Feeling through Images: Architectural Histories after the Emotional Turn

This set of Field Notes explores the emerging topic of urban emotions by foregrounding the critical role of images in mediating how built environments are experienced, interpreted, and imagined. While social histories have increasingly engaged with the ‘emotional turn,’ the spatial and visual implications of this shift remain underexplored. We argue that both still and moving images – whether artistic, journalistic, documentary, or otherwise – operate as powerful modes of representation that not only depict urban realities but also actively construct them. Their rhetorical and affective force offers a critical lens for understanding the entanglements between emotions and the built environment. Drawing insights from the 2024 workshop of the EAHN’s Urban Representations Interest Group, we outline diverse case studies that reveal how emotions such as anticipation, anxiety, outrage, longing, and detachment circulate through images and shape urban imaginaries. These contributions argue that emotional responses mediated through visual culture are integral to interpreting the built environment. By situating images at the centre of scholarly enquiries, we call for a broader methodological engagement with emotions within architectural and urban scholarship. The emotional life of images, we contend, not only enriches historical and critical analysis but also illuminates the dynamic processes through which cities are produced and reproduced.