Atmosphere design of urban places. A scientific phenomenological approach

The aim of this chapter is to deal with the concept of atmosphere from a scientific phenomenological perspective, and to define it in terms that can be operationally used by designers of urban places. Within the theoretical context of Gestalt psychology experimental phenomenology, atmosphere falls into the category of tertiary-expressive qualities. Atmosphere is an expressive quality of a higher order, in the sense that it assimilates in a structure the expressive qualities of a lower order, but it does not unify them. The atmosphere of an urban place presents itself as an objective phenomenal property of the field outside the self; but, as long as the users are part of the dynamic ego-environment system, it can both generate contagion effects and activate processes within the users.