Aesthetics of Urban Culture: Corporeal Experience of Copenhagen

Abstract: This thesis explores the visual culture of the streets; images and sensory experiences that shape our sense of space and ideas of identity and belonging. The atmospheres of cities, partly constructed by planners and partly lived by those who inhabit its spaces, produce audio-visual material that affect the atmosphere of the city, influencing dynamics of hierarchal structures in society. Nørrebro, a central area of the Danish capital Copenhagen, is known for its urban culture and sense of community, while also permeating a sense of non-conformity and anti-commercial ideologies. Yet, Nørrebro is, conflictingly, commercially dense, treading a frail line of small scale and home-grown in a global, capital neighborhood. Departing from a phenomenological understanding of the relationship between body and city, with influences of auto-ethnography, psycho-geography and semiotics, I examine how everyday aesthetics is permeated by its sociocultural environment; its history, norms, and contemporary ideologies—each integral parts in building mythologies, or mediated notions that project urban identities as objective truths. Consequently, commercial investments are transforming the urban landscape. Field observations are performed in well-known Nørrebro locations to study how a seemingly diverse and interchangeable environment of images co-exist and by extension creates a more or less unified sense of space. These tensions of interchangeability will be studied through the internalized approach, taking into account emotive sensations and putting them in contrast to established scholarly framework.