Urban Life
Over half of mankind lives in cities; although it represents a lofty goal, planning and achieving urban aesthetics (beautification) involves a good deal of historical luck, happenstance, and indirect gestalt. Nevertheless, aesthetically pleasing cities share certain traits: ethnic and cultural variety, numerous microclimates that promote a diversity of vegetation, sufficient public transportation, Public art and freedom of expression in the community in the forms of sculpture, graffiti and street art, a range of build-out (or zoning) that creates both densely and sparsely populated areas, scenic neighboring geography (oceans or mountains), public spaces and events such as parks and parades, musical variety through local radio or street musicians, and enforcement of laws that abate noise, crime, and pollution.
Read more about this topic: Applied Aesthetics
Famous quotes containing the words urban and/or life:
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)