Place-Temporality and Urban Place-Rhythms in Urban Analysis and Design: An Aesthetic Akin to Music

Places are temporal milieus and the tempo of a place is inherently rhythmical. In an urban place, patterns of people movements, encounters, and rest, recurrently negotiating with natural cycles and architectural patterns, merge into expressive bundles of rhythms, which give a place its temporal distinctiveness. This paper investigates the aesthetics of place-temporality, focusing on its expression and representation; it explores its principal attributes, experience and significance. And, building on an analogy with musical aesthetics, the paper brings forward a conceptual framework for the understanding and analysis of temporality in urban space, with a focus on place-rhythms and the triad of place-temporal performance, place-tonality and a sense of time. These are the principal aesthetic processes through which place-temporality expresses and represents itself in urban space.