<< Power of the senses >>
i. Sensory hierarchies past/present:
Following from the earlier point that the ways senses are given meaning and value is socially, culturally and historically dependent we suggest to be aware of the sensory hierarchies that are constructed through particular designs, practices and policies of urban redevelopment. Questions that need to be asked is: which and whose senses predominate in a place? For what purpose? What are the moral codes associated to particular places – do they overlap with particular sensory regimes? Which social group has most control over the use of space and therefore the predominant sensescape?
> Methods:
Here are some examples from our workshops on how sensory hierarchies could be researched:
Example 1: London workshop - Mapping the senses
The group chose an observational method. They suggested to create three maps of Whitechapel Road. The first one maps the senses of the observer on the street: What smellscapes can be identified? What can be seen? What do the touchscapes consist of? What can be heard? This is complemented by a map with subjective experiences from people interviewed: What are their feelings about the space? Do they experience a hostile, friendly, oppressive, etc environment? The third step is to create a ‘relationship map’ i.e. asking users of space: why do you experience this space as hostile, friendly or oppressive? The aim of this method is to create ‘places of translation’ bringing together the observational maps of the researcher with the experiences of interviewing people using this space.
Example 2: London workshop - Observation and evocative interviews
The group chose to consciously reflect on their interdisciplinary set up by having each researcher observe the same place for 30 minutes by walking around the space. They then met to compare their observations: the disciplinary training informed very different observations of the same place revealing how our disciplinary training shapes how we sense. Agreements and disagreements came up which helped to problematise the subjective positioning of the researcher. This highlights the importance of a) group work; b) the need for interdisciplinarity when researching the senses and c) reflexibity. The researchers’ observations then fed into shaping an interview schedule in which 5 questions are asked to the diversity of users of space from the more general to the more evocative.
Example 3: Barcelona workshop - Research and Representation for Policy makers group
The different members of the group were allocated different tasks:
Steffano, our architect drew a map of the area outlining the spatial organisation of space;
Angelina and Monica started mapping a sensory inventory walking along the streets of the Pl Padro and noting which sensory experiences predominated etc. We noted the existence of a range of low grade shops that seemed to provide for the local and immigrant population: pharmacy, halal butcher, mobile phone shop, small supermarket, fruit shop, local cafes. Not one smell seemed to predominate. Visually it was a very legible space with a mixture of architecture from different centuries and a range of ‘touchscapes’ that engaged ones eye and tactile sense. Walking around led to a high engagement on the senses: one is very quickly immersed in the everyday life of the neighbourhood as streets are narrow, pedestrians need to negotiate their way with cars, bicycles and skaters. However, it is not overwhelming but fosters a sensory integration into the rhythms of the neighbourhood. We observed a diversity of people making use of the C/Hospital and Pl. Padro. An in depth study would need to assess this over different times of the day/week.
Rebecca sat in one spot and noted the sounds that were shaping the area. She tried to group the sounds into a range of themes: renewal, circulation, sociability, absence, building work etc to get a sense of the identity of place and existing social power relations.
> Links to talks/literature:
Here are some suggestions of how sensory hierarchies impact on the social, economic and historical structures of places.
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
Dr Astrid Swenson (Historian, Brunel University)
In the Shadow of the Cathedral: writing sensory histories
Eva Herr (Stadt Köln – Dezernat Stadtentwicklung, Planen, Bauen und Verkehr)
Current Challenges for City Planning in Cologne
Caroline Pembroke & Mahbubul Anam (Whitechapel Vision Delivery Team, Tower Hamlets Council)
Whitechapel High Street Regeneration
Reading suggestions:
Monica Degen (2014) “The Everyday City of the Senses” in Paddison, R. & McCann E. (eds) Cities and Social Change, Sage. https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/cities-and-social-change/book233407
ii. Reflexivity:
(how to reflect and why it’s important): Urban redevelopment does not only restructure the city physically and economically but radically transforms the somatic and experiential landscape of places. While urban professionals work within a range of temporal, political and legal constraints, discussions in our Sensory Cities network suggested that reflecting on the sensory impact transforming urban spaces has important consequences for place attachments, sense of place and the socio-economic stratification of spaces. To ensure a ‘good quality’ of urban public space, accessible by many social groups and as a political arena for expression urban professionals need to reflect on how the senses operate in the public realm.
> Methods:
Here are some examples from our fieldwork groups on how to research how the senses operate in the public realm:
Example 1: Cologne workshop - City of touch
The group experimented with different methods to access the touchscape of cities. A range of issues were discussed before setting up some research questions: What kind of city do we encounter through touch? How can this be translated in a non-visual but tangible representation? What are the politics of touch? Is urban living about organising non-touch? How is touch mediated through the other senses? This group decided to try three different methodological approximations. The first one involved walking blindfolded through a street and the blindfolded person describing in detail what she could feel. The touchscape can be divided into the sensible bodyscape and the other environment. The descriptions would inform a model of a touch city produced by an artist. The second method, involved detailed observations of social interactions: when do people touch in the city? Under what circumstances and for what reason. It quickly become evident from our short observation of the Eigelstein that apart from direct inter-personal touch of people familiar to each other, or in social groups, economic exchanges are the base for most tangible connections between people and between people and the environment: products are designed to be touched, people pay and touch, people hold shopping bags, people try clothes on etc. The last method consisted in following different people from different age groups to observe how they manoeuvred the city, a ‘choreography of the city’ based on an explicit focus on their interactions with the environment.
Example 2: Cologne workshop - City of sound
The group developed methodological approaches to research the soundscapes of the city. Cities have rhythms, sound changes within 24 hours but also with seasons. Sound sources mix and create their own symphony. In winter inside and outside sound are more separated; in summer they mix a lot more due to open windows and doors. Although sound levels can be measured and assessed – sound perception is subjective depending on the role of the listeners and their occupation. Sound categorisation can already evoke feelings of bad or good sound such as noise, music, and ambience. The perception of loudness also depends on emotional reactions and experiences, whilst traffic noise is often associated with negative feelings (added health concerns), laughter and music (especially in Cologne – collective identity through dialect/music) seem to evoke positive reactions. Familiarity of sounds to a ‘visitor/listener’ are similarly important for orientation, and attentiveness. Specific auditory information of a city might also form part of signature sounds such as the bells of the Cologne cathedral. The team looked at a particular part of the street first and recorded different sound sources to present a soundtrack of that spot. It became evident that whilst some sources provided more constant streams (ventilation, distant traffic, accordion player) others were fading in and out of hearing (train, cars, people passing by) or created sound events (bell on a bicycle, burst of laughter).
Technological recordings isolate information but humans also look at sound sources and process other information from the environment. By moving sensory information out of space and time, vital contextual sensory information is lost that has to be substituted for. We took images of sound sources as additional sound references to present later. Recording is usually a conscious process – a reflective process in itself requiring decisions over what is worth recording and what is not, for how long, and who is receiving it. When analysing a city’s auditory sensorium we concluded one has to look at a variety of factors – time (day, year), differing subjective experiences including a variety of different human ‘listeners’ (their sensory reflections in and out of context) – but also objective readings, interactions between the materiality of the build environment, humans, transport and environmental factors (e.g. wind) – extending the idea of the thermal maps (presented in Carolina Vasilikou’s talk during the first day).
> Links to talks/literature:
Here are some of the talks that reflect on how the senses inform urban redevelopment.
Sandra Kurfürst (University of Cologne)
Semiotics of urban space: producing and negotiating meaning in the city
Chris Miele (architectural historian and chartered town planner, Montagu Evans LLP)
Measuring change in a changing city: Understanding London’s expansion
Albert Sales/Carlos Delclós (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
A Sense of Exclusion: Poverty, otherness and the senses
Hanna Katherina Goebel (Universität Hamburg, Institut für Bewegungswissenschaft)
Users without bodies. Material paradoxes of ‘socially’ engaged architecture
iii. Training the senses:
Professional training informs and shapes the ‘sensing’ of cities. Moreover, professionals work within the boundaries of a number of constraints such as legal frameworks, time pressures, economic and political constraints that influence and frame how the senses are ‘curated’ in the public realm. Cross-professional and interdisciplinary teams are therefore important to understand from multiple perspectives how the senses interact and how perception is organised.
> Methods:
Example 1: Cologne workshop - City of Vision
A diverse group in terms of academic disciplines and professions discussed how to study the visual sense in Eigelstein Road.
Image: Eusebius Wirdeier
Key points of discussion were:
1. Each of us have different sensory maps of the street depending on our purpose of visiting/seeing it – when focussing on the ‘visual’ for research we all tend to look up beyond street level.
2. Our methods combined visually driven questions and conclusions (picking up clues about the history through the architectural fabric) with textual (attention being drawn to particular bits of the street through knowledge of the historical record) and oral (interest and representation being driving by conversations with inhabitants and visitors) ones.
3. Knowledge makes us see and sense: We all saw things we had not seen before by having our attention drawn to different layers of history and interpretation.
4. Conversation creates community: from a discussion of the museum’s exhibitions and the use of photography it appeared strongly how conversation about objects, memories and uses through the senses can positively create a sense of place and decisions about regeneration.
5. We noted that for all of us our research involves an element of fieldwork and participant observation but we usually do not discuss the process in our writing as part of the discussion of methodologies. We discussed whether this should be done more in historical or art historical work.
6. Visual methods and multi-sensorial awareness: we found that external conditions (a cold, clear Saturday morning with few people and cars in the street) meant there were few sounds, smells or movements distracting from a focus on the visual – and indeed the built-environment rather than the uses of street by people. Awareness of the importance of other senses on this occasion came rather through knowledge of the historical record, memories of other conditions in the street and the discussion with the other groups after the fieldwork. It seemed valid to focus on one sense and then to combine insights.
7. Turning from analysing what we saw to how we would represent it, we noted that given the strong links between senses and imagination – the representation of visual sensing can not only be done visually but also powerfully through narrations and art forms that draw on other senses.
8. We found our existing methods not challenged through the experiment, but we found that we a) literally ‘saw’ more through the interdisciplinary exchange and b) were reflecting on a broader range of question by having the question about the interaction of the senses in our mind.
Example 2: Cologne workshop - City of taste
The group experimented with methods for discovering the tastescapes of the city. It is obvious that one cannot directly ‘taste the public’ but the group focused on finding traces of ‘practices of taste’. The main methods to collect these were mapping, photography, observation and autoethnography. In terms of mapping the group mapped the tastescapes of different establishments i.e. is there a concentration of certain food types, restaurants, supermarkets in certain areas? This could be aided by a visual map of different locations of taste and expanded into a ‘global map’ that would trace where different foods, tastes come from and how they travel. Photography could be an underlying method for different methodological approaches. So for example different ‘practices of taste’, active versus finished, could be captured and analysed. Photographs could also capture the signages of food both in terms of food advertising and the signages of shops: what food identity is created by these adverts? Observation as a method revealed the spaces and temporalities of taste i.e. as the morning wore on more food practices started to happen at the Eigelstein. This highlights the temporality of the urban tastescape that changes over the day but also changes according to the seasons. Observation further revealed the ‘sociability of food’ – tastescapes are often experienced in a convivial setting. Lastly the group reflected on how researching social media in regards to the tastescapes of particular streets or areas of the city reveals how taste gets mediated as a social, sensory practice and reveals geographies that go beyond the immediate street setting.
Example 3: London workshop - Observation and evocative interviews
The group chose to consciously reflect on their interdisciplinary set up by having each researcher observe the same place for 30 minutes by walking around the space. They then met to compare their observations: the disciplinary training informed very different observations of the same place revealing how our disciplinary training shapes how we sense. Agreements and disagreements came up which helped to problematise the subjective positioning of the researcher. This highlights the importance of a) group work; b) the need for interdisciplinarity when researching the senses and c) reflexibity. The researchers’ observations then fed into shaping an interview schedule in which 5 questions are asked to the diversity of users of space from the more general to the more evocative.
> Links to talks/literature:
The following talks illustrate how sensing is framed by our professional background.
Euan Mills (Urban Designer, GLA, Research leader for Mayors Design Advisory Group)
What Really Matters in Architecture
Hanna Katherina Goebel (Universität Hamburg, Institut für Bewegungswissenschaft)
Users without bodies. Material paradoxes of ‘socially’ engaged architecture
