Urban Image and Urban Aesthetics: Urban Aesthetics in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Environments can be divided into natural environments and constructed ones. Although urban environments are the most important and complex built environments, works about urban aesthetics are fewer and less comprehensive. The paper argues that the urban image is an object of urban aesthetics, which can respond to the two fundamental questions, "what and how to aesthetically appreciate," proposed by Allen Carlson in his aesthetics of natural environment. In this study, Kevin Lynch's idea of the "city image" is taken as a starting point for the response, and then the focus moves onto the urban aesthetics that are mainly implied or reflected in the aesthetic characters of traditional Chinese cities and the philosophy of design behind them. In his outstanding book, The Image of the City, Lynch develops his theory of the city image, concentrating on the city's "environmental image" and its three components: identity, structure, and meaning. In view of Lynch's theory of the city image, the traditional Chinese cities were typically structured and shaped as squares, and the basic orientation was sited north and faced south, with the North-South avenue as its axis. The paper traces the philosophical and cultural reasons for this kind of structure and its orientation, pointing out that the principle of traditional Chinese-city design is "to imitate the images that cleave to Heaven and the forms manifested on Earth" (Xiang-Tian Fa-Di) recorded in Chinese classic Kaogongji. Ancient Chinese people thought that Heaven is round and the Earth is square. The main reason for imitating the images that cleave to Heaven is to ensure the ideal orientation. With this cosmological symbolism, the city is perceived as being a condensed representation of the world. Meanwhile, the ancient Chinese perceived the earth as a square checkerboard, the form of a square was obviously taken to be a prerequisite for the general morphology of an ideal capital city that would be a replica of the earth. The main goal of doing so is to establish a harmonious link between the world of man and the world beyond. Through the analysis of the metaphysical significance of this goal and the author's two personal experiences of disorientation, the paper declares that it is impossible to appreciate environments aesthetically without metaphysical insight, and urban aesthetics viewed with metaphysical insight can be taken as the philosophical reflection of the crisis of modern urbanization.