Jürgen Hasse: Alexander von Humboldt Lecture: 'Urbanity – Between Atmospheres and Moods'

Alexander von Humboldt Lecture Series 2019-2020 on 'Integrative Affects of Urban Public Space'

Alexander von Humboldt Lecture, for the opening of the Master Programme Human Geography 2019-2020.

Alexander von Humboldt Lecture: 'Urbanity – Between Atmospheres and Moods'

Prof. Jürgen Hasse, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Wed. 04.09.2019

Abstract: Urbanity has architectural, physical and other structural presuppositions. Above all, it has a performative dimension. This is cognitively dispositioned by what people decide to do and to be. But it is also affectively tuned by what people do practically (often enough against better knowledge). The gestures of symbolic interaction follow the path of bodily communication, just exceptionally in words. So quarters are silently marked as exclusive spaces. Through gestural action (usually not through an action) others are integrated into the common or affectively excluded. The body of the city is formed performatively – and not as a result of intelligent planning – it owes its success to its performativity and will constitute a collage of urban “bodily islands”. The public space of the city is tuned on the background of both stative and actual situations. These tuning powers give rise to atmospheres that give a feeling of urbanity in the form of moods and suggest specific milieu qualities. What happens in the seismic field of the urban is essentially directed d controlled by feelings. What are the media of their communication? With regard to research, finally the question will arise how one can talk about feelings.