A Quest on the Role of Aesthetics in Enhancing Functionality of Urban Planning (original) (raw)
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The history of Western philosophy is marked by the controversial relationship between conceptual though and sensory perception – between how things supposedly are, and how things appear to be. Philosophical aesthetics, in turn, has been in the epicenter of this crisis, striving to find the fundamental principles underlying the connection between the quality and truthfulness of experience. On the basis of such foundationalist accounts, also normative assertions regarding particular experience follow: one has to pay attention to the right aspects of reality and take the right background information into account, if one is to achieve appropriate and justified “aesthetic experience”. Concerning various environments, and especially the urban realm, such line of thought has led to a hegemony of expertise-based evaluation of aesthetic quality. Thinking of the politics of urbanism, this has meant an implicit yet compelling demand for a consensus about the environmental aesthetic issues – a consensus that is “informed” by the expertise, and thus reflects the worldview of the aesthetic elite. From a contemporary perspective such conception is, in short, absurd. Cities are cultural melting pots, and every urbanite has a right to aesthetically satisfactory habitat. Thus urban aesthetics should be primarily aesthetics of diversity – not aesthetics of consensual uniformity.
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