Urban emotions and the making of the city

This chapter introduces the volume Urban Emotions and the Making of the City: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. It provides an overview of the scholarship of urban emotions and developing methodologies in this area, before exploring the contribution this volume makes to the field. Divided into sections ‘Emotional Communities,’ ‘Powerful Feelings’ and ‘Cities Transformed,’ this chapter explores how cities are sites of emotional norms and communities that give shape to their identities and the capacities of people to find belonging. It highlights that, as a result, emotions are critical to power relationships within urban space, deployed to enforce authority and impacting on the ‘comfort’ of living in place. Finally, this chapter considers the significant role of emotions in urban transformation, noting that emotions are not just the by-product of change but also vital to understanding how transformation occurs.