Postcards and Enclosures: The Policies of Urban Décor Between Body, World and Narrative. Review of the Seminar "Dibattiti Contemporanei. Making Cities and Policies of Perception"

Abstract

This paper runs through the analysis of public décor policies, starting with the book Corpi e recinti. Estetica ed economia politica del decoro by Pierpaolo Ascari and the paper Tra decoro e degrado, la fotografia a rischio by Michele Smargiassi, both presented during the seminar "Dibattiti contemporanei. Fare città e politiche della percezione," held on 30th April 2020 as part of Andrea Borsari’s “Aesthetics for the City” course, as part of the Advanced Design program of the Department of Architecture at the University of Bologna. In the first part, the function assigned to the aesthetic dimension within the framework of quality of life policies is examined. As a device of exclusion and assimilation of space and its dwellers, these policies point out the connections between moral judgment and aesthetic perception of what remains outside of the processes of capital valorization. Following authors such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Siegfried Kracauer, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon and other contemporary thinkers, the effects of urban décor on the body/world dialectic are explored, between spatializing morality and moralizing space. In the second part, the relationship between the production of discourse of urban décor and its visual narration is addressed. Photography reclaims a privileged yet ambiguous relationship with the metropolis, between rejection and celebration of urban landscape, subjected to processes of haussmannization. A review of photographers exemplifies alignments and pitfalls within the binary scheme urban décor/decay.