Conference: Shaping & Sensing the city. Power, People, Place

Online Event, 14-16 July 2021

How we see, hear, feel, smell and perhaps even taste the city, shapes urban life materially, socially and imaginatively. Through our sensory experiences, cities as heterogeneous constellations of places and people acquire meanings, create place attachment or detachment and offer ground for boundary work along lines of class, ethnicity, gender and other categories. How citizens experience fragmentary, unequal and contradictory realities of global urbanity has long been of interest to urban scholars. It inspired Simmel to explore the mental life of urban citizens in the early 20th century metropolis. Ever since, scholars have analysed the embodied experience of urban life, its materiality and the social inequalities produced, reproduced and challenged by it. 

Although sensing the city is an everyday urban engagement of citizens, the air we breathe, the sounds we hear or the views we enjoy obviously are shaped by political and economic power. A first theme of this conference is how urban inequalities are affected by and result in unequal access to varieties of sensory experiences. How do segregation patterns, intersectional disadvantages and other forms of exclusion affect who gets to enjoy what in our cities? How do groups with different urban power positions access and create ‘pleasant’ sensory experiences?

Shaping, sensing and imagining the city was always mediated through technologies. However, the emerging corporate-driven smart city pushes us to analyse the multiple ways in how we sense and navigate the urban. Some smart city innovations may disempower and reinforce social exclusions, e.g. by surveillance and control, while others may empower citizens and support inclusion of marginalized groups, e.g. by citizen science projects or digital storytelling. As a fourth theme, we invite scholars to reflect not only on the gaze of control and surveillance of smart city and big data, but also on the ways in which these digital technologies are being or could be used to enhance citizen’s symbolic and political ownership of their urban environments.

Veranstaltung übernehmen als iCal