The Embodied City: A Method for Multisensory Mapping

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter presents a methodology for recording sensory data in an urban landscape and looks forward to how this might be adapted to enable multisensory mapping of ancient spaces more broadly. The premise is that it is impossible to make a single map of a city without overlapping temporal, monumental, social, and sensory spaces, a premise situated in Henri Lefebvre’s philosophy of social space. The focus of the authors’ methodology is lived space. Lived space is constructed from the relations between people and their habitation of the physical environment. Recognition of, and attachment to, places is constructed through personal experience and memories. Sight, sound, smell, taste, kinaesthesia, and touch all contribute to the creation of the experience and affectiveness of place. Sensation is complex, and the sensory experience of place is more so. In any discipline, taking a multisensory approach means embracing this complexity, while recognising the myriad variables and finding methods and approaches by which to record them. In order to draw attention to the embodied city, the authors invited a group of workshop participants to work with a map of the Canterbury city centre (Kent, UK) as a critical tool with which to analyse concrete space. Participants were encouraged to map the impressions engendered by their physical environment in the specific moment in which they encountered it. The objective of this exercise was to capture the qualitative experience of sensory space by recording individual perceptions of sensory stimuli. The results were then digitised and are presented in the final section of this chapter.