Jale Erzen & Raffaele Milani (eds.) Nature and the City. Beauty is Taking on a New Form. International Yearbook of Aesthetics. Volume 17. Sassari: Edzione Edes 2013
Contents
The city, too, is landscape. We can leave it by going into nature exchanging the urban for the rural, but we can also enter the city to live within the architecture and contemplate its forms. Every architectural structure is a landscape and promotes an educational or paedeumatic relationship between the spirit and the environment. Our gaze and our bodies activate a certain way of contemplating that promotes the interchange between the external perception of the physical world and an internal seeing, which is the psychic perception of the visual image. There is a close relationship between the aesthetic experience of the natural environment and that of the urban landscape. In the same way that humankind lives on the earth so, too, it lives in the city.
The theme could be approached from various perspectives such as ‘nature/culture’, ‘city as human nature’, ‘ecology and the city’, symbols and metaphors, domesticated nature, nature interiorized, parks and natural environments, and other related issues.
About the Editors
Jale Nejdet Erzen (Izmir University), painter and art historian, publications on Ottoman architecture, painting and aesthetics. Vice president of IAA. Founder and long-time president of Turkish Association of Aesthetics, SAN ART. Affiliations, Middle East Technical University-Ankara and izmir University Izmir Turkey. Recent publications on urban aesthetics, contemporary art.
Raffaele Milani is Professor of Aesthetics and the author of numerous books, including The Aesthetic Categories, The Adventure of Landscape and The Faces of Grace. Philosophy, Art, and Nature. Director of the Laboratory of Research on the Cities (Institute for Advanced Studies), University of Bologna. Member of the European Commission at the French Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development on: De la connaissance des paysages à l’action paysagère.
