Nature of Order Webinar: Urban Beauty as a Total Experience: Beyond What Can Be Designed, Stefano Cozzolino

This will be presented on May 1, 2025 at 15:00 UTC.

The topic of urban beauty is often addressed superficially; it is certainly under-discussed. Today, a long architectural and compositional tradition still heavily influences the perspectives and value judgments of experts, leading to a tendency to believe that the experience of beauty is confined to the physical, visual, and compositional characteristics of the built environment. In contrast, based on recent cognitive studies and progress in complexity theories, urban beauty can be better understood as a ‘total experience’ that includes both tangible, material elements and emerging social and cultural stimuli and structures that, by definition, transcend intentional urban design operations.

On the one hand, this implies the need to revisit mainstream contemporary concepts of urban beauty, broadening its scope to include the ‘social’. On the other hand, it is necessary to reflect more consciously on its production and generative processes. This talk will highlight the three peculiarities of urban beauty that distinguish it from other types of beauty and propose planning and regulatory approaches to support its generation.

Stefano Cozzolino is a Senior Researcher at the ILS – Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development (Dortmund) and a Lecturer at RWTH Aachen University. Born in Bergamo, Italy (1988), he earned his PhD from the Polytechnic University of Milan (2017). Besides Germany, he has gained additional international experience, having studied in Bristol and conducted research visits in New York City and various cities in the Netherlands. He coordinates AESOP's thematic group on “Ethics, Values, and Planning” (Association of the European School of Planning). He recently co-authored the book “Action, Property and Beauty. Planning With and For Emergent Urban Complexity” (Routledge, 2024). He gave a TED Talk in Berlin on “Building Beauty Humanising Urban Planning” (October 2024).

Dortmund 2021