The "urban environment" and the methods of its research deserve a critical analysis. The solution of open questions is proposed to be considered from different positions, including on the basis of the disciplinary nature of the new visual ecology. Imagination is the border of reality. The city has al-ways been a place where the streets were shared and the dreams that people saw in their homes were private. Much has changed -- thanks to technical images, through digital and network, dreams and fantasies have become common, and the streets - thanks to the colonization of advertising images - have become monopolized. The space of modern cities goes up in height and, with rare exceptions, is subordinate to the plane of the analog image, a per-son, on the contrary, goes into technical ecstasy - into augmented, expanded, modified reality. Are not the city and the person moving in different direc-tions, thanks to the critical (digital) modification of the visual image, which was previously responsible for the unity of the social body? Consequently, even at the level of a technically expanded imagination, the relationship be-tween a person and a city is problematic. It is important to conceptually cap-ture the dynamics of urban imagination, to understand the role, meaning and significance of the visual image (both analog and digital) in the for-mation of the modern landscape of the life world, behavior modification and interaction. The more digital images are at our disposal, the less urban images are available to us, and the authentic presence becomes less and less an event produced by us, the city is less and less a common cause and common interest. There are questions about how a visual image is able to alienate and reconcile, create conditions for anxiety, aggression, violence and, on the con-trary, create zones of increased comfort, remove the negative by transferring it to another dimension, and increase the power of a person. It is important to understand the visual image as a medium responsible for the radical modification of the urban experience and what tools open up what use of it. The philosophical interpretation proposed during the discussion makes the con-sidered method of analyzing the urban environment a universal reflexive method for studying aesthetic experience and ethical problems in the social urban environment. It is designed to develop criteria for the measurement of visual aggression and comfort, the possibility of taking them into account in the qualitative improvement of life in a modern urban environment.
Based on the main research directions of the participants of our section in the past years, while maintaining the tradition, in 2021 we offer the following thematic areas for discussion:
- images of zones of psychological alienation, zones of visual aggression;
- visual boundaries, invisible barriers;
- representative spaces, visual pollution, visual ecology in the urban environment
The round table was held at the A. I. Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University (Building 5), 48-50 Moika River Embankment and consisted of two blocks "Visible Boundaries in the Cities" and "Invisible Boundaries in the Cities" in the urban environment.
The event was organized jointly with the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies (Pisa, Italy) under the Project Erasmus + K 107.