What is it about?
This article examines the inverse of urban beauty by identifying five recurring categories of urban ugliness: neglect, incompatibility, copy-paste repetition, negative affordance, and junk places. Based on interviews with planning and design professionals in Israel, the study argues that while urban beauty is often considered subjective and difficult to define, its opposites are more concrete, shared, and diagnosable. The paper suggests that avoiding urban ugliness may offer a practical route toward more humane, meaningful, and aesthetically rich urban environments.
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Why is it important?
Urban beauty is often dismissed as subjective, vague, or secondary to practical planning concerns. This article shows that looking at the opposite of beauty can make the discussion more concrete and useful. By identifying recurring forms of urban ugliness, the study offers planners, designers, municipalities, and researchers a clearer language for recognizing what harms the quality of urban environments. This can support better decisions about maintenance, design coherence, public space, comfort, identity, and everyday urban experience.
Perspectives
This article is part of my broader research on the role of beauty in urban planning. I became interested in the fact that while planners often hesitate to speak directly about beauty, they tend to recognize very clearly what makes urban environments feel ugly. For me, studying the opposites of urban beauty is a practical way to bring aesthetic questions back into planning discourse without treating beauty as a purely subjective or decorative issue.
Dr. Asher Elbaz
Holon Institute of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Urban beauty and its oppositions, Cities, August 2026, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2026.107192.
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