Aesthetic Investigations | Call for Contributions and Guest Editors

The quality of our built environment tends to encourage lively debate. That is because all users of the built environment are direct stakeholders. As a result of this we all have an opinion about such things as the aesthetic of others imposed upon public space, about the relationship between the public and private practices, between the old and the new, innovation and imitation, we have opinions regarding issues of scale, materialisation, detail and their propriety when applied in a certain context, the experiential poverty of endless repetition or the arbitrary banality of diversity for its own sake, or indeed about the arrogating power implicit in any act of building, frequently unleashing painful social processes of gentrification and slummification. Perhaps a rappelle á l’ordre by the discipline of aesthetics to ground those opinions inferentially on a more secure basis could help those involved in the creation of the built environment to recalibrate some of those opinions. With this call for papers, you are invited to contribute to the journal, which will focus on these issues:

• Philosophical questions concerning the authority and inferential grounding of design decisions
• The role of aesthetics in architectural and urban design and design education and its relationship to ethical considerations
• The relationship between the practice of and the reflection upon architecture and urban design