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Prologue: In the early 1990s, we had to read an article about the transformation from Fordism to Post-Fordism as an underlying societal transformation for urbanism in our curriculum, in the sociology program where I was a student. The text was ‘Postmodernism, post-Fordism, and critical social theory’ by Niels Albertsen (1988a). This was the first time I came across Niels Albertsen’s academic work. Later, when I embarked on a PhD, I learned that Niels Albertsen had a big influence in the Danish and Scandinavian debate about the status of urban theory and on key issues of urbanism (Albertsen 1985, 1988b). The article I am introducing here came to my attention just as it was published in 1999. When preparing this introduction to ‘Urban Atmospheres’ I found it in my archives as an official print-off from the Journal ‘Sosiologi i Dag’ (a Norwegian sociology journal). In those days, paper prints in special formats with the Journal’s specific layout were the order of the day (not as nowadays, where you get a DOi number or link, at best). On the front page of “my copy”, Niels Albertsen had written ‘Dear Ole. Congratulations with the PhD. Best Wishes Niels’. The reason I have a signed copy of the then new paper by Niels Albertsen was that he served as one of three members on the assessment committee for my PhD thesis. I read the paper and remember thinking that this would be an interesting trajectory to follow for my own research. For various reasons, many years went by before I had the opportunity to actually involve myself in research touching upon issues of atmospheres (e.g. Jensen &#38; Lanng, 2017; Jensen et al., 2014; Wind et al., 2018). Over the last decade, I have served with Niels Albertsen on the board at the Centre for Strategic Urban Research. A Danish network of architectural research environments. This work has not only allowed a continuing dialogue, but also enabled me to follow his work on urban atmospheres. I ask for the reader’s forgiveness for this personal and anecdotal introduction, but I see it as testament to the fact that I not only must have been amongst one of the very first readers of this seminal article, but also that I am able to contextualize it, as well as its author.Niels Albertsen was born in 1945 in a small country village in the northern part of rural Denmark. He became Master of Political Science from Aarhus University in 1982 and started his academic teaching career as teaching assistant at Aarhus University in the early 1970s. However, from the mid-1970s, he began teaching at the Aarhus School of Architecture – an institution he kept being employed at throughout his full career. During these years, Niels Albertsen established himself as an urbanist and critical reflective thinker with a large influence not only on the architectural students at the Aarhus School, but also on the academic urbanism community across Scandinavia. Niels Albertsen’s role at the Aarhus School of Architecture became one of bringing high levels of social science and philosophy into the more practically oriented architectural curriculum. In particular, he came to set out the frames for decades of architectural research through his close interaction with the PhD students at the School (many of the PhD students he supervised are now established and influential architectural researchers in their own rights). It is fair to say that over the years he developed a unique combination of key insights from social science and architectural theory. The built environment and the city in particular never lost his attention, but areas of aesthetic theory, art, design thinking, and landscape architecture became part of his research during this travel into foreign territories. His role as a cross-disciplinary and open-minded thinker earned him credits far outside the walls of the Architecture School in Aarhus, and he led research projects like ‘The borderless city’, and was deeply engaged in the establishment of the Centre for Strategic Urban Research that connects different urban research environments across Denmark. Throughout his academic career, the ‘urban question’ has been the pivotal axis (Albertsen, 2008, 2012, 2013, 2016) and in particular the interest in post-war urban transformations, often connected to sprawl, post-industrialism, post-modernism, and network cities. Niels Albertsen has contributed to the conceptualization and theorization of this in many publications over the years. In the early writings, the presence of political science themes was noticeable, but from the 1990s, his interest in architectural theory and design thinking became more and more prevalent. Niels Albertsen’s first academic publication on the theme of atmosphere was the article ‘Urbane Atmosfærer’ published in the Norwegian Journal Sosiologi i Dag in 1999. This article represented not just a turn of attention in his own academic work, but also a new direction that took him into international research networks, such as the International CNRS research network on ‘Translating Ambiances’, as well as earned him a seat on the Scientific Committee for the ‘Ambiance’ Journal. It is the English translation of this article that I will now turn to. Characteristically, the article opens with a story. Having read many of Niels Albertsen’s publications, I see a coherent approach and method here. The ‘capturing of the reader’ and the ‘tuning in’ to the theme at hand by means of a vignette or an empirical example is a didactic technique he often applies. Therefore, the opening gambit of the article is the story of the closing of the old maternity hospital in Aarhus in 1996. The story is referenced with a quote from clients and professionals, all pointing at the unique atmosphere of the old hospital. As readers, we already engage both in the reflection on the theme of atmospheres in a straightforward manner, but also in connecting to our individual experiential recollections of places and atmospheres. So despite the disclaimer that there will be little empirical analysis and documentation, as is stated in the introduction, Niels Albertsen utilizes the power of story as an opener. Setting the scene in this manner enables the article then to expand to the actual purpose of the article, namely that of extending and focusing the concept of atmosphere to the phenomenon of the city. The article thus entertains a set of underlying key questions: is there such a thing as an urban atmosphere? And what are the adequate conceptual and theoretical ways of thinking about urban atmospheres? Is it possible to establish a new aesthetics of urban atmospheres beyond the realm of art theory? In the words of the author himself: ‘The purpose of the following is to examine what the concept of atmosphere can mean and how it can be thought to contribute to the understanding of urban life and the aesthetics of cities’ (emphasis in original). The stage is set for a speculative and reflective exercise aiming at connecting the established research on atmospheres (with specific reference to Gernot Böhme’s work) to the realm of urbanism. And furthermore to do so in a manner that explores the potential for addressing the aesthetics of urbanism from another vantage point than art theory and classic aesthetics.The article opens up with a conceptual discussion of the notion of ‘atmosphere’ and an ‘atmospheric ontology’. Unsurprisingly, the opening theme is the ambiguity and ephemeral status of atmosphere. Here, Niels Albertsen relies on Gernot Böhme and his contribution to the research on atmosphere. Böhme’s research is widely acknowledged as fundamental to the state-of-the-art and in particular his argument that atmosphere is neither a property of a thing or a place, nor is it a subjective sentiment. Böhme claims that atmospheres are ‘between us’ (Böhme, 1993) and Niels Albertsen concur only to ‘spatialize’ the question of atmosphere. He asks ‘where, then, is atmosphere?’ A question of high importance to the agenda of urbanism and a key link back to Niels Albertsen’s longstanding research within architecture. In an elegant way, the identification of atmosphere as something ‘between’, not just ‘us’ as registering humans but also ‘between’ us and the material environment points to the next paragraph of the article, which is dedicated to the discussion of character, physiognomy, and sensory perception. Following Böhme, the ‘ecstasies of things’ can only be registered, perceived and felt through a multi-sensorial and embodied experience. The feeling and sensing body is as important as the contemplating mind, or, to quote Niels Albertsen in the article: ‘Atmosphere, then, exists in a border zone between sensuousness and meaning, between sensory experience and the semiotic or hermeneutic’. In other words, atmospheres need both to be felt and reflected. In the second part, Niels Albertsen addresses art, architecture and atmosphere. He points to the development of art practices and interpretations of art that, after avant-garde art, has led to a convergence of ‘art work’ and mundane everyday life experiences. This, says Niels Albertsen, is ‘when we are in the times of atmospheres’. Within architecture, as different architects as Peter Zumthor and Frank Loyd Wright acknowledged the importance of atmosphere. Despite controversies within Modernist architecture, the ‘atmospheric power’ of architecture is not to be discharged. Niels Albertsen again relies on Böhme and his argument that the kind of society we live in depends also on architecture (Böhme, 1995), and importantly for his agenda of urban atmosphere that ‘the relations among human beings … are constituted by the contribution of the surrounding physiognomies’. In the third part of the article, Niels Albertsen turns to one of the founding figures of urban sociology, Georg Simmel, in a discussion of the ‘mood of landscape and the mental life of the metropolis’ as the section is titled. The former part of this is targeted at a critical discussion of Simmel’s notion of landscape, whereas the latter is about Simmel’s most influential writing within urbanism, the seminal essay ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ (Simmel, 1903). Niels Albertsen proposes a very interesting hypothesis in an attempt to explain why one of the founding thinkers within urban sociology (and one with a strong phenomenological sensitivity, we may add) never articulated an idea of urban atmospheres. Niels Albertsen’s hypothesis is that it is the Kantian heritage of an art-oriented and individualized understanding that leads Simmel to see landscape as ‘an individual unity of mood’. To Simmel, then, the city (which he imminently explored in the ‘Metropolis’ essay) cannot be a landscape. It would be too extensive to engage in this discussion here. However, one may question if Simmel’s reflections, developed within the ‘Philosophy of Landscape’, necessarily would invalidate the ‘Metropolis’ essay’s potential for re-thinking the notion of atmosphere. In the fourth part, Niels Albertsen reaches the key issue, an articulation and discussion of the notion of ‘Urban Atmospheres’. He takes us back to the mundane and multi-sensorial experience of the city as the outset when he discusses ‘smell, sound, and form of life: City life as a generator of atmosphere’. In a quite Simmelian fashion we are taken to the Parisian Metro and its ‘smell-scapes’, as well as to the odor from the old Oil Mill in Aarhus that Niels Albertsen describes as a ‘characteristic, location-identifying feature of the inner city’ (an interpretation I truly concur as I remember my childhood in Aarhus and the peculiar, and actually not very pleasant, smells in this neighbourhood where I often came in the 1970s). Sounds and acoustics are also discussed as key markers of urban atmospheres (and perhaps it is Niels Albertsen’s love and affection for Jazz and his own practice as a long-time practicing jazz drummer that activates his analysis here). With a set-off from the situationist’s ‘psychogeographical’ urban explorations, he turns to the next theme: the atmosphere of the modern city. Through seminal urbanist thinkers, such as Richard Sennett, Niels Albertsen discusses the sanitized, planned, and ordered city as it manifested itself within Modernist ideals of city planning. A theme that mobilizes quite a lot of discussion within the field of urbanism, and where Niels Albertsen quotes Dutch Architect and ‘enfant terrible’ Rem Koolhaas and his claim that ‘urbanism disappears’ as architecture and city converge into ‘XL-Architecture’. From this, he draws the conclusion that atmosphere simply needs both to cover classic building architecture, as well as the Koolhaasian ‘quasi-urban’ atmospheres. The need for a concept of atmosphere to capture 20th (and now 21st) Century urbanism becomes even more important as we face a technological development with large infrastructural landscapes and mega-structures blurring notions of building, urban space, and landscape. Here, Niels Albertsen re-reconnects to the contemporary discussion of the ‘formless city’ as he would term it. The urban habitat has transformed, and the need for understanding its atmospheric qualities (or lack hereof) becomes even more pertinent. In the section on the ‘cyborg’s picturesque cityscape’, he explores the increasing mobility of urban dwellers and the new aesthetics of mediatized landscapes (at the moment of the article confined to the practice of flicking through TV channels, but today obviously something that would look into digital communication). From the technology discussion, he moves to the classic discussion of sociality and urbanism with the section on neighbouring community, age of urban architecture and age atmospheres. Here, the suburbanisation of ‘extra-urban’ spaces in Denmark is a parable for reflecting upon urban planning and its role in contributing to urban atmospheres. Even though we were warned about a lack of empirical cases at the article’s outset, Niels Albertsen here turns to the theme of ‘atmosphere of conflict’ by referencing the controversy related to the construction of a bus terminal at the City Hall Square in Copenhagen. We are reminded about Bruno Latour’s point that architecture ‘brings controversy’ (see Yaneva, 2012). In the public discussion about the bus terminal (in the vernacular baptized ‘the black box’), it is shown that most of the argumentation drew on explicit or implicit notions of atmosphere. With Niels Albertsen’s example, we might say that the black box unleashed atmospheric controversies of a noticeable magnitude.As we move towards the end of the article, Niels Albertsen returns to Rem Koolhaas in the section on ‘urban atmospheres and imaginary city centres’. One of Koolhaas’ most influential texts within urbanism, ‘The Generic City’ is referenced for the discussion of identity (or lack hereof) within generic urban typologies, such as shopping malls, airports, and other modern urbanist landscape typologies. The rest of the section is dedicated to an example from Oslo. Niels Albertsen discusses in some detail the Norwegian sociologist Dag Østerberg and his then new book ‘Arkitektur og Sosiologi i Oslo’ (Architecture and Sociology in Oslo) from 1998. I remember reading this book and finding great value in Østerberg’s analysis of a city ‘gone wild’, a city illustrating the need for new concepts beyond the classic mono-nuclear understanding. Oslo is, states Østerberg, a ‘socio-material field of action’ and the notion of a homogenous and coherent city with a clear history is a fiction, a play on the collective memory. Niels Albertsen criticizes the conclusion by Østerberg that the atmosphere of Oslo is a purely imaginary construction, utilizing his notion of urban atmospheres to correct this fallacy. The discussion of the shape of the city (its morphology), that Østerberg used as the entry point to his analysis of Oslo, becomes his queue to the last section in the article on ‘urban morphology and urban sociology’. When I was re-reading the article for this presentation, I first thought that the article was missing a conclusion. However, as I re-engage it, it is clear that the clash between morphology and sociology in many ways speaks to a much larger debate within the field of urban studies. Niels Albertsen states it a bit boldly as: ‘Urban morphology and urban sociological studies rarely play well together. The first cares most for the accumulation of buildings and infrastructures whereas the second cares most for the accumulation of people’. Niels Albertsen finds Østerberg’s attention to the dialectics of ‘socio-materiality’ to be almost sufficient – it just lacks the notion of atmosphere, as he states in the very last sentence of the article.Epilogue: The article ‘Urban Atmospheres’ is ambitious and comprehensive. Upon reading it in 2019, one inevitably will have to consider its year of publication being 1999. The three decades have not only changed the phenomena studied. Such a time-frame is also bound to change the analyst him – or herself. Seen this way, it is a brave act to allow an unrevised re-print after so many years. One might have rethought arguments and wanted to make revisions. But there is something pristine and ‘clean’ about simply translating and reprinting a text after so many years. The ‘effective history’ (Wirkungsgeschichte) of a text, as Gadamer explained, needs to be comprehended as the way in which horizons fuse (1989). I as a reader have changed, the urban reality has changed, and the author has changed since 1999. Nevertheless, the re-printing of this clearly illustrates that the need for thinking through the notion of ‘urban atmospheres’ is as relevant now as it was three decades ago. The re-reading or the first-time reading of Niels Albertsen’s article is bound to set an agenda of high importance not just for urbanists but also for all students of atmospheres. With this introduction, I hope to have created enough motivated interest so that you will explore this eminent text with the same enthusiasm as I did when reading it back in 1999. It is beyond doubt that this article deserves the wider attention that an English translation will give it. 