Monica Degen
Biographic Data
| ID | 166429 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Monica Degen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Monica |
| FAMILY NAME | Degen |
| SIGNATURE | DEGEN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brunel University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6804-1704 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 755 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Using GIFscapes to examine young people’s affective experiences of urban spaces
Data availability: The authors do not have permission to share data
Conceptualising aesthetic power in the digitally-mediated city
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 fee…
Beyond critical pedagogy of place: Sensory-embodied learning through the university campus
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed an alarming chasm between traditional higher education pedagogies and the lived experiences of students, posing new challenges to educators worldwide .Addressing this, our study proposes a curricular paradigm shift that foregrounds sensory and embodied learning.Influenced by a Critical Pedagogy of Place framework, we conceptualize the delivery of an urban studies module as an experience-centred encounter with th…
Seeing the City Digitally: Processing Urban Space and Time
The argument that many cities are now digitally mediated is an increasingly familiar one.The social, experiential and physical spaces of a city are more and more often designed, defined, navigated and experienced with digital data shared with platforms.But from its app icon to its interface to its advertising campaigns, every platform deploys a wide range of imagery, and most successful social media platforms are based on sharing images.This book…
The changing feel of place: The temporal modalities of atmospheres in Smithfield Market, London
Within the context of recent debates around urban atmospheres, this article examines the situatedness and partiality of urban experiences. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the Smithfield Market area, a neighbourhood undergoing a period of rapid urban regeneration as part of the 'Culture Mile' in the City of London, we explore how different individuals experience the changing feel of place. By focusing on the felt body, the article analyses the…
Timescapes of urban change: The temporalities of regenerated streets
Urban regeneration strategies since the 1980s have been framed around a recovery and extension of the urban realm by focusing on the redevelopment of streets as loci for public life and social interaction. Research has tended to analyse these changes through an exclusive focus on the effect spatial transformations have in reshaping social life. This article seeks to extend engagement with the concept of the regenerated street by examining its tem…
Urban Regeneration and “Resistance of Place”: Foregrounding Time and Experience
Time and experience lie at the heart of urban life. While extensive research on the social implications of the spatial transformation of urban landscapes has been undertaken since the 1980s, the discussion of the impact that manifold temporalities and sensory experiences might have in shaping or constraining the physical and social change of a neighbourhood have been limited, however. Existing research has a tendency to focus on a specific period…
Lived bodies’ and the neoliberal city – a case study of vulnerability in London
This article explores the ‘more-than-work’ aspects of the lives of vulnerable women who street-sex work. Particularly, we are interested in the differences between the women’s experiences, within the broader context of power structures as manifested in neoliberal cities. Few studies have explored this aspect of street-sex workers’ lives and theorisations of the co-creation of environments tend to elide the experiences of the most vulnerable peopl…
The Real Modernity that Is Here: Understanding the Role of Digital Visualisations in the Production of a New Urban Imaginary at Msheireb Downtown, Doha
This paper explores how Computer Generated Images (CGIs) have enabled the visualisation and negotiation of a new urban imaginary in the production of a large-scale urban development project in Doha, Qatar. CGIs were central not only to the marketing but also the design of Msheireb Downtown. Our study of their production and circulation across a transnational architectural and construction team reveals how their digital characteristics allowed for…
Producing place atmospheres digitally: Architecture, digital visualisation practices and the experience economy
Computer-generated images have become the common means for architects and developers to visualise and market future urban developments. This article examines within the context of the experience economy how these digital images aim to evoke and manipulate specific place atmospheres to emphasise the experiential qualities of new buildings and urban environments. In particular, we argue that computer-generated images are far from ‘just’ glossy repr…
The Sensory Experiencing of Urban Design: The Role of Walking and Perceptual Memory
Experience is conceptualised in both academic and policy circles as a more-or-less direct effect of the design of the built environment. Drawing on findings from a research project that investigated people’s everyday experiences of designed urban environments in two UK towns, this paper suggests at least two reasons why sensory encounters between individuals and built environments cannot in fact be understood entirely as a consequence of the desi…
Sensing Our Way: Using Yoga as a Research Method
As part of a wider research project on embodiment in a support center for vulnerable women in East London, we have adopted the teaching of yoga as a practice to enter the field and connect with these women. During the course of teaching yoga it has become clear that an attendance to the senses, both spatially and corporeally, provides us with important understandings of the lifeworlds of these women and our research relationship. In particular, w…
The Transformation of the 'Barcelona Model: An Analysis of Culture, Urban Regeneration and Governance
Barcelona's redevelopment has been widely celebrated for its apparently successful combination of cultural strategies with urban regeneration to address social problems. The 'Barcelona model' has evolved, however, with changing relationships between urban regeneration, the use of culture and modes of governance. The role of cultural strategy has shifted from being part of a cultural vernacular with social and political citizenship at its core to …
Bodies and everyday practices in designed urban environments
In recent years, the centres of many towns and cities have been reshaped by urban design projects, but little attention has been paid to how these transformations are experienced everyday by users of the city. In other words: how do the users of urban centers, such as shoppers, cleaners, or workers, perceive these changes, as embodied subjects in specific material environments? This paper analyses how bodies in two intensely designed urban spaces…
Wallpaper* City Guides and Gendering the Urban Aesthetic
Cities are socio-cultural constructions in which physical spaces stand in a symbiotic relationship with their representations. In this context, city guides play a crucial role in framing how urban spaces are mediated and engaged with. In spite of critical readings of such guides, a gender analysis is lacking. In 2006 the first Wallpaper* city guide series was launched, advertising themselves as design-conscious handbooks. In this article we incor…
More on ‘big things: Building Events and Feelings
This paper begins by reviewing a range of recent work by geographers conceptualising buildings less as solid objects and more as performances. Buildings, it is argued, are not given but produced, as various materials are held together in specific assemblages by work of various kinds. This has led to a range of studies looking at the diverse sorts of work that make buildings cohere: the political institutions they are embedded in, the material aff…
Using Websites to Disseminate Research on Urban Spatialities
This paper reviews a selection of websites that explore urban geographies. Many sites use the web as a depository for large amounts of research data. However, many are using websites to disseminate research findings, and the paper focuses on these. It suggests that, thus far, there are three significant ways in which urban researchers are exploiting the potentialities of web technologies to interpret urban spaces: by evoking a sense of the comple…
Sensing Cities: Regenerating public life in Barcelona and Manchester
As cities globally re-design their urban landscapes, they produce a different urban aesthetic and create new experiential milieus. Urban regeneration processes generate radical physical, social and cultural changes in neighbourhoods that demand new conceptual frameworks to address their impact upon daily urban life. Sensing Cities investigates the reconfiguration of contemporary public space and life through the prism of the senses. The book expl…
Experiencing Visualities in Designed Urban Environments: Learning from Milton Keynes
In many discussions of how cities in the global North are changing, the growing importance of urban design is emphasised: that is, the production of visually and spatially coherent urban buildings and spaces seems to be increasingly central to urban change. To date, most attention has focused on exploring the reasons for this shift. Much less attention has been paid to the experiences of the people inhabiting and using such designed spaces. Altho…
Ecologies and Economies of Action-Sustainability, Calculations, and other Things
In ecological, environmental, and urban-regeneration terms, the participatory turn and the turn to action have been written about at length in both academic and official literatures. From neighbourhood renewal to lay ecologies, people are being 'given' all kinds of agency in the making of economy and ecology. Yet relatively little has been said regarding the financial organisation of this new populism, which is often achieved through calculation …
Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitical Experiment
Cities are inhabited by all manner of things and made up of all manner of practices, many of which are unnoticed by urban politics and disregarded by science. In this paper we do two things. First, we add to the sense that urban living spaces involve much more than human worlds and are often prime sites for human and nonhuman ecologies. Second, we experiment with what is involved in taking these nonhuman worlds and ecologies seriously and in prod…
Fighting for the global catwalk: Formalizing public life in Castlefield (Manchester) and diluting public life in el Raval (Barcelona)
Increasingly cities are using regeneration strategies to revive their economy and to give a facelift to their physical environment to compete on a global catwalk. As urban environments change, their sensuous geography is also altered. This article argues that the transformation of sensescapes has been a neglected dimension of urban politics that needs to be analysed. By focusing on two inner-city neighbourhoods, el Raval in Barcelona and Castlefi…
Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitical Experiment
Cities are inhabited by all manner of things and made up of all manner of practices, many of which are unnoticed by urban politics and disregarded by science. In this paper we do two things. First, we add to the sense that urban living spaces involve much more than human worlds and are often prime sites for human and nonhuman ecologies. Second, we experiment with what is involved in taking these nonhuman worlds and ecologies seriously and in prod…
More on ‘big things: Building Events and Feelings
This paper begins by reviewing a range of recent work by geographers conceptualising buildings less as solid objects and more as performances. Buildings, it is argued, are not given but produced, as various materials are held together in specific assemblages by work of various kinds. This has led to a range of studies looking at the diverse sorts of work that make buildings cohere: the political institutions they are embedded in, the material aff…
The Sensory Experiencing of Urban Design: The Role of Walking and Perceptual Memory
Experience is conceptualised in both academic and policy circles as a more-or-less direct effect of the design of the built environment. Drawing on findings from a research project that investigated people’s everyday experiences of designed urban environments in two UK towns, this paper suggests at least two reasons why sensory encounters between individuals and built environments cannot in fact be understood entirely as a consequence of the desi…
Producing place atmospheres digitally: Architecture, digital visualisation practices and the experience economy
Computer-generated images have become the common means for architects and developers to visualise and market future urban developments. This article examines within the context of the experience economy how these digital images aim to evoke and manipulate specific place atmospheres to emphasise the experiential qualities of new buildings and urban environments. In particular, we argue that computer-generated images are far from ‘just’ glossy repr…
The Transformation of the 'Barcelona Model: An Analysis of Culture, Urban Regeneration and Governance
Barcelona's redevelopment has been widely celebrated for its apparently successful combination of cultural strategies with urban regeneration to address social problems. The 'Barcelona model' has evolved, however, with changing relationships between urban regeneration, the use of culture and modes of governance. The role of cultural strategy has shifted from being part of a cultural vernacular with social and political citizenship at its core to …
Experiencing Visualities in Designed Urban Environments: Learning from Milton Keynes
In many discussions of how cities in the global North are changing, the growing importance of urban design is emphasised: that is, the production of visually and spatially coherent urban buildings and spaces seems to be increasingly central to urban change. To date, most attention has focused on exploring the reasons for this shift. Much less attention has been paid to the experiences of the people inhabiting and using such designed spaces. Altho…
Ecologies and Economies of Action-Sustainability, Calculations, and other Things
In ecological, environmental, and urban-regeneration terms, the participatory turn and the turn to action have been written about at length in both academic and official literatures. From neighbourhood renewal to lay ecologies, people are being 'given' all kinds of agency in the making of economy and ecology. Yet relatively little has been said regarding the financial organisation of this new populism, which is often achieved through calculation …
The changing feel of place: The temporal modalities of atmospheres in Smithfield Market, London
Within the context of recent debates around urban atmospheres, this article examines the situatedness and partiality of urban experiences. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the Smithfield Market area, a neighbourhood undergoing a period of rapid urban regeneration as part of the 'Culture Mile' in the City of London, we explore how different individuals experience the changing feel of place. By focusing on the felt body, the article analyses the…
Fighting for the global catwalk: Formalizing public life in Castlefield (Manchester) and diluting public life in el Raval (Barcelona)
Increasingly cities are using regeneration strategies to revive their economy and to give a facelift to their physical environment to compete on a global catwalk. As urban environments change, their sensuous geography is also altered. This article argues that the transformation of sensescapes has been a neglected dimension of urban politics that needs to be analysed. By focusing on two inner-city neighbourhoods, el Raval in Barcelona and Castlefi…
The Real Modernity that Is Here: Understanding the Role of Digital Visualisations in the Production of a New Urban Imaginary at Msheireb Downtown, Doha
This paper explores how Computer Generated Images (CGIs) have enabled the visualisation and negotiation of a new urban imaginary in the production of a large-scale urban development project in Doha, Qatar. CGIs were central not only to the marketing but also the design of Msheireb Downtown. Our study of their production and circulation across a transnational architectural and construction team reveals how their digital characteristics allowed for…
Urban Regeneration and “Resistance of Place”: Foregrounding Time and Experience
Time and experience lie at the heart of urban life. While extensive research on the social implications of the spatial transformation of urban landscapes has been undertaken since the 1980s, the discussion of the impact that manifold temporalities and sensory experiences might have in shaping or constraining the physical and social change of a neighbourhood have been limited, however. Existing research has a tendency to focus on a specific period…
Conceptualising aesthetic power in the digitally-mediated city
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 fee…
Sensing Our Way: Using Yoga as a Research Method
As part of a wider research project on embodiment in a support center for vulnerable women in East London, we have adopted the teaching of yoga as a practice to enter the field and connect with these women. During the course of teaching yoga it has become clear that an attendance to the senses, both spatially and corporeally, provides us with important understandings of the lifeworlds of these women and our research relationship. In particular, w…
Timescapes of urban change: The temporalities of regenerated streets
Urban regeneration strategies since the 1980s have been framed around a recovery and extension of the urban realm by focusing on the redevelopment of streets as loci for public life and social interaction. Research has tended to analyse these changes through an exclusive focus on the effect spatial transformations have in reshaping social life. This article seeks to extend engagement with the concept of the regenerated street by examining its tem…
Seeing the City Digitally: Processing Urban Space and Time
The argument that many cities are now digitally mediated is an increasingly familiar one.The social, experiential and physical spaces of a city are more and more often designed, defined, navigated and experienced with digital data shared with platforms.But from its app icon to its interface to its advertising campaigns, every platform deploys a wide range of imagery, and most successful social media platforms are based on sharing images.This book…
Wallpaper* City Guides and Gendering the Urban Aesthetic
Cities are socio-cultural constructions in which physical spaces stand in a symbiotic relationship with their representations. In this context, city guides play a crucial role in framing how urban spaces are mediated and engaged with. In spite of critical readings of such guides, a gender analysis is lacking. In 2006 the first Wallpaper* city guide series was launched, advertising themselves as design-conscious handbooks. In this article we incor…
Lived bodies’ and the neoliberal city – a case study of vulnerability in London
This article explores the ‘more-than-work’ aspects of the lives of vulnerable women who street-sex work. Particularly, we are interested in the differences between the women’s experiences, within the broader context of power structures as manifested in neoliberal cities. Few studies have explored this aspect of street-sex workers’ lives and theorisations of the co-creation of environments tend to elide the experiences of the most vulnerable peopl…
Using GIFscapes to examine young people’s affective experiences of urban spaces
Data availability: The authors do not have permission to share data
Beyond critical pedagogy of place: Sensory-embodied learning through the university campus
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed an alarming chasm between traditional higher education pedagogies and the lived experiences of students, posing new challenges to educators worldwide .Addressing this, our study proposes a curricular paradigm shift that foregrounds sensory and embodied learning.Influenced by a Critical Pedagogy of Place framework, we conceptualize the delivery of an urban studies module as an experience-centred encounter with th…
Fighting for the global catwalk: Formalizing public life in Castlefield (Manchester) and diluting public life in el Raval (Barcelona)
Increasingly cities are using regeneration strategies to revive their economy and to give a facelift to their physical environment to compete on a global catwalk. As urban environments change, their sensuous geography is also altered. This article argues that the transformation of sensescapes has been a neglected dimension of urban politics that needs to be analysed. By focusing on two inner-city neighbourhoods, el Raval in Barcelona and Castlefi…
Urban Wild Things: A Cosmopolitical Experiment
Cities are inhabited by all manner of things and made up of all manner of practices, many of which are unnoticed by urban politics and disregarded by science. In this paper we do two things. First, we add to the sense that urban living spaces involve much more than human worlds and are often prime sites for human and nonhuman ecologies. Second, we experiment with what is involved in taking these nonhuman worlds and ecologies seriously and in prod…
Ecologies and Economies of Action-Sustainability, Calculations, and other Things
In ecological, environmental, and urban-regeneration terms, the participatory turn and the turn to action have been written about at length in both academic and official literatures. From neighbourhood renewal to lay ecologies, people are being 'given' all kinds of agency in the making of economy and ecology. Yet relatively little has been said regarding the financial organisation of this new populism, which is often achieved through calculation …
Sensing Cities: Regenerating public life in Barcelona and Manchester
As cities globally re-design their urban landscapes, they produce a different urban aesthetic and create new experiential milieus. Urban regeneration processes generate radical physical, social and cultural changes in neighbourhoods that demand new conceptual frameworks to address their impact upon daily urban life. Sensing Cities investigates the reconfiguration of contemporary public space and life through the prism of the senses. The book expl…
Experiencing Visualities in Designed Urban Environments: Learning from Milton Keynes
In many discussions of how cities in the global North are changing, the growing importance of urban design is emphasised: that is, the production of visually and spatially coherent urban buildings and spaces seems to be increasingly central to urban change. To date, most attention has focused on exploring the reasons for this shift. Much less attention has been paid to the experiences of the people inhabiting and using such designed spaces. Altho…
Using Websites to Disseminate Research on Urban Spatialities
This paper reviews a selection of websites that explore urban geographies. Many sites use the web as a depository for large amounts of research data. However, many are using websites to disseminate research findings, and the paper focuses on these. It suggests that, thus far, there are three significant ways in which urban researchers are exploiting the potentialities of web technologies to interpret urban spaces: by evoking a sense of the comple…
Bodies and everyday practices in designed urban environments
In recent years, the centres of many towns and cities have been reshaped by urban design projects, but little attention has been paid to how these transformations are experienced everyday by users of the city. In other words: how do the users of urban centers, such as shoppers, cleaners, or workers, perceive these changes, as embodied subjects in specific material environments? This paper analyses how bodies in two intensely designed urban spaces…
Wallpaper* City Guides and Gendering the Urban Aesthetic
Cities are socio-cultural constructions in which physical spaces stand in a symbiotic relationship with their representations. In this context, city guides play a crucial role in framing how urban spaces are mediated and engaged with. In spite of critical readings of such guides, a gender analysis is lacking. In 2006 the first Wallpaper* city guide series was launched, advertising themselves as design-conscious handbooks. In this article we incor…
More on ‘big things: Building Events and Feelings
This paper begins by reviewing a range of recent work by geographers conceptualising buildings less as solid objects and more as performances. Buildings, it is argued, are not given but produced, as various materials are held together in specific assemblages by work of various kinds. This has led to a range of studies looking at the diverse sorts of work that make buildings cohere: the political institutions they are embedded in, the material aff…
The Sensory Experiencing of Urban Design: The Role of Walking and Perceptual Memory
Experience is conceptualised in both academic and policy circles as a more-or-less direct effect of the design of the built environment. Drawing on findings from a research project that investigated people’s everyday experiences of designed urban environments in two UK towns, this paper suggests at least two reasons why sensory encounters between individuals and built environments cannot in fact be understood entirely as a consequence of the desi…
Sensing Our Way: Using Yoga as a Research Method
As part of a wider research project on embodiment in a support center for vulnerable women in East London, we have adopted the teaching of yoga as a practice to enter the field and connect with these women. During the course of teaching yoga it has become clear that an attendance to the senses, both spatially and corporeally, provides us with important understandings of the lifeworlds of these women and our research relationship. In particular, w…
The Transformation of the 'Barcelona Model: An Analysis of Culture, Urban Regeneration and Governance
Barcelona's redevelopment has been widely celebrated for its apparently successful combination of cultural strategies with urban regeneration to address social problems. The 'Barcelona model' has evolved, however, with changing relationships between urban regeneration, the use of culture and modes of governance. The role of cultural strategy has shifted from being part of a cultural vernacular with social and political citizenship at its core to …
Producing place atmospheres digitally: Architecture, digital visualisation practices and the experience economy
Computer-generated images have become the common means for architects and developers to visualise and market future urban developments. This article examines within the context of the experience economy how these digital images aim to evoke and manipulate specific place atmospheres to emphasise the experiential qualities of new buildings and urban environments. In particular, we argue that computer-generated images are far from ‘just’ glossy repr…
The Real Modernity that Is Here: Understanding the Role of Digital Visualisations in the Production of a New Urban Imaginary at Msheireb Downtown, Doha
This paper explores how Computer Generated Images (CGIs) have enabled the visualisation and negotiation of a new urban imaginary in the production of a large-scale urban development project in Doha, Qatar. CGIs were central not only to the marketing but also the design of Msheireb Downtown. Our study of their production and circulation across a transnational architectural and construction team reveals how their digital characteristics allowed for…
Urban Regeneration and “Resistance of Place”: Foregrounding Time and Experience
Time and experience lie at the heart of urban life. While extensive research on the social implications of the spatial transformation of urban landscapes has been undertaken since the 1980s, the discussion of the impact that manifold temporalities and sensory experiences might have in shaping or constraining the physical and social change of a neighbourhood have been limited, however. Existing research has a tendency to focus on a specific period…
Lived bodies’ and the neoliberal city – a case study of vulnerability in London
This article explores the ‘more-than-work’ aspects of the lives of vulnerable women who street-sex work. Particularly, we are interested in the differences between the women’s experiences, within the broader context of power structures as manifested in neoliberal cities. Few studies have explored this aspect of street-sex workers’ lives and theorisations of the co-creation of environments tend to elide the experiences of the most vulnerable peopl…
Timescapes of urban change: The temporalities of regenerated streets
Urban regeneration strategies since the 1980s have been framed around a recovery and extension of the urban realm by focusing on the redevelopment of streets as loci for public life and social interaction. Research has tended to analyse these changes through an exclusive focus on the effect spatial transformations have in reshaping social life. This article seeks to extend engagement with the concept of the regenerated street by examining its tem…
The changing feel of place: The temporal modalities of atmospheres in Smithfield Market, London
Within the context of recent debates around urban atmospheres, this article examines the situatedness and partiality of urban experiences. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the Smithfield Market area, a neighbourhood undergoing a period of rapid urban regeneration as part of the 'Culture Mile' in the City of London, we explore how different individuals experience the changing feel of place. By focusing on the felt body, the article analyses the…
Seeing the City Digitally: Processing Urban Space and Time
The argument that many cities are now digitally mediated is an increasingly familiar one.The social, experiential and physical spaces of a city are more and more often designed, defined, navigated and experienced with digital data shared with platforms.But from its app icon to its interface to its advertising campaigns, every platform deploys a wide range of imagery, and most successful social media platforms are based on sharing images.This book…
Beyond critical pedagogy of place: Sensory-embodied learning through the university campus
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed an alarming chasm between traditional higher education pedagogies and the lived experiences of students, posing new challenges to educators worldwide .Addressing this, our study proposes a curricular paradigm shift that foregrounds sensory and embodied learning.Influenced by a Critical Pedagogy of Place framework, we conceptualize the delivery of an urban studies module as an experience-centred encounter with th…
Conceptualising aesthetic power in the digitally-mediated city
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 fee…
Using GIFscapes to examine young people’s affective experiences of urban spaces
Data availability: The authors do not have permission to share data
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (13 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Art (12 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (11 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Geography (10 works) · Public Spaces through Art (10 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works)