Rethinking the City

Interdisciplinary in approach, this book employs the key concepts of fragmentation and reconfiguration to consider the ways in which human experience and artistic practice can engage with and respond to the disintegration that characterises modern cities. Asking how we might unsettle and decrypt the homogeneous images of cities created by processes linked to capitalism and globalisation, it invites us to consider the possibility of reimagining and rethinking the urban spaces we inhabit.

An exploration of the complex relationship between aesthetics, the arts and the city, Rethinking the City: Reconfiguration and Fragmentation will appeal to scholars across various disciplines, including philosophy, urban sociology and geography, anthropology, political theory and visual and media studies.

Maria Filomena Molder is a Professor Emeritus at NOVA University Lisbon and a researcher at IFILNOVA. Her philosophical interests converge towards aesthetical issues concerning poetry and art. Reading Dante, Kant, Goethe, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Pessoa, Broch or Colli, she has acquired the conviction that art and poetry are forms of knowledge of a generative kind: they allow us to see the very conditions under which reality is perceived by granting us a presentation of it. Ever since the beginning of her research, she has sought to demonstrate the fertility allowed by aesthetical issues towards the understanding of what philosophy can be.

Nélio Conceição (PhD, NOVA University Lisbon, 2013) is a researcher at IFILNOVA (NOVA Institute of Philosophy). His research focuses on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, with recent work addressing topics within the philosophy of photography, film-philosophy, and the philosophy of the city. He has co-edited the volumes Aesthetics and Values: Contemporary Perspectives (Mimesis International, 2021), Conceptual Figures of Fragmentation and Reconfiguration (IFILNOVA, 2021) and Planos de pormenor: leituras críticas sobre a experiência da cidade (Húmus, 2023). He is the author of A realidade em exercício: a fotografia, da fenomenologia a Walter Benjamin (Edições do Saguão, 2023).

Nuno Fonseca (PhD, NOVA University Lisbon, 2012) is currently a researcher at the NOVA Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) and coordinates the “Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art” research group at CultureLab. He investigates various topics in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art both in the context of the arts and of everyday urban life. He has taught philosophy courses at NOVA FCSH and, since 2021, he co-teaches the course "Urban Aesthetics: Philosophy, Art and the City". He has co-edited several books and authored chapters and articles on the city and urban experience, such as Planos de Pormenor (2023) and A cidade nas práticas artísticas (2023).