Our Teaching
Event Month workshops
Rethinking the urban experience: the sensory production of place
Professor Simon Guy.
Our sensual experience of the city - mediated through issues of noise, smell, tactility, taste, as well as the visual, is a recurrent focus of urban policy at both national and international levels (eg. PPG24). However, much state and municipal planning is dominated by the reduction of human experience to that which can be made visually legible through maps and models (Scott 1998). This disciplining of the city has been the subject of fierce critique from writers like Richard Sennett, who make connections between the technologising of cities and the poverty of public life (Sennett 1994). Cities, for Sennett, are experienced through all our senses and the result of prioritising visual experience is a sensual sterility that is the root cause of an urban malaise. Other researchers concur with this view of the sensory reductionism within urban studies and policy-making. Macnaghten and Urry (1998) refer to the ‘primacy of the visual’, and Bull (2000) goes further by saying there is no contemporary account of the auditory nature of everyday experience in urban and cultural studies. Furthermore, Classen et al (1995) refer to an ‘olfactory silence’ and argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and that its social history has been ignored. Add to this the vacuity of research on touch and taste and a need for an appraisal of sensory studies becomes apparent. By contrast, exploring sensorial research through the windows of architecture and urban infrastructure and through the experiences of mobility and temporality in the city, will facilitate the crossing of disciplinary boundaries and the connections between research on urban design, policy and practice.
The ‘event’ will unfold through the use of ‘sense-walks’ designed to explore areas such as: the relationships between public and private space; buildings and their various uses; the sensory qualities of the material world and their social significance; multi-sensory appreciations of physical urban artefacts; materials and their sensory significance. The aim of the event will be to challenge an ocular-centricism that arguably underpins much scholarship in the arts, humanities and social sciences, and to engage with an emerging multi-sensory research agenda. We will explore this debate within studies of ‘the city’ where, as Phyllis Lambert (curator of a recent Canadian exhibition on ‘senses and the city’) puts it, the “whole gamut of ‘sensorial’ phenomena that figure prominently in daily experience, and largely determine the design of buildings, are strikingly absent from urban studies” (Lambert, 2005, 15). There have long been calls from within architectural studies for an “architecture of the senses” that challenges the “dominance of the eye” and ‘recognises the realms of hearing, smell and taste”, the “haptic architecture of the muscle and the skin” (Pallasmaa, 1996, 48). Such sensory studies would go beyond ‘reading or visualising’ the city, and instead explore the significance of “sensing the city through multiple sensory modalities” (Howes, 2005, 323).
References
Bull, M. 2000. Sounding out the city: personal stereos and the management of everyday life. Oxford: New York Berg Publishers.
Classen, C., Howes, D. and Synnott, A. 1995. Aroma: the cultural history of smell: Routledge.
Department of the Environment 1994. 'Planning and Noise: Planning Policy Guidance Note 24 (PPG24)': HMSO.
Howes, D. 2005. 'Architecture of the senses' in Zardini, M. (ed.) Sense of the city: and alternative approach to urbanism. Toronto: Lars Muller Publishers.
Lambert, P. 2005. 'Preface' in Zardini, M. (ed.) Sense of the city: and alternative approach to urbanism. Toronto: Lars Muller Publishers.
Pallasmaa, J. 1996. The eyes of the skin: architecture and the senses. London: Academy Editions.
Macnaghten, P. and Urry, J. 1998. 'Contested Natures'. London: Sage.
Scott, J. 1998. Seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sennett, R. 1994. Flesh and stone: the body and the city in Western civilisation. New York: Norton.