Tehran: Confrontation with Aesthetics?s

The importance of the “beautiful” goes even before the 5th century BC, when Plato suggests a difference between rational and logical facts, Noêta and the good, the sensitive, and the perceptible fact, Aisthèta. This phenomenon, which already existed among philosophers well before the appearance of its scientific definitions and of which societies had an intuitive perception, affected academic discourse through the course of the centuries and the experience of the various evolutions of societies: “the Science of the Sensitive”, definition proposed in the middle of the 17th century by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. The apprehension and understanding of the “beautiful”, therefore, began to evolve, and far from being limited to the discourse of art and concerning the subjective dimensions, this phenomenon reached an objective and pragmatic dimension. A concrete example of this mutation in urban literature would be the appearance of the expression “Urban Aesthetics”. Since the appearance of Roman cities and ancient Greece, societies have been familiar with aesthetically driven urban interventions or urban interventions with aesthetic aims. Measures such as the decoration of urban facades with a variety of patterns, the creation of framed visual perspectives, and the embellishment of urban public spaces with vegetation contribute to the aestheticization of cities. Urban management, using objective and sensitive tools on the one hand and relying on subjective and mental capacities on the other, seeks to achieve aesthetic goals in the urban context. However, what remains to be discussed is that in addressing this issue, urban management in Tehran has failed to recognize aesthetic capacities, potential, and needs. As a result, rather than being aligned with aesthetics, such methods seem to have confronted it.