Urban places are of central significance for cities both as built structures and as centers of everyday life. Due to the emergence of various design-led place-making policies and practices, "urban place" has largely become a marketed and branded product. Aesthetics plays a major role in this project of place-making, and the related interpretation of "commodified aesthetics of place" emphasizes certain experiential and qualitative place-attributes-such as authenticity-despite apparent conceptual confusions and controversies. A thorough reconsideration of central place-concepts is required to shed light on this problematic sphere. This article provides an alternative reading of urban places and the related aesthetic dimensions, based primarily on a Heideggerian account of human existence as placed being in the world. Such an approach emphasizes the decisive difference between an object-based and a contextual interpretation of place, providing also a framework for understanding the aesthetics of place and its fundamental lifeworld-constituting role anew.

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The pervasiveness of technology has changed the way urban everyday is structured and experienced. An understanding of the deep impact of this development on everyday experience and its foundational aesthetic components is necessary in order to determine how skills and capacities can be improved in coping with such change, as well as managing it. Urban technology solutions -how they are defined, applied and used -are changing the sphere of everyday experience for urban dwellers. Philosophical and applied approaches to urban aesthetics offer perspectives on understanding technologically mediated sensory experiences within the urban realm. This chapter shows how new urban technologies act as an agent of change within the familiar urban environment. We outline how the perspective of philosophical aesthetics can be used to understand urban technologies and their role in the constitution of everyday urban lifeworlds.

Understanding better the effects of the use of mobile apps to the use and appreciation of urban environments has been gaining more prominence as a research topic recently due to the increasing everyday use of these apps. Whether this type of digital mediation changes the lived experience is of interest in this article. The intention is to show, that besides changing the prevailing practices and behaviour, new technologies also enhance and add positive value to the everyday urban experience. This positive experiential value is approached with the framework consisting of recent advances in philosophical urban and everyday aesthetics, which put emphasis on both familiarity and fun as important qualities that describe the everyday experience in urban environments. We claim, that new digital tools increase the quality of fun when moving in familiar surroundings. Fun, understood through the lens of the aesthetic, precedes the experienced quality of playfulness. It alters the existing affordances of the urban environment in a way, that make more complex aesthetic qualities emerge. The case examples are GPS-based wayfinding applications such as route planners and navigation tools for pedestrian use but and related AR applications such as the popular game app Pokémon Go.