Temporality, Rhythm and Place: a new temporal approach to urban aesthetics.

As cities’ temporal crisis aggravates, accrued by unsustainable growth-led development, growing estranged patterns of behaviour and the deterioration of mental-health. In this context, there is a need for a paradigm shift in the way we think and practice urban place design for contemporary urban environments.

This keynote is on an alternative approach coined Temporal Urban Design that challenges designers, decision-makers and researchers with a new aesthetics of city and place. This aesthetics shifts the focus from physical form and materiality onto time and rhythm, performance, performativity and affect in urban space. The focus is on “place-temporality” and “place-rhythms”. Cities are seen as ephemeral and performative, where material urban elements such as buildings, streets, squares and parks are the visual and physical stage-sets for everyday rhythmic performances that create the quality of urban space.

Temporal urban aesthetics looks at urban places as an art form and its temporal design as experiential and performative, shaped through ‘praxis’, i.e. processes of co-production and practice. This place temporal aesthetics can be mapped and orchestrated, played and choreographed, and is as such analogous to the aesthetics of music.

Supported by theories of temporality as phenomenological time and distaff theories on temporal territoriality through rhythm and refrain, as well as by recurrent analogies between the aesthetics of everyday social-spatial realm, its temporality, and that of music, this alternative temporal aesthetics of place supports new forms of place analysis and design. Also, it is the lens through which urban designers can better understand and learn to actively influence or co-design the rhythmic condition in which we live. ie. how to design social place-rhythms of co-production to engender common temporal experiences.