• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.51 no.2
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• pp.42-53
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• 2023

This paper explores the recent development of environmental aesthetics and critically examines the main agendas, claims, issues, and implications of everyday aesthetics, which is emerging as an important branch of environmental aesthetics. Environmental aesthetics began in the context of cultural change and environmentalism in the 1960s and expanded in the second half of the 20th century with a solid theoretical foundation. At the beginning of the 21st century, it entered a process of diversification of objects and subjects. Having reached academic maturity, environmental aesthetics has expanded into theoretical territory considering the urban environment and the human environment, providing practical coordinates as a discourse for planning and designing urban environments and landscapes. The most notable achievement of environmental aesthetics since the mid-2000s is the establishment of 'everyday aesthetics'. Yuriko Saito, who is leading the research on everyday aesthetics, expanded the objects and scope of aesthetic theory to everyday objects, events, activities, and environments. She excavates the microscopic and sensory aspects of everyday life, which have been overlooked by conventional art-centered aesthetics, through the lens of aesthetics. She reinterprets various layers of phenomena in contemporary urban landscapes and analyzes how the 'power of the aesthetic' hidden in everyday life profoundly affects the quality of life and the state of the world. Saito examines the appreciation of the distinctive characteristics and ambiance inherent in everyday objects and environments and proposes a 'moral-aesthetic judgment' to alert citizens to the environmental, social, and political consequences of everyday aesthetic appreciation and response. This paper identifies the issues and implications of everyday aesthetics as first, the expansion of aesthetics and the ambiguous everyday, second, the moral-aesthetic judgment and the aesthetics of care, and third, urban regeneration landscapes and aesthetic literacy. In particular, the moral virtues of everyday aesthetics that Saito proposes, such as care, thoughtfulness, sensitivity, and respect, provide a critical reference for the practice of contemporary urban regeneration landscapes. The 'aesthetic literacy' is a key concept demonstrating why an environmental aesthetics perspective is necessary to interpret everyday urban environments and landscapes.