Gandy turns atmosphere into a critical urban category situated between material environment and corporeal experience. Rather than treating atmosphere as metaphor or decorative mood, he examines it as a spatial phenomenon generated through air, light, affect, architecture and collective forms of sensing. The theoretical contribution lies in refusing a clean division between objective urban conditions and subjective response: atmospheres are produced through relations among material processes, bodies and historically specific modes of perception. His discussion of phenomenology and new materialism gives atmosphere ontological density while retaining its political ambiguity, since air, illumination and sensory conditions can be engineered, regulated and unevenly distributed. Methodologically, the essay does not prescribe a single field technique; instead it establishes a conceptual vocabulary for interpreting sensory evidence without collapsing it into individual psychology. Gandy’s wider bridge is to environmental humanities and critical geography, where atmosphere becomes a means of connecting urban infrastructure, affective life and material politics across scales that conventional visual analysis often keeps apart.
URBANISM MEETS ART