Sensory Walks – Sensory THiNK KiT

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How do you experience a city as a long term resident, a newcomer or a visitor? And how does your sensory experiences differ from those of the city's many other users? Would you like to explore your senses, learn how they are shaped by culture and connect to the sensory experience of others in the past and in the present? Here you will find some ideas for exercises to awaken your senses, links to talks & literature on the senses, examples of sensory walks of three cities and a ‘toolkit’ to make your own sensory walk.

i. Becoming attentive to your senses

We generally experience our environment with more than one sense at the time. While it is useful to focus on individual senses and understand how each sense frames our access to the world, it is also important to think about how senses interact. Which senses do you notice most? Are some sensory features so dominant that they overpower others? How do you think you might be conditioned by upbringing, education, or profession to pay more attention to some senses than to others? Do your perceptions change once you filter out a particular sense? Are you more attentive to it afterwards when focusing on all the senses again? We suggest to alternate focusing on the interaction of the senses with zooming in on particular senses.

1. Multi-sensory Methods:

> Walking and Talking

Walk alone or with another person, paying attention to all your senses and discuss your impressions either afterwards or while you walk. Are your perceptions similar or different?

Example: Research and Representing for tourists

A group of academics from diverse disciplines and different knowledge and attachments to el Raval studies a multi-sensory survey of el Raval from the perspective of the Raval local, tourist, Barcelona visitor.

TOUR ITINARY AND ACTIVITIES:
To think about the different sensory ‘atmospheres’ and different uses of public space we propose to concentrate on the part of the street between Jardins de Rubió i Lluch and Plaça del Pedro, exploring the Jardins de Rubió i Lluch, the Carrer de l’Hospital, the Rambla, the Plaça del Pedro and the Capella de Sant Llàtzer. To stop and talk, the broader open squares seemed most suited.

While developed for, and on the basis of, the sensory landscape of Carrer de l’Hospital, and for (rather individualistic tourists) walking and talking, the principles are adaptable to other media, places and audiences. The format will need to depend on a) the space and b) the aims, but the general format and aims of a small scale, interactive multi-sensorial tour can provide a good starting point to educate researchers, public and policy makers to become more reflective and engaged individuals.

London workshop report

> Standing and Sketching

As ‘sensescapes’ change while we move it can help to stand still to better concentrate. Sketching is a good way to observe the sense of movement in a place. Try for instance to stand still for 30 minutes and experiment with a range of analogue methods by using paper and pen. Sketch what you see and make movement notations; or draw a list of her immediate sensory impressions to get closer to the fluid nature of urban sensing and capture some of the evasive and temporal aspects of urban life.

> Performance

Interactive performances offer different, less controlled ways to explore once sensory body.

Giovanna Pezzullo and Stephane Laident (Teatro de los Sentidos)
The Theatre of the Senses - Performance with participants

Giovanna Pezzullo and Stephane Laident (Teatro de los Sentidos)
The Theatre of the Senses - talk

2. Methods focusing on one sense:

> Sight

Example 1: Analogue Vision

Vision is perhaps our best trained sense. If in a group discuss whether or how your vision has been trained. Do you ‘see’ different things? Which level of the street to you ‘automatically’ focus on? Do you look up or down? Observe people or buildings?

Cologne workshop - City of Vision

Example 2: Digital Vision

Reflect on how vision is translated into digital images.

London workshop - Social Media and the making of place

> Hearing

Example 1: Ear cleaning

Stand and listened while cupping your ears, trying changing the direction of the ‘cupping’ or turning your bodies. ‘Fill’ your ears with the more ‘natural sound’ of a more silent space (or a park), putting your hands over your ears to take this sound with you out onto the street and then releasing your ears to notice the sounds of the street. You could also try to do the same exercise backwards, walking from a more silent to a louder environment. For another exercise work in pairs. One person can closed their eyes and be led by the other repeating a noise such as clicking fingers or clapping. Meanwhile, try to listen, experience and possibly try to classify the surrounding sounds.

Example 2: Recording Sounds

Cologne workshop - City of Sound

Ilaria Sartori (Director at Barcelona Sonora)
Barcelona through Sound

Example 3: Observing Sounds

Barcelona workshop - Research and Representation for Museum Curators

> Taste

Taste can be analysed directly (by tasting) or by looking for traces of taste in a city.

Cologne workshop - City of Taste

Alex Rhys-Taylor (sociologist and deputy director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Fried Chicken and Flat Whites: Olfactory Agents of Demographic Change

> Smell

Like taste smell can be smelled and visually observed (which sights for example indicate smells which are absent due to closed doors, the weather or street cleaning).

Katherine McLean (artist, Royal College of Art)
Invisible, Erratic, Ephemeral: Lives of Urban Smells

> Touch

Touch too can be experienced and observed. Think about what can be touched and not touched in a city? To experience touch, touch surfaces or try to blindfold a member of a group; to observe you could pay attention while standing or walking to who touches whom or what.

Cologne workshop - City of Touch

Albert Sales/Carlos Delclós (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
A Sense of Exclusion: Poverty, otherness and the senses

> Temperature

Our thermal sense reacts to temperature. Here objective and subjective data can be combined. A thermometer (or more elaborately a portable whether station) can record data. Subjective data can be gathered through a thermal walk, recording impressions of temperature at different times of the day and year and before and after a meal.

Carolina Vasilikou (University of Kent)
The doors of thermal perception in sensory research

> Movement

Experiment with what you can notice and record on paper or an electronic device while walking versus standing.

ii. Sample Walks

Here are some examples of sensory walks: The first section links to the different experimental walks we did in three street across Europe - some multi-sensorial, some focusing on individual senses. The second section provides links to inspiring sensory walks focusing on smell, sound, taste, touch and temperature.

1. The Sense of Three Streets:

Across the Sensory Cities Website you will find explorations of three vibrant streets in three European cities that go back to Roman times: London’s Whitechapel Road, Barcelona’s Carrer de l’Hospital and Cologne’s Eigelstein. The material is experimental and preliminary in nature. It is the result of three ‘fieldwork’ workshops conducted as part of the project. They are not in-depth studies of the three streets. Rather, the emphasis was on trying out and developing methods through interdisciplinary and inter-professional dialogue involving experts on these streets, as well as those without prior knowledge. The walks in London focused on different styles of fieldwork from observation to interviews and social media research and experimented with moving versus static methods. In Cologne, each group researched a different sense, while in Barcelona the groups reflected on how sensory power relations can be researched and communicated for and by different audiences.

2. Guided Walks:

> Smellwalks

Smellwalks, sensory maps & artworks by artist and designer Kate McLean, http://sensorymaps.com/

Katherine McLean (artist, Royal College of Art)
Invisible, Erratic, Ephemeral: Lives of Urban Smells

> Soundwalks

Soundwalking & Interactions: a project by Montreal researcher Pohanna Pyne Feinberg, https://soundwalkinginteractions.wordpress.com/
Resonance, European Sound Art Network https://resonancenetwork.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/the-art-of-soundwalk/

> Taste and Touch Walks

A Sensory Cities Workshop by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Centre for Sensory Studies, Montreal, http://www.centreforsensorystudies.org/the-sensory-city-workshop-sensing-the-city-through-touch-and-taste/

> Thermal Walks

Report on thermal walks by Carolina Vasilikou & Marialena Nikopoulou (Kent School of Architecture), https://mediatum.ub.tum.de/doc/1169386/1169386.pdf

Further Reading

Degen, M.M. & Rose, G., 2012. The sensory experiencing of urban design: the role of walking and perceptual memory. Urban Studies, 49(15), pp.3269–3285.

Bates, Charlotte and Rhys-Taylor, Alex, eds. 2016. Walking Through Social Research, Routledge.

iii. Make your own Sensory Walks

You can adapt the following ‘exercises’ in any city. It does not matter whether it is an old or a new city, in the centre or the periphery, or whether you are familiar with it or not – as long as you act responsibility and respectfully.

Aims:
Having found the combination of interdisciplinary conversation and embodied fieldwork of our workshops beneficial for our own reflection, we want to share some of the ingredients that can help to feel, to reflect and to communicate. (We tried this out experimentally in Barcelona – see Cities/Streets). We suggest a format that is participatory, interactive and analogue to allow the senses to appear and to have conversations about their interaction and interpretation in a social space. But you can also do this on your own.

At the most general level the aims are to:

become more aware of your own sensing
understand that the senses are not neutral
reflect on the unique sensory landscape of a street
develop transferable skills for decoding other localities with the sensory tools learned
develop as a reflective individuals and engaged citizen

Format:
A small group tour on foot (8-10 participants at most) would best allow these aims. The suggestions we make can be adapted to different age groups, and mobilities. The tour is not designed to be for outsiders but would indeed be enriched by a dialogue between locals, visitors and urban professionals.

Step 1: Ten Minutes of Exploration

Step 2: Group to come together and talk about impressions

Tour guide/or group members to initiate debate about subjectivity, implicit comparison and what the sensory observations can tell us about shared and contested uses of space.

Tour guide/teacher/researcher could now provide contextual information on

social nature of the senses
a brief introduction to the senses in the location
a brief introduction to the history of the site and the street as sensory history
a brief introduction to cultural regeneration and the senses
a brief introduction to the role of tourists

Depending on the observations made my tour members, the guide could ask questions/give pointers about whether members noted any absences (people; places etc.).

Step 3: Walking and talking in pairs

different tasks could be experimented with: discussing multi-sensory impressions, focusing on one sense (using the different techniques listed above); focusing on signs of tourism, signs of regeneration
children/young adults could focus on senses at their height, on counting particular smells, sights, sounds etc (from bakeries to hair products to pigeons) or on marking different form of absences (see Barcelona workshop - Research and Representing for Children (13-16 year olds)).

Step 4: Participant discussion

Step 5: Sharing impressions