“Sense and Sensibility" City ambiences in architectural (urban), cartographic and fine art visual representations of cities

Ευφροσύνη Τσακίρη

Keywords: city map, city plan, painting, cartography, fine arts, visual city

City ambience, the emotional footprint of the city in humans, has been the subject of philosophical, scientific and artistic discourse since 1950 and the establishment of psychogeography. Numerous studies and artistic works resulted thenceforth. In order to describe the nature, composition and process of ambience formation in city representations, I will discuss selected paradigms in architecture, cartography and painting. I will argue that although commonly the property of ambience is assigned to aesthetic –such such as paintings– and not operational representations, this is not entirely true. In the contrary, ambience is a property of both types of representation, formed by a collaboration of their emotional and intellectual attributes.