Rancière, Aesthetics and the Politics of the City-Scale - Joe Blakey

Описание: This chapter explores how Rancière’s aesthetic framework can help overcome an impasse around the scale debate within human geography—namely around scale’s relative position to ontology—and in turn provide insights for rethinking the city-scale in urban studies. In particular, it identifies Rancière’s concept of the “distribution of the sensible” as a way beyond this impasse, framing scales like the city-scale as part of a politically contestable, common-sense ordering of space. This perspective sees scales, and by extension the city-scale, not as fixed but as contingent social constructs that can in turn shape society and materiality. Rather than limiting political entry points, scales such as the city-scale are often the object of political struggle. Moreover, concerns that scholars can erroneously presume the city-scale, or scales more generally, can be avoided by following Rancière and focusing on moments of dissensus, where imaginaries about scale are challenged with alternatives “on the ground”.

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Aesthetics and the City engages aesthetics to explore the role of the city in urban experience. Drawing on diverse theories and global case studies, this edited collection examines how aesthetics relates to how cities and urban spaces are perceived, organised, and transformed.

This book celebrates and ponders the wide diversity of aesthetic approaches within urban studies, noting that the way aesthetics is understood impacts what can be understood about cities and the urban order more generally. In its most general sense, aesthetics refers to our sensuous relation to the world. It invariably figures in how we make sense of the city and ourselves—bound to how urban life is experienced imaginatively, materially, socially, culturally, and politically. In an era where scholars have expressed concern at epistemological city-centrism, aesthetics is proposed as a versatile concept through which the centrality of the city to urban thought can be assessed. The book also explores how aesthetics intersects with a range of tangential concepts including power, the political, art, and affect. Ultimately it makes the case that this diverse ensemble of approaches to aesthetics can enable scholars to understand the city and its enduring relevance to urban thought.

This book focuses on the concepts of "aesthetics" and "the city" and will appeal to scholars and students in urban studies, human geography, planning, politics, and sociology.