The Embodied City: A Method for Multisensory Mapping

Abstract

This 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.

1 Embodied City Mapping

It is a gloomy morning in the late Spring of 2015 when a group of fourteen people, one by one, embark on a journey to explore and map elusive lived space. Exiting the warmth and monotonous humming of the Lodge, they are met with the fierce wind, which makes it difficult not only to record anything but barely to hold onto the thin paper proformas. Proformas flap violently in their hands, threatening to escape at any moment. The contrast between the stillness and controlled detachedness of the building’s interior and the anticipated but still somehow unexpected physical force of the wind makes most of them put a colour sticker on a map regardless or probably because of the struggle. The ochre limestone of the Canterbury Cathedral that towers over the participants radiates warmth, contrasting grey sky and piercing wind. A metallic clanking sound of a scaffolding parasitising on the stately Cathedral spreads through the area. Directed by individual intuition, participants disperse through the territory of the Canterbury Cathedral Park and beyond. We follow behind, observing them, recording video, and taking measurements of the natural light’s intensity.

Most of the participants turn right and, after a short walk, a birdsong melody and tree fragrance tell them that they enter the precinct’s park area. Soon, their bodies relax, relieved by the warmth behind the rough stone walls of a chamber garden that shelters them from the wind. The whiff of honeysuckle tickles their nose. Their bodies carry them further, and the vehicle fumes and sounds hit them as they pass through a gate to a busy road. The smell of fumes mingles for a while after they enter a lively shopping district. The streets are narrow; the echo of their footsteps reminds them of this narrowness when they can hear it through the human chatter, coffee machine whirring, and shop signs squeaking. They brush against the stone pillars, though most buildings are brick, and the cold glass meets them on the ground floors. Their body feels wobbly as their feet suddenly hit uneven cobblestones. The sounds of human voices intensify as participants approach the main Cathedral gateway and return to the precinct. All along their way, participants map their experience of the city (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Participant sheltering the map from the wind

The mapping exercise is a part of a methodology for recording and analysing sensory data in an urban landscape. While conducted in the contemporary setting, the chapter looks forward to how this methodology might be adapted to enable multisensory mapping of both modern and ancient urban spaces more broadly. The lived space that participants are mapping is a part of a conceived-perceived-lived triad that constitutes social space as described and explored by Henri Lefebvre, primarily in The Production of Space (1991). Lefebvre stressed that space has always been a complex social construct based on values and the social production of meanings. It affects both spatial practices and perceptions: “…space is social: it involves assigning more or less appropriated places to social relations…social space has thus always been a social product” (Lefebvre 2009, 186–7). He further argued that the social space comprises conceived space, perceived space, and lived space. Conceived space expresses the dominant social order and hence its conceptualisation, signs, and symbols representing that order. It is “the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers” (Lefebvre 1991, 38). Perceived space, or spatial practice, is a space of everyday life. It “secretes that society's space; it propounds and presupposes it, in a dialectical interaction; it produces it slowly and surely as it masters and appropriates it” (Lefebvre 1991, 38). Lived space is “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols…the dominated—and hence passively experienced—space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects” (Lefebvre 1991, 39).

Here it is essential to understand how Lefebvre relates the terms “space” and “place”. Interpreting Lefebvre's work, which does not explicitly elaborate on that relation, Merrifield (1993) defines place as practised space. For Lefebvre, he writes, space is a social dynamic, a continuous movement. The place is to space what form is to process: a grounding of a flow. However, the place is not the direct fixation of that flow but its momentary embodiment that is neither constant nor determined. It changes under the flux of social dynamics—it is shaped by the space but shapes it simultaneously. “…space is already flow and place—it is simultaneously a process and a thing” (Merrifield 1993, 521). The place is where the complex triad of space is tangible and can be delineated.¹ A city is an eloquent example of a place epitomising social space—it is in the constant process of formation rather than something formed (Ingold 2020).

Exploration, contextualisation, and understanding of places, especially cities, have historically relied heavily on mapping, along with a textual description and theorising (Mayer 2021, 23). Considering that the spatial triad is tangible in a city, we chose the map as our primary tool to reveal lived space. Besides being instrumental in representing and analysing places, mapping is a way of contemplating the very nature of place and time (Kainz 2020). Conceived space can be revealed by mapping power relations and reading city plans, subdivision maps, and other bureaucratic representations of space generally used to manage cities. Mapping flows of everyday life in the urban fabric unveil perceived space. Lived space is harder to capture because it consists of lived experiences, memories, dreams, and aspirations. It is the space of pure subjectivity, embodied and imaginative involvement of people with their surroundings. Lefebvre also pointed out that the bodily experience of space as lived is “strangely different” from when space is conceived or perceived (1991, 40). Based on Lefebvre's theorising of social space, Kinkaid (2020) further argues that lived space is more than merely a part of the triad. It is the phenomenal ground of space, the practico-sensory totality in which people perceive and act in the world. Kinkaid demonstrates that differential embodiment carries the potential for political change through spatial practice. We suggest that exposing and acknowledging differential perceptions of space does as well bear liberating potential. The diverse lived experiences contradict and oppose the hegemony of the dominant social order. To map lived space is daring to take on the present no matter how complex and subjectively perceived it is. Interested in the relationships between fluid social life and the apparent stillness of urban places, we asked participants to listen to their experiences and dare.

Participants held identical A4 format base maps. They were plain and primarily white, except for pale hatches that identified unpaved areas and thin grey shadow strips at the buildings’ edges to delineate their height (see Fig. 2). These subtle maps gave participants enough information to locate themselves within the city and provided space for their discoveries and paths. The maps intentionally covered a relatively small area, barely one block beyond the Cathedral walls. This partiality did not invalidate the map as a critical tool. It made the map concise and direct within limited parameters. The duration of the exercise also conditioned the map's coverage area.

Fig. 2

Base map showing the Cathedral Precinct and adjacent areas

Participants wandered around. They listened to their bodies and let sensory stimuli lead them: they followed a smell that caught their attention or moved away from a disturbing sound:

“I let smells and sounds guide me to areas of interest. Strong smells and sounds drew me to or kept me in one particular area,” said participant #11 later, when the group returned to the Lodge for the plenary.

Lefebvre suggested that people can understand the lived experience of space only by examining it through their bodies, without privileging any one of the senses (Lefebvre 2014, 33–4). Bernard Tschumi also emphasises the physical connection between place and body, precisely a sensory encounter before a person consciously analyses their surroundings. At that moment, the “body tries to rediscover its lost unity, its energies and impulses, its rhythms and its flux” (Tschumi 1996, 39). The body communicates with the place through multiple senses. Sight, sound, smell, taste, kinaesthesia, touch, and many more contribute to creating the experience of place. Sensory stimuli can be singular, repeated, or constant, invasive or ambient, situated or directional. While having measurable physiological effects, they are not necessarily consciously observed.² When they are indeed consciously observed—in other words, when a human subject perceives them—sensory stimuli become embodied as sensations. Then come perceptions, or how the human subject interprets sensations (Levine and Shefner 1981), often basing these interpretations on the previous experiences. Thus, the way an individual perceives sensory stimuli, a single stimulus or a sensescape of multiple stimuli, is mediated. Sensations are inherently interdependent and can influence and even transform individual characteristics (Stein and Meredith 1993)—a multitude of sensory stimuli thus translates into elaborate coexistence of sensations.

“Some streets I will avoid because I do not like the way they feel, not quantifiable, but it may be a combination of visual, sound and smell,” participant #7 commented on the indecipherable interrelation of multiple sensations of a place.

Both sensation and perception are also culturally, geographically, and temporally specific and dependent on the individual ability to attune to various sensory stimuli (OpenStax 2020). Perception additionally depends on how human subjects cognitively interpret and attribute stimuli sources (Spence 2020). For example, participant #6 could not initially identify a smell and was “suspicious of it” until associating it with wood and accepting it as pleasant. Perception of sensory stimuli is therefore complex, and the sensory experience of a place is more so. Taking a multisensory approach means embracing the complexity while recognising the myriad variables and finding methods and approaches to recording them.

These sensations gradually appeared on the participants’ maps in the shape of out-of-scale colour stickers (see Fig. 3). The stickers marked sensory impressions that an environment gave to an indoctrinated perceiver, such as the following:

• The sound of wheels screeching,

• The smell of wisteria,

• The wind whipping,

• The warmth of the sun on the skin,

• The uneven pavement beneath their feet.

Fig. 3

Participant's hands holding stickers, map, and proforma

Due to their incommensurability with the map, the stickers could not pinpoint the exact location. They neither outlined a region where the fluid and ambiguous sensory stimulus with often nebulous geographic and temporal borders was present. They did not mark the source of the sensory stimulus but where the participant was standing/sitting/laying when acknowledging the sensation. The disproportionate size of the stickers also lifted the weight of scientific precision and allowed participants to attend more to their feelings than their physical location. However, many participants looked around having a limited non-visual vocabulary in deciphering and describing the stimuli:

“...there was a very strong ‘flower’ smell,” wrote participant #8, “although I couldn’t… figure what the smell was or where it was coming from. It made me look around to try and locate its source but also confused me as I couldn't identify the smell or location of it.”

There were five colours of the stickers; each represented a particular sensation: red for touch, blue—kinaesthesia, yellow—sound, and green—smell. The white sticker was a variance sticker symbolising any sensation that did not fall into the other categories in the participant's opinion. We determined categories based on Lefebvre's “sensory field” (2014, 114–15). “Sensory field” included nine types of sensation: (a) visual, (b) auditory, (c) olfactory, (d) gustatory, “(e) mechanical (touch and pressure, penetration), (f) thermal, (g) kinaesthetic (position, resistance, and security, opposing or auxiliary), (h) static (weight, translation, rotation), and finally, (i) the affects (tickling or caressing, pinching, accompanied by sensory pleasure and pain)” (Lefebvre 2014, 15). To simplify the exercise, we retained only auditory (b) as a separate category; we combined the last five categories into two—haptic ((e), (f), and (i)), and kinaesthetic ((g) and (h)). Touch denoted anything felt via the skin; kinaesthesia was instead a muscular sensation (though both may be simultaneously in play). Gustatory (d)—“poorly discernible from olfactory given the ambiguity of the physical” (Lefebvre 2014, 114)—was also eliminated as a separate category in the exercise and merged into olfactory (c). From Lefebvre's “sensory field”, the visual was left out intentionally during the exercise. The place in all its complexity cannot be understood until ocularcentrism is undermined³ (Levin 1993) as generally prioritised sight provides only a partial understanding of a place (Lefebvre 1991, 146). Thus, the five colours and categories: haptic, kinaesthetic,⁴ auditory, olfactory, and an undetermined open-ended category. Participants could potentially use the last category for visual sensations, but we did not mention or encourage it in any way during the initial briefing.⁵

In the aftermath, we saw that participants still used the white sticker mainly for the visual sensations. Although, those visual entries were prompted either by the momentary changes of the environment (“the sun suddenly came out and it transformed everything”) or the symbolic meaning of places both collective and very personal:

“I used it to mark historical significance—a landmark,” participant #4 mentioned.

“There was graffiti, a very historical graffiti on the wall of the Cathedral, and it made me want to touch it”, noted participant #2.

“I used the white sticker for memory”, and participant #13 continued to tell a personal story.

Kevin Lynch first expounded how the realm of perception conditions an individual subject's actual practices in the city. He pointed out that people acted in their cities according to personal mental images of the urban environment—“the product both of the immediate sensation and the memory of past experience, and it is used to interpret information and to guide action” (Lynch 1977, 4). The image of the city is both a personal and collective way of seeing cities as made not from a collection of objects (buildings, infrastructure) but as a net of places. Lynch distinguished five main categories that constitute this image: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. Paths are the channels within which an observer moves through the city (e.g., streets, walkways, and transit lines). Edges are boundaries between two distinguished spaces (e.g., shores, walls, and railroad cuts). Districts are large but distinct urban areas that can be entered and exited (e.g., neighbourhoods, parks, and gated communities). Nodes are strategic public loci often located on paths’ intersections (e.g., subway station, plaza, and market). Landmarks are standing-out tangible elements used as a reference point (e.g., monumental buildings, public art, and striking landscape architecture). These five categories intersect and combine in different patterns in any urban environment. The five categories connect the lived experience with the city as a place.⁶

Lynch mentioned that nearly every sense is involved in the production of the image of the city. However, it is not clear how the non-visual qualities of the environment correlate with the categories mentioned above. In his work, Lynch paid most attention to the urban attributes perceived by the eye. Generally, other senses are sidelined in the perception of the urban environment and its production processes (Bille and Sørensen 2018). While sight has always dominated the fields of architecture and urban planning,⁷ an even more substantial shift towards a sight-centred paradigm happened in modernity⁸: “modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless” (Pallasmaa 1996, 19). Therefore, for the exercise, we chose the urban setting that has been developed gradually, mainly in the pre-modernist era (see Fig. 4).

Fig. 4

Participants in front of the Cathedral

While a useful critical tool to analyse a concrete place, a map, both in production and interpretation, also heavily relies on sight.⁹ Acknowledging this limitation, we asked the participants to record their experiences in any convenient way. The proforma attached to the back of the map added a linguistic layer¹⁰ to the cartographic representation (see Appendix 1). Proforma consisted of instructions for the exercise and four empty fields repeated several times to accommodate multiple entries: identifier (of the location, where a participant noticed a sensation), time (when it occurred), weather/temperature/wind direction, and description (of the sensation, elaboration on why the participant placed the sticker on the map). The proforma also gave participants some pointers on how to engage with their surroundings. The questions touched on sensory ‘stimuli’ qualities, sensations’ characteristics, emotional responses, and personal sensitivity. They prompted participants to deeply analyse feelings and be as specific as possible in their descriptions. We made the questions as open as possible so as not to direct participants too strongly, in an attempt to avoid biassing the results. None of the questions concerned the urban environment as a material place. They focused on personal bodily experiences and invisible, subtle features of the city as a lived space.

The proforma enriched the colour stickers’ substance and added a temporal factor to the marked locations on the map. The map and the proforma link individual experience with the city form: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. However, while graphic and textual recordings provide substantial data for interpretation, we advise using a more multisensory approach to record the experiences. It will make the exercise available to a broader group of people and resolve another map limitation that rests in its two-dimensionality.¹¹ The complication here lies in not merely recording the sensory stimuli directly (e.g., the sound of the wind) but the participants’ perceptions. Additional tools and approaches could include haptic models that elucidate non-architectural features of the urban environment, associative along with descriptive audio recordings, and gathered and juxtaposed objects from the analysed environment to translate an olfactory experience. Besides producing unique individual impressions of urban places, such multisensory recording techniques might also open up this exercise to participants unable to record their experiences with visual means. This further can improve the general understanding of urban spaces as perceived by various people, whose being-in-the-world does not heavily rely on sight.

During the introduction to the exercise, we suggested participants explore three different areas covered on the map. Each of them had a distinct physical and sensory character: a park around the Cathedral enclosed within stone walls (Area 1, see Fig. 5), a monotonous sidewalk along a busy road (Area 2, see Fig. 6), and a dense and lively shopping district (Area 3, see Fig. 7). Later, many participants spoke about the audial sensations that distinguished the areas (“the different kinds of sounds—vegetation, people, and vehicles”) besides the strong visual cues. The maps showed that the smells were also quite different in the areas and followed a similar pattern: vegetation, food, and car fumes. These three areas were also clearly related to Lynch's categories¹²: Area 1 was a district with a landmark, Area 2 was a path along a clear linear edge, and Area 3 was a district with nodes and paths.

Fig. 5

Participant walking in the park

Fig. 6

Participants recording their experiences by the road

Fig. 7

Participant marking the map at the shopping district

Each participant used a colour pen to record their path, connecting one sticker to the following on the base maps (see Fig. 8). The starting and ending point was the Cathedral Lodge; it conditioned the initial movement¹³ and skewed the routes, which inevitably took a shape of an enclosed loop.¹⁴ All of the participants that left Area 1, the precinct, passed through the Cathedral gate—architecturally articulate entry point,¹⁵ either at the beginning of the exercise or at the end. When the explorative part of the exercise was over, the participants headed back to the Lodge, where everything started around an hour earlier. Back then, we briefed them on lived space, explained the exercise, and equipped them with maps, proformas, stickers, and pens. Upon return, participants saw a large map awaiting them on the wall. It was an enlarged version of the base maps that participants filled with their impressions of the city. Gathering together around the A0 map, participants replicated their maps. They drew their paths and placed stickers accordingly.¹⁶ Colour pens were instrumental there because they highlighted singular paths in the convoluted net of lines and stickers. While an individual map came from a single perspective, a map produced by several people, a collective map, grasped a more comprehensive range of information. This richness of views, while still subjective, better translated the complexity of the city. Overlapping individual maps created a dialogue between those maps and the experiences they represented. Having the dialogue between numerous viewpoints gave the personal knowledge value and worth (Haraway 1988). While illustrating the multifacetedness and entanglement of the urban environment, the collective map was more about what participants and the city were in the process of becoming than what they were ceasing to be (Braidotti 2002).

Fig. 8

Participant’s individual map with stickers and path at the end of the mapping exercise

The final part of the exercise was a discussion centred on the collective map (see Fig. 9). A new geography of the city appeared on the collective map. We discussed the expected large number of yellow (sound) stickers¹⁷ and unexpected proliferation of the blue (kinaesthesia) stickers and the meaning behind the white (variance) stickers (see Video 1). What sensory stimuli prompted participants to put down stickers in general? How did participants choose their paths? What were the differences they noticed between the three areas? With these and some other questions answered, participant #6 concluded the discussion with the discovered difficulty of attending to one's senses beyond sight:

...I think quite possibly this needs the practice to focus in on the senses.

Not all of the participants were outspoken during the discussion. We followed up with a couple of questions a few months after the exercise (see Appendix 2). The discussion and the retrospective questionnaire gave us more insight into the sensory and mental processes behind the participants’ maps.

Fig. 9

Map with sensory nodes. Image credit Anna Misharina and Eleanor Betts

2 Embodied City Map Analysis

Years later, we review the exercise. Synthesising and analysing the data have somewhat a historical quality to it—we try to reconstruct what had happened a long time ago, ourselves having a weak recollection of the events but with individual and collective maps made by the participants, proformas, and a short video recording.

We begin by systematising the data we have collected by putting it into different forms of spreadsheets, redrawing the collective map in hopes of learning something from the very act of retracing participants’ journeys, and building a 3D model.¹⁸ For the clarity of reference and an attempt to relate different recorded sensations to one another and the urban fabric, we divide the map into nodes. First, we attempt to do it following Lynch's categories, but this endeavour renders futile: the sensory experiences are so diverse and often fluid that it is impossible to distribute them neatly among five categories. The categories also appear too large in scale to indicate the sensory subtleties of places picked up by a human body.

We then distinguish nodes based on the patterns of the sensations marked on the map. First, we still try to tie them to some change of the material condition either in vertical or horizontal planes (architecture, landscape), but it does not work for most of the places because the marked sensations do not appear to have a clear relation to the buildings, trees, fences, infrastructure, and other palpable urban elements. In the end, we outline nodes not paying particular attention to the material borders and give them a nebulous form. The amorphous form further emphasises the difficulty to identify an area of influence of various sensory stimuli. Entries from at least two participants in nearby locations define the node. Additionally, several similar or interrelated entries create a node, disregarding a more considerable distance in-between them (for example, a couple of participants commented on the smell of wisteria, and those entries make one node G). The original map transforms from displaying a collection of primarily rectilinear objects to highlighting a net of paths interwoven with irregular beads of nodes (see Fig. 10).

Fig. 10

Collective map with participants’ intermingling paths

The analysed areas considered on the map—Area 1 (Cathedral park), Area 2 (road), and Area 3 (shopping district)—include the following nodes: Area 1 incorporates nodes A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, Area 2—J, K, and Area 3—M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X. Area 1 is the largest in its coverage but has almost the same number of nodes and entries as Area 3 which is the densest. Area 2 is the poorest in the inputs of sensations. It lacks density; its monotony and deprivation of natural elements and people also drove most of the participants away (only 4 participants decided to explore this area; a couple approached it but moved away, not noting any sensations). There is a tentative correlation between the density and the number of sensory stimuli. However, the nature of the exercise might be at fault here to some extent. Participant #6 elaborated on this:

I think you are aware that you are recording. [I] felt sort of halfway through that street [node B] that there should have been something that should have captured the experience of that street... [in] the Cathedral precinct [nodes H, I, L]... the dots are so much spread out because there is, I suppose, less of the sense of where you naturally stop to make your recording.

Another participant, #12, had a systematic approach to the exercise¹⁹ deciding on the places for the recording before leaving the Lodge in fear of not having enough time to cover the area of interest. Other participants, however, stated that they indeed concentrated on the exercise and tried to attune to the sensory stimuli. They were not consciously attempting to capture the experience of a particular place or cover a specific area but to follow the sensory stimuli of their interest.²⁰ For example, participant #11 admitted:

I attempted to shut off my visual sense (to the extent that I closed my eyes on occasion) and to be led by my other senses.

We asked participants to work alone, which they did. Rarely, several participants were at the same node at the same time. At node W, one participant noticed conversation as another person remarked on people speaking French adding more information to the first participant's entry. At node I, participants #11 and #1 simultaneously described flower scent (participant #11 gave more details: “honeysuckle (light)”). While participant #11 mentioned a few sensations in that entry, participant #1 only described one smell. Node R, a controlled entry point to the Cathedral grounds with an adjacent square, had an overwhelming number of sound entries of a social nature: young voices, voices of adults, different languages, and whistles (one participant mentioned a siren in addition to crowd murmur, another—trees). Some of them were recorded at the same time.²¹ At node Q, participants #14, #12, and #5 picked up on the construction noise within a few minutes from one another and identified a bar—one describing the sound of music from the inside, doors opening and closing, and loud chatter and the other picking up on the smell of the cigarettes. The proforma entries did not correlate in the other four instances when participants were at the same nodes simultaneously. Indeed participants would mainly note sensations at the exact locations at different times. Many participants stopped to write something down near the Lodge (node A) at the very beginning of the exercise. The contrast between the interior space and the outdoors caused many entries (participant #9: “the change from inside to outside makes me aware of my body and weather”); other entries derived from the sounds of the metal (nearby construction) and a siren from an emergency service vehicle. The only recording at node A later in the exercise was again a kinaesthetic sensation of being “buffeted by the wind” and voices (noted by participant #11).

Participants also had different relations to the analysed site. While some of them were familiar with it, for others, it was a completely new place. Per The Image of the City, an individual knows how to behave in a new environment based on the previous experiences in similar places. The lived space then for some participants was full of symbols and sensations that developed over time, and for others, the lived space had an immediate character, inciting them to project new meanings and the memories of experiential analogies onto the place.

Lynch's categories still appear on the collective map to a certain extent. As mentioned earlier, a few participants observed changes in smells and sounds at the Areas’ edges (nodes J, M, and Q). However, more participants traversed the edges without noting anything. The sounds of people’s chatter, whistle, and squeaking at node R blurred the delineation between Lynch's edge and node—the sound extended beyond the material edge of the Cathedral walls in all directions. The social noises from the node (the market) and the edge (people waiting to enter the Cathedral grounds at the controlled entry) mixed and spread some distance away. The sound at the edge was so overwhelming that participants did not mention any difference between the Areas. When considered with multiple senses, the edges as physical borders such as walls lose their explicitness in separating one area from another—sounds and scents travel across the walls (for instance, the melody of organ from the Cathedral, the smell of pastries from a bakery; participant #8 heard and saw a group of kids at node J, Area 2, at the same time as participant #11 separated by a stone wall heard their voices at node I, Area 1). The notable material edge is the change of pavement. The urban edges perceived through multisensory lens are closer to “in-between” (Grosz 2001, 91–104)—a bodily response to the transformation of a place rather than a mere change in urban structure. The edge is not where one ends and the other begins—they blend and create possibilities of something yet different to form and be perceived.

The paths from The Image of the City on the collective map are fragmented—they do not represent continuous routes. The sensory stimuli appear interrupted; the sound and the smell often appear as an amorphous locus, not as a solid line. Sensory paths are irregular nets of nodes of different sizes. Similar segmentation appears in the district. While there are some repeating sensations within a district, smaller areas with individual sensory characters disintegrate the large urban entity. The node per Lynch is the only category consistent with the definition, yet its sensory footprint expands beyond its physical borders.²² The landmark²³ blends with the environment having tactile qualities, smells, and sounds similar to those of the other buildings and even the pavement.²⁴ Fully embodied exploration of the environment then breaks down The Image of the City categories into smaller nodes that are not explicitly related to the urban setting. They emerge as a combination of material form, natural features (including weather), and social happenings.²⁵

During the analysis of the collective map, we create several spreadsheets. They add another level of clarity to the maps. The first spreadsheet, count per person (see Appendix 3), shows that sound was the most noticed sensory stimulus. Kinaesthesia followed behind. Smell and touch were almost even in their numbers, and the variance category was the least used. Some participants entirely dismiss touch, smell, or variance in their recordings. The number of sensory entries in the proforma ranges per person from 6 to 16. Often, when participants decided to mark a stimulus that triggered their inner response, they ended up putting more than one marker on the spot. Thus, each proforma entry consisted of one or all five senses, and individual maps had 10–29 stickers. This wide range of sticker numbers points more to how much descriptive information participants provided for each entry than the number of sensations the participants felt. The number of entries also does not reflect the size of the area covered by the participant.²⁶

Single entries (e.g., if a person has only one touch marked on their map among multiple entries for other senses)²⁷ are indicators of out of the ordinary stimuli. Participant #1 in the only tactile entry mentioned touching the graffiti, which participant #2 did around 20 min earlier in the same location—node C in the cloister. For participant #13, the touch appeared when they were “caught in a sudden crowd”, touching arms and coats.²⁸ Tactile entries could be generally be divided into two kinds. The first was a passive experience of being touched by an object²⁹ (“hit by flying foam”), human (brushed by “hands and coats”), or weather (“extreme wind whipping face”). The second kind was an experience of intentionally reaching for something (participant #14 “had to touch the gargoyle… to see if it was stone or wood”) dealing with the material side of the urban fabric³⁰ (be that architecture, vegetation, or urban furnishing). It was not an unexpected encounter but a conscious choice that often came with a revelation that actual tactile qualities rarely coincided with visually perceived and assumed tactile qualities. Participant #9 described a street lamp:

It feels warmer than it looks, I expected cold metal. Instead it is dry and warm… It is very uneven even if it looks shiny and smooth.

This discrepancy echoes Panagia’s hypothesis that sensory experience interrupts perceptual givens, creating occasions to question the order of things expanding further into opportunities to suspend authority and reconfigure the arrangement of political order (Panagia 2009). The discrepancies between visually perceived and actual tactile qualities stress the deceitfulness of the assumed accuracy of the visual information. Challenging perceptions through multisensory investigation bring to light hidden processes, lives, and happenings. Visibly solid and formed things in the city are felt as they are—in constant “holomovement” (Bohm 1980, 156–167).

Participant #3 had an only an entry for smell at node G—a mix of sweet wisteria with a distant flavour of fast food. Participant #11 described fragrant wisteria there a bit earlier. Participant #2 picked up a floral smell there but was unsure what it was (“lavender?”). Not being able to identify the fragrance (possibly, not having experiential memory of encountering this floral species), they still found it worth recording—outstanding sensory qualities of the environment caught the perceiver's attention even being only distantly familiar. Similar entries foreground the collective experience and memory (Halbwachs 1992) of the external world as opposed to individual perceptions.

Participant #5 found a herbal whiff at node F that nobody else mentioned, while not distinguishing other odours (including natural) along the way noted by other participants. Participants #7 and #8 were at the same spot at the same time (16:35); participant #8 mentioned the siren, but participant #8 did not, while observing it at other locations and at other times. This highlights the agency of the participants in the act of recording—deliberate selection of sensations at different moments that comes with choices, uncertainties, omissions, and intentions—and the ambiguous subjective nature of mapping, which is often obscured in the final product. The maps represent the external world perceived through a sensorium formed by individual physiology, psychology, and personal, cultural, social, and historical background.

The single kinaesthetic entry that participant #8 had was on the brink of emotion, writing that they “felt ‘in the way’… [and] could sense groups approaching or moving out to go around” them. It was both a bodily sensation and an emotional perception.

After working with the count per person spreadsheet, we develop a count per node spreadsheet (see Appendix 4). Besides node A, the initial encounter with the city, node B, had the second largest number of entries, with the majority (16 out of 24) senses recorded on the way back to the Lodge. The question arises whether the participants were impelled to record something, realising that they were approaching the end of the exercise. However, those entries were not remarkably different from the earlier ones. Participant #2 even marked sensations at this node twice—in the middle of the exercise and at the very end—not noting any difference between the entries (“sound of trees, kinaesthetic wind”). Participants #9 (at the beginning of the exercise) and #13 (at the end) noticed a tree with a visibly “wonderful texture” that induced their desire to touch it. One of them followed that desire and felt it by hand; the other did not, avoiding walking over the flower bed. The same object attracted the attention of different people, but only one allowed themselves to build a tactile felt relation (Spuybroek 2016, 112) with it. Most of the city features that provoked intentional tactile connection were made of stone even though the majority of the buildings in the investigated areas were made of brick. Other materials of frequent occurrence were glass and wood and a bit of metal. The perceived and actual historicity of the material was the reason for most of the tactile entries³¹: “radiates history and time, permanence!” Old structures’ stone stood out among the more even and flat surfaces of brick, glass, and metal, promising a thrilling sensation.³²

The stone also came out a lot in the proformas as pavement. Participants often marked “cobbles underfoot” when stepping from a smoother surface to a more uneven. They felt “unbalanced”, needing to “walk tougher.” These material transitions produce subtle edges within the city more readily observed by the body than attended to by the eye.³³ They affect the way people move and experience the environment. Various surfaces point out the socio-economic and cultural qualities of the area (smooth asphalt and muddy road with potholes can tell about the social space as much as architecture or other artefacts) and its place within the context of the city, primarily through comparison with other areas, again underscoring the importance of such transitions.

The other large number of entities was at node M—a transition between Areas 1 and 3, near Area 2. Participant #2 mentioned the loss of natural smell when leaving the park, while participant #4 noted car fumes in the same area. Several participants commented on the cobbles under their feet (change of pavement but not at the very transition point). They also mentioned kids’ chatter and vehicle noises; a couple remarked on a police siren. 9 out of 10 participants who passed through node M recorded something, regardless of transitioning from one area to another or just walking by. The conjunction of all three areas provided the node with rich sensory data creating a distinct “sense loci” (Betts 2017, 28).

Some of the participants did not note the time in their entries, so we create one more spreadsheet, count per minute (see Appendix 5), that allows us to calculate approximate times for those participants, marking the time per the distance they covered and the number of entries (see Fig. 11). The exercise took place in the late afternoon: the first entry was at 16:11 and the last was at 16:58. The spreadsheet shows sensations that were recorded at the same time in different locations, for example, the sound of an emergency vehicle. It first appeared at around 16:18-16:20 and was heard from nodes Q, A, and G (Areas 1 and 3—there was no participant in Area 2 at that moment, but presumably, it would be heard there as well). The second time it appeared at 16:35 at the nodes M, K, and T (participants are in all three areas but no mentions of the siren in Area 1; possibly the audial source is far away on the intersection of the road and the furthest Area 3 street where node T is located). The third time it came up around 16:45 for several minutes; the sound seemed to be moving from node M towards X (heard at nodes B, H, L, and M (earliest recording) and N, R, and X (latest recording)).

Fig. 11

Embodied city timelapse map with concurrent sensory entries and paths. Image credit Anna Misharina and Eleanor Betts

Fig. 12

The process of creating architectonic compositions from participants’ sensory entries. Image credit Anna Misharina

From working with structured information in spreadsheets, we transition to working with a 3D model and video. The sensations represented as physical forms placed on a map reveal the relations between the urban fabric and individual and collective experiences. The simplified urban model of the three areas shows the overall volumes of the buildings without any detailing.³⁴ If the architecture is commonly perceived as fixed and permanent and thus gains prominence in representing cities, can giving seemingly solid and material form to sensory experiences articulate their inherence to the urban environment? Each proforma entry transforms into an architectonic composition³⁵ made of ready-made models³⁶ available online representing described sensations (see Fig. 12). Models do not explicitly portray the “sensory artefacts” (Betts 2017, 26) identified by participants, but a kind of a universal form collectively created and shared online. To further distinguish sensations, qualities of different materials widely present in cities are assigned to the models: red clay of brick or roof tiles to touch, yellow wood to sound, weathered concrete covered in green moss to smell, blue metal to kinaesthesia, and grey marble to a variance sensory category. Each recording then enters the city model in its own right—in the shape of a complex architectural object. While representing simultaneous sensations, it is not inferior to buildings in its monumentality (Fig. 13). The less tangible and stable the described sensation, or its source, the harder it is to translate it into a composition. For example, the concrete model of a tree illustrates the smell of trees, and the metal footprints indicate the kinaesthetic “standing”; the wooden waves signify the sound of the wind. While made of often repeating elements (sounds of crowds, bodily sensation of wind, touch of the sun on the skin, smell of wisteria, and view of a monument), each composition is unique. Some elements, experienced through various senses, appear in different materials and colours. For instance, a pram is wooden at node U, being heard there, and of clay material at node R, being accidentally touched; the wind was experienced through sound, kinaesthesia, or touch in different places.

Fig. 13

Embodied city 3D model with volumes representing existing buildings and sensory architectonic compositions. Image credit Anna Misharina and Angelina Voytash

In the video (see Video 2), compositions appear in groups divided by time, accompanied by written descriptions and corresponding sounds.³⁷ The video shows the abstract representation of the sensations and personal impressions of the urban environment, subjective encounters with the city rather than its material side, and the lived space perceived through the senses, through bodies (Simonsen 2005). The compositions made of irregular forms and multiple materials and colours lack neatness and cohesion. The messiness and intricacy further emphasise the complexity of urban experiences. This new city model brings to light things that are not readily observed: “…focusing on the senses in the configuration of public life reveals an alternative geography of place by offering an insight into narratives, feelings, practices, and experiences often hidden from common view” (Degen 2008, 196). The composure of the old city is agitated by the sounds of kids’ voices, and the stink of public toilets and garbage bins disturb the nobility of the Cathedral. The homogeneity of a British town architecture is disaccorded with the diversity of foreign languages.³⁸ The sound of the siren contradicts the calmness of a park. The car park smells of flowers, and the garden smells of traffic fumes. The perceived architectural lees³⁹ are full of piercing wind. The seemingly immobile urban architecture and infrastructure are animated and transformed by the living and nonliving things and processes. They are full of memories, impressions, and felt relations that link the place with the lived space, providing access to otherwise autonomous and violent in their purity places (Coccia 2020). The city that is felt expands and contradicts the city that is seen.

Besides artistically asserting sensory experiences on a tangible level in the city, such an urban model provides more cohesive information than a 2D map or a spreadsheet linking sensory data with the city's structure. Two yellow stickers take the shapes of a wooden siren and a tree in the Cathedral precinct; a description of the traffic fumes in proforma becomes a moss-covered concrete car. While not being exact replicas of described stimuli, the emerging and disappearing compositions, along with sounds and subtitles, produce an experiential analogy of places (Foka and Arvidsson 2016).

Few of the sensory stimuli that come through in all the analysed material are different effects of the weather. prevalent weather conditions were gloomy and cloudy, cold strong wind. Sun breaking through attracted attention and directed it either to the participants’ tactile sensations (“warmth of the sun on my cheek”) or to architecture (“suddenly aware of the sun shining on the Cathedral as a visual spectacle”). Area 1, the precinct with larger open areas, had most of those moments; participants did not notice the sun effects on the narrow streets: the taller buildings’ shade might have conditioned that along with the smaller distances between the perceiver and potentially highlighted objects. The wind muted some of the sensory stimuli:

“Oddly expect to smell something but nothing prevalent pass due to wind,” wrote participant #7 at node B.

Participants remarked on the architecture sheltering them from the wind and the wind dying down. These moments of silence and freedom from bodily resistance to moving air allowed them to concentrate more on their surroundings than on their bodies. The weather and overall climate conditions significantly impact behaviour (looking for shelter) and the perception⁴⁰ and experience of a place (including emotional, as a result of comfort or discomfort). These major omnipresent elements of the environment and their influence highlight the importance of non-architectural things in urban life (Jon 2020). The birds,⁴¹ vehicles, hair dryers, trees,⁴² stone, pastries, wind, Cathedral organ, echo, street signs, sun, hammers, and pollen—all things perceived by the entire sensorium and things that lay beyond human perception—contribute to the construction of places collectively, along with buildings and people: “only because things are joined that the material world can manifest any kind of coherence, and only because of its coherence can this world be inhabited” (Ingold 2020, 17).

3 Possible Application to Past Cities

This chapter has presented a methodology (the theoretical framework, mapping exercise, analysis, and representation technique) that unveils lived spaces by highlighting the multitude of divergent individual experiences.⁴³ It exposes the myriad corresponding things and processes that create a city through “joint attention and response” (Ingold 2021, XIII). The methodology can be employed in design practices to ameliorate places for human and non-human things and processes. It can stress the plurality and variety of the individual sensory impressions of built (and natural) environments, breaking a hegemonic “objective” image of a city or a place, validating the “abnormal readings” (Boys 2018, 57). It can expose and bring attention to the things and processes that contribute to the production of lived spaces beyond people and architecture. Embodied experience can help answer why this or that place is excluded from social life. It can uncover not readily observed factors that define places negatively or positively and underlying physical, social, and chemical conditions (for example, a smell of mould indicating rotting hidden behind the impassive surface of walls). It smears the physical borders to highlight marginalised events, practices, and circumstances. It brings to light what possibly is not supposed to be seen. Attention to multiple sensory stimuli as a result of the exercise also heightens participants’ perception of self as an interwoven part of that world, not an autonomous entity. Emphasising a human body decentralises the human within the social space; it brings to light the evolving intricate contradictory felt relations.

The methodology stresses the value of the full-body experience of the environment in understanding current and past cities. It breaks the noumenal image thereof. The methodology demonstrates the importance of multiple sensory stimuli in the lived space, not merely the visually perceived components. In application to ancient sites, this means reconstructing as many sensory stimuli as possible and experiencing them with the entire sensorium.

First, sensory data from archaeological records, classical literature, and epigraphy should be mapped onto a city or archaeological site (Betts 2011, 121). Then the methodology should be applied several times. Considering it is difficult to pinpoint the source of the stimuli described in the ancient accounts, after analysing the results (What sensory stimuli were noticed? What patterns appeared on the collective maps? What were the individual responses? What was the area of influence of different stimuli? To what extent do the proformas correlate with the historical source?), the location and the intensity of the source stimuli should be adjusted every time.⁴⁴ Such iterations will bring the environment closer and closer to the one experienced in the past while still underscoring the differential individual perceptions. The participants will be entering these reconstructed lived spaces as tourists, encountering most of the stimuli for the first time and gradually building relations with them. Further, people with various backgrounds and physical abilities should be invited to experience and record the reconstructed space to provide a more comprehensive image of differing perceptions of that space.

Reconstructing the embodied experience of the past lived space and recording, it can become an essential tool in understanding the past, teaching, and making knowledge accessible to a broader public. As suggested in this chapter, ways of recording and representing the impressions of the environment can aid in distributing differing accounts of the site beyond its borders. While there are no universal sensations and perceptions, and it is impossible to replicate both the sensory stimuli and individual responses from the past, multisensory reconstruction of the ancient lived spaces can translate the intensity and fluidity of human and non-human processes by immersing participants in experiential analogy attuned with the help of this methodology.

4 Conclusions

This chapter discussed the methodology for capturing and investigating lived space of modern and past cities. Starting with the premise that the lived space can be understood through a human body, the methodology provided instruments for recording the sensations and perceptions of the urban environment. The chapter further showed how the collected data can be analysed and represented. It also elaborated on Kevin Lynch’s urban categories from The Image of the City through a multisensory lens and discovered that they need to be scrutinised further and possibly redefined. The chapter also provided suggestions on how the described methodology could be improved to become more accessible to different groups of people and to highlight a wider variety of individual experiences of the urban environment. This consequently can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of Lefebvrian social space and place, especially cities, as ever-evolving and corresponding to a multitude of human and non-human things and processes.