Art Education and Urban Aesthetics
- Art Education and Urban Aesthetics
The widespread problem of visual illiteracy prevents people from perceiving the aesthetic quality of their surroundings. This inability represents a barrier to full participation by the public in debates over the kinds of cities they want to live in, and yet the physical qualities of the environment strongly affect the social and psychological well-being of its inhabitants. This article argues that art educators have an important role in fostering the awareness, understanding and appreciation of urban aesthetics. It then recounts the author's field study, which investigated the effectiveness of three instruments for developing understanding of urban aesthetics. The article concludes with some suggestions for art educators interested in developing programs for studying the urban environment.
The inclusion of urban issues in the art-education agenda can be traced to three developments that emerged during the 1960s: the mingling of art with political, social and ecological issues; the spread of environmental awareness and activism; and the development of new information about the human-environment relationship. Studies in the social and behavioral sciences disclosed the importance of the environment for human well-being and indicated that culture, age, gender, socio-economic status and the environment itself, among other factors, affect the way people experience their surroundings and their criteria for judging environmental quality [1]. These findings led to the characterization of conventional methods of design as authoritarian and lacking interest in the users' values and ways of life. In response to these developments, art educators joined professionals from other fields to propose an urban environment education that would foster informed, responsible public participation in environmental decisions.
With its origins linked to postmodern theories and activism, urban environmental education has a strong commitment to issues of citizenship, equity, sustainability, pluralism and community. Its advocates recommend that teachers discuss environmental issues that are directly relevant to their students' everyday lives, encouraging them to analyze local problems and possible solutions [2]. In accord with this conception, art educators involved with the urban environment place great emphasis on helping students to reflect upon the connections between urban aesthetics, ethics and cultural and socioeconomic factors [3].
A number of art educators, architects and urban planners consider the widespread problem of visual illiteracy one of the main obstacles for effective public participation in environmental decisions. McFee and Degge [4] and Nelson [5] state that most people are "visual illiterates," meaning that they categorize objects by their concepts and functions while overlooking their visual properties. According to these authors, the Western education system concentrates on the mastery of numbers and written language, almost at the expense of learning to see. This bias, coupled with a general belief that there is no learning process involved in the ability to see, has produced a society of visual illiterates.
Lynch, in his pioneer book about the city's image, proposes visual education as a means of improving the quality of the urban environment. He states that
in the development of the image, education in seeing will be quite as important as the reshaping of what is seen. Indeed, they together form a circular, or hopefully a spiral process: visual education impelling the citizen to act upon his visual world, and this action causing him to see even more acutely [6].
Sanoff affirms that "if we are concerned with the quality of the physical world around us, it is evident that there needs to be an increased awareness of the impact of the visual environment on people's everyday lives" [7].
Since experiencing the environment involves not only visual and spatial perception but also input from the other senses, references to the urban environment as visual are sure to bring controversy. Moreover, neither the terms visual literacy nor visual education address the multiple aspects involved in urban aesthetics. Yet, as Riley puts it, the "discussion of vision and landscape must begin with the recognition that vision dominates our immediate sensory and cognitive transactions with the landscape." This is not to dismiss the complexity of the problem, as Riley himself observes a few lines later: "But it is the very dominance of vision that makes its relationship with landscape an enormous...
