the vantage point of the outsider, we can regard the city as the quintessential human built environment. It is the repository of the fullest range of human values, negative and positive, aesthetic values as well as ethical ones. To the inhabitant it may have the comfort of familiarity, but to the visitor the city is never neutral. Unfamiliarity breeds not contempt but excitement, confusion, physical difficulties in navigating its unknown ways, and unrest from the intense pressure of perceptual stimuli: new sights, disruptive sounds, incessant activity: the signs, the calls, the commotion of city life. 4. An Aesthetic of Urbanism Let me here move to one of the city's normative domains, its aesthetic.[4] Urban experience for the visitor typically focuses at first on its architecture: the public buildings, the commercial streetscapes, and even the residential areas. The particular products of architectural practice, of course, are not ordinarily thought of as environments, but architecture is increasingly regarded more as the design of built environments rather than simply that of independent physical structures. Architecture shapes both interior and exterior spaces. It creates volumes, surfaces, and patterns of movement for various purposes--domestic, commercial, industrial, governmental, celebratory. Moreover, architectural structures occupy sites that are contiguous with other environmental configurations and are often integral parts of larger urban areas. The aesthetics of the architectural environment therefore merges with that of landscape architecture as its concerns move beyond the physical boundaries of a structure to embrace its connections with its site. Architectural aesthetics also coalesces with urban design by including relationships and groupings of multiple structures and patterns of human activity.[5] Urban aesthetics, in contrast with architectural aesthetics, focuses more generally on the larger built environment as it is shaped by human direction for human purposes: paradigmatically, the city. However, we do not have to oppose the city aesthetically to the countryside or to wilderness, even though it is a common tendency to do so. The city is rather a particular kind of environment, made from materials obtained or derived from the natural world and embodying the same perceptual elements as other environments but more fully designed and controlled by human agency. Moreover, although the city is a distinctively human environment, it is nevertheless an integral part of the geography of its region, the larger environment from which it usually has only indistinct boundaries, as we have seen, and with which it has numerous and complex reciprocal relationships. Both architectural aesthetics and urban aesthetics deal with the same perceptual factors that are part of all environmental experience. Moreover, in the city, which is the pre-eminent human environment, sensory dimensions are inseparable from historical and social ones. The aesthetic values of the city thus include more than urban beauty; they also encompass the perceptual experience of meanings and traditions, of familiarity and difference. In addition, urban aesthetics, even more than architectural aesthetics, also includes a consideration of negative aesthetic values: the obstruction of positive perceptual experience by factors such as omnipresent noise, air pollution, strident signage, utility lines, littered streets, and dull, trite, or oppressive buildings. An aesthetic critique is therefore essential in evaluating a city's character and success. To incorporate aesthetic considerations into urban design and planning is to put the city in the service of the values and goals that we associate with fulfilled human life. Urban experience from the perspective of the outside is often vivid and notable. It is clearer, less obscured, than experience tamed by routine, perhaps by overexposure, so that, like a habitual route we follow in going to work or returning home, we rarely see the details anymore. This offers the visitor an often wider normative range than the city dweller. The two masques are set in motion and enlivened; they become animated. How, then, can an aesthetic critique of urban experience proceed? Critical for achieving an aesthetically satisfactory urban environment of human proportions is our ability to determine and control the conditions that shape the perceptual patterns through which we carry on life in the city. Thus, in addition to structural dimensions that respond to the demands of the human body and human activities, the environment must work as a sensory one. For this reason, urban design and planning cannot be confined to the arrangement of objects but rather must be used to create sequences of experience. This can take many forms, one of which is what Kevin Lynch calls "imageability" or "legibility," those visual traits by which people can maintain an awareness of their position in the urban complex and find their way through it. An "imageable" city is one whose paths, nodes, districts, boundaries, and landmarks are readily apparent and easily recognizable.[6] Moreover, fashioning an aesthetically satisfactory urban environment must go beyond an ordering of visual experiences to include other experiential dimensions to which North American culture is frequently insensitive: auditory stimuli that distinguish neighborhoods, not only the drone of traffic and the roar of machinery, but the shouts and calls that distinguish different neighborhoods. Other sensory stimuli are of equal importance: tactile perceptions such as the surface textures of roads, walks, and façades; and olfactory sensations noticed not only as evidence of decay, fuel combustion, or manufacturing, but also as appealing signs of the character of districts such as waterfront, market, restaurant, and park. In addition, all the senses combine in the temporal progression of perception in concrete situations, as we drive along a street, stroll through a park, window shop our way down a shopping plaza, sit in a square, or gaze out over the city from an observation point. In this manner, a full range of sensory cues can serve to direct human activities, enabling us to move with comfort and security, as well as with interest and excitement, through an urban setting shaped to accommodate human functions. It becomes clear that, for an urban environment to function not only as a humane one but also as a source of rewarding aesthetic experience, it must succeed as a setting for experience, facilitating patterns of movement by determining the arrangement of things as they are encountered in our perception. This not only enables the city to work more effectively; it also enhances common symbols, meanings, and memories. Such urban experience can thus provide emotional security and help make possible that social condition by which, as Aristotle observed long ago, the human animal becomes fully human.[7] 5. The Future of Urban Experience Like Aristotle, I think that society is the place where people become human. We are now aware more than ever before of what environment means and is, and about the human presence as an active participant, inseparable from environment, "doing and undergoing," as Dewey used to say, affected by as much as affecting the conditions of living. I want to conclude this inquiry, then, with an unabashed sketch of how a fulfilling humane urban environment might now be understood. The city has evolved through various functional stages over its long history.[8] Small urban organizations appeared as far back as 5000 B.C.E. in the Mesopotamian basin. In their earliest form they served a basically sacred purpose. Ancient urban groupings often developed around monumental temple structures where priestly functions and religious rituals took place. These urban centers were ordered and guided by the priestly class, and their temples provided a feeling of security and cosmic order to the palaces of the rulers and the dwellings of the populace. Somewhat later the city assumed an imperial function. Powerful rulers established conditions for land ownership and provided systems of laws and security from invaders. Later as large areas came under the control of such rulers and trade developed, cities grew in size and proliferated. Their commercial role developed over a long period and eventually became their dominant feature. Conflict persisted among these different functions, with religious, political and commercial interests vying for control. We see some of the same competition today in different ways in various parts of the world. Still, commercial interests seem to be more fully in control than ever before, as commerce joins with industrial technology to dominate the landscape and direct political decisions. From an external perspective a fascinating drama is being enacted as population is diffused throughout the surrounding countryside, since commercial and industrial needs no longer require a large urban concentration, while within the city there is greater insecurity and at the same time increasing control over the population. This commercial hegemony itself excites further tension with other social interests. Thus sacred, imperial, and commercial interests continue to co-exist in a conflict that has become increasingly intense and widespread. At the same time that most of the world's population has gravitated to cities, an exodus has been taking place. Motivated by environmental needs that are at the same time physical and social: physical in the effort to avoid congestion and multiple forms of pollution, and social in the desire for greater security, people have moved to the ever-expanding periphery of the city. Suburbs have become urban neighborhoods, the surrounding countryside has been refashioned and regulated into new suburbs and into the semi-rural settlement known as ruburbs, and the city's function has shifted to become the locus for business, education, technological research, and cultural activities. At least in the highly industrialized parts of the world, factories have moved out of the inner city into industrial parks on its outskirts and increasingly to underdeveloped regions with cheap labor and raw materials. Similarly, fundamental changes have been taking place in our understanding of key urban concerns, including architecture and environment. Buildings are no longer considered discrete structures but as somehow interpenetrating the environmental region of human movement and use, and these functions are themselves incorporated into the design as inseparable components. As we have observed, architecture has become not the design of structures but the design of environment in which everything is considered and shaped in ecological terms, i.e., in the interconnections of humans and environment as a single complex totality. An entrance, for example, is understood not as a break in the outside barrier wall of a structure and thus an intrusion into its uniformity, but as an interconnection of outside and inside that invites transition. Thus when aesthetic interests become more insistent and necessary, urban aesthetics focuses more generally on the larger built environment as it is shaped by human direction for human purposes: paradigmatically the city. Let me conclude, however, by suggesting that urban experience is undergoing still further transformation, with unimaginable opportunities and equally unimaginable dangers (such as mass culture engulfing people), a transformation guided by aesthetic as well as ethical interests. We might even speculate that this may generate a new vision of urban experience and, indeed, a new utopianism. What could this be? 6. A Creative Community Pictures of a successful urban environment usually and quite properly mention public safety, the lawful conduct of personal and public life, clear and efficient patterns of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, efficient and dependable utilities, a strong economic base and high level of employment, a wide range of artistic and educational opportunities, and a broad array of cultural and recreational choices. But is this the optimum condition of a good city? Is this the urban ideal? I want to suggest that it is not, and that this picture describes a healthy city but not urban experience that elevates the life of the city dweller. Liken this picture to the human organism and it will become clear why it is not. As good circulation is necessary for a healthy body, the smooth flow of walkers and efficient traffic patterns help a city function smoothly and well. Similarly, the satisfactory distribution of goods and services seems to resemble the body's digestive system. As safe living and working conditions safeguard human health, so safe streets and a low crime rate help make a city livable. Prudent decisions and conduct help ensure the safety and security of a person, both as a physical organism and as a city dweller. Finally, a healthy organism is one that is strong and active, with weight proper to its size and age. So, too, is a vital city busy and prosperous. Now no none would dispute the desirability of such conditions in an urban environment, but I want to suggest that they are necessary but not sufficient for humane and happy urban experience. Although a healthy body is a precondition for a good life, it hardly fulfills our human potential. What more is needed for humanly fulfilling urban experience? Here the aesthetic may serve ethical ends, inasmuch as we are concerned with normative experience. As all human experience consists in or derives from sensory perception, and insofar as sense perception is at the heart of the aesthetic, the aesthetic domain is indissolubly implicated in the fundamental ethical goal of fulfilling experience and thus a good life. If we add to this the Aristotelian premise that humans are social, cultural animals, it follows that such an aesthetically infused goal must find its fulfillment in the social condition. It is appropriate, then, to speak of aesthetics at the same time as we consider ethics, and so to speak of an urban aesthetics at the same time as we consider an urban ethics. But what constitutes an urban aesthetic? Just as Aristotle recognized that adequate material conditions are necessary for human happiness, our description above reviewed those conditions in a city.[9] Yet we must supplement this material account with the aesthetic conditions, conditions that are at the same time perceptual. So now we must ask, What are the perceptual conditions of a positive urban aesthetic? Here let me propose, as a start, that many of the usual sensory dimensions of the aesthetic experience of art and of environment will prove useful. In the visual realm these include color, texture, line, composition, and proportion. Since the urban environment is three-dimensional, we should also include mass, volume, and scale. This last is of signal importance in achieving humane urban experience, especially as the modern city has enlarged disproportionately to its ability to serve humane purposes by carrying on its basic functions. Much as a greatly overweight person has more difficulty carrying out his or her activities and is more prone to illness, an overweight city has similar difficuties in effectively meeting the needs of its inhabitants. Excessive scale carries a psychological burden, as well. It is intimidating, oppressive, and inefficient. It encourages abuse and corruption. And when an urban region extends itself without restraint or limit, it appears to be afflicted with a cancerous growth that will end by destroying its host. Similar considerations apply to the auditory, olfactory, tactile, and kinesthetic domains of experience, whose importance matches the visual and which joins with it. Let me conclude by bringing this discussion around to end on a more harmonious note, to the potential for an aesthetically informed urban future. As the city's principal function shifted from the sacred to the seat of power, and from this to the generating force of commerce and industry, and as the city is now becoming less necessary for carrying out these functions, there remains one role it can play that brings it, in some sense, back to its origin as a place for community and the fulfillment of the basic needs and developed possibilities of perceptual experience. This can happen when the city fulfills a new function as a center of culture. How can this take place? A first answer is for the city to become the host of those institutions that encompass the creative, preservative, and productive activities and fruits of a rich and complex culture: art, science, and history museums; research institutions and universities; libraries and performance centers. As organizations and structures, these are the tangible evidence of the creative activities of a culture. Behind them lie the exchanges and associations that take many forms and lead to fuller development and enlarged capacity for enlightenment and creativity: intense discussion, debate, and exchange; and networking, sharing and collaboration of ideas, knowledge, and techniques. This requires a concentration of population large enough to generate cultural ferment but not so large as to be oppressive or overwhelming. Such mutual stimulation joins, of course, with the often solitary efforts of artists, scholars, and scientists. Such a creative culture is an ideal, one that is only possible in community. This is the vision of a distant city, a city easier to discern from the outside, the city of which we continue to dream as we are drawn by the promise of urban life. At the same time, it is the vision of a city that is both plausible and possible. "Distant Cities: Thoughts on an Aesthetics of Urbanism," paper given at the International Institute of Applied Aesthetics (IIAA) international summer school in environmental aesthetics and philosophy on Urban Spaces, Everyday Experience and Well-Being, Lahti, Finland, 19 June 2006. [1] (Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), Everybody's Autobiography, ch. 4 (1937).) [2] Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History (New York: The Modern Library, 2005), pp. 128, 186. [3] William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Bk.8, l. 696. Throughout Book 8, Wordsworth reflects the force of both masques when recollecting his first experience of London. He was appalled by "the senseless mass" (l. 670) with its bizarre range of human types ("This Parliament of Monsters" l. 692), where "the senseless mass…unites." (l. 580-584). At the same time, on entering the city he saw London as a "…a thing divine." (l.710 ) and a place of hope and fulfillment:: "… that vast Abiding-place…[4] This section is adapted in part from the Introduction to Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson, eds., The Aesthetics of Human Environments (Peterborough, Ont., Canada: Broadview, 2006). [5] This theme is developed more fully in Arnold Berleant, "Architecture and the Aesthetics of Continuity," and in Allen Carlson, "Existence, Location, and Function: The Appreciation of Architecture," both in Philosophy and Architecture, ed., M. Mitias (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994). [6] Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1960) is the classic source in this area. The entire book is an insightful development of the experiential aspect of the urban environment. Another classic work is Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). Also of interest is Arto Haapala, ed., The City as a Cultural Metaphor: Studies in Urban Aesthetics (Lahti: International Institute of Applied Aesthetics, 1998). [7] Aristotle, Politics [350 B.C.], Book I, Chapter 2. [8] Cf. Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History. [9] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. I, Ch. 8, 1099a. |