Place-Temporality and Urban Place-Rhythms in Urban Analysis and Design: An Aesthetic Akin to Music

Abstract

Places are temporal milieus, and the tempo of a place is inherently rhythmical. In an urban place, the patterns of people's movements, encounters, and rest, recurrently negotiating with natural cycles and architectural patterns, merge into expressive bundles of rhythms which give a place its temporal distinctiveness. This paper investigates the aesthetics of place-temporality, focusing on its expression and representation; it explores its principal attributes, experience, and significance. And, building on an analogy with musical aesthetics, the paper brings forward a conceptual framework for the understanding and analysis of temporality in urban space, with a focus on place-rhythms and the triad of place-temporal performance, place-tonality, and sense of time. These are the principal aesthetic processes through which place-temporality expresses and represents itself in urban space.

Keywords:

• place-temporality
• sense of time
• rhythms
• everyday
• place
• urban analysis
• urban design

Notes

1. With reference to Kevin Lynch (1972). In Lynch's work, time is touched upon briefly and from different perspectives (though mostly the planning dimension). The present study focuses in depth and exclusively on the everyday sensorial dimension of time in places in the city.