Moving and Mapping: exploring embodied approaches to urban design and planning

This chapter explores ways in whichsensorial understandings of the city generated by dance practitioners canprovide the basis for dialogue with urban designers and planners to informpublic interest design. In doing so it provides a framing for the moving andmapping micro-project within the larger Sensing the City project, foregrounding the situated dance practice of dance collective enter& inhabit. 

Reflecting on the ‘moving and mapping’ micro-project, the chapterconsiders the value of iterative, reflective and processual city engagement aspractised by dance artists, arguing that this offers a methodology forunderstanding the lived experience of cities. Closing with future recommendations, this chapter suggests that dance artists can be considered tobe ‘expert-notators’ who can offer spatial, haptic and affective understandings of the city crucial to emerging urban design and planning approaches concerned with participatory and interdisciplinary methodologies. 

'The reflective writing catalogs the work of the company over multiple years as it interacts with the city using embodied methodologies as a form of sensory engagement with space as it morphs through the processes of urban decay and renewal. The multiple examples offered make ‘apparent the ways in which the built environment shapes activities and how people are implicitly allowed to act in it, as well as the sensations and feelings evoked’ (115). The reflection offers the reader a roadmap for utilizing dance practice as a format for better understanding the living nature of the urban environment, something that is never static but continually in relation with its inhabitants...the project offers a fresh format for documentation and serves as a blueprint for those interested in undertaking collaborative practice as-research (PaR) projects.' 

William W. Lewis (12 Dec 2023): Review of Urban sensographies, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, DOI: 10.1080/14794713.2023.2291599