Arnold Berleant

CULTIVATING
AN URBAN AESTHETIC

For most people the city, particularly the industrial city, is the
antithesis of the aesthetic. While there may be sections that have
their charm, trucks and automobiles have conquered the urban
streets and pedestrians scurry before them like vanquished before
a victor. Gardens and parks are occasional oases amidst the stone
desert of concrete and asphalt, but the dominating features of
urban experience remain mechanical and electronic noise, trash,
monolithic skyscrapers, and moving vehicles. The personal and
intimate are swallowed up in mass structure and mass culture. And
the human place-precarious and threatened.
This is no exaggerated picture but a realistic portrayal of the
urban environment that is experienced in the great industrial
centers of the world and, to a lesser degree, in smaller regional
cities. Urban centers offer important gains, to be sure, primarily in
the ability of such concentrations of wealth and population to
support a cultural life rich in range and variety. But there are
sacrifices, too often decided by those who do not make them, by

1
people whose financial and political power enables them to insulate
themselves against much of the urban dross and to escape
frequently for respite to places of luxury and leisure.
Yet the gains of urban living need not require human sacrifice.
There is no necessary principle of quid pro quo governing industrial
civilization which demands that grace, delight, and beauty be
foregone in the name of material progress. Both city and
civilization originate in the idea of community, and the city still
holds the promise of the classical world as the place where people
become human.
But what is a human, a humanizing city? What are the
conditions for experience which an environment contributes to the
life of its inhabitants and how do these conditions affect the quality
of their experience? We can understand such conditions best, I
believe, through the idea of perceptual awareness. This is the
sensory awareness of a person as an embodied consciousness, an
awareness that resonates within the chambers of history, of the
accrued meanings of a culture, of the social interplay of communal
life, and of personal activities. Such an awareness holds a central
place in the notion of the aesthetic. This signifies far more than
what is beautiful or pleasing; it involves the full range of intrinsic
perceptual as the center of value. Understood i~ this
way, the aesthetic lies at the center of being human and it is the
urban environment that holds the greatest possibility for achieving
it. How is this possible?
In exploring this question, it is important to know what we mean
by a city, for the same term can be applied equally to ancient places
of a few thousand population and to modern metropolitan
agglomerations of many millions. The word is certainly relative,
for qualitative changes in the nature of physical organization and
social life take place concurrently with quantitative ones. It will
serve our purposes best to be most inclusive and consider a city to
be a concentration of people and structures of such size and
complexity that its proportions are no longer intimate but exceed
the daily life activities of most of its inhabitants.
While cities in the Orient, especially China, were often planned
in advance, this was not as frequent in the West where, until early
in this century, it was common for cities to develop by accretion.
In either case, when planning was done, it was usually for special

2
needs, in particular political, military, or religious ones. Trading
colonies and military garrisons required coordination and order to
operate effectively, while sacred cities typically exemplified some
geometrical shape that symbolized the cosmos. Instances of such
cities lead us to the trading city of Naucratis in Egypt in the
seventh century B.C. and to the religious city of Persepolis in
Persia in the sixth, although evidence of planned cities takes us
back far earlier, at least to the temple city of Sakkara in Egypt, cay
2700 B.C.
Different physical layouts developed for different purposes. The
rectangular block units of the ancient Chinese and later of Milesian
planning in Asia Minor facilitated commercial activities and
political control, while the organization of ideal cities was
sometimes circular, a plan that could be of assistance for purposes
of defense but that also had powerful symbolic appeal as a
reflection of cosmic order. These special needs imposed
requirements that determined the organization of the cities that
fulfilled them, set their character, and generated the mood and
quality of the life within ther~.’I
Moreover, while special circumstances did lead to the
construction of planned cities, residential areas within them often
developed with no such guidance, and the bulk of the rural
population that lived in towns and villages received little assistance
from any such rational organization. However, the development of
most towns and cities at the slow pace of pre-industrial technology
allowed for deliberate action, both personal and social, at least in
the case of bourgeois dwellings. Decisions tended to be long range
ones and, while there may not have been bureaucratic reviews,
there prevailed a sense of time as gradual and steady and of the
future as ageless. The slow and regular succession of years joined
with the steadying hand of tradition in a process of balance and
homogeneity to produce the architecture and organization we
admire and study today. What was unsuitable was eliminated by
the attrition of long deliberation or of the vicissitudes of weather
and climate, and what proved itself under those conditions

1 Lewis Mumford, The City in History, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World,
1961, pp. 124, 191-193; Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall,
1974, ch. 11, esp. p. 152.

3
endured. Thus diverse urban textures developed that were layered
over the passage of years in a cumulative process that resulted in
physico-cultural environments, each of which had a high degree of
integration and a distinct identity.
We feel more than curiosity and quaintness in the villages,
towns, and old cities in so many parts of the world. There is a
strong sense of the harmony of time, of place, and of the kind of
movement they generate. There is a feeling of identity, of a place
to which people belong that has a distinctive character with which
even the casual visitor can sense and associate. As with trees of
great age, there is an awareness of a conjunction of past and place,
and so such urban clusters possess the precious quality of human
continuity. It is not surprising that. these are the very qualities we
recognize and seek to preserve in the old cores of most modern
cities, where so much tends to be dismissed and obliterated
through blindness, personal gain, or the expedience of
standardization.

II
Still more may be present than time and history. We experience
cities perceptually as places of vital activity, and the presence of
large numbers of people engaged in a wide range of activities
stands at the center of the urban character. Some cities are
pedestrian cities, where people crowd the streets at most times of
the day and often of the night, producing a prolific mixture of
activity and sensation. Indeed, most important for understanding
the urban aesthetic are the sensory qualities that cities generate.
These are profuse and varied, and not only visual but olfactory,
kinesthetic, and auditory. Urban places produce an exuberance of
sensations, sometimes stimulating, sometimes oppressive. These
sensory environments may be fertile places in which a creative
culture grows, or they may be maelstroms of sensation that
overpower and drown any perceptual sensitivity.
Thus the city, whatever else it may be, is an aesthetic
environment and, like any human environment, it is the product
of human agency. With quickened time, self-conscious perception,
and the lessons of heedless development before us, we have come
to realize that the processes of forming and re-forming this
environment can no longer be abandoned to profit or politics, just

4
as they cannot be left to the geological pace of pre-industrial time
or the geometrical planning of the contemplative mind. How, then,
can urban design features be shaped in ways that will create an
environment that is rich in aesthetic interest and values? How can
the elements of urban experience be coordinated so as to produce
a condition of perceptual awareness that encourages the productive
and vitalizing qualities of collective life-curiosity, interest,
exploration, discovery, wonder? More specifically, how can we
generate the conditions in a city that have occurred in the past
mostly in fortuitous and inconsistent ways, circumstances that
encourage perceptual development, creative activity, and human
satisfaction and fulfillment?
In the past, unguided development had its genius: the city was a
social creation shaped under the discipline of climate, of function,
and of time. Such development has resulted in vernacular
techniques, styles, and structures that both reflect and direct the
social patterns and the ethos of regional cultures. Industrial
technology, however, has loosened most of these constraints.
Building materials are shipped to areas to which they are foreign
and exotic: marble-clad skyscrapers rise in regions of sand or
granite; mobile homes stand beneath groves of evergreens. In the
United States, the ranch house and the colonial stand side by side
in suburban developments across the country. Similar designs are
placed in vastly different conditions whith total disregard of local
climate patterns and are then equipped with powerful systems of
heating and air conditioning to compensate for that disregard.
Standardization and mass distribution bring the same perishable
foods at great cost into the same supermarkets on the same Main
Streets to be prepared in the same kitchens of the same
development houses, irrespective of region, of geography, of season
and climate, and even of nationality.
An identical fate has befallen people. From individual
personalities who associate ourselves with distinctive places, we
too have become standardized items, removable, replaceable,
easily transported and transferred from one location to others. Our
ideas, our wants, even our needs are produced to meet the
requirements of the mass market. It is hard to know how our
patterns of behavior originate, whether they be of work, sex, family
relationships, or recreation, since new modes of thought and action

5
are taken up and exploited by the media so quickly that they lose
their spontaneity and the honesty of their reponse to the conditions
under which they first appeared. We are thus like our environment.
In fact, we are our environment. The Marxist critique of alienation
no longer applies. That analysis holds when people can be
distinguished from their tools, their work, their productive and
social forms, their ideologies. When we are wholly absorbed in and
by these, when we are unified with them into a single
socio-cultural-environmental complex, then there is nothing
foreign to us. The process of adaptation soaks through us to the
bone and we are one with our world. In an earlier epoch this was
a harmonious condition of reciprocal fulfilment of person and
place; in our own age of industrial and electronic technology, it
represents a state of the invisibility and indeed the disappearance
of the individual human factor. The unguided development of the
physico-social city has its sacrificial victim.
Unhappy as this loss of a separate identity may sound, it is not,
in fact, the consequence of pervasive industrialism and a mass
commercial culture. Such unity of person and physico-social place
is the observation that anthropologists and geographers tend to
make about human cultures in general. Our recognition of it now
is a combination of the extreme degree to which human sensibility
has been pressed under present conditions and the contradiction
of this situation with the modern myth of the separateness of the
individual and the social order. The moral issue lies, then, not with
the fact of this unity but in its quality.
There is a contradictoriness, too, in the qualitative experience of
the modern city. Its very combination of exhilaration and
inhospitality makes the city difficult to assess. The city has always
been a vital center of human culture (I use that word in its
anthropological sense) and now, with its size and complexity far
exceeding any previous period, its exemplary character is all the
more brilliant. The modern city is the heart of the social organism,
the central force in the activity of a living society. It is the place
where a society discloses its most visible forms and forces, not just
its commercial, institutional, and social patterns and changes, but
its perceptual forms, as well.
These forms do not appear only in the structures that constitute
the physical city but, perhaps more subtly, in both the arrangement

6
of its physical structures and, most important here, in its sensible
environment. The architecture, parks, and physical plan of a city,
and especially its texture of visual, auditory, lcir~estheti~ sensations,
offer the exemplary social environment of a people. In one sense,
the city is a museum, not a house of past accomplishments shorn
of their roots and their entanglements with the activities from
which they emerged, but a living, participatory, unedited collection
of the social world of a contemporary culture. It is obvious how
store windows are museum cases housing the art and artifacts of a
society and how shops are their special collections. Yet we must
look further to recognize commercial streets as linear markets and
shopping districts as the marketplaces of the local and regional
population. These constitute an urban fair that offers the
excitement of the color, movement, and sounds of a living culture,
a richly qualitative perceptual environment.
Such intensely social activity bears on its face the problems as
well as the marvels of the city. Speaking here only of the qualitative
conditions of modern urban living, there are many less fortunate
aspects. Many of these are common to most industrial cities of the
world and vary considerably in degree, while others are more
specific to certain places. Although these may be well known and
even hopelessly tolerated as unavoidable, they are not less

important or regrettable. The invasion of the city by trucks, buses,

and automobiles has resulted in a barbaric desecration of nearly
every outdoor human place. They have turned urban streets into
perilous places for health as well as safety, often defeating their
very own purpose of rapid movement in a kind of reflexive
self-destruction. Urban squares have been turned into parking lots
and street level façades are barricaded parted vehicles. The
inescapability of air pollution and its immediate harm has received
a great deal of journalistic and somewhat less legislative comment,
but fume-generating machines remain visibly present and most
cities are encased in a carcinogenic mushroom cloud. Furthermore,
noise is invisible and intangible and thus not recorded in
photographs, and it is usually ignored. Yet ambient sound is
inescapable, indoors as well as out. Not only is there the
background drone of traffic and its surface saliencies (to which
must be added the omnipresent lawnmower in the suburbs). There
are also the sounds that subtly subvert the human voice by

7
absorbing it, such as the hum of air conditioners and ventilation
systems and the buzz of fluorescent lights. Perceptual
circumstances like these may be called oppressive, a kind of
environmental oppression, and this can take many forms. There is
architectural oppression from both the intimidating masses of
skyscrapers and the naked, exposure of over-scale plazas,
themselves an interesting dialectical opposition, and from
inhospitable physical surroundings in general. Thermal oppression
occurs from the difficulty of adjusting the temperature level in
public buildings, institutional offices, and hotel rooms. Social
oppression takes many forms, ranging from loud voices and blaring
radios to the constant fear of crime. Most generally, we may suffer
from the oppression of inescapable sensory overloading. Perhaps
the most extreme case is the New York City subway, the oldest and
largest underground rail system, and today the most abyssmal
collective dungeon of industrial devising.

III
Urban perception thus may take many forms, at times
life-enhancing, at times oppressive. It is a rich, often an over
abundant rnélange of perceptual notions, some of which are
positive tor us, some of which are negative. Still, at other times
and places the city provided a harmonious environment, never
without its difficulties and fears, perhaps, yet at its best an
interplay of forces that provide a fertile opportunity for florescence
and fulfilment: Periclean Athens, Elizabethan London (apart from
its low degree of cleanliness), Renaissance Venice, Antwerp in the
sixteenth century, Kyoto during the Heian period. Perhaps a
complete reconciliation of opposing forces is a goal never entirely
realized, and surely the city has its history of ideal projections,
from Plato and Thomas More to the nineteenth century and
present-day utopian communities. Nevertheless, some semblance
of community did develop on occasion from classical times on,
when the city functioned, not as an anarchistic jungle, not as a
battleground for conflicting parties operating by legal or extra-legal
rules, but as a social and physical environment in which
individuals and groups have acted within a confluence of forces
toward mutual fulfilment. This is a condition perhaps more likely

8
found before the modern nation state attempted to submerge and
absorb regional traits and traditions into those of the most
powerful group. And it appeared before modem scientific
technology introduced rapid and disruptive changes into the
texture of urban life and which now, with growing
internationalism, has carried the standardization of products,
institutions, and people to a scope that now moves threateningly
close to becoming universal.
If perception, broadly construed, is the central feature of
experience, how can we understand environmental experience in
its terms? Surely not as a passive receiving of external stimuli. That
legacy of eighteenth-century empiricism has increasingly given way
during the past century and a half, under the combined influence
of scientific and philosophic developments that stress the active
contribution to our experience that we make as perceivers and
actors. Marxism, pragmatism, Gestalt psychology, and existential
phenomenology are some of the intellectual sources that have
contributed to this transformation of perception which is still
incomplete.
These developments have led us to recognize not only our
formative influence in the perceptual process but the difficulty of
defining a boundary between our human presence and our
environment, between ourselves as conscious bodies and the
conditions within which we live and act. We are beginning to
realize that the environment is not a foreign place outside us but
that it is continuous with our bodies, with our selves. Like the
concentric ripples that move out from an object dropped in still
water, our environment rings us as a setting of which we are the
activating center. As vernacular architecture uses local materials
and indigenous designs that evolve over long periods intro forms
that harmonize with the landscape and come to belong to it, so do
we join with other aspects of our urban landscape, take on its
coloration and its contours, respond to its masses, join in its
movement. There is constant pressure toward compatibility
between person and place but it is not always a happy conjunction.
Many of us are like the androgenous lovers in Plato’s Symposium,
searching, however, not to rejoin the severed halves of our bodies
but for the places that will finally complete us and make us whole
again. Some, by good fortune, have not far to look; most must

9
search widely; and there are those few who can shape it to suit
themselves.
These places necessarily include other people, for we are social
animals and the community of others is most attainable
and comprehensive in the urban environment. As an environment,
the city places more in our hands than any other. It is the
pre-eminently human environment, that which is almost entirely
the product of human agency. Although the natural landscape is
human nature, infuenced by human action, from its vegetation and
precipitation to its climate and land surface, the urban landscape
is the pre-eminently human landscape. With a bare nod at major
topographical features, such as great hills and watercourses, the
city is the creation of people. There is almost divine omnipotence
in the way the human animal has shaped masses and open space,
influenced climate, affected wind patterns, exercised mortal power
over the kinds and numbers of inhabitants, from insects and birds
to domesticated animals, including humans. But we are interested
here more in the moral environment than the physical one, in the
climate of values and normative actions that define human society,
and still more in the aesthetic environment than the moral, in the
qualitative sensibility that activates and directs perception. For
whatever else it may be, the city is the aesthetic environment par
excellence.
How does that aesthetic environment show itself? Certainly
beyond physical dimensions and layout, for the city is a perceptual
world, a realm in which the qualitative domain of sensible
awareness is fashioned and in which our encounter with this
domain is directed. Here is a region of mass and space contrived
almost wholly by human agency. The size and placement of
buildings, the order and dimensions of interior spaces, the breadth
and directionality of streets, the location of squares and parks, all
these create a physical setting which determines the opportunities
for people’s movement and the conditions of their interaction.
These are not just physical arrangements; they are physical
presences felt kinesthetically by the body and the senses as inviting
or hostile, intimidating or embracing, oppressive or comfortable,
and all the nuances that lie between these contrasting conditions.
The same is true of the other perceptual aspects of the urban
environment. The ways light and shadow are modulated by the

10
siting of structures, the textures and colors introduced by surfaces,
the materials of roads, buildings, and the choice of plantings, these
qualitative sensory aspects of the environment are equally
significant in forming the urban environment. Similarly with
sounds: cities have their soundscapes, no less apparent for being
intangible, and these occur in the same variety as the other
qualitative features of environments. Industrial sounds, traffic
noise, radios and tape players, and the human voice all contribute
to a three-dimensional auditory texture that is thick as it is broad,
permeates solid walls, and envelopes everything within its realm.
Urban aesthetics thus constitutes the perceptual realm of~ the
city, the ways the city is experienced through a kind of bodily
consciousness by people as thoughtful, perceiving organisms.
Cultural and historical meanings fuse with the data of sensory
awareness to form an almost liquid medium of sensibility. I use

&dquo;sensibility&dquo; in its double significance, referring both to the senses

and to meanings, for perception and import are joined in the
integrity of our experience.
Moreover, as I have already noted, a moral dimension lies
hidden here, for while perception is qualitatively neutral, it is not
morally so. Mass and space occur, howsoever they may be
arranged, and the analysis of their configurations may assume the
quasi-objectivity we associate with science. But whenever people
are present, human values appear and these cannot help becoming
a central concern. As condition for human consciousness and
action, an environment radiates a kind of influence that is not
neutral. Endless variation is possible here, certainly, yet we can
nonetheless discriminate between those environments that enlarge
the awareness of their inhabitants and those that confine and
constrain it, between those that expand human activity and those
that inhibit and discourage it. There is no real mystery here, only
obfuscation, and to eliminate the human perceptual element in
planning as being personal, subjective, intangible, or variable, is to
lose the very point of all decision and action: the meeting of human
needs, including those that are distinctively human.
Environments, then, are a human product, and none more than
the urban environment. Insofar as it forms the conditions for living
and largely directs patterns of behavior and the kinds and qualities
of experience, the environment is suffused with human values.

11
 Yet the modern city is thick, often an overly rich mixture of
a
perceptual activity, some of which leads and extends us, some of
which threatens and denies us. Can we recapture the humanized
aesthetic of the pre-industrial city for the urban world of the
future? How can we locate the qualitative features of exemplary
human environment and guide them toward human ends?
Much modern development has failed here. Political and
economic motives have produced environments that have largely
overlooked the intangibles of perception and the central place of
human experience. It has created false environments,
environments that are urban trompe l’oeil, giving us the illusion of
real places instead of substantial ones that meet real human needs.
What is a false environment? In our late industrial-commercial
societies we suffer from environments that surround us with
surfaces, not contents, that provide images, not substance, and that
therefore fail to satisfy our longing for a place in which we are at
home and to which we belong. This falseness is found most
blatantly in development housing, including luxury developments,
where we are given stock plans, a standard variety of fagades with
virtually identical interiors which bear little relation to each other,
to the site, the region, its history, or the personalities of the people
who inhabit these houses. It is the general condition of the
suburban regions of the industrial world, areas that house a
pervasive dissatisfaction with the order of things. This is more than
personal prejudice: there is a real condition here that has not been
diagnosed or analyzed effectively. What is perhaps more obvious
is that these environments, sometimes oppressive, sometimes
sterile, sometimes demeaning, but always deceptive and false, are
conditions people endure, usually without the least awareness of
what these conditions are and without recognizing that they offend
our humanity and produce a generalized frustration and
unhappiness. Can it be surprising that such a situation would lead
to aggressive behavior or at the very least create a predisposition
toward it? Understanding the significance of these environmental
conditions may help explain both the overt forms of urban violence
and the quieter forms of desperation that populate suburban areas.
On the other hand, the notion of a false environment allows us
to see, in contrast, what a humane environment would be like.
Such an environment would reduce or eliminate such destructive

12
 feelings and responses and encourage us to direct our energies in
ways that are creative and fulfilling. It would be based on the
recognition that the environment does not lie around us but is
continuous and integrated with us, an idea that must replace the
notion of the environment as external and apart, which is the
theoretical source of the false environment.

IV
How can we characterize a true place, the kind of authentic
environment where people not only belong but are at home, joining
in a domestic attachment of affection and fulfilment? Where can
we turn to find such a place? Perhaps it is possible to glimpse a

genuine environment, one that is part of its time, place, and

people, in those pre-industrial towns that have survived two
centuries of transformative change without losing their personal
character. We may sense some of its qualities in those nineteenth-
century cities that did not surrender their human proportions and
appeal in the interests of industrialization. Again, signs of an
authentic environment may persist in the old districts of modern
metropolises. And fictional projections of ideal cities can illustrate
,
features not present but thought to be desirable in the future.
People are now trying to reach out to such places,not sure where
to find them orwhat to look for. The current widespread interest
in the preservation and restoration of historic buildings and
districts acknowledges the environmental values that places from
the past embody for us. While this may romanticize that past, there
is more here than mere nostalgia. There is a recognition that social
history is associated with particular locations and that places are
inseparable from people and events. This is valued all the more as
human qualities continue to be bulldozed away, for most new
building continues the present trend toward increasing
monumentality, usually coupling it with nondescript
standardization and impersonality that cannot be behind a
polished, &dquo;high tech&dquo; look. Such is the typical case from eastern
Europe to the western hemisphere. The impulse of post-modern
architecture to recapture the individual traits of past places is an
effort toward the same end by combining variety of detail with
historical allusion. Its syncretism, however, offers more a collage

13
 of stylistic features from architectural history than a place that
generates its own authentic character.
Indeed, the retention of the past, whatever form it take, is
ultimately a futile grasp at a social condition that is no longer our
own. We need to feel our history by having it around us, but we
cannot retain districts or towns unchanged without turning them
into lifeless museums by a kind of architectural taxidermy, as in
Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Williamsburg, Virginia and their
numerous progeny. Nor can we manufacture the qualities of a
humanized place by merely imitating past styles. Such efforts
attempt to seize important values, yet we have grave difficulty
.

translating those values into forms that will work in a mass

post-industrial society. Is there some way we can recapture and
enhance the qualitative individuality and proportions, the
human-scale aesthetics of the old city?
Simply retaining its outward features is not a solution. Take the
square or place, for example. As the pedestrian has disappeared
from vast areas of the city, the urban square has become a parking
lot, as in the Grand’ Place in Brussels; a traffic circle, as in the
Place de la Concorde in Paris; a center for dr~.~ dealing, as in
Washington Square Park in New York. Yet even the traditional
square has not always been a place for human activity, except :.

peripherally in the most literal sense. People have typically been

relegated to benches arranged along the boundaries and edges of
spaces designed as visual patterns to be appreciated from a
distance or for the rational appeal of their geometrical order. The
great exception, of course, is the most famous and successful
square of all, the Piazza San Marco in Venice, for centuries a
model place for social life, and new and old squares alike have
emulated it.
The fountain is perhaps a more powerful traditional example of
an urban design feature that retains its human significance. One of
the most ancient of social centers, the fountain has retained its
magnetism, drawing people through circles of traffic to its edges
and even inside. From the village well to the water that spouts,
gushes, flows and falls at the heart of modern cultural centers and
shopping plazas, the fountain continues to exercise a magical hold
on us.
Urban sounds, as we have noticed, are less apparent but quite

14
as pervasive as any feature of the city. Present at the very
beginnings of human
society, the history of social sounds has only
begun to attract scholarly attention.’ It is possible to offer a
taxonomy of urban sounds that points up, perhaps better than a
consideration of any other environmental feature, the changes and
needs of humanized urban design.
Natural sounds are least distinctive of the city. They were
present before people came to dwell on any particular site and have
accompanied their habitation: the rushing of wind, the aural
pointilism of rain, bird calls, perhaps the sound of running water.
While natural, these sounds have been influenced by city structure.
Cities create winds and we hear their passage through trees, around
the corners of buildings, funnelled down the canyon-like streets
between skyscrapers. Trees, parks, gardens, streets, and squares all
influence the presence of birds and selectively encourage some
species and not others, the most hardy survivors in United States
cities being the English sparrow, the starling, and the pigeon. Rain
has a repertory of tunes and our structures become sounding
boards and resonating chambers on which it plays-automobile
roofs, windows, housetops. Even puddles produce their distinctive
song. Streams and rivers may flow through a city, but the first are
generally channelled through underground conduits and the latter
usually make little sound. Yet city streets create their own brooks
and ponds in a heavy rain, and they may offer an auditory
accompaniment to our walking and driving. Although we do not
often associate natural sounds with cities, they are nonetheless
present and important.
Organic sounds are more obvious: the cries of street vendors,
fragments of conversation, sounds of children’s play, a parent’s
calls, the murmur or roar of crowds, the animal sounds of barking
dogs, wailing cats, horses’ hooves. These are the direct sounds of
life and whatever else they convey, they offer proof that living
things are actively present.
Such direct sounds of life, however, are generally overpowered
by mechanical sounds. Trucks, automobiles, buses, trains,
motorcycles, airplanes, chain saws, and construction equipment fill
the air with noise and exhaust fumes that are insistent and

2 Cf. R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World, New York, Knopf, 1977.

15
inescapable, polluting two senses at once. There are bells, whistles,
and sirens, wheels and tires against the pavement. All contribute
to a mostly pitchless cacophony in outdoor spaces that surrounds
and conquers the human voice.
Finally there are the new sounds of the electronic age: horns,
loudspeakers, public address systems, radios, tape players,
television. More and more these exert their presence. Less
impersonal than the sounds of the machine, they are only falsely
the sounds of people. Will these constitute the aural ambience of
the city of the future, insistent and insinuating, giving us the
appearance of human presence behind which are nothing but the
chips and wires of robotic electronics?
How can we recover the human presence in sound? Can we
create an aural climate in which the voice reasserts its preeminence
so that what we hear are the direct sounds of people and not of
machines or speaker systems? The auditory dimension of the
perceptual environment is as penetrating as it is pervasive. Once
we include our bodies in what we understand by the environment,
we must acknowledge that sound has no less a physical presence
than space or mass, and directing its forms and proportions is
equally a part of the design of environment.
This discussion points up certain essential features of the urban
aesthetic. Squares, fountains, and sounds are aspects of the urban
environment whose long history and continued importance
provide clues for a modern aesthetic of the city. Spaces that
require the human presence for their completion, places for social
gathering, the sounds of people’s activities are among its essential
components. And as sounds are not local but spread far in all
directions, so experience of the city is not an encounter with a
the
separate, isolated object from which we can set ourselves apart. It
is a perceptual plenum, a sensory realm filled with meanings and
associations which we enter and in which we participate. Perhaps
we can think of the city as a continuous medium of varying density
in which people are but a single component among many.
Buildings, streets, squares, parks, vehicles, sounds, textures,
temperature, smells, humidity, wind, color-these are part of a
long catalog of perceptual objects and qualities that join with the
active human presence to constitute the living environment we call
the city. In this respect the city may be a paradigm of all art. More

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strikingly and insistently than in any other case, the aesthetic of
the city is an aesthetic of engagement. Is is a condition of
perceptual activity and response that so takes up the sensibilities
of the person that we have continuity rather than separation,
involvement rather than isolation and distance. Each becomes the
complement of the other: the city of its inhabitants, its people of
their city.’
This is not a paean of praise to the city. The mutual fashioning
of person and place that is central to the urban process is a thick
and complex process, often compared to a drama on a universal
stage.4 The endless succession of episodes that constitute this urban
theater is perhaps more tragic than comic. Yet unlike the
traditional stage, it is a theater without spectators, only
participants. Nor is its space as well defined and its place and time
as organized. Once ~~~ recognize these traits, it is easier to
understand the aesthetic character of urban life and how shaping
that life requires both the artist and the philosopher, the first to
guide us in molding the conditions under which experience goes
on, the latter to help direct those conditions toward the goal of
human fulfilment.
Recognizing the human importance of the aesthetic is essential
here, but developing the urban environment is neither simple nor
straightforward. We cannot accept the engineering mentality that
regards all problems as technical ones that have technological
answers. Problems are at bottom human difficulties and these
require solutions that take into account their effects on the quality
of people’s experience. Moreover, the aesthetic qualities ®f ~ city
should not be thought of as prettifying features, imposed from
without upon an already formed urban structure, a surface veneer
on a functionally complete object. Nor should an urban aesthetics
be taken merely as a separate component of a total plan
determined ab ~~ci~i~9 without regard either to the particular
conditions of location, geography, culture, and history, or to the

3 Cf. my essay, "Aesthetic Participation and the Urban Environment", in Urban

Resources, I, 4 (Summer 1984), 37-42.
4 J.B. Jackson gives a most instructive account of the use of the theater and
drama metaphors for describing landscapes during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. Cf. "Landscape as Theater", Landscape 23, no. 1 (1979), 3-7.

17
peculiarities of the political and social weather and the vagaries of
the people involved.
The agricultural metaphor of my title is deliberate. It suggests
the need for cultivating the urban environment, including the
aesthetic dimension that is part of every place, so that it offers the
conditions under which people will develop and flourish. Humane
environments require time to grow and should emerge out of local
needs, conditions, and traditions. What was once spontaneous
urban growth of a proportion and scale to match the human body
and activities that completed it must now be deliberately chosen
and quickly accomplished. But the same organic principles apply.
Planning under these conditions demands a gardener who is
talented and sentitive, one who understands that the balance of
differences among the components of an environment must be
nurtured by being responsive to the distinctive qualities of each,
to the interrelations among them, and to the unpredictabilities
inherent in a complex and temporal process. This is the essential
reciprocity of people and place, and the aesthetics of environment
rests on a perceptual engagement between them. The capacity to
cultivate the functional and the aesthetic as inseparable aspects of
the same urban growth is what makes planning an art and the
planner an artist. Can there be any act more profound or scope
more significant?5
Arnold Berleant
Long Island University
( )

5
An earlier essay develops some different aspects of the urban aesthetic. See A.
Berleant, "Aesthetic Paradigms for an Urban Ecology", Diogenes, 103 (Fall 1978),
1-28.

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