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

This chapter explores ways in which sensorial understandings of the city generated by dance practitioners can provide the basis for dialogue with urban designers and planners to inform public interest design. In doing so it provides a framing for the moving and mapping 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 chapter considers the value of iterative, reflective and processual city engagement as practised by dance artists, arguing that this offers a methodology for understanding the lived experience of cities. Closing with future recommendations, this chapter suggests that dance artists can be considered to be ‘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.