Urban Beauty asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to make cities beautiful? Most of us agree that beautiful streets, buildings and public spaces enrich our lives. They lift spirits, strengthen communities and even improve health. Yet the moment we try to define ‘urban beauty’, certainty crumbles. Is beauty objective, something we ‘know when we see it’? Or is it wholly subjective, forever ‘in the eye of the beholder’?

This book explores the fertile tension between these poles. Around the world, governments now regulate for beauty, planners and designers are tasked with delivering it, and communities increasingly demand it. But how do we pursue something that resists clear definition?

Structured in four parts across eight chapters, the book traces beauty’s rise as a public mission, probes its contested meaning, investigates what people prefer in their built environments and reports on innovative experiments that have sought to test out the delivery of a beauty agenda. Six guiding questions shape the journey, culminating in a seventh: can the unknowable ever be made knowable? Rather than offering one final answer, the book maps a rich and unsettled terrain, showing why urban beauty matters, and how it might guide the creation of more humane cities.