Book launch: The New Urban Aesthetic

Cities are key sites for the reproduction of global capitalism, and urban branding is central to this transformative dynamic. In the 21st Century, cities are also being profoundly reconfigured by the deployment of many kinds of digital technologies. Both of these shifts entrain sensory bodily experiences. This digitally mediated reconfiguration of what cities feel like is what this book terms the "new urban aesthetic".

Join us for an evening of discussion on this important work with the authors and special guests from the University of Oxford, Brunel University London, LSE, UCL Geography and the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment:

Prof Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences. She is the author of Feminism and Geography (Polity, 1993), Doing Family Photography (Ashgate, 2010) and Visual Methodologies (Sage, fifth edition 2022); she is also the editor of a new collection of essays on Seeing the City Digitally, available open access from Amsterdam University Press here . She has written many papers on images, visualising technologies and ways of seeing in urban, domestic and archival spaces. Her current research interests focus on contemporary digital visual culture and how cities are seen and experienced.

Prof Monica Degen is a Reader in Cultural Urban Sociology in the Political and Social Sciences Department at Brunel University London. Her research focuses on the politics of space with a particular interest in the ways sensory, temporal and emotional dimensions underpin urban culture and politics. In 2016 she was awarded the prestigious British Academy Fellowship to research ‘Timescapes of Urban Change’. Monica has worked on international projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy and the Economic and Social Research Council. More recently she has been working on developing digital tools to capture the sense of place of cities and the ways in which urban environments are stratified by power relations. See www.sensorysmithfield.com and www.sensorycities.com.

Prof Ayona Datta researches on postcolonial urbanism, smart cities, gender citizenship and regional futures at the Geography Department of UCL.  Her research is set in the ethos of co-production with grassroots communities using digital/mapping, visual and participatory research methods to develop and build gendered capacity in the digital and urban margins. In the last 5 years, she has received over £3m funding from European Research Council (Advanced Grant), AHRC, ESRC, British Academy and Swiss National Science Foundation to pursue groundbreaking research on digital urban transformations in the global south and their impacts on everyday social, material and gendered geographies. 

Prof Myria Georgiu researches and teaches on migration and urbanisation in the context of intensified mediation at the Department of Media and Communication in the LSE. In research conducted across 6 countries over the last 20 years, she has been studying communication practices and media representations that profoundly, but unevenly, shape meanings and experiences of citizenship and identity. Professor Georgiou is the author and editor of four books and more than sixty peer reviewed publications. Her work has been published in English, French, Portuguese, Japanese, and Greek. She has also worked as a consultant for a number of regional and international organisations, most importantly the Council of Europe in three different projects.

Prof Christoph Lindner is Dean of the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment and Professor in Urban Studies at University College London. In his research and teaching, Christoph is particularly interested in the interrelations between cities, globalization, and issues of social-spatial inequality, which he approaches from a comparative, transnational perspective. Before joining The Bartlett, he was Dean of the College of Design at the University of Oregon from 2016-2019. Previously, he was Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where he created and led the ASCA Cities Project, co-founded the Amsterdam Centre for Globalization Studies (ACGS), and served as founding Director of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA). From 2010-2014, he was Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), a research institute and graduate school focused on the interdisciplinary study of contemporary theory, culture, and society.