Encountering Urban Places

The aesthetics of urban life are a curious quality, one that is both highly visible and hidden, both openly effective and subtly influencing. These aesthetics participate in the production of places; to the way it is built, to its resisting materiality, to its image in people's minds, to advertising and to the way people look and act in the place. Exploring the aesthetics, images and material design of urban life, this book offers analytic insights into contemporary cities - places in which social order, identities and exclusions are constantly brought into being, maintained and transformed. It shows how photography, maps and videos, play a crucial role in creating aesthetic dimensions into urban studies. This transdisciplanry approach draws on the full spectrum of the visual representation: the artist-photographer's perspective, the systematic photography of the anthropologist, photography as a tool for the analysis of social processes, the capturing of architecture as seen when driving-by, the in-depth interpretation of video clips, and the use of maps and drawings both as ideals and analytic tools. In contrast to other publications where images tend to be uncommented add-ons to the text, these texts tie the realm of the visual directly and explicitly into the exploration of urban space.