In an almost legendary lecture held in 1928 at the first CIAM – Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne – held in La Sarraz, Switzerland, German architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, the first modern school of architecture and pioneer of rationalism in urban design, presented a seminal image, which would influence the development of global cities for decades to come.

Through a diagram endowed with a crystalline clarity, the architect expressed the value of urban density in the design of the modern city. By simplifying the space of a residential development to a linear sectional scheme, Gropius was extending the paradigm of the exact sciences to a field, that of planning, that had hitherto been governed by spontaneous growth or the artistic intuition of design. Yet in the age of “Neues Bauen” – new building, as the German architects liked to consider the architecture they were introducing to the European city – it was necessary to adopt rational tools for the control of urban space. Density was the foremost indicator, basically tabulating how much usable surface was being built for each unit of land developed.

The city that Gropius envisaged was in the meantime being built, primarily in the workers’ settlements of the Weimar Republic, giving life to a model of rational building that would eventually expand to the other European nations, then across the Atlantic to America, and finally to the rest of the world.

Nearly a century after Gropius’s seminal lecture, the way cities are built and transformed has become more complex, but the foundations of contemporary planning still rely on the intuitions of experimental design in the 1920s. We are still somehow piggybacking on the idea that quantitative parameters – density in the first place – are necessary to give urban spaces their correct form. Density has been enormously successful because it binds together several things: it is not only representing a matter of physical construction, but also hints at the density of population and activities, which contribute to giving urban space their vitality.

Yet what largely remained out of the frame of Gropius’s considerations – and would continue to do so for a long – was indeed human presence. As we consider urban spaces in the wake of the affective turn, trying to understand the way cities affect our emotional life, and how planning can become more sensible in sustaining the stability of human presence, density appears to be a blunt tool, which remains miserably blind towards our experience of the built environment.

What I will try to do is to observe the processes of transformation of the city using an altogether different notion, that of intensity. I’m speaking of the intensity of feeling, which is all but a numerical parameter, defies exact quantification, and allows us to describe the dynamics of urban experience in a non-representational fashion.

To do so, I will start from a celebrated token of urban transformation: the advent of the European industrial metropolis in the second part of the 19^th century, where the variation in urban density produced new, intense affects that were spawned by this tremendous – and sometimes cataclysmic – process. The description of the urban emotions at the turn of the 19^th century will serve as the basis for some methodological considerations on how the dynamics of spatial perception unfold in the city, and on the conceptual tools that we can adopt to make sense of this particular condition. I will then proceed to clarify how the accumulation and intensification of affective cues contributes to the emergence of what is sometimes called the urban ambiance, and how this in turn produces in the subjects inhabiting the city processes of affective scaffolding.

Building the Modern City

The history of the industrial and post-industrial city in the Western hemisphere has been largely thematized in terms of density. A common recognition in 19^th century Europe was that after the massive influx of workers into urban centers that followed industrialization cities had become too dense: density of population as overcrowding, of traffic and activities as congestion. In the early days of public transportation, and well before the advent of a broad access to private transportation, the commuting distance for urban workers could not exceed what can be reasonably covered on foot. Industrial sites often included housing for the workers and their families, which normally consisted in hyper-dense, slum-like accommodations lacking sanitation facilities and, in general, the possibility of a decent life. Still unable to sprawls towards the surrounding countryside, cities started to grow upon themselves.

The solution to this unhealthy and inhuman growth, in the eyes of paternalistic local and national governments, was to act on the physical components of density. The European capitals of the 19^th century – Paris paving the way, followed by many others over a period spanning over half a century – opted to reduce density by thinning out the urban fabric. Haussmann’s plan for the French capital, the most famous (and infamous) urban transformation program of the entire 19^th century, achieved a series of selective, “surgical” demolitions that were meant to provide more air, light, and sun to the congested streets and alleys of the city’s medieval fabric. Vienna’s Ringstrasse, which followed in the footsteps of the French model, equally strove to build the image of a “bourgeois”, modern capital by substituting a significant part of the city’s minute housing around the historic core with broad avenues lined with the Nation’s prime seats of administration, arts and culture. Many other cities followed these models with more or less ambitious transformations, all meant to bring the urban density down.

The alterations of these cities, quite obviously, were not only sustained by philanthropic causes or the need for political self-representation of Europe’s major Nations. The still-recent memory of the 1848 tumults, of the harsh combat unfolding amidst the narrow medieval streets, and the military effort that proved necessary to quell them, led 19^th century planners to review the urban density also in terms of defendability. Broader streets could not be blocked by barricades, and straighter boulevards proved more effective to provide clear sightlines for modern artillery, which was otherwise hindered by the winding layout of traditional centers.

While today we have become accustomed to these spatial configurations, and do not shiver in front of a broad avenue, but may instead find it pleasingly pacifying, enlightening and monumental, many of Haussmann’s contemporaries experienced this harsh transformation in urban density as something uncanny. Many artforms from the second half of the 19^th century, and well into the inter-war period, speak of what would later become known as the city-psychosis nexus. The sheer change in size of the modern metropolis can certainly be in part accountable for this affective phenomenon and its disturbances, just like the exponential increase in traffic, noise, pollution of the modern metropolis. But my argument is that the very change in distance – the distance from which things and people are perceived, the distance separating me from the “safety” of built fronts when I’m crossing an apparently boundaryless street or square, the height from which I’m afforded the view of an urban space – upset the traditional modes of perception, fueling that modern disoder that we know as agoraphobia.

As a response to this spatial anxiety, many observers of contemporary urbanization chose to step away, retreating backwards to acquire a safe distance from the looming spatial daimons – a distance either vertical, or horizontal, or both.

Two clues pointing in this direction: Camille Pissarro inaugurated a new urban perspective, a different point of view from which to observe the contemporary city. While his paintings portraying agrarian scenes are almost invariably taken from a position on the ground, his Parisian panoramas all hover above the street, as if depicted from a window in a higher floor of the haussmannesque buildings overlooking the French capital’s boulevards. This change could be dismissed as an obvious painter’s trick to gather a wider view, but it can also hint at the necessity of seeking a safe position, from where the traffic and the “excess” of space can be more efficiently controlled.

Writing in the same years, the young Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal described the nocturnal breath of the city from a distance, as perceived from his retreat in the hills surrounding the Austrian capital:

Do you see the city, as it rests over there / Cuddling, whispering in the dress of the night? / The moon pours its silver-silken tide / To cover it in magical majesty. / The lukewarm night-wind carries here its breath / So spectral, extinguishing faint sound: / It cries in sleep, it breathes heavy and deep, / It whispers, mysterious, alluring, anxious… / The dark city sleeps in my heart / With shine and glow, agonizing colorful glory / Yet its reflection floats flattering around you / Muffling its whisper, gliding through the night.

The anxiety Hofmannsthal mentions is not so much that which he individually feels, rather a collectively experienced mood that agitates the city’s atmosphere, influencing the corporeal disposition of urban denizens. The forms of neurosis that at the turn of the century Freud identified as altering his patients’ mental health, and Arthur Schnitzler’s Viennese malaise, all hint at a form of collective disturbance that agitated the Austrian capital.

Many individuals were deeply disturbed by the modern city, and some of them left testimonies in literature. While the most celebrated character of the industrial metropolis is certainly the Baudeleirian/Benjaminian flâneur, who deliberately seeks what we would today call an “immersive experience” in the nocturnal heart of the city – but does so with the blasé attitude, that protects him from an excessive emotional engagement – we may on the opposite side consider another literary character that is driven to insanity by the modern metropolis: Franz Biberkopf, the protagonist of Alexander Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, who however, being a former inmate and thus a social outcast, has nowhere to go to escape from the assault of the contemporary city.

The fact that the modern city may fuel aggressive, unstable affects has been largely explored, and still today, more than a century after the early emergence of these phenomena, planners have to cope with the fact that urban transformations and the communities’ mental health do not always share the same ground. What we observe is that the 19^th-century interventions on the body of traditional European cities, which were largely conducted to reduce the urban fabric’s density, also produced powerful side effects in the way citizens experienced and affectively responded to new magnitudes and distances. In trying to disentangle the problem of congestion, the engineers in charge of the transformations inadvertently over-simplified the structure of urbanization, critically interrupting a liaison between lived bodies and the physical articulation of space that contributed to sustaining a balanced form of human life. In reducing density, the intensity of spatialized feelings, produced by a powerful and unprecedented sensorial stimulation, was brought to much higher levels, which in many cases proved difficult to cope with. The history of the industrial city could thus be reframed in terms of the manipulation of feelings.

Affordances and the Lived Body

What happened in the European metropolis in the wake of industrialization is but a token of the bond existing between urban space and its citizens’ emotions. Every transformation of the artificial habitat that the city establishes rattles the affective domain of those who inhabit it. This becomes especially visible in the case of traumatic changes – wartime destruction, natural disasters, etc. – but is also present in more nuanced ways each time the city stops being a “stable” environment, capable of creating that “scaffolding” necessary to allow human subjects to attend undisturbed to their daily business. At this point, we can take a step back from this particular scenario to provide a methodological framework capable of outlining the drivers and dynamics that articulate the relationship between urban space and human affects.

There are two key notions involved in this interplay: on one side affordances, in an acceptation that expands from the classic Gibsonian definition; on the other, the felt body, a grounding concept in phenomenology, in the specific formulation provided by Hermann Schmitz. The dynamic of the felt body in the city is based on the spatial relationship with the physical environment, how this invites or discourages movement, how it affords possibilities of use and stimulates emotional stirrings.

The fundamental dynamics that Schmitz identifies as the driver of the felt body is the dialectic between expansion and contraction. This primary stirring is experienced in the alternation of inhalation and exhalation occurring in breathing, but is powerfully influenced by the interaction with the environment and linked to the emotional response it elicits. The encounter with some spatial conditions – for example the opening of a wide vista or the entrance into a lofty, monumental plaza – produces a corporeal expansion that the subject senses. Conversely, a loud noise or the sudden appearance of a menacing presence makes us contract, in a response that is conducive to fear and to a retreating movement. Schmitz provides us with a thorough analysis of the events of our daily life, elaborating a syntax of corporeal stirrings that are all based on the articulation of expansion and contraction.

Gibson’s affordances, a concept that has proven enormously successful, provides an efficient model explaining the organism’s dynamics within the environment. As we perceive possibilities of movement and use of the objects populating our world, we are constantly prompted to interact with them, seeking opportunities and staying away from potential threats. As enactive theory has postulated, perception is no passive process but rather an active engagement with the environment, which is constantly being scanned, almost “palpated” with our distal senses.

Yet an aspect that Gibson’s affordances only partially address is the link between motion and emotion, two dynamics that have more in common than just a semantic root. There is indeed a continuous feedback loop between the way we move and what we feel: the encounter with an object can prompt us to approach it or withdraw from it depending on the emotional response that our felt body experiences. Such relationships become stabilized in our “styles” of movement: in gestures, which exemplify the recurrent attitudes we have towards our ambient environment, and in postures, which are physiognomically expressive of an affective condition.

A further increment vis-à-vis Gibson’s affordance model relates to the given fact that our ambient environment is not composed of physical objects alone. While these are the material infrastructure of our interaction with the world, our daily experience tells us that we are constantly driven by other presences that lack a material base. Surpassing the classic ontology of objects that we have inherited from Greek philosophy, Hermann Schmitz speaks of “surfaceless spaces” that occupy our environment with a voluminosity that, while not being directly measurable or quantifiable, makes itself clearly felt in the experiencing subject’s body. Among these he includes “half-things” (Halbdinge), which, although not constituted by physical matter, share with objects their ability of being spatially present: «voice, wind, an overpowering sense of gravity, pain […], emotions as half-things moving the felt body» (Schmitz 2019, 56). Tonino Griffero has further developed this model by considering these surfaceless, atmospheric acting forces as “emotional affordances” (2019, 171): just as Gibson’s praxic affordances, they are perceptually available to anyone who encounters them, and will prompt an affective response that in turn influences the sphere of physical motion.

How this model comprising praxic and atmospheric affordances may be useful to understanding what happens in urban life becomes immediately evident. The space of the city is defined by its materiality, by its density in terms of built substance, but is further articulated by a myriad presences that inhabit it as “parasites” of form. What we experience in the city goes well beyond its physical constitution: there are fleeting situations unfolding according to recurring or occasional conditions.

In the first place, praxic affordances are crucial to urban life since cities are primarily spaces of movement. The moving urban subject has been at the center of investigation ever since the city has risen to the foreground as a field of research: from Walter Benjamin’s flâneur to the Guy Debord’s situationist dérive, from Michel de Certeau’s Walking in the city to Lucius Burckhardt’s promenadologie or strollology, from Gordon Cullen’s studies on townscape to Kevin Lynch’s imageability, urban citizens have always been considered as being on the move. In the countless interpretive models that have emerged over the past century, what forms a permanent baseline is the interest in the quality of this movement, on the dynamics that make it occur in certain ways. Gibson’s affordances establish a foundation: my movement largely depends on what I perceive – and especially on what I see.

While his theory establishes an early systematization of the relation between visual perception and movement in the environment, it is based on intuitive knowledge that has been in the toolkit of architecture since well before the 20^th century, becoming crucial especially in the planning of the modern Western city. Here, once again the question of density returns to the foreground: the relationship between massing, distance, horizontal and vertical dimensions can lead to highly variable gestaltic configurations that modulate visual perception and prompt different movements.

While the space provided by an urban setting for motion – streets, squares, alleys, sidewalks – is a fixed material support, varying perceptual dynamics may indeed bring the subject to follow less deterministic routes, carving out “hodologic” movement patterns within the available boundaries.

The repertory of forms and elements developed by modern city planning is capable of sustaining a granular modulation of movement. Porticoes, galleries, arcades, underpasses, sidewalks, elevated walkways, etc. are conceived to offer a variety of praxic movement affordances to an urban space that needs to adapt to the coexistence of pedestrians and vehicular traffic, whose appearance after the industrial revolution has purported one of the most significant shifts in the experience of the city. If we return to the initial claim that every transformation of the artificial habitat of the city resounds in its inhabitants’ affective spheres, we must observe that the change in styles of motion that has occurred in the transition from the traditional urban fabric to the industrial and post-industrial metropolis has had a tremendous impact. The change in density has brought to a different way of moving, and in turn this has altered the intensity of the urban feeling experienced by citizens.

Urban Ambiances

But what is this “urban feeling” we are observing? Culturally, we are speaking of overturning the materialist tradition that has sustained planning since the days of the industrial revolution. Urban development is indissolubly connected to capital surplus: the city grows – in the early days of the modern metropolis just like today – when excess capital is available to be invested. The city is not simply built – it is produced, as any other industrial good or consumer commodity. This economic role is what makes its quantification necessary: it gives a measure of how much city is available to be placed on the market for rent or sale. Density, in this sense, equates to the specific weight of the product, and establishes a market value in relation to the degree of exclusivity that can be achieved. The materialist outlook on the city is also accountable for the powerfully ocularcentric tradition that has sustained its development: in most interpretive models, movement in the city has been largely thematized on the basis of the visibility and imageability of urban space.

Yet considering the city after the “sensorial turn” gives us a cue towards an altogether different understanding of urban space. The Schmitzian phenomenological model speaks of a subject corporeally resounding to the ambient environment by means of an enriched sensorium. We are sensible to far more than visual stimuli, an awareness that demands an overcoming of Gibson’s affordances, which are closely linked to visual perception. Soundscape, a research field first originated to observe the natural environment, has long since expanded its field of inquiry to include the sonic configuration of cities; equally, smellscapes are becoming popular tools to describe urban space.

What makes Neo-phenomenological theory even more relevant to the understanding of cities is the externalization of feelings, which are included by Schmitz in the ontology of half-things. Rather than being considered private and accessible only to the individual, feelings acquire a spatial dimension, and become propagated by means of expressive characters and corporeal communication. This dynamic is not strictly bound to human subjects, since it can expand to other living subjects, and also include objects that gestaltically express movement, postures and dispositions by means of their formal configuration. What ultimately emerges is a space that is affectively charged: any subject inhabiting it can come in contact with these spatialized emotions and involuntarily respond to them. This collectively experienced mood is what Schmitz defines an atmosphere.

The reason why this interpretive model has become widely appealing in urban studies is bound to its comprehensive nature. While the material city relies on categorizations that include or exclude entities depending on their ontological status – physical objects, for example, pertain to a different category than movement, which has no material constitution – affective responses can be equally instantiated by the material configuration of urban space and by non-objectual half-things. A protesting crowd, for example, is conducive to an atmospheric resonance as much as a deserted street at night: the hinge between these situations is not their material dimension, their spatial density, rather the intensity of feeling that they can spark in the experiencing subject.

Urban atmospheres are thus primarily defined by two families of phenomena: on one side, the material articulation of the city, its buildings and open spaces, along with the transitory presences and half-things that variously occupy it – light and shadow, wind and air, noise and smells, traffic, congestion etc.; on the other, the “forms of life”, or social practices that are embedded in the city’s spaces and constitute the domain of the anthropic. These two phenomenal fields are tightly interrelated, and offer the subject affordances that are both praxic and affective.

In several city-related fields of research, primarily geography and urban studies, the notion of atmosphere has gained momentum due to its ability of capturing «something, that exceeds rational explanation and clear figuration. Something that hesitates at the edge of the unsayable» (Anderson 2009, 78). Opposite to conventional, third-person methods of description, such as those traditionally adopted in planning and that are capable of providing a crisp, exact representation of physical reality, atmospheres are more suited to grasping the vagueness and transitoriness of non-material presences and agent forces. This capacity to frame the blurred and fleeting is at once their most alluring potential and serious limit – upon which in fact criticism is most often affixed.

Considering the relationship between density and intensity, what becomes relevant in the discourse around urban atmospheres and ambiances is that these may also be framed in terms of “sedimentation of feelings”. While a city’s materiality usually changes at a slow pace, and is thus endowed with a greater stability, atmospheres are more transitory, and become perceptually present only under specific circumstances. They are however often also bound to temporal cycles – daily, weekly, seasonal, yearly – that are recurrent and somehow predictable. The urban subjects’ attunement to these spatial phenomena becomes stratified, accumulating after each cyclical return of similar conditions: it is the process that leads to the emergence of familiarity, of the recognition of what our habitual place of dwelling feels like. Yet the anthropic practices of a certain city are also embedded in its materiality, exerting an expressiveness that becomes spatially available even for those who come from elsewhere and are not familiar with this place. This is what gives rise to a city’s distinctive style, atmosphere or climate, what makes it stand out from other urbanities, serving as its hallmark. 

If we return to observe the industrial city of the 19^th century, we may at this point ask ourselves: to what extent was the city-psychosis nexus a consequence of a threatening urban atmosphere? Was the anxious mood experienced by the urbanites of the Western metropolises just an individual, private state of affective affairs, or rather something that was “in the air”, as per Schmitz’s model that presumes the externality of feelings? What we do know, in any case, is that the modernization of the European city, exercised in the name of a more balanced urban density, unleashed something that started haunting the inhabitants’ lives, occupying the space they experienced like the daimons of classical tradition.

If a city’s style and affective tone derive from the articulation of physical matter and fleeting spatial entities that emerge through specific situations, we may wonder how this intertwined system comes to be: is it built, or rather the unpredictable result of the stratification of actions, of moods that are felt by its inhabitants? Is the atmosphere of a city just something that happens to us, or do we have an inroad allowing us to modulate it? While a significant portion of our lives plays out pathically – making things and events come upon us, not trying to keep everything under strict control – to inhabit space is never an entirely passive attitude, even more so in the changing city of our contemporary times. So how do we set up the props and supports that allow us to act on the urban atmosphere that we experience?

The City of Affective Scaffoldings

While cities can be magnificent, monumental, spectacular, lovely, welcoming, friendly, etc., we know that they can also become places of fear and loathing. In his 1968 pamphlet Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (The Inhospitality of our Cities), German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich accused the modern urban structure of being the harbinger of a wide array of mental disorders, social disfunctions, and the rise in levels of aggressivity and depression. In his view, the reviewed density of the cities rebuilt after the war’s destruction, especially the layout of the residential neighborhoods, was almost cynically conceived to summon every possible affective disorder. While his position may be extreme, it is certainly true that not all urban configurations are well suited to positively cater to the inhabitants’ emotional life.

As the 2020 pandemic has once again dramatically demonstrated, global events can powerfully affect the corporeal disposition of subjects. With the gradual reduction of lockdowns and the return to collective life, we all felt that there was something wrong “in the air”: not the presence of the Coronavirus, quite obviously, but a looming menace that made the space of the city feel unsafe. And while we have by now nearly forgotten it, for almost two decades after the 9/11 attacks and during the global war on terror, walking in cities of the Western hemisphere never felt entirely alright. The density – in both cases density of population, of human presence, of global exchanges capable of carrying violence and contagion – evolved to become a threat, and many who could decided to flee the city to escape its menacing atmosphere. The mood of fear and mistrust in urban space can spread like contagion.

What ensues the inhospitality of contemporary cities is that their inhabitants seek countermeasures. This proactive attitude can be both spontaneous and deliberately designed. It is in fact a form of “niche construction” of an affective kind, the process of “actively modifying one’s environment for the sake of one’s affective life itself (to sustain, amplify, or dampen it). […] affective states involve the active manipulation of the world” (Colombetti and Krueger 2014, 1160).

An anthropological observation of daily urban experience provides us with an endless array of practices attesting to how this affective niche construction is performed. Some are of a primarily cognitive nature: for example, there are areas of the city from which we stay away because we know that they may be dangerous, crime ridden, or just too crowded on Saturday nights. Kevin Lynch’s work on urban imageability in the late 1950s focused on understanding how the boundaries between different city sectors emerged, and how landmark elements would signal citizens their limits.

If some parts of the city remain permanently off-limits, in other cases the different characters of a portion of urban fabric can be more difficult to circumscribe. Some encounters with unpleasing atmospheres can happen by pure chance – for example, the flashing lights of police and ambulance on an urban road signaling the presence of a traffic accident can prompt me to make a detour from my usual way home because I want to escape from the potential sight of wounded people lying on the street. Atmospheres are also likely to change over time, appearing and disappearing at some particular moments of the day – for example, the sunset plaza where people like to hang out to enjoy the reddening sky.

Yet if this is the occasional spontaneous reaction of disgust that modifies my contingent felt-body sensation, my home city is dense with spatial articulations that allow me to modulate my mood, the principal goal of practices of affective scaffolding. Some configurations are bound to routines: for example, the neighborhood park I visit for my morning run, where I know that three laps of the asphalt lane will amount to the forty-five minutes of desired exercise. Yet while this is a typical cognitive tool embedded in space – the distance which allows me to measure time without looking at my watch – it also becomes a situation that I trust – for I always meet the same fellow runners sharing my route at the preferred time for exercise – and it further allows me to observe, day after day, the passing of seasons, as vegetation fades into winter repose and blooms back in springtime, attuning me to the natural cycle of the world.

Many urban places are bound to typical actions and the moods they produce: the auditorium where I usually attend concerts, or the square where the produce market is held on Fridays. My attraction towards these situations may primarily emerge from practical purposes, but is also bound to the more-or-less expressed desire to experience that particular atmosphere once again. Equally, there are some places from which I keep away exactly because of the atmosphere that they host, like the beautiful Baroque square where the celebrated fountain permanently attracts dense crowds of tourists, or the residual spaces around the motorway where the urban fabric has been rather brutally severed.

Many affective scaffoldings determine the places I go or my style of movement, but others imply actual physical manipulations of space. Urban spaces are often theaters of conflict and confrontation, of the biopolitics of exclusion and control. Manipulations of visibility – from installing a curtain on a window to keep unwanted gazes at bay to painting mural art on the blind walls of poorly-planned public housing estate – are forms of practical engagement with experienced space that modulate mood. Enclosures, fences, guarded gates, are all forms of policing of space meant to establish boundaries that are only selectively permeable, dividing citizens in those who do and those who do not have access to a space, a compound, a private street, a garden or a building. Enclosures are not only functional artifacts of control: they sustain the emergence of a corporeal sensation of comfort, excluding the possibility of being caught off-guard by an oncoming aggressor – but only if you are on the right side of the fence.

Returning to the dawn of the industrial city, to the sudden changes in density that we have observed, we may wonder why so many cultural expressions from that age declare that the urban citizens appeared helpless against the new forms of spatial arrangement and the existential threats these posed. Today, we are not immune from the aggressive affects that animate our cities, but our affective niches, intergenerationally transmitted, have allowed us to adapt to an environment populated by certain stimuli. What dramatically upset a 19^th century man coming for the first time into a large city – the din of traffic, the glare of lights, the vastness of buildings and the spaciousness of the boulevards – today does not make us lose our composure. Each era has its own demons, and while cities in the West no longer grow and change at the frenetic pace of the age of industrialization or with the tremendous energy of contemporary Asian metropolises, our urban affective lives are indeed agitated by other menaces, by the atmospheres of crisis, conflict, contagion that are in the air. To each of these spatialized feelings there is a countermeasure that may mitigate its intensity: again, we are speaking of ways of moving, and of the physical manipulation of the built environment.

Conclusion

To conclude, it seems plausible to adhere to a conceptual model that sees in the ambient environment an affective scaffolding supporting human action. This environment acts directly upon the subject, but is also actively modified by the subject herself to serve a certain purpose, the modulation of mood, or the stabilization of affects. Just like a comfortable, ergonomic chair is capable of supporting our physical posture in the world, so the materiality of the city and the way we interact with it provide us with the ground upon which our affective existence rests. When this relationship works appropriately, the felt-body’s alternation of expansion and contraction – as postulated in Schmitz’s phenomenological model – remains balanced, making us experience a sense of stability. When, on the other hand, our urban environment exposes us to excessive affective stimuli, continuous menaces, overwhelming affordances, then we are more likely to retreat to where space is less agitated, removing ourselves to higher, distanced, protected positions, as we have seen in the attitudes of 19^th century authors.

While density has been largely considered a measure of urbanity – of its built mass, but also of its vitality – we may argue that intensity – the intensity of feeling, the extent to which emotions lead our felt bodies to expand and contract – can afford us a more sensible tool for the observation of human life in the urban environment. We are not speaking of something that is measurable, at least not directly so: it is rather the occasion of countering the emotion-blindness that many urban planning practices and processes suffer from. It stresses the fundamental need of expanding the limits of planning and design to engage with interdisciplinary discourse.

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