Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article aimed to conduct a critical analysis of how the body of science constructed between 2015 and 2025 has conceptualized and organized the affective and experiential dimensions of space in the city. Building on the affective turn in urban studies and the collapse of functionalist urbanism, this research investigates the shift from approaches focused on infrastructure and efficiency in the city to perspectives that recognize emotional, sensory, and bodily experience as constitutive locations of the city. A critical narrative literature review was conducted on related topics using indexed databases (Scopus, Web of Science, and ScienceDirect) and Boolean combinations related to affective urbanism, emotional geography, and urban atmospheres. Fourteen theoretically dense and methodologically clear studies were considered. The information was organized into analytical matrices that facilitate the comparison of theoretical frameworks, methodological strategies, and scales of analysis. The results are considered to paint a picture of three main types of approach: phenomenological-relational, instrumental-measurable, and critical-governmental. Methodologically, there is an expansion toward hybrid techniques that combine emotional mapping, performative walks, participatory biosensing, statistical modeling, and neuroscience tools. Despite this, it remains epistemologically fragmented between empirical measurement and the political analysis of affect, and its multi-scalar articulation between bodily experience and socio-spatial structure is weakly articulated. It is necessary to conclude that the city must be understood as a relational affective field in which materiality, embodiment, and power co-produce urban atmospheres.
Source: Sinergia Académica
DOI: 10.51736/sa965
Language: Spanish
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7216355158