The aesthetics of urban life offer a curious quality, one that is both highly visible and hidden, both openly influencing and subtly imprinting. Exploring the encounter with the aesthetics, images and material design of urban life, this book offers analytic insights into contemporary urban space.

Lars Frers is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Technology Darmstadt, Germany. Lars Meier is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Technology Darmstadt, Germany.

Chapter 1 Encountering Urban Places - Visual and Material Performances in the City, LarsFrers, LarsMeier; Chapter 2 Urban Aesthetics and the Excess of Fact, HelenLiggett; Chapter 3 Perception, Aesthetics, and Envelopment - Encountering Space and Materiality, LarsFrers; Chapter 4 Eye-Catchers. Staging the Sociosexual - The Example of Prostitution, MartinaLöw; Chapter 5, DenizAltay; Chapter 6 An Uncommon Common Space, Zeuler R.M.A.Lima, Vera M.Pallamin; Chapter 7 Seeing Succession in Little and Big Italy - Encountering Ethnic Vernacular Landscapes, JeromeKrase; Chapter 8 Working in the Skyline - Images and Everyday Action, LarsMeier; Chapter 9 Simulation or Hospitality - Beyond the Crisis of Representation in Nowa Huta, ?ukaszStanek; Chapter 10 Sensing Place - Mobile and Wireless Technologies in Urban Space, Katharine S.Willis; Chapter 11 Working with the Visual, LarsFrers, LarsMeier;