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Aesthetic Engagement in the City
Aesthetic Engagement in the City
Nathalie Blanc
Translated from French by Miriam Rosen
This article aims at showing how environmental aesthetics relates to
the common environment, the ordinary environment that we discuss,
share, and live in. Aesthetics has primarily been understood in relation
to art and art history, but it has now been emancipated from this
framework of interpretation. In the wake of John Dewey, aesthetics
has become the problem of experience as ordinary sensitivity. One can
even think that it is a question of adequately defining the world of
sensitivity that rests on the faculty of perception: both the capacity to
perceive and the concept of the perceptual commons that follows from
this. The forms that are perceived could then very well be understood
as those we have in common and that we discuss in questions of policy
(formal commons).
Arnold Berleant, in his essay "The Aesthetic Politics of Environment,"
explains:
Such a vision brings us to the need for recognizing and shaping
environment. It may be that the perceptual commons identifies the
establishing conditions of the human environment, that is, of the
human world, and that in shaping environment we are enhancing and
making coherent all its participating constituents.[1]
In the remarks that follow I would like to show just how much aesthetic
engagement, involving active participation in the appreciative process,
sometimes by overt physical action but always by creative perceptual
involvement,[2] concerns urban lives and also, in spite of the eminently
artificial nature of the urban environment, how much it draws on the
depth of the perceptual experience involved. Indeed, if there is
knowledge in our city-dwellers' gaze, it is not this erudition that gives
the aesthetic experiences their depth and liveliness, but the human
capacity to project ourselves into these environments, to feel connected
to them ecologically.
1. Aesthetic engagement in urban space
Today's worldwide urbanization has profoundly transformed humans'
relations with their natural and built environments. The latter is often
considered as an entirely artificial setting, but the presence of
ecological dynamics shows that it remains a living environment for
many species. Experiencing the city, in fact, attests to a natural
dimension that contributes to a renewed appreciation of the urban life
setting. The numerous mobilizations in favor of nature in the city are
accompanied by an appropriation of the urban environment that has
been encouraged by the awareness of overall ecological issues. The
fact that urbanites are expressing a desire to reconnect with nature in
the city is in keeping with the elimination of the subject-object
dichotomy. But before going any further, I would like to make several
remarks about the debates around aesthetic engagement,
environmental aesthetics, and eco-aesthetics.
First of all, it is important to stress the practical experience of the urban
environment and the relationships that make it a framework for
experiencing the city. This practice constitutes the heart of a vital
process that we can term environmentalization, that is to say, the
creation of environments proper to the human being. The sensory
materiality of the city contributes to this. Consequently, the
representation of the environment is the result of a process involving
keen aesthetic engagement. The individuals and communities sharing
such aesthetic engagement do not dissociate the urban experience (as
something appreciative, creative, central, and representational) from
the production of the urban environment. Giving the urban setting its
full meaning, this aesthetic engagement brings into play a learning
experience, narratives, visions, landscapes, and panoramas.
Second, this experience of the city has recently taken a new turn that
might be termed aesthetic and environmental. City-dwellers have
gradually become aware not only of the importance of nature in the
urban setting but also of the environmental issues arising from the
damages caused by human activities, locally and globally. This growing
awareness, through mobilizations, has gradually produced a change in
the shaping of the city and has contributed to the creation of a new
urban aesthetic (especially visible in eco-neighborhoods and other such
experiments). In short, the aesthetic experience of the city is not
limited to what has been constructed but includes living environments
as well.
Third, the idea of aesthetic engagement involves an active experience
so that the aesthetic experience of environment increases the value of
the environment and provides an opportunity to talk about it and about
oneself at the same time. By simultaneously enhancing the self and the
environment or a particular aspect of it, aesthetic engagement
constitutes a recognition of oneself in the environment.[3]
Fourth, the perceptual habits governing our daily lives blot out part of
the spectacular, monumental nature of the built city in favor of a
singular syncopated experience that tends to be associated with urban
rhythms. To cite one example, a contemporary analysis of aesthetic
engagement inevitably refers to an experiential framework caught
between the extremes of mobility and immobility. This gives the city
and its different urban spaces an uncertain appearance, like a kind of
hesitation waltz between the extreme fixity of the spaces as setting and
the great fluidity of the processes – a phenomenon that is tied at once
to contemporary capitalism and a desire to make urban spaces
physically safe. Such a reading takes into account phenomena of
mobility (roads and motorways, flows of data and persons, etc.),
regardless of the speed, as well as relations between the built and the
natural, and the tangible and the intangible. The particular aesthetic
that emerges foregrounds the inhumanity of the situations encountered
(from the high-speed motorways of urban networks to the traffic jams
of the city taken as machine). All the same, the spread of mobility
networks comes up against local and/or environmental resistances that
take inspiration from novel forms of action to defend precious or
endangered environments and species.
At the micro level, the city proclaims itself the site of friendly
movement, such as flâneurs, improvised byways, and shortcuts.
Various sources of legitimacy are invoked: pollution, the need to slow
down, new perceptions of the urban landscape, all sorts of leitmotifs in
remarks about the need for a “friendlier” aesthetic perception of the
city, as well. In less than twenty years, we have gone from the
hegemony of the automobile, in Western cities at least, to the
renaissance of so-called friendly transport and the re-emergence of
figures until now lost in modernity: the pedestrian, the cyclist, even
the farmer.
This trend opposes two forms of disengagement. The first is tied to the
professionalization and highly technical process of urban planning,
which has altered the sensory features of the city and prohibited many
customs and practices (sleeping on the grass, savoring the odor of
springtime, watching the stars, feeding the birds, etc.). The second
form of disengagement comes from the privatization and
commodification of the “public” space, where a significant portion of the
road network is reserved for automobiles, advertising, and various
means of blocking and closing off the space.
Here it must also be emphasized that the aesthetic experience, whether
individual or collective, reflects forms of engagement in the
environment that lead to understanding it in such a way as to resist
normative injunctions concerning our ordinary behaviors. In this sense,
turning the environment upside down means doing the same to
ourselves. City-dwellers and their environment are closely
interdependent on a conceptual level, which might be qualified as
cultural ecology, and they perceive the depth of this
interdependence. Thus, the beauty of neglected urban neighborhoods
claimed by certain residents raises questions of ethics, individual
dignity, and environmental justice.
The issue here is to elaborate an alternative way of understanding
environmental processes. This alternative path rejects the social
constructionism that endows societies and individuals with a kind of
pure power to shape the environment. It also rejects a kind of
naturalism or realism that would grant scientific objectification a higher
power for revealing reality. This alternative path draws on research
dealing with agency and intra-action. To begin by explaining these
terms, we can say that the on-going relations human beings maintain
with their environments lead them to jointly construct and elaborate a
shared world as a frame of reference.[4] Aesthetic engagement is a
powerful means of shaping environments. Consequently, it is no longer
possible to understand a given event without including the
observational setup and even the ways in which the observation, the
environment, and the actors are constructed. A few examples will allow
us to illustrate the way aesthetic engagement accompanies thinking
about the city.
2. The cockroach in the city: a shady animal
The first example deals with a truly urban creature, the
cockroach. Interdisciplinary research on the population dynamics of
this species in three French cities: Paris, Lyons, and Rennes, have
demonstrated the usefulness of aesthetics to characterize the behaviors
it sets off. The cockroach (or Blatta, to use its scientific name) is
specifically urban because, like other increasingly numerous animals, it
profits from the ecological conditions provided by the modern city
(constant, year-round heat in buildings, moisture, abundant hiding
places, and the presence of food). In this sense, we are studying the
ecology and ethology of this species of insect by situating it in a context
that has not often been studied, that of the representations and
practices it engenders.
This pioneering study, in both its form and content, has led to
appreciating the significance of the aesthetics of the cockroach and the
practices that characterize our reactions to it. In addition to bringing
out its formal qualities and the way it is perceived (a dark insect with
many feet, highly mobile, taking refuge in dirty places, fleeing human
beings and light), the aesthetic experience of this creature includes a
large place for the imagination. The same imagination is brought to
bear on the aesthetics of the neighborhood and the people living there.
This kind of insect contributes to a debate that makes its presence an
element full of meaning, as an indication, for example, of the
stigmatization of disadvantaged neighborhoods in which they
proliferate.
A woman who used to live in the countryside thus conveys the shame
she feels through this account of her life in an urban housing block:
People weren't used to seeing us in this kind of environment. That's
how you discover who your friends are. It's the same for the
building. People say, “Do you see where you're living, how it smells,
what the people are like, their color?” For me, it was clear, I warned
the people who were coming here: “There are cockroaches, if that
bothers you, you leave, and if it doesn't bother you, you stay.”
Her way of dealing with the cockroaches stems from a broader struggle
to adjust to a place that represents the “slum belt” and the behavior of
some of the residents (reciprocal intolerance, irresponsibility,
etc.). She is trying to improve her living conditions.
People imagine that the animal is dark and associate it with building
technology: the plumbing, the interstices between buildings, all kinds
of crevices constitute its “home.” This is where it settles, takes refuge
when someone chases it, lies low in preparation for invading the nooks
and crannies of private space. In other words, it is a shady animal
taking up residence in the recesses of the everyday.
By extension, this animal of the shadows represents the foreigner, the
other, who, in these housing blocks in the south of Rennes, a French
city in Brittany with some 292,000 inhabitants, may be seen as a
problem. As one of the women queried explains: "One year, we came
back from vacation and the walls were crawling. That must have come
from somewhere. People say it's because of the Arabs. Where it
comes from and how it got there, but I don't really know...." Two
reasons are advanced: first, the insect is dark and likes the night, and
second, it likes heat: "I've never studied the cockroach's
behavior. I've just noticed that we didn't see any in the daytime and
that it comes out in the evening.
Once I was in Tunisia and went into a store and there were
[cockroaches]. It seems that there are a lot of them in warm
countries." These two features of the animal serve to associate it with
the foreigner who, in France, comes from the South and has an olivecolored skin. In Man and The Natural World, Keith Thomas offers a
striking example of this.[5] The author analyzes the exclusion affecting
animals and parts of humanity between the 16th and 19th
centuries. He cites a letter written in 1879 by "an animal-lover whose
house has been overrun by black beetles: “I hate making war even
upon black beetles,” it runs, “they have as much right to live as black
Zulus. But what can one do in either case?”
The metaphorical dimension of the approach to the cockroach also
demonstrates the power of aesthetic engagement. The metaphorical
universe, a bridge suspended over reality, brings out the latter's
illusory depth. The judgment that confers greater importance on one
metaphor or another, to the point that some of them, like the sunset,
seem perfectly obvious, recognizes the universality of the aesthetic
experience. The metaphor creates a link with reality, offers the
possibility of increasing the value of certain places: when we attribute
one term to another, we are not simply enhancing the description of
the first but giving it a value. The metaphor increases the value of an
imaginative, poetic way of grasping the real; it manifests an awareness
of relationships uniting us with the environment.
By way of example, the etymology of the word cockroach in French –
cafard – is a marvellous tracer of the metaphorical construction of
relationships between human beings and things. The two terms used to
designate this insect in French, the scientific name Blatta and the
common name cafard, bring out the fact that both refer to its nocturnal
habits.[6] Indeed, cafard (1589) is probably borrowed from the Arabic
kāfir, "unbeliever." The pejorative suffix –ard replaced the original
ending and the word was adopted with the religious sense of "poser" or
"hypocrite" employed polemically in the sixteenth century, especially
during France's religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. It
seems that the everyday meaning of Blatta (blatte in French), attested
from 1542, is a metaphorical use of "religious hypocrite" now applied to
a dark-colored animal hiding from the light. This meaning was initially
regional (Normandy, Berry) but spread into French as a whole by the
nineteenth century. The term blatte, from the Latin blatta, which
covers various insects "fleeing the light" (Pliny), follows the same
lines. Through the intermediary of scientific Latin, the naturalists of the
second half of the eighteenth century established Blatta as a genus of
cockroaches. The animal's night-time habits thus play a large role in
the representations and practices surrounding it, as demonstrated by
many literary texts (where the cockroach swarms, threatens, should be
exterminated, renders uncomfortable, etc.).
3. Natural spaces in the city: sensory experience and scientific
knowledge
Second, studies attempting to characterize people's relationships to
nearby patches of nature, and more specifically, to the greenways in
the greater Paris area, have shown that sensory, aesthetic engagement
permits the richness of nature to be characterized other than by the
use of scientific terms that usually attest to particular
knowledge. Thus, if neither the ecological dimension of biodiversity nor
the spatial dimension of the continuity is clearly perceived, do we still
have to conclude that there is no link between the attachment
mentioned above and the existing biodiversity? Several questions from
the survey addressed the users' sensory perceptions in these
spaces. On the basis of the findings, these perceptions bring out an
ecological dimension that, even if it is not consciously defined, is
reflected nonetheless in the interest these spaces generate. The
presence of animals, for example, is important: no fewer than 88% of
the sample state that they see animals. Even if we remove replies
concerning pets such as cats and dogs, there are still 65% of the
replies mentioning birds, more than 30% citing different kinds of
mammals, 5% mentioning fish and nearly 3% talking about
insects. On the average, users thus declare that they have seen
between two and three animals and cite a total of nearly eighty species.
Vegetal diversity is also perceived. With regard to trees, 70% of those
surveyed indicated that they have distinguished several species, with
half of them able to cite at least two. The percentages are slightly lower
for grasses (52% of users identified several kinds), with a total of
nearly eighty herbaceous plant species named by those surveyed. This
attention paid to animal and vegetable species is also part of the
attractiveness of these spaces, and even more interestingly, of the
well-being they may generate. Forty-two per cent of the respondents
declared that they heard pleasant sounds and 39% that they smelled
pleasant odors. This feeling is directly tied to biodiversity: the pleasant
sounds primarily come from animals (72%), and secondarily from
vegetation or water (13%), while the odors depend above all on plants
(69%). Sounds and odors related to biodiversity thus contribute
directly in the well-being felt in these greenways, as well as the sites'
"aesthetic quality" that is cited among the terms best describing these
spaces, just after "calm" and "verdure." We thus observe a profound
difference between the knowledge of biodiversity (practically nonexistent) and its perception that constitutes a large part of the
attraction felt for these spaces. The role of these sensory perceptions
as "gateways" to a greater awareness of biodiversity ultimately brings
out the importance of the places, considered both from the standpoint
of their biological diversity and from that of their aesthetic qualities as
landscapes.
4. The experience of illness: rediscovering the senses
Third, aesthetic engagement helps to treat the symptoms of today's
illnesses. In terms of the link with nature, this does not just involve a
spiritual reconnection but everything affecting city-dwellers, directly
and physically.
Here, the University Hospital in the north-eastern French city of Nancy
offers an extremely interesting case in its "therapeutic garden" created
by the hospital in 2008 for patients suffering from Alzheimer's
disease. Conceived within the logic of horticultural therapy, the "Art,
Memory and Life Garden," as it is called, brings together elements
stimulating the cognitive mechanisms of Alzheimer's patients. To that
end, it is divided into four sections evoking the classical elements: air,
earth, water, and fire.[7] The idea is to mobilize all the senses: sight,
through the colors and landscapes; hearing, through the sounds of the
fountains and sound sculptures; touch, through the plants; smell,
through the scents and fragrances of the flower beds. Memory,
language, and emotion are solicited by the cycle of the seasons and
exchanges with the support staff. Strolling in the garden also provides a
spatial and temporal frame of reference. Because it is outdoors and
accessible to visitors, it is a place of openness and thus of mediation.
5. The senses and science
A final example concerning atmospheric pollution demonstrates how the
capacity of aesthetic engagement for enhancing the value of everyday
experience is such that the scientific knowledge that might be
associated with it is sometimes not even mentioned. The study in
question was based on nearly sixty semi-structured interviews
concerning ordinary residents' practices and representations with
regard to air pollution in the eastern French city of Strasbourg. Half of
the sample was composed of individuals suffering from asthma or
allergies to grass pollen, following the principle of the "case-control"
study widely used in epidemiology. Two interviews with heads of the
local Association for the Monitoring and Study of Atmospheric Pollution
(ASPA, the organization that officially monitors air quality in the Alsace
Region), as well as a study of ASPA articles in the press, complemented
the survey. These elements were then compared with measures of air
quality indoors and outdoors carried out by physicians and
chemists. The findings of this study may be summarized in three main
points:
1- The individuals queried paid little attention to information about air
pollution. They relied on sense information (odor, sight, noise) to
construct their understanding of the phenomenon.
2- The standard, objective scientific information disseminated about air
quality by the ASPA was quite remote from the residents' empirical,
sensory knowledge of air pollution. This was reinforced by an
attachment to a concrete social context with which they identified. The
opposition between these two spheres of knowledge about the physicochemical phenomena is striking.
3- For the city-dwellers, the practical form of involvement against
pollution is a way of linking it symbolically to other environmental
phenomena. Some of those surveyed believed, for example, that the
vegetation protected them from pollution.
Such reasoning was based less on scientific knowledge than on the
feeling that greenery purifies and that the "garden" it suggests –
Paradise in many religious cultures – could shelter them from the
pollution they considered to be a product of unnatural human
activities. We can thus see that the cultures of nature, relying on an
engaged aesthetic perception of the environment, play a fundamental
role in understanding that environment and, consequently, on the
practices people follow.
6. Conclusion
If it is essential to take aesthetic engagement into account in urban
development, it is just as necessary to remain critically vigilant about
the methods and objectives of this integration. Indeed, today's
decision-makers and developers do take aesthetic experience into
consideration; but it nonetheless contributes essentially to an
aestheticization of the environment that favors a spectacular vision of
the city. But is it not possible to think of the city as an experience of
discontinuity and syncopation? The light used to create striking nighttime images of places that become impossible to miss, the greenery or
the mix of city and nature all contribute to turning the city into a
spectacle. The objective is to create hypnotic images of the urban
space, to capture the tourist's eye, to produce instantaneity and
silence, "ghostliness," or images that, coming back to haunt us,
obliterate the reconstituted fluidity of the different experiences.
The city also becomes a mirror, a place reflecting a singular condition, a
looking-glass. Urban policies, notably in France, tend to multiply
sensory experiences to create a backdrop. (The "Paris-Plages" artificial
beach is an example of this). Thus, the setting is increasingly
understood as an attempt to improve urban well-being. The
importance assumed by quality of life is symptomatic of this
situation. Public authorities, but also representatives of civil society,
are expressing a new demand for well-being that is deemed essential to
the urban life of cities. It thus marks the transition from an urban
aesthetic (space as setting) to an urban aesthesis or sense perception
(urban environment as atmosphere), from a space of decors to a space
of well-being. Urban strategies thus reflect this shift toward an
ecological urbanism in the sense of a multitude of possible
experiences. Certain places in the city would be able to produce
emotions or new aesthetic experiences. It should be noted, however,
that representatives of civil society, such as community garden
movements, consider this environmental approach as a change of
lifestyle. Nonetheless, these various changes tend to enlarge the place
for the sensory and the living in systems in order to increase the value
of the urban environment.
Do our bodies now contribute to the environmental fashioning of urban
space?[8] The "sensorial" standards thus being created are now
integrated into environmental policies, town-planning, and
"landscaping" practices where artists participate as well. In a broad
sense, the development of these ecological events plays a de facto role
in producing public space. This involves, first of all, ejecting inhabitants
deemed undesirable, whether these are living species, such as pigeons,
or the homeless, who are prevented from staying in the protected
urban space. Second, the multiplication of sensory experiences in that
space and the creation of a living environment that meets city-dwellers'
demands for leisure activities underscore the theses of aesthetic
capitalism:[9] capital is invested and produced in the commodification
of the urban environment. The production of a green environment is
part of the branding of the product "ecology" that is appropriated by
capitalists and urban policy-makers to inject dynamism into a society
keen on consuming new experiences. For the cities' political leaders
and technical experts, the artist often appears to be the means of
rehabilitating damaged or ailing environments in the "green"
imagination of an ecology-oriented society. Navigating between local
development and political manipulation, the artist offers the potential of
a new reading or experience of the sites. The urban space, formerly
dedicated to specific urban functions (services, production, etc.),
becomes the very locus of experimentation and the creation of new
events. Animals, vegetation, air, and climate are all part of this
rereading of the city.
Nathalie Blanc nathali.blanc@wanadoo.fr
Nathalie Blanc is a Director of Research in Geography in the French
National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS – UMR 7533 Ladyss). Her
research fields include nature in the city and environmental aesthetics.
She has published five books and numerous papers, including also in
2012,"From environmental aesthetics to narratives of change"
Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. 10 (2012)
http://www.contempaestetics.org/newvolume/pages/journal.php.
Published on December 30, 2013.
Endnotes
[1] Arnold Berleant, "The Aesthetic Politics of Environment,"
in Aesthetics beyond the Arts, New and Recent Essays (Ashgate, 2012,
p. 187).
[2] Aesthetics is returned to its etymological origins by stressing the
primacy of sense perception, sensible experience, and perception itself
was reconfigured to recognize the mutual participation of all sensory
modalities, including kinesthetic sensibility.
[3] A. Honneth, La réification. Petit traité de théorie critique. (Paris:
NRF essais, Gallimard, 2007).
[4] K. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics And the
Entanglement of Matter And Meaning (Durham NC: Duke University
Press, 2007). See also A. Gell, Art and Agency. An Anthropological
Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1998).
[5] Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in
England 1500-1800, (London: Penguin, PP History PB, 1991)
[6] Translator's note: The English 'cockroach' is also a borrowed word,
apparently taken from the Spanish name for the same insect,
cucaracha, and anglicized into cock + roach.
[7] Horticultural therapy entails a comprehensive practical
rehabilitation of the individual through gardening activities adapted to
different kinds of handicaps (physical, sensory, mental, or multiple). It
may serve as a preventive practice or as a form of therapeutic
education.
[8] G. Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1966).
[9] O. Assouly, Le capitalisme esthétique. Essai sur l"indus-trialisation
du goût (Paris: Cerf humanités, 2008).