Introduction: Making Sense of the City

This introductory chapter explores how to make sense of ‘the city’, acknowledging its complex and often contested nature in contemporary urban studies. It proposes aesthetics as a lens through which the city’s role in shaping collective imaginations and individual lives can be evaluated. For urban scholars, the concept of the city has been increasingly decentred in favour of more process-oriented understandings, whilst the concept of aesthetics has simultaneously gained traction as a means to study urban experiences and processes. Through an overview of debates around the city and a genealogy of aesthetics in relation to urban thought, the chapter sets the stage for the volume's contributions, which collectively argue for an aesthetic approach for evaluating the enduring relevance of the city in urban scholarship. The chapter also points to a range of tangential concepts that operate within or alongside the broad remit of aesthetics. It concludes by outlining the subsequent chapters, which together emphasise the importance of aesthetics in understanding and reimagining the city.