Since Henri Lefebvre suggested that space is socially constructed and constituted, cities have been reclassified from static ‘maps’ for human activities to performed spaces that draw together human behaviour, meaning, discourse, and material conditions in their production. Cities are not simply a background for movement, but a function of cultural and emotional practice. That cities are named, given boundaries and called home – and in turn that cities name, define and give identity to their inhabitants – has equally implicated emotion in their production, as a recent turn to emotional geographies and urban emotions reminds us. This symposium seeks to contribute to this burgeoning scholarship through exploring the productive relationships between emotions and cityscapes across time and space.
The event is particularly interested in the relationship between urban geographies, architectures, buildings, and materialities and emotion. How are neighbourhood boundaries produced through and with emotion? How do emotional communities form and define themselves through urban space? How does architecture and the physical environment inform social relationships and behaviours and vice versa? And how do the emotional imaginings of urban environments impact on their histories, identities and communities? Moreover, what are the implications of such emotional productions of the cityscape for relationships of power, identity and more within them?
* The symposium will be followed by dinner. If you wish to attend the dinner please make sure you register for both tickets (two separate tickets). Dinner will be at attendees own cost and payable to the venue at the conclusion of the night.