Urban beauty and its oppositions

What makes a city beautiful—or, more precisely, what makes it not beautiful? This study explores the inverse of urban beauty by identifying five recurring categories of urban ugliness: neglect, encroaching incompatibility, copy-paste repetition, negative affordance, and junk-places. Drawing on in-depth interviews with planning and design professionals in Israel, the research uncovers a consistent perception that contemporary urban environments often fail to meet the experiential, cultural, and spatial qualities that define beautiful cities. The findings suggest that while urban beauty is elusive and subjective, its negation is widely recognized, concrete, and diagnosable. The study positions these categories as not only critiques of current planning paradigms but also as reflections of a broader historical rupture between pre-modern and modern urbanism. In contrasting the nuanced, locally embedded practices of pre-modern cities with the industrialized and homogenized tendencies of modern planning, the paper argues that avoiding urban ugliness is a vital step toward restoring the emotional and aesthetic richness of the urban environment. While the study is not concerned with defining beauty, it is about assessing its opposites. The paper focuses on the Israeli built environment yet offers broader, international and theoretical insights.