Urban Aesthetics: Beauty and Interestingness of the City

This paper develops an empirically informed aesthetics of the city by introducing interestingness as acomplementary category to beauty. While beauty has long defined architectural value throughharmony and rightness, urban life also requires experiences of dissonance, openness, and surprise.Contrasting Scruton’s notion of architectural beauty with Mumford’s conception of the city as secularand dramatic, I side with Mumford’s more open understanding of urban life.Conceptually, I propose a middle way that neither centers exclusively on beauty nor simply endorsesa pluralist aesthetics of the city, as is common in contemporary philosophy of the city. To capture thepsychology of urban life, I focus on aesthetic emotions that help explain the experiences of beauty,interestingness, and belonging. Methodologically, I likewise argue for a middle way that combinesphilosophical reflection with empirical research on the psychology and neuroscience of the builtenvironment. Taken together, the paper outlines an urban-theoretical framework that understandsurban public space, in particular, as an aesthetic interface linking perception, affect, and cognition toforms of civic participation. Beauty provides coherence; interestingness sustains vitality. Together,they define the aesthetic and psychological livability of the city.KeywordsAesthetic emotions; Affordances; Beauty; Empirical aesthetics; Interestingness; Neurourbanism,Urban Aesthetics