The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since 1500

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.

About the Author

Alexander Cowan is Reader in History and Jill Steward is Senior Lecturer in Cultural History both at Northumbria University, UK.

Jill Steward, Alexander Cowan, Jo Wheeler, Laura Wright, Ulf Strohmayer, Ava Arndt, David Inglis, Kim Carpenter, Hazel Hahn, Janet Stewart, Dorothy Rowe, Rosemary Wakeman.