Sensing the City: an Embodied Documentation and Mapping of the Changing Uses and Tempers of Urban Place (a practice-based case-study of Coventry)”

The overall purpose of the research is to model a usable practice-based template for sensing the city, drawing on the city of Coventry (UK) as a case-study in the first instance. The template will offer a range of methodologies towards, first, engaging constructively and productively with urban sites using the sensate presence of the human body as the primary means of gathering data and, second, processing and presenting that data in innovative ways within a critical framework that assesses the city's habitability and sustainability. As such, the term 'sensing' has a dual application inasmuch as it refers to both the physical apperception of the city (how the body responds) and to an active sensitising or aestheticising of urban sites via the presence of the body. Dr Natalie Garrett Brown & Dr Emma Meehan from C-DaRE will deliver the micro-project within Sensing the City called ‘Moving & Mapping; knowing communities through dance practice.’ This micro-project proposes a series of research labs curated by enter & inhabit which draws together dance artists associated with C-DaRE and who have made work in the city landscapes of Coventry. The focus of the research labs will be to explore the ways in which dance practitioners and the moving body offer spatial, haptic and affective understandings of the city landscape, understood to be an evolving and dynamic landscape. Specifically, the project will use dance to engage with those that inhabit the city of Coventry and those that contribute to the public planning and social policy of the City. The project will draw on a variety of consultants such as dance artists expert in working in the City, enter & inhabit group members as curators, key arts stakeholders programming movement based art work in the city alongside scholars expert in the field of site performance.