Reframing Urban Aesthetics: Beauty as a Multisensory, Embodied, and Culturally Mediated Experience

Noroozi, Hossein

Reframing Urban Aesthetics: Beauty as a Multisensory, Embodied, and Culturally Mediated Experience

James Alexander Gordon on 2nd December 2025

Author Information

Hossein Noroozi, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Abstract

Urban aesthetic research continues to face several conceptual limitations: a persistent visual bias, limited cross-cultural sensitivity, weak explanation of how environmental qualities become aesthetic judgments, and insufficient attention to differences among user groups. Addressing these gaps, this paper proposes a multisensory framework that re-frames urban beauty as an embodied, relational, and culturally mediated experience. The framework conceptualizes urban aesthetic experience as a non-deterministic process connecting: (1) environmental inputs, including built, nature-based, symbolic-cultural, sensory-ambient, and functional qualities; (2) multisensory and embodied encounters through visual, olfactory, atmospheric and bodily engagement; (3) user classes, such as residents, commuters, visitors and city users; (4) contextual moderators, including individual, socio-cultural, spatial, environmental, institutional, and professional conditions; and (5) aesthetic responses, ranging from immediate appraisal to durable place-related outcome. It therefore avoids assuming a fixed relationship between urban form and aesthetic judgment. Although theoretical in focus, the paper is informed by a broader doctoral research project comparing Oulu, Finland, and Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The empirical material is not analysed in detail here, but it sensitizes the framework to cultural, climatic, morphological, and planning differences. Insights from this project, combined with a focused synthesis of the literature and identified research gaps, inform the proposed model. The paper contributes to urban studies, environmental aesthetics, and tourism-related urban research by offering a culturally responsive framework for understanding how urban beauty is perceived and mediated beyond visual form, while showing why aesthetic perception may vary across different contexts.