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Aesthetics, generally understood as an intensified emphasis on the sensorial look and feel of urban environments, has become an important perspective through which urban scholarship is examining the economic, social, political and cultural processes of urban regeneration projects across the globe. Much of this aestheticising work is now mediated by many kinds of digital technologies. The entanglement of digital technologies with the sensorial feel of urban redevelopments manifests in many different ways in different urban locations; it is deeply reshaping the embodied experiencing of urban life; and it enacts specific power relations. It is the focus of this paper. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Jansson, this article develops the notion of 'textured' space in order to offer an analytic vocabulary that can describe distinctive configurations of urban experience at the intersection of specific urban environments, bodily sensations, and digital devices. Analysing embodied sensory politics is important because various aspects of bodily sensoria are central to human experiences of, and relations between, both self and other. Hence bodies are enrolled differentially into different expressions of these new urban aesthetics: while some are seduced, others are made invisible or repelled, or are ambivalently entangled in digitally mediated aesthetic atmospheres. The article offers some examples of the power relations inherent in the textured aesthetics of three of the most significant, and interrelated, processes of contemporary, digitally mediated urban change: efforts to be seen as a 'world-class city' and to facilitate gentrification and tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photographs have always played a major role in geographical studies. Ever since the invention of photography in the 1830s, it has been assumed that photographs are perfectly suited to help answer that eminently geographical question, "what is this place like?". Photographs can convey a great deal of information about the appearance of a place far more succinctly than words. However, more recently, some geographers have begun to treat photographs rather differently. Instead of using them as descriptive illustrations that simply show what a location looked like when the shutter snapped, increasing numbers of geographers are thinking about the ways that photographs can be active players in the construction of a range of different kinds of geographical knowledge. That is to say, instead of thinking of photos as transparent windows that allow one to peer into places he would never otherwise see, some geographers are starting to think of photos more as prisms that refract what can be seen in quite particular ways. And still others are emphasizing the importance of how photographs are seen and used by particular viewers in particular contexts. This essay focuses on some of the implications of this new work for using photographs as illustrations in human geography. This interest in photographs by a range of different geographers raises some pressing questions in relation to the use of photos as illustrations. The author explores what some of these questions are and discusses five rather different ways of approaching photographs. It is less a "how-to-do-it" lesson in taking good photographs, and more a "why-do-it" and a "with-what-consequences" discussion of using photos in one's work.

The commentary focusses on the techno-cultural mediation of temporality. While lauding the paper's tracing of continuities between colonial pasts and smart futures, it asks how ‘distant time’ spans two such different forms of temporal organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argues that teaching about gender relations as a means of structuring social institutions and the division of space and behavior remains marginal in geographical teaching. Describes the role of gender in (1) urban geography; (2) locality studies; (3) development studies; (4) theory and method; (5) culture and environment; and (6) political geography as central areas of the discipline. (SG)