Abstract

Yuriko Saito argues for the broadening of environmental aesthetics' scope from natural environments to mixed environments such as gardens, agricultural landscapes, urban environments, and its further expansion to include what Saito has called 'everyday aesthetics', i.e., all those ingredients that constitute our spatial environments, namely artefacts, human activities, and social relationships. The environment understood in this widest sense shapes the state of the world and the quality of life. Aesthetics plays a crucial, although often unrecognized, role in this ongoing world-making project, for better or worse. Environmental aesthetics can help cultivate aesthetic literacy so that we become aware of the power wielded by aesthetics, but it can also help to find ways of guiding aesthetically motivated decisions and actions toward better world-making.

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