Tasting the City: Bringing Sociology of Evaluation to Studies of Urban Aesthetics

• In Event: 228 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 15. Sociology of Taste

Abstract

This paper is concerned with urban aesthetics and the ways they are recognized, described and valued by city residents. Urban studies have been preoccupied with the importance for urban transformations of ‘culture’: various actors’ ability to recognize and value specific design qualities of urban places and ‘sense’ their distinct atmospheres. Two aspects of culture as a driver of change remain underexplored in this literature: taste and material culture and its role in it. Extending the concern with urban aesthetic to that with the processes of evaluation from which aesthetic value of urban space emerges, will enrich our understanding of urban change. To demonstrate how this can be done, the paper turns to the case of Kaliningrad, former Königsberg. By using the interview data collected during Q-sort, we show how an aesthetic judgment emerges as an interface between individual subjectivity, broader societal systems of categorization and concrete material properties of urban space. Form and design, but also color, shape and material, operate as ‘quali-signs’ guiding value-assignment in a specific direction. Different items of urban space emerge as endowed with different power of attraction, and co-existence and co-occurrence of material properties of urban forms strengthen and contest the categories of evaluation among which are ‘authentic, ‘European’, and ‘democratic’ urban space. The paper charts some future possibilities for bringing in an insight from the sociology of evaluation to sociological studies of urban transformation.

Author

• Anastasiya Halauniova, University of Amsterdam