The City and the Senses

The City and the Senses
Urban Culture Since 1500
Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward
Series: Historical Urban Studies Series



from publisher
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How do we experience a city in terms of the senses? What are the inter-relations between human experience and behaviour in urban space? This volume examines these questions in the context of European urban culture between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, exploring the institutions and ideologies relating to the range of sensual experience and its interpretation.

Spanning pre-industrial and modern cities in Britain, France, Germany and the United States, it enables the reader to establish major contrasts and continuities in what is still an evolving urban experience. Divided into sections corresponding to the five senses: noise, vision, taste, touch and smell, each sections allows for comparisons which act as reminders that the experience of the city was a multi-sensual one, and that these experiences were as much intellectual as physical in their nature.

Contents
Introduction, Jill Steward and Alexander Cowan. Part One An Environment of All the Senses: Stench in 16th-century Venice, Jo Wheeler; ‘Not carrying out the vile and mechanical arts’. Touch as a measure of social distinction in early modern Venice, Alexander Cowan; Speaking and listening in early modern London, Laura Wright; Engineering vision in early modern Paris, Ulf Strohmayer. Part Two The Culture of Consumption: Touching London: contact, sensibility and the city, Ava Arndt; Sewers and sensibilities: the bourgeois faecal experience in the 19th-century city, David Inglis; ‘We demand good and healthy beer.’ The nutritional and social significance of beer for the lower classes in mid-19th-century Munich, Kim Carpenter; Boulevard culture and advertising as spectacle in 19th-century Paris, Hazel Hahn. Part Three Cultural Control and Cultural Subversion: A taste of Vienna: food as a signifier of urban modernity in Vienna 1890–1930, Janet Stewart; Seeing imperial Berlin: Lesser Ury, the painter as stranger, Dorothy Rowe; Street noises: celebrating the Liberation of Paris in music and dance, Rosemary Wakeman. Index.
Reviews
'This book raises many interesting and thought provoking points in relation to the city and a range of senses and its publication is a welcome one. For too long, sight has been the primary sense and the reawakening of other senses is long overdue.' The Dog Rose Trust

About the Author/Editor
Alexander Cowan is Reader in History and Jill Steward is Senior Lecturer in Cultural History both at Northumbria University, UK.

Further Information
Affiliation: Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward, Northumbria University, UK
Illustrations: Includes 6 b&w illustrations
ISBN: 0 7546 0514 0
Publication Date: 01/2007
Number of Pages: 264 pages
Binding: Hardback
Binding Options: Available in Hardback only
Book Size: 234 x 156 mm
British Library Reference: 307.7'6'094
Library of Congress Reference: 2006003937
Extracts from this title are available to view:
Full contents list
Introduction
Index
ISBN-13 978-0-7546-0514-0