Faces and the City: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Facial Presence in Urban Space (Routledge/FACETS Advances in Face Studies)

Faces and the City advances the understanding of the role of faces and face representations, their meanings and interpretations, in physical and digital urban space.

This comprehensive study builds a typology of biological, represented and digital faces within urban space and presents an interdisciplinary approach to the facial presence in urban space, which it is used to analyse in depth urban faces and facial representation in public art, monuments, memorials as well as memorial practices, including digital ones.

This innovative volume will interest PhD students and scholars in semiotics, visual communication, digital humanities, cultural geography and urban studies, as well as those working in urban planning and design, architecture, memory studies and art history.

Federico Bellentani is a project manager and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Turin, working on the ERC-PoC project EUFACETS (EU Face Advanced Communication for Elders Treasuring in Society). He was also a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project FACETS (Face Aesthetics in Contemporary E-Technological Societies) from 2021 to 2023. He holds a PhD from Cardiff University (2017), an MA in Semiotics from the University of Bologna (2013) and was a visiting researcher at the University of Tartu.

He is Director of Marketing and Communication at Dinova, an AI-driven company integrating semiotics and storytelling. He was named among Forbes Italia’s Top 100 Marketing Managers (2025) and received the Google Cloud Star for Marketing and Communication in 2022 and 2024.