{"id":3143,"date":"2015-03-25T13:46:53","date_gmt":"2015-03-25T20:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=3143"},"modified":"2015-03-28T12:07:07","modified_gmt":"2015-03-28T19:07:07","slug":"what-makes-a-city-beautiful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2015\/03\/what-makes-a-city-beautiful.html","title":{"rendered":"What Makes a City Beautiful ?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[contextly_auto_sidebar id=&#8221;krjjjXo4RZIvrWEAQUieiD1G6Y9vbRUb&#8221;]<\/p>\n<p>IT&#8217;S all just a matter of opinion, isn&#8217;t it? Nobody can agree on aesthetics, right? The Anglo-Swiss writer Alain de Botton demolishes these myths and others in a video on &#8220;How to Make an Attractive City.&#8221; Slate has a fascinating <a title=\"Slate on de Botton\" href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/blogs\/the_eye\/2015\/03\/06\/how_to_make_an_attractive_city_a_six_point_manifesto_from_alain_de_botton.html\" target=\"_blank\">story<\/a>\u00a0on the topic, and breaks out the writer&#8217;s six criteria for urban beauty.<\/p>\n<p>By the part that interests me &#8212; and speaks to this site&#8217;s concern for the overlap of culture and economics &#8212; is this bit on the way cultural relativism works out in the real world.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cWe think that no one has a right to say what\u2019s beautiful and what\u2019s ugly,\u201d de Botton says, noting that there are \u201cgood reasons\u201d no one vacations in Frankfurt, Germany, or Birmingham, England. \u201c[L]et\u2019s stop being dangerously relativistic about this. Yes, there is such a thing as beauty. Sydney and San Francisco and Bath and Bordeaux have it, and most other places don\u2019t. The proof lies in the tourist statistics. Let\u2019s stop saying that beauty is just in the eye of the beholder. That\u2019s just a gift to the next wealthy idiot who wants to put up a horrible tower.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/375px-MSIChicago.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-3144\" src=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/375px-MSIChicago-300x168.jpg\" alt=\"375px-MSIChicago\" width=\"300\" height=\"168\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/375px-MSIChicago-300x168.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/375px-MSIChicago-360x200.jpg 360w, https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/375px-MSIChicago.jpg 375w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>This can operate as a metaphor for a lot of cultural issues since the &#8217;80s or so. (\u201cVery, very few out of many thousands are really beautiful,&#8221; he says. &#8220;Embarrassingly, the more appealing ones tend to be old.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p>De Botton is about my age &#8212; a fellow Xer &#8212; and though he is European, he grew up in the age of postmodernism and neoliberalism, which I am increasingly convinced are the same things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[contextly_auto_sidebar id=&#8221;krjjjXo4RZIvrWEAQUieiD1G6Y9vbRUb&#8221;] IT&#8217;S all just a matter of opinion, isn&#8217;t it? Nobody can agree on aesthetics, right? The Anglo-Swiss writer Alain de Botton demolishes these myths and others in a video on &#8220;How to Make an Attractive City.&#8221; Slate has a fascinating story\u00a0on the topic, and breaks out the writer&#8217;s six criteria for urban beauty. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[654,702,615,701,94],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3143","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-capitalism","7":"category-neoliberalism-economic","8":"category-postmodernism","9":"category-relativism","10":"category-urbanism","11":"entry","12":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3143"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3147,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3143\/revisions\/3147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}