About The Aesthetic City

Welcome. This is The Aesthetic City, a content platform created in August 2021 by Ruben Hanssen, with a clear mission: to help make our built environment more beautiful, liveable and sustainable by spreading knowledge about urbanism and architecture.

The Aesthetic City was originally intended to only be a podcast. A Twitter account was created to promote the podcast, which started to grow rapidly. Our first podcast episode was finally released on the 10th of March, 2022.

By now, The Aesthetic City is much more than our Twitter account: we are active on YouTube ,  Instagram, Tiktok, there is a Substack newsletter and a Patreon account. A book is in the works, as well as many more videos and podcasts. We hope to grow our reach by growing the team, giving talks and publishing works – all to spread information on how to make our cities more liveable, beautiful places.

Support us

If you really like what The Aesthetic City is doing and want to support our mission, please consider becoming a patron. For now, this is purely a passion project, but I want to ultimately turn it into my full time job. With enough patrons, it will be possible to hire an editor to create even more content and to achieve even more impact in the real world.

Click here to go to our Patreon page!

My name is Ruben Hanssen, founder of The Aesthetic city.

I studied Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam (2010-2014) and Urbanism at Delft University of Technology (2015-2017). After a short time as co-founder of a small VR company (VRBANISM), I worked for almost three years at Witteveen+Bos, a Dutch engineering firm. In 2021, I quit my job to focus full-time on The Aesthetic City.

I enjoy traveling, photography, visiting museums and philosophising about a great deal of things, like life, architecture and the city, science, the impact of technology and much more. Mostly I love to create – films, photographs, music, drawings, writing, and of course podcasts! I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands – but whenever I can, I travel to new places to discover the local beauty and to run around with my camera.

”To foster the creation of beauty and true sustainability in architecture and urbanism through the advocacy for local, timeless, traditional and human-centered design principles and -traditions.

The Aesthetic City
How to change our built environment?

Impact through content

The Aesthetic City wants to make an impact on the public debate through educational content on YouTube, the Podcast, Twitter and potentially publications like books at some point. This 'bottom up' approach is meant to inspire and inform the general population, professionals, designers, leaders and policy makers alike. With access to inspiring conversations, clearly presented information and beautiful artwork, I hope to inspire enough people to make different choices so beauty gets a chance once more.