Experiential Walks for Urban Design: Revealing, Representing, and Activating the Sensory Environment (Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering) 3030766934, 9783030766931

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Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering

Barbara E. A. Piga Daniel Siret Jean-Paul Thibaud   Editors

Experiential Walks for Urban Design Revealing, Representing, and Activating the Sensory Environment

Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering Series Editors Sheng-Hong Chen, School of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China Marco di Prisco, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy Ioannis Vayas, Institute of Steel Structures, National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece

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Barbara E. A. Piga Daniel Siret Jean-Paul Thibaud •

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Editors

Experiential Walks for Urban Design Revealing, Representing, and Activating the Sensory Environment

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Editors Barbara E. A. Piga Laboratorio di Simulazione Urbana Fausto Curti, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning (DASTU) Politecnico di Milano Milan, Italy

Daniel Siret Graduate School of Architecture UMR CNRS AAU Nantes, France

Jean-Paul Thibaud CNRS—French National Centre for Scientific Research UMR CNRS AAU Grenoble, France

ISSN 2366-259X ISSN 2366-2603 (electronic) Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering ISBN 978-3-030-76693-1 ISBN 978-3-030-76694-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Introducing the Pluralistic Approach to Experiential Walks

Abstract The chapter introduces the concept of the experiential walk addressed by the book and presents the logic and structure that guided the collection of contributions, i.e. the three thematic focuses organising the parts, namely: “Experiential Walk for Revealing the Sensory Dimensions of Public Spaces”, “Experiential Walk for Representing and Communicating the Urban Experience”, and “Experiential Walk for Informing Urban Design and Favoring Citizens’ Engagement”. By doing this, it provides an overview of the different approaches by the authors that collectively make it possible to frame an interdisciplinary perspective of in-motion sensory investigation of the urban environment. The parts discusses the reasons that led to this collective book and explains the criteria behind its structure in chapter. Keywords Sensory walk, Interdisciplinarity, Ambiance

Chapter The idea of this book came about within the “Translating Ambiance” GDRI (CNRS International Research Group) international project (2014/2017).1 The GDRI is part of the larger framework of the International Ambiances Network which fosters the investigation of the sensory perspective of architectural and urban ambiances at the international level. This sensory approach brings into play sound, light, smell, temperature, touch, and kinesthesia, among others. A network of this sort naturally demands multi-sensory and pluri- and interdisciplinary methods and skills ranging from research to applied design, teaching, practice, and artistic action. The GDRI project consolidated the ambiances network’s theoretical, conceptual, instrumental, and operational basis by an interdisciplinary process aiming at collaborative exploration of ambiance issues from different perspectives. This process becomes a tool for translating ambiances into an interdisciplinary and shareable way. To do

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www.ambiances.net/seminars/gdri-translating-ambiances.html.

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Introducing the Pluralistic Approach to Experiential Walks

this, the research activities were developed in four levels of translation organised in languages, disciplines, senses, and activities, as follows: (i) “Translation in terms of language: clarifying the concept of ambiance”, focused on the translation of the French term “ambiance” into other languages by exploring the differences between cultures; the process becomes a heuristic means of deconstructing the concept, highlighting its implicit content, uncovering unexplored resources and broadening its meaning. (ii) “Translation in terms of discipline: exploring scientific bridges”, i.e. creating the conditions for exchange and contribution between separate disciplines on the ambiance topic. The goal is to explore more possible bridges, areas of agreement, and transverse commonalities between the various approaches. (iii) “Translation in terms of the senses: experimenting multimodal forms of expression” aiming at investigating experimental bridges between the senses and how the relationship between various sensory modalities works. The goal is then to study the in situ inter-sensoriality. (iv) “Translation in professional terms: in a quest for modus operandi” investigates the exchange between research and architecture and urban planning practice; in other words how tools and processes are brought into play to make the ambiance concept operational in the professional framework. To achieve these goals, a series of interdisciplinary and international research seminars were organised leaving plenty of room for experimentation and participant involvement. Following this approach, an in situ “translating ambiances” investigation procedure was followed in each seminar. These collective activities were deliberately experimental and aimed at fostering the following interdisciplinary debate, i.e. a laboratory of differing views. The purpose was to reinforce the “taking shape” process of the ambiance field of research and action. This topic is indeed gaining increasing attention and is studied in several forms in disciplines such as geography, architecture, sociology, environmental psychology, urban studies, ethnography, and philosophy to investigate the peculiar spatial, social, sensory, and atmospheric character of places [1, 2]. This book on experiential walks contributes to and fosters the goals of the “translating ambiance” project, with a focus on the overall experience rather than the sensory perception per se. For this reason, condensing different approaches and perspectives in a single collective book is crucial for providing a wider scenario on the topic of “ambiance in motion”. The book provides a piece of the wide framework of the multitude of theories, approaches, methods, and applications for studying the ambiance of places through different kinds of experiential walks, i.e. sensory and in-motion immersion into an urban or natural environment. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive reference on the topic of the experiential walk, rather emphasising the potential interdisciplinary and multimodal approaches for observing and interpreting, representing and communicating, designing and governing the sensory environment, with a view to urban design purposes. The act of walking is intended as an immersive process of (re-)discovering and learning through the embodied sensory experience that structures personal and collective life.

Introducing the Pluralistic Approach to Experiential Walks

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How to experience and design the sensitive city while walking? As soon as we put this question to the test through fieldwork, we were led to experiment with new methodological devices [3, 4]. Transitory by definition, walking resists any posture that is too static, objectifying, and one-dimensional. Rather than being reduced to a clearly delimited object that can be put at a distance, it invites the walker to vary angles of approach and to engage in situated experience. To give an account of such elementary and daily behaviour is not without difficulty. Indeed, the obviousness of such a practice makes it particularly elusive, as the most familiar phenomena are also the most difficult to apprehend. What could be more banal and ordinary than walking? We find here the problem of the ordinary such as it could be thematised by authors as diverse as Georges Pérec, Maurice Blanchot, or Harold Garfinkel. In a certain way, it is a question of updating what is self-evident while not forgetting the part of strangeness present in the most everyday practices. The difficulty is all the more acute as walking is essentially a bodily activity, relying on skills and know-how that are largely incorporated and naturalised [5]. How then to describe what operates below the level of discourse? This time, we may call upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty with his notion of motor intentionality, Marcel Mauss through his techniques of the body, or Anthony Giddens when he insists on the importance of practical consciousness. To the supposed insignificance of the ordinary is thus added the enigma of the body in action. These two components of the walk must be integrated into the work of investigation and become, so to speak, its guiding axes. To join together a questioning on the constitution of the natural world (the ordinary) and on the accomplishment of social activities (the practical), we generally rely on two great philosophical traditions. On the one hand, the phenomenological inspiration emphasises the lived body and the movement of empathy between the investigator and the investigated; on the other hand, the contribution from pragmatism insists rather on practical performances and the public character of observable behaviour. By collecting interdisciplinary theoretical analyses and case studies, the book can be used in two ways: on one hand, it presents an overview of the specific applications of experiential walks through the lenses of different disciplines, and on the other hand, on the whole, it depicts a framework of theories and practices on the subject. By showing different approaches, methods, and applications together, the book aims at inspiring cross-contamination and mutual influence of perspectives, encouraging other methods to come that will enrich the panorama of experiential walk from the research, education, and professional practice perspective, thus, reinforcing an interdisciplinary approach and fostering collaboration based on the embodied experience. The book is divided into sections that are logically structured starting from (i) the direct experience of the sensory environment, (ii) the representation and communication of this experience, (iii) the use of experiential walks for urban planning and design purposes. According to this logic, the book is divided into three main parts. “Experiential walk for revealing the sensory dimensions of public spaces” explores innovative and experiential approaches to study the ambiances of places in motion.

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The kinesthetic sense is transversal to all contributions that range from vision, hearing, and smell providing a comprehensive overview of these sensory dimensions. “Experiential walk for representing and communicating the urban experience” collects different ways of grasping and communicating the in-motion experience and its relevance for the place knowledge and understanding. The first chapters provide a theoretical insight on the topic, whereas the last ones are more focused on the application in practice. “Experiential walk for informing urban design and favoring citizens’ engagement” presents the use of experiential walks for explicitly informing urban planning and design, from professional practice to education. The contributions are relevant for demonstrating how these embodied and in situ perspectives, which explicitly deal with the daily life experience, can have an impact on people-environment studies and specifically to a human-centred approach in the urban design field. Each chapter was selected on a double peer-review basis and includes a theoretical introduction and the methodological approach developed by the author/s; almost every contribution presents a case study of the method, relating theory to practice. Chapters presenting theoretical frameworks on the topic without specific case studies are placed at the beginning of each part.

References 1. Piga BEA, Chiarini C, Vegetti I et al (2016) Mapping ambiance. A synopsis of theory and practices in an interdisciplinary perspective. In: Rémy N, Tixier N (A c. Di) Proceedings of 3rd International Congress on Ambiances, vol 1, pp 367–373. International Ambiances Network & University of Thessalie. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01414063 2. Gandy M (2017) Urban atmospheres. Cul Geo 24(3):353–374. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1474474017712995 3. Büscher M, Urry J, Witchger K (eds.) (2011). Mobile methods. Routledge 4. Grosjean M, Thibaud JP (eds.) (2001) L’espace urbain en méthodes. Parenthèses 5. Ingold T, Vergunst JL (eds.) (2008) Ways of walking: ethnography and practice on foot. Routledge

Contents

Part I 1

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Experiential Walk for Revealing the Sensory Dimensions of Public Spaces

‘Echoes of Elves and Demons in the Riverbank’ the Exploration of History and Folklore in Kythera Through Walking . . . . . . . . . . Dionysis Anemogiannis and Angelos Theocharis

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Drawing Heritage: A Heuristic Approach to Ambiances Through an Urban Sketching Experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mariana Kimie Nito

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The Sonic Drifter: A Psychogeographic Approach to Understand a Re-emerging City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

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Scaffolding Walking Experiences Through Interactive Sound Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nassrin Hajinejad

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Combined Sound- and Lightwalks. A Novel, Mixed Method to Assess Sound and Artificial Light of the Urban Environment at Night . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Antonella Radicchi

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Smell Walks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Suzel Balez

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Walking Together: Towards a Common Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Ekaterina Shamova

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Part II

Experiential Walk for Representing and Communicating the Urban Experience

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Experiential Media in Urban Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Peter Bosselmann

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From “la Dérive” to Virtual Reality: Representing the Urban Walk Between Reality, Senses and Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Rossella Salerno

10 Sensitive Wanderings in the City: Exploring the Spatial Empathy in Urban Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Bárbara Thomaz L. Nascimento, Ethel Pinheiro Santana, and Cristiane Rose de Siqueira Duarte 11 Experiential-Walk: Experiencing and Representing the City for Urban Design Purposes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Barbara E. A. Piga 12 Capturing Chromatic Effects in Urban Environment . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Anne Petit, Daniel Siret, and Nathalie Simonnot 13 Ambiance Partition: An Interdisciplinary Reading, Measurement, and Notation of in Situ Experiences . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 Claude M. H. Demers and André Potvin Part III

Experiential Walk for Informing Urban Design and Favoring Citizens’ Engagement

14 Interior-Exterior Ambiances: Environmental Transitions in the Recollection of an Urban Stroll . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Claude M. H. Demers and André Potvin 15 Towards Using Space Syntax for Soundwalk Set Up . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Tin Oberman, Tamara Zaninović, and Bojana Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci 16 Urban Flâneur: A Site-Responsive Walking Methodology for Fashion Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Tarryn Handcock and Tassia Joannides 17 A Walking Methodology as the Participatory Tool for a University Master Plan Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 Karen Andersen and Sofía Balbontín 18 Experiential Walks for Challenging Planning Education: The Case of Laboratorio del Cammino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Luca Lazzarini and Marco Mareggi

Contents

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19 Way-Tales: An Archaeological Topophonics for Emerging Tourist Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 Charlie Mansfield Correction to: Interior-Exterior Ambiances: Environmental Transitions in the Recollection of an Urban Stroll . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Claude M. H. Demers and André Potvin

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Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Barbara E. A. Piga Architect by education, she is Assistant Professor at the Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI), where she is also Coordinator of the Laboratorio di Simulazione Urbana Fausto Curti—labsimurb (POLIMI—Department of Architecture and Urban Studies) since its foundation in 2007. At labsimurb she is also Project Leader and responsible for the experiential simulation and sensory design research. She is part of the Board of the interdepartmental research laboratory i.Drive—Interaction Between Driver, Road Infrastructure, Vehicle, And Environment since 2019, where she is responsible for mobility experiential simulation and the urban/landscape environment design guidelines. She is the POLIMI Coordinator of two recent European Projects H2020 EIT Digital (Digital Cities) “AR4CUP: Augmented Reality for Collaborative Urban Planning” (2019 and 2020), where she is responsible for a novel co-design methodology through Augmented and Virtual Reality. Within these projects, she developed an innovative methodology for pre-assessing the experience of people in space through simulation: “Experiential Environmental Impact Assessment—exp-EIA©” (Copyright BOIP N. 123453—06.05.2020 and Copyright BOIP N. 130516—25.02.2021). She works in particular with dynamic simulations of the urban environment as a design and evaluation tool. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from POLIMI (2010). Daniel Siret an architect, Ph.D. in engineering sciences, and accredited as a research director (HDR). He is a senior research fellow at the Graduate School of Architecture of Nantes where he also heads the CNRS AAU (Ambiances Architectures Urbanités) laboratory. His work deals with the ways in which sensory dimensions are taken into account in the built environment, especially with regard to the architectural and urban expression of solar radiation. He was a visiting scholar at the Fondation Le Corbusier (2005), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (2012), and New York University (2013).

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Jean-Paul Thibaud a sociologist, he is a senior researcher at CNRS. A researcher at Cresson (Research Centre on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment, UMR1563 Ambiances Architectures Urbanités). His field of research covers the theory of urban ambiances, sensitivity to lifeworlds, ordinary perception in urban environment, social anthropology of sound, and sensory ethnography of public places. He has directed the CRESSON research laboratory and has founded the International Ambiances Network (www.ambiances.net). Jean-Paul Thibaud has published numerous papers on urban ambiances and has co-edited various books on this field of research: https://cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/jean-paul-thibaud.

Contributors Karen Andersen Université Paris Est, Champs-sur-Marne, France; Institut d’Urbanisme de Paris, Université Paris XII, Créteil, France; Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile; Institute of Architecture and Urbanism, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile Dionysis Anemogiannis School of Social Sciences, Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of Aegean, Mytilene, Greece Sofía Balbontín Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; School of Architecture, Design and Construction, Universidad de las Américas, Providencia, Chile Suzel Balez AAU Ambiances, Architecture, Urbanités - Unité Mixte de Recherche 1563 CNRS, École Nationale Supérieure d’ Architecture de Paris La Villette, Paris, France Bojana Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia Peter Bosselmann University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Budhaditya Chattopadhyay Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA), Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands Cristiane Rose de Siqueira Duarte Graduate Program of Architecture, PROARQ of the ‘Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro’, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Claude M. H. Demers École d’architecture, Vieux-Séminaire, 1 Côte de la Fabrique, Université Laval, Québec, Canada Nassrin Hajinejad Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Berlin, Germany Tarryn Handcock School of Fashion and Textiles, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Editors and Contributors

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Tassia Joannides School of Fashion and Textiles, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Luca Lazzarini Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DASTU), Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy Charlie Mansfield Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK Marco Mareggi Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DASTU), Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy Bárbara Thomaz L. Nascimento Architecture, Subjectivity and Culture’ Laboratory—LASC/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Mariana Kimie Nito University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil Tin Oberman Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia; UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, the Bartlett, London, UK Anne Petit Graduate School of Architecture of Nantes, AAU UMR CNRS 1563, Nantes, France Barbara E. A. Piga Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Laboratorio di Simulazione Urbana Fausto Curti, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy André Potvin École d’architecture, Vieux-Séminaire, 1 Côte de la Fabrique, Université Laval, Québec, Canada Antonella Radicchi Technical University of Berlin, Institute of Urban and Regional Planning, Berlin, Germany Rossella Salerno Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy Ethel Pinheiro Santana Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism and Permanent Professor at the Graduate Program of Architecture, PROARQ of the ‘Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro’, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Ekaterina Shamova LACTH Laboratory, ENSAP Lille, Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France Nathalie Simonnot Graduate School of Architecture of Versailles, LéAV, Versailles, France Daniel Siret Graduate School of Architecture of Nantes, AAU UMR CNRS 1563, Nantes, France Angelos Theocharis School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, Department of European Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Tamara Zaninović Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia

Part I

Experiential Walk for Revealing the Sensory Dimensions of Public Spaces

Chapter 1

‘Echoes of Elves and Demons in the Riverbank’ the Exploration of History and Folklore in Kythera Through Walking Dionysis Anemogiannis and Angelos Theocharis

Abstract This paper reflects on the use of walking as a tool for exploring, situating and actualising local cultural stories, while it investigates how walks, when infused with the element of storytelling, can ignite the sensory imagination, trigger memories associated with the place, generate new or hidden stories and reinforce a sense of place and community. The case study under discussion is the cultural and learning initiative ‘Sound of Kythera’ (2016), which involved a six-month cultural expedition to the island of Kythera, Greece, with a mixed group of artists, educators and academics collaborating with high-school participants and other members of the local community. Through a series of walks (memory walks, silent sensory walks and performative walks) the project aimed to explore, actualise and interpret the history, mythology and folklore of the island. Analysing the interpretations generated by the community, as well as ethnographic observations, the paper asserts that walking when combined with storytelling, can be a powerful methodological tool for embodying and aestheticising intangible cultural heritage. Keywords Storytelling


Sensory studies
Sensory communities

The case study under discussion is the cultural and learning initiative ‘Sound of Kythera’ (2016), which involved a six-month cultural expedition to the island of Kythera, Greece, with a mixed group of artists, educators and academics collaborating with high-school participants and other members of the local community. Through a series of walks (memory walks, silent sensory walks and performative D. Anemogiannis School of Social Sciences, Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of Aegean, Mytilene, Greece e-mail: [email protected] A. Theocharis (&) School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, Department of European Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_1

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D. Anemogiannis and A. Theocharis

walks) the project aimed to explore, actualise and interpret the history, mythology and folklore of the island. Analysing the interpretations generated by the community, as well as ethnographic observations, the paper asserts that walking when combined with storytelling, can be a powerful methodological tool for embodying and aestheticising intangible cultural heritage.

1.1

Introduction

Kythera is an island of mythos, mystery and folklore. Since ancient times, its wild shores, afflicted by the strong winds and waves, have been woven with stories of miraculous events and hideous anecdotes. Every stream, every gorge and cave of this island carry a different story that remains hidden to the unsuspected traveler, only to be hinted by landmarks, place names and travel guides. These stories however, are an essential companion to the local residents of the island, since they have been passed from one generation to the other and draw a line between the everyday, the sensory and the symbolic landscape. Walking as a means of exploring and reinventing the landscape—walking as a practice for ‘making’ space ([33], p. 177), has been regarded as an effective way to discover and negotiate stories embedded in the land [35]. Taking this observation as a jumping off point, this chapter investigates the case of the island of Kythera, Greece; and the results of the study employed at the Sound of Kythera1 project by NACUSSO2. The project aimed to investigate the cultural stories, the oral history and the sensory landscape of Kythera through a series of cultural and learning interventions. As part of the research on the local folk narratives and their contemporary appropriation, the programme initiated three types of walks with groups of local volunteers: memory walks, silence sensory walks and a performative walk. The aim of the walks was to investigate the interrelations between the stories, the land and the people. In the following sections, we are setting the theoretical premises of our research, focusing on the practice of walking and its variations, the sense of place and the sensory dimensions of walking, the ties between the people, the land and the senses, through the idea of sensory communities and the art of storytelling, as related to the land and its inhabitants. Following that, the paper zeroes in on the case study of Kythera, reviewing its folklore background, analyzing the three types of walks implemented and drawing conclusions based on the participant observations, the feedback received, and the interpretations generated during and after the walks.

1

The Sound of Kythera was funded by the Robert Bosch Stiftung, as part of the START- Create Cultural Change programme. 2 NACUSSO is a cultural, learning and research organisation focusing on aspects of acoustic ecology and storytelling www.nacusso.com.

1 ‘Echoes of Elves and Demons in the Riverbank’ the Exploration …

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Walking Practices

Walking constitutes an embodied everyday practice, a self-evident and often unconscious sensory activity. Crossing a crowded square on the way to work, leaving the car to take a narrow path to the beach, enjoying the fine weather by strolling around a park, carrying the shopping home at the end of a long day, are common cases of walking at urban or rural environments that most people perform every day without focusing on the actual process. In several disciplines, such as urban studies, acoustic ecology, landscape architecture, geography and sensory studies, walking is employed as a multi-sensory perceptive medium, a flexible and active research method promoting awareness for the environment, urban or not [63]. Walks offer the chance for interaction with place using multiple and complimentary sensing mechanisms, positioning the walker at the very present of existence with imaginary links to the past and the future. A perceptive walking practice requires an energetic and active stance towards the environment that acts on two different levels; the personal due to its embodied and sensory character, and the social through the encounter with greater sociocultural discourses [34]. For Ingold and Vergunst [29], walking is a way to experience the place and the city, a way of knowing and finding a personal rhythm; summarizing the tradition of flâneurs, Lettrists and the Situationists [5, 13, 40] who aimed, among others—and in the relevant to each group framework —to come into a closer contact with urban sites. Either set on an urban environment or not, walking is a practice that negotiates our relationship with the environment, and it is mutually reshapes and is shaped by the environment where it takes place. Being widely theorized, walking practices have been categorized in various ways. Wunderlich’s [64], pp. 131–133) typology distinguishes between three modes: purposive, discursive and conceptual walking. Purposive walking has a task-oriented nature and is the most common type of walking. Someone is going to work, another visits its child’s school. It is often unconscious, instinctive or even automatic. Discursive walking represents the dialectic relationship between the walker and the place in terms of rhythmicity and harmonic symbiosis. In this case, walking takes place for the sake of walking, for the enjoyment of its practice. Expanding Wunderlich’s notion, which was inspired by the practice of flâneurs, we argue that memory walks fall under discursive walking. Memory walks [31], spontaneous, as most discursive walks, or meticulously designed, enhance ‘sensory remembering’ in a dialogue with the place. Memory walking uses the land as a trigger to allow the body and the mind of the walker to reminisce over the past. This way, walking facilitates the search of a personal rhythm with the past and a multi-level attunement of the walker with place and its embedded discourses. During memory walks, a temporal dialectic relationship, both internal and external, is created, amplifying the usual sensory experience and enriching it with new meanings. The last type of walking under this categorization is conceptual walking. Conceptual walks cover a variety of artistic practices that have flourished over the years [10, 39, 51] employed as a means of reflection and expression. The identifying element of this type is that walks are usually scripted and carefully planned. The walkers do not mechanically traverse the

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landscape towards a certain direction or synchronize their practice with the place’s rhythms, instead they direct and manipulate the creation of the sensory and mental experience by calibrating their movement in relation to a conceptual given, following specific patterns in walking, and challenging the perception of the walker about familiar places. Conceptual walks are strongly performative and are often used for in situ artworks exploring the place. Under the category of discursive walks, and sometimes partaking the conceptual walks category as well, one can find the walking practices that relate to the senses. This broad category of walks, that includes soundwalks, haptic walks, smellwalks, light walks, sensory walks and others, draws its origins from the tradition of the flaneurs and the situationists.3 The first reference to sense-walks can be traced back in the 1950s when sense-engaging walk practices were applied for the first time to investigate the perception of the urban environment by its inhabitants ([24], pp. 42, 43). Although long scholarship and many artistic and research projects can be found for each particular type of sense-related walk, the practice of sensory walks has not been extensively reviewed as a holistic practice or wider category ([25], pp. 195, 196). For this reason, we will draw material from soundwalks’ theory, the most widely applied walking practice, attempting to explore the parallels between sound and sensory walking. Soundwalks first appeared as part of the World Soundscape Project and was later defined by R. M. Schafer as ‘an exploration of a soundscape of a given area’ ([54], p. 213). This definition presupposes the exploration of a soundscape through attentive, conscious listening ([57], p. 440), and possibly facilitated with the necessary technical equipment. Soundwalks can be classified in many ways depending on their methodology, whether they are silent or not and the mediation of technology. Gallagher and Prior ([21], p. 163) distinguish the non-mediated with the ‘technologically mediated walks’ where either the medium (listening) is enhanced by recording devices, headphones etc., or the object (soundscapes) through infusion of sounds and recordings; while Schafer ([54], p. 213) distinguished between a listening-walk and a sound-walk where the “listening walk is simply a walk with a concentration on listening” and the soundwalk “is an exploration of the soundscape of a given area using a score as a guide. The score consists of a map, drawing the listener’s attention to unusual sounds and ambiences to be heard along the way”. The usual practice of soundwalks has been accurately summarized as ‘public exercises of awareness’ ([41], p. 138), to which most people who have enjoyed even once a guided soundwalk would easily agree: the ‘public’ translates to both the participatory character of soundwalk and the fact that it takes place in public spaces; the ‘exercises’ to the often educational or academic framework, and ‘awareness’ to its connection with acoustic ecology and the highly active and conscious soundwalk practice. Even though soundwalks and listening walks are focusing on the acoustic space and experience, one can hardly argue that it is possible to leave out the rest of the senses. Deriving from a theoretical position that questions the hegemony of sight and

For example, the “aural flânerie” [9] or the Situationists’ dérive.

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the ‘ocularcentric’ Western culture ([12], p. 9; [38], p. 38), scholars promote a multisensory approach of city and nature [25] ‘mediated through sound, smell, tactility, taste, as well as sight’ ([1], p. 133). Going even further, Howes [28] suggests the notion of emplacement, as a more inclusive way to discuss the interrelation of humans, the environment and the sensory world. In the same fashion, Casey [11] draws a line between embodiment and emplacement stating that “the lived body is as intelligent about the cultural specificities of a place as it is aesthesiologically sensitive to the perceptual particularities of that same place” ([11], p. 34). In this view, sensory walks constitute an efficient methodological tool for exploring places, their embodied perception and sensescapes [6], which include but are not limited to, soundscapes, touchscapes and smellscapes [47]. As Pink ([44], p. 62) argues, the sensory engagement with the place can take four different forms: first—the ‘undefined sensory emplaced experience’; second—the linguistic representation of experience; third —the ‘everyday sensory practice’; and forth—‘sensory creativity’. In this account, everyone is daily involved, consciously or not, in sensory emplaced practices that involve forming, expressing over and often interpreting the sensory experience.

1.3

Sense of Place

Emplaced sensory experience is strongly connected to sense of place, which is defined by Edward Ralph as “a synaesthetic faculty that combines sight, hearing, smell, movement, touch, imagination, purpose and anticipation. It is both an individual and an intersubjective attribute, closely connected to community as well as to personal memory and self” ([49], p. 314). Going back to its theoretical roots, sense of place and walking have been combined in the practice of the Situationist International (SI), an artistic and intellectual group, which from 1957 to 1972 explored, among other, the concept of psychogeography. In their work, psychogeography was approached as “the study of the specific events of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals” ([2], p. 69). Following a particular walking practice, the dérive, the members of SI aimed to read and experience the city through walk, to understand the psychological interconnections between place and its inhabitants. Moreover, social scientists and researchers from the field of sensory studies also speculated on the notion of the sense of space. According to Colin Goodrich and Kaylene Sampson [23], “‘spaces’ become ‘places’ expressed through a variety of social, cultural and semiotic processes” ([23], p. 258) and based on these ‘senses of place’ people build their identities and form communities. Sense of place is articulated simultaneously as a form of emotional attachment, a process of signification and codification of sensory experience, both social and personal. Environmental sociologists have answered this social constructionist approach by stressing the importance of each place’s character in the formation of the sense of place. Not all places can create the same attachments or interpretations and the physical world with its unlimited variations promotes different ‘senses’ for each place. John Eyles in his book ‘Senses of place’ [18]

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presents a list of ideal types for the most ‘dominant senses of place’. Ranging from ‘apathetic’ (non-existing attachment) to ‘instrumental’ (‘place as means to an end’), social and nostalgic, what captures most the attention of a contemporary reader of this book is the last and most undeveloped category: sense of place ‘as an aesthetic experience’ ([18], pp. 123–126). According to Eyles, this type of sense of place describes places where individuality gives place to the experience of the landscape; where the place is not treated as a commodity but as a lived space. In this account, sense of place is not only a gaze at the past [37] or the social everyday setting, instead it is a full-fleshed, multi-sensory and multimodal experience of space.

1.4

From Acoustic to Sensory Communities

Community, one of the fundamental concepts in sociology and anthropology, has been part of the discussion about the role that senses play in the experience and understanding of place from the very beginnings of sensory studies. Schafer [53, 54] and Truax [58, 59], coined and explored the notion of acoustic community, as a symbolic entity created by and within an acoustic space, a soundscape. The sense of communality derives from the community’s exposure to certain sounds, often everyday and common, for example the church bell, the sound of trees at the neighboring forest in windy weather and is established through ‘soundmarks’ and ‘sound barriers’, which are perceived by the community members and not necessarily by others ([58], p. 59). Sounds are mediators, carriers of meanings and, through familiarity or distance, they can act as the basis for the construction of difference. If soundscapes can form acoustic communities, it is open for speculation, whether other forms of sensorial input can in turn create communities based on the common experience of the sensory environment. Even though sound can dominate an environment and have an essential role in navigation through space with the help of soundmarks, other sensory stimuli separately or jointly with sound are also able to acquire a symbolic dimension for a certain group of people. The redolent lavender fields in Aix-en-Provence, France, the extensive olive groves on Paxos island, Greece dominating the sensescape with an odorous ambience, the distinctively steep streets of San Fransisco, and many other examples from around the world, foster communities around them through their distinct sensory experience. Even in the case of soundscapes, the sound might be domineering, still, it is not the only stimulus available; the wind is not only heard, but felt, and often carries smells with it. These communities might follow a centroperipheral system with the stimulus standing at the center or like a rhizomatic structure [17] with multiple stimuli connected through narratives and memory fragments. By suggesting the notion of sensory community, we aim to shed light on the communal bonds formed by embodied sensory experience which exists in parallel to other types of communities and social spaces.

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Place and Storytelling

Stories are an indispensable element of every locale and storytelling has been the nurturer of all cultures and a powerful means of extending the human existence beyond its limits [27, 61]. Folk tales, myths and legends, historic narratives, personal anecdotes, rumors and hearsay, they all open a dialectical space between personhood, communities and locale since they have the potential not only to bind space but also to reshape it or even create it anew [4]. Stories are rooted in the land; their presence can be hinted through place names or marks in the land, which are the physical manifestation of the ‘processes of experienced activity […] that invest places with memorable depths, laminating living to language’ ([19], p. 108). The very act of telling a story about a place is a cultural practice that can formulate identities, consolidate communities and influence the perception of reality, as it binds time and space and connects the listener with the thick body of knowledge of oral tradition [35]. Walking is an efficient way of uncovering, embodying and emplacing stories about the land. Since places are delineated by movement and unfold along paths and personal trails ([30], pp. 148–149), walking those paths can revive the narratives associated with them and the meanings ascribed. Conversely, storytelling as cultural performance can formulate a restorative bond for the imaginative reconstruction of the landscape for people who lost contact with their locale, in cases such as displacement, migration etc. [20]. One of the most important elements of storytelling, that highlights its transformative agency, and has been widely associated with folklore narratives, is performativity [7]. Its verbal and non-verbal components (e.g. kinaesthetic elements such as walking or dancing, gestures, musicality, ideophones) have the ability to elevate the reciting practice into a multisensory experience and a transcendental reading of the “already inscribed meanings found within the landscape” ([61], p. 3). Legat [35] in her recount of Tłıcho people’s practices, describes the act of walking the land, and more particularly the places that the old narratives usually refer to places walked by the community’s ancestors, as a quintessential cultural performance, a key to universal and communal knowledge and a ritual of personal development. At the same time, many performance art theorists, such as Mock [39] and Pearson [42] have pointed out the performativity of walking as a means of exploring stories about the self and the land. Apart from unearthing and reviving the stories of the land, walking can also redefine, negotiate or even challenge the narratives related to a place. Walking, due to its limitless and place-binding nature, creates a neutral zone, where narratives and ideologies can be constructed and reworked ([15], pp. 1–3). Therefore, researchers have used walking as a means of giving voice to personal narratives silenced by the authoritative heritage discourse [14, 31, 50]. The interplay between walking, storytelling and interpretation becomes even more fruitful when engaging with places highly invested with certain cultural narratives (e.g. monuments, industrial ruins, archaeological sites). Walking those places can transform them into lived spaces, where walkers can negotiate their embodied experience, contrast it to the situated narratives and ascribe new meaning to them [8, 56].

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Storytelling in Kythera

Kythera is the setting for several mythological and folklore narratives. There are two main bodies of narratives associated with the island: the narratives that connect the island with the birthplace of Goddess Aphrodite and the folklore narratives, that can be identified as typical Greek folktales and legends [16]. With the latter being common in almost every Greek locale [46], it is the first category that makes the case of Kythera a peculiar one. The mythos of Aphrodite’s birth, originating from Hesiodous’ Theogony4, was resurfaced by the travellers of the 17th and eighteenth century and inspired the rococo painter A. Watteau for his works The Embarkation for Cythera (1717) and Pilgrimage to Cythera (1718). The paintings depicted Kythera as a sacred hideout for young lovers, where cupids and the statue of the goddess Aphrodite resided. This symbolism of Kythera was later adopted and critically interpreted by many intellectuals from the eighteenth century to date; creating a recurring, intertextual and often contradictory mythical construct for the island. The voyage to Kythera inspired music compositions (e.g. C. Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse (1904)), poems (e.g. C. P. Baudelaire’s Voyage à Cythère (1855) and V. Hugo’s Cérigo (1855)), travel memoirs (e.g. A. L. Castellan’s Lettres sur la Morée (1820)) and films (e.g. T. Angelopoulos’ Voyage to Cythera (1984)) and became a double symbol of utopianism and fallen paradise5.

1.7

The Sound of Kythera

From January to June 2015 a group of 20 artists, academics and media technicians visited the island of Kythera in Greece, to record local stories and soundscapes in collaboration with a group of 13 local high-school students and other community

4

This is how Hesiod [26] describes the genesis of Aphrodite when Ouranos’ severed genitals merged with the sea (translated by Athanassakis 1983, p. 19) Ouranos came dragging with him the night, longing for Gaia’s love, and he embraced her and lay stretched out upon her. Then his son reached out from his hiding place and seized. Him with his left hand, while with his right he grasped the huge, long, and sharp toothed sickle and swiftly hacked off his father’s genitals and tossed them behind him and they were not flung from his hand in vain. […] As soon as Kronos had lopped off the genitals with the sickle, he tossed them from the land into the stormy sea. And as they were carried by the sea a long time, all around them white foam rose from the god’s flesh, and in this foam a maiden was nurtured. First, she came close to god haunted Kythera and from there she went on to reach sea-girt Cyprus. There this majestic and fair goddess came out, and soft grass grew all around her soft feet. Both gods and men call her Aphrodite, foam-born goddess, and fair-wreathed Kythereia Aphrodite because she grew out of aphros, foam that is, and Kythereia because she touched land at Kythera. 5 C.Baudelaire and Hugo poems depict Kythera as a barren and perilous place, making a comment on the futility of pursuing divine love and highlighting the distinction between sacred and profane love; while Rafailidis [48] claims that «the voyage to Cythera cannot happen; because Cythera do not exist».

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volunteers, as part of the 6-months project ‘The Sound of Kythera’. The programme initiated over 10 learning workshops with the students, multiple field visits in different areas of the island, interviews with local residents, field recording sessions, the creation of soundscape compositions, an extensive local history and folklore research, and the creation of an interactive soundmap of the island [3]. Part of the methodology for the data collection and interpretation, as well as the learning/ outreach programme of the project, involved a series of walks in the island. The aim of the walks was to explore the capacity of different walking practices to unearth, situate and actualise local cultural stories and to investigate the ties between the stories, the place and the community. In the course of the six months, the programme launched twelve memory walks with local residents of the island, three silent sensory walks and one performative walk. The series of walks implemented during the programme gave us significant insights into the capacity of walking practices to excavate, actualise and interpret anew folklore and historic cultural stories associated with the land. The design, application and summative stage of each walk, were decisive factors in the final review of the walking practices. During the design phase, all three walks placed particular emphasis on three elements: participation, briefing and preparation. In terms of participation, all walks were designed by the participants themselves and in all three walks, the participants were the ones to relate the walk with local cultural stories (except for the performative walk where the story was a given). In terms of briefing, in all cases, the participants were briefed on the background, the aims and the process of the walks. Lastly, in terms of preparation, many different preparation practices were applied, mostly with the participants of the silent sensory and the performative walks. Those practices included: learning workshops (on the topics like sensewalking and acoustic ecology), mindfulness and sensory exercises (e.g. blind listening), interviews with local storytellers and historians, and research on local cultural stories, on a solitary basis. The application of all walks was subject to the initial briefing and followed the design principles that were commonly agreed by the researchers and the participants. Finally, the summative phase featured a short meeting after the walk, where the participants had the opportunity to make their final remarks and provide us with their interpretation of their walking experience. The participants’ interpretations, along with the ethnographic observations—in the fashion of Pink’s [45] sensory ethnography-, made by our research group, helped us understand better the processes and the impact of the walking practices (Table 1.1).

1.8

Memory Walks

Memory walks were one of the main practices implemented for the data collection and interpretation. Data collection was also supported through one-to-one interviews with locals and archival research. The main aim of memory walks was to tap into the memory of locals and resurface stories of local interest inspired and triggered by the walking process. The participants of the walks would walk along a

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Table 1.1 The walks applied during the project

Type Number of walks Purpose

Duration Number of participants per walk Type of path

Stops/ Evaluation points Commentary

Equipment

Memory walks

Silent sensory walks

Performative walk

Discursive 12

Discursive 3

Conceptual 1

Resurface memories and cultural stories associated with the place 40’–80’ 1

Embody, interpret and experiment with cultural stories, through the lenses of the sensory experience of the place 30’–40’ 6–13

Actualise and re-interpret a cultural story

Decided by the participant, in advance and during the walk Decided by the participant, in advance and during the walk Comments during the walk

Decided by the participants, before the walk

Voice recorder

Decided by the participants, before the walk Comments at the end of the walk

Notebooks, Sound recorder, Photo camera

25’ 12

Decided by the participants, before the walk No stops/ evaluation points Comments at the end of the walk Musical instruments, found objects, body

path of their own choice, accompanied by the research team (usually 1–3 individuals). They were encouraged to reflect on the memories and stories they associated with the place, with focus on the ones related to folktales, myths and legends, and share them with the team. Occasionally members of the research team would make questions or would ask clarifications, in relation to the stories discussed. Diversions from the initial destination and stops were allowed and even encouraged, in order to follow the stream of consciousness of the volunteers and accommodate their need for rest or further discussion on landmarks of memory. The duration of the walks fluctuated between 40 and 80 min, depending on the participant. At the end of the walks, the participants would usually debrief shortly their walking experience and reflect on their memory process. Memory walks were rather insightful in terms of resurfacing cultural stories and discussing the participants’ views on them, especially when contrasted to the one-to-one interviews with locals taken as part of the same project. Just like the memory walks, one-to-one interviews aimed to collect memories and stories related to Kythera; they featured a semi-formal structure, since they were based on a semi-structured questionnaire, and they took place in locations familiar to the interviewee—usually their houses or a local kafenio. In most cases, during

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one-to-one interviews, the participants would find it difficult to discuss stories; either because they would quickly ‘run out’ of stories to share, or because they would not go into detail about those stories. On the contrary, the participants of the walks seemed much more confident in sharing their stories, giving more detailed accounts of them, leading the conversation and jumping into new topics. Leading the walk, as well as the responsibility of choosing the path, seemed to give them a sense of agency. All the more, walking familiar trails, being in a social environment along with the very physical aspect of walking the land, seemed to give the participants confidence and inspiration. Even silence, that in many cases caused discomfort during the interviews, had a more integrated role at the memory walks: it served as a natural pause, necessitated by the physical exercise and/or the reflective nature of discursive walking. Memory walks unearthed many cultural stories, most of which were not encountered in archives and collections. In most cases, the cultural stories were a mix of folktales, history, mythology and personal anecdotes. The memory walk at the periphery of Mitata village by I. Protopsaltis (further referred as I. P.), is a good example of how most of the memory walks were performed. Our walk started from the main square of Mitata village, where the impressive, but derelict church of Agia Triada dominates the view. I. P. walked around the temple talking to the team about the destructive earthquake of 2006 that damaged more 50 houses of the village and roads and left the church in its current condition. Later on, we walked uphill, outside the village on a footpath that led us to Tzigkouras stream and the church of Agios Ioannis Koulouthras. At that point, I. P. stopped to recount the story of ‘koulouthra’, malicious spirits that belong to children that died before being christened and were buried at the churchyard. According to the legend, the spirits appear at the roof of the church and passerbys’ would hear their cries at night. The next stop of our walk was also dictated by the landscape, since further up the footpath, on a 200 m altitude, the footpath, as well as the mountain itself were covered with millions of seashells. I. P. took the opportunity to explain the scientific and mythological story behind the uncanny phenomenon6. According to I. P. the countless shells that still remain on the mountainous slopes where the reason that ancient Greeks associated the birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, with Kythera, since according to the myth, she emerged from a seashell. On our way back to Mitata, while passing outside church of Agios Ioannis Koulouthras I. P. had one last story to recount, this time a personal anecdote of folk flair: once, his grandmother coming back home from work in the fields, riding a donkey, while passing from the same spot we were currently standing at, she had an encounter with bad spirits and her donkey stopped moving. As much as she ordered it to move, it wouldn’t. At the peak of her despair, she saw a blinding light and that is when Agios Ioannis7 appeared and pulled the donkey, who started moving again and took her safely back

6

The seashells and fossils date back to the Mesozoic era, when the island emerged from the sea, about 200 million years ago. 7 The orthodox Christian equivalent of St. John.

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to the village. I. P. at the end of the narration commended that he personally believed that the holy vision was a fabrication of his grandmother who, tired as she was, had experienced a bad dream while riding the donkey. After the end of the walk, I. P. and the research team had a quick debrief, where he made his final remarks and reflected on his experience and the stories he shared. As an overall comment, most participants noted that they enjoyed the physical exercise and contact with nature while almost everyone admitted that walking the land helped them remember better and dig up stories they had seemingly forgotten. Place names, paths, cultural and natural landmarks, as well as sensorial modifications (e.g. echo from the gorge, whistling sound of the wind) were deemed important in the process of remembrance. Finally, many participants recounted that the stories of their community are a crucial part of their identity and that, unfortunately, those stories are slowly dying out since they are not passed on to the younger generations (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1 Silent sensory walk and sensory experimentations in Potamos, Kythera

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Silent Sensory Walks

Silent sensory walks were part of the educational agenda of the project and they were designed with regards to the four principles of sensory engagement noted by Pink [44]. All three silent sensory walks were conducted with the group of students from the local high school and other local volunteers and aimed to engage the senses of the participants, indicate the existence of a sensory community among the participants, achieve an immersive connection with the place and its stories and a reflection on the experience of the walk itself. In contrast to the memory walks, the silent sensory walks had a fixed, pre-designed path, with pre-decided stops, that the participants had to follow without diversions. The itinerary was designed by the group of students and other local residents (Fig. 1.2). During the preparatory stage, the participants would use a map, to decide on the itinerary and potential stops of the walk. Since the walks were taking place in locations that the participants were familiar with, they would discuss the reasons they chose the particular paths and the stories, landmarks and points of interest related to the walk. At this stage, the facilitators of the walks would employ mindfulness and sensory exercises—like ear cleaning exercises [52]—in order to prepare the participants for the walk. During the walks, the participants were asked not to make any sounds and were encouraged to navigate the landscape with their senses, think of the stories related to the place and to keep a mental account of their experience. In order to keep an account of their sensory impressions and mental associations during the walk, the participants were equipped with sound recorders, a photo camera, and notebooks. The total duration of the walks was usually around 30–40 min and involved several evaluation stops, defined in advance. Experimentation with the surroundings was encouraged, and could involve any action that could trigger the sensory properties of the environment (e.g. shaking reeds to make sound, touching natural materials, throwing stones to test the echo, balancing on curved surfaces). In the summative stage, which would be after the end of the walks, the participants would regroup to reflect on their experience, share their impressions and any recorded material (sounds, pictures or notes). Silent sensory walks focused on creating new layers of sensory experience in familiar locations and highlighting the sensory connections to the land shared by the group of participants. However, as noted, the stories associated with the land would also play a subtle role in the walk experience. Firstly, the trails of the silent sensory walks would usually revolve around local heritage, cultural and natural landmarks and other sites with a narrative background. Secondly, although the primary focus of the walks were the sensory properties of the landscape, the stories would also make an appearance at a later stage. For example, during the silent sensory walk at Potamos village, while passing by its historic seven arcs, stone bridge, the students were evidently intrigued by the acoustic properties, the texture, the photographic aspects and the climbing prospects of the bridge (applying their senses of hearing, touch, vision, equilibrioception). However, during our summative discussion at the end of the walk, their notebook interpretations would feature elements related to the

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story of the site, along with references to its sensory values. Having said that, storytelling was also effective, even in the case where the walk was explicitly focused on the sensory properties of the land. At the closing discussions with the groups, once the walks were finished, the participants had the opportunity to share their interpretations (photographic, auditory and textual), their impressions with the group, and give feedback. Overall, silent sensory walks were positively evaluated by the participants. Although some participants seemed to find it difficult to engage with the mindful, quiet and highly-focused aspects of the walk, they were intrigued by the exploratory and experimental nature of them (e.g. creating sounds, balancing, exploring different textures). Focusing on the senses was proven quite an effective means of attuning oneself with the environment and its imagined extensions. As a matter of fact, during the debrief, many participants recounted how they could sense aspects of the stories we had discussed before the walk. At the same time, other participants claimed that they disregarded the story, in favour of the focus on the sensory experience of the place. A recurring theme in the feedback was that the silent sensory walks helped the students discover new aspects of their familiar locations and experience them anew, as individuals and as members of a sensory community.

1.10

Performative Walk

The performative walk was partially an extension of the silent sensory walks’ interpretation experiments. Alike the silent sensory walks, it was co-designed and performed by the participants, its aims and process were discussed in the preparatory stage and were evaluated in the end, it took place in a familiar location and revolved around a cultural story. Similarly, to the silent sensory walk, the

Fig. 1.2 Silent sensory walk at Potamos village

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performative walk was a rather strictly-structured activity, where the participants were instructed to remain silent, mindful and highly focused. Nevertheless, instead of focusing and experimenting with the sensory environment, the students were encouraged to engage and creatively interpret the story itself; and instead of using sound recorders, cameras and notebooks for the interpretation, they were asked to use their bodies, found and musical objects as their primary interpretive media. The performative walk that was performed in Kythera focused on the legend of Xenolaos8, it was chosen on the basis of the sensory extensions of its narrative, as well as the scope for creative interpretations in could generate. The walk’s total duration was 25 min. Although many variations exist, the legend of Xenolaos, which is found exclusively in Kythera [16], narrates the noisy encounters of elves and demons in the riverbanks, who either march or perform wedding ceremonies. Xenolaos is supposed to echo through the valleys and gorges, producing sounds of percussions, whistling, and screams in languages unknown and sharp metallic noises among others that inspire awe and wonder to the travellers of the area. Having the above description in mind, the participants of the walk decided to situate the walk in a riverway that was alleged to be a passing of Xenolaos and brought with them metallic objects (e.g. pots and pans), percussions and a flute. During their performance, they also used found materials like piles of fallen leaves, tree branches, pebbles etc., as well as their own bodies. Their embodied interpretation of the story involved mainly rhythmic and fitful walking, mimicking animal movements, stomping, clapping, and vocalizing (laughter, cries, shrieks, muttering, nondescript noises etc.). Their performance was recorded in video and sound9. During our summative discussion, the participants had the opportunity to review the documented material and reflect on it. As an overall comment, the students felt very much in synch with the narrated story. The combination of the location with the story helped them embody the legend and make it come to life (Fig. 1.3).

8

Xenolaos or Fousato is what traditionally Kytherians would name the battalions of elves and demons, said to noisily march through the island’s ravines at night. The combination of the island’s mountainous nature and constant strong winds produced sounds that people believed to come from the dragging of chains and the voices of incarcerated pirates. Some even believed to see visions that resembled them. According to legend, meeting the Fousato while away from home, could be perilous and lead to misfortune or even death. This legend seems to stem from the stigma left on Kytherians by the frequent pirate attacks of the past that resulted to the pillaging of many villages and the deaths of thousands of people. One of the most prominent attacks is that of the island’s old Byzantine capital, Agios Dimitrios, from Barbarossa. Due to its geographical location and rocky coasts, Kythira were known to be a target for pirates who often used the island’s unusual terrain as their hideout. It’s the overtone of those attacks that created the “Xenolaos/Fousato” tradition that is often described by locals as sounds of percussions, whistling, screams in languages unknown, sharp metallic noises and the scary sound of a rocky landslide. 9 You may listen to the audio piece created as part of the performative walk at the following link: https://soundcloud.com/sound-of-kythera/xenolaos.

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Fig. 1.3 Performative walk

1.11

Walking in Kythera: A Conclusion

Reviewing the observations and outputs from all three walking types implemented at Kythera, we may reach several conclusions regarding the capacity of different walking practices to negotiate and re-interpret the stories of the land, but also to form communities based on their embodied experience. First of all, the effectiveness of walks to resurface stories related to the land depends greatly on three factors: the location of the walk, the interests, and the background of the participants. For example, the memory walk at the periphery of Mitata village with I. P., was very fruitful because the participant had a vivid interest in local history and archaeology (interests), he had grown up listening to folklore stories from his parents and grandparents (background), and the village of Mitata had a rich body of stories associated with it (location). At the same time, this proved relatively restrictive in our work with the group of students (silent sensory and performative walks). Although the locations chosen were related to several cultural stories, the students found it rather difficult to identify them, sometimes due to lack of interest and in most cases because of their weak background on local folklore stories. This can be attributed to a gradual abandonment of folklore and traditional narratives from younger generations observed nationwidely in Greece ([32], pp. 217, 218). Cultural stories, as well as other aspects of the folklore culture seemingly, lost their

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prominence after the second half of the twentieth century and younger generations have lost touch with them. Despite the above observation, a high percentage of the students who participated at the reflection meetings admitted that they were interested in local history and folklore and that through the walking practices, as well as the preparatory exercises they understood better their local heritage and connected further with their locale. Jumping off from this observation, it seems that the context of the walks and the deep, embodied connection with the land they encouraged, helped the participants engage with the stories of the land and their subtexts. Moreover, the engagement of the participants with the place and its stories became evident through their interpretations of the walks and the retelling of the stories. During the silent sensory walks, photography and sound recording were the most popular means of interpretation. However, as discussed during our debrief meetings, in many cases the use of technological equipment was disrupting the user from focusing in the activity, while photographs and recordings alone were unable to capture the multiplicity of the sensory experience. Such observations led the group to gradually depend more on notebooks and to develop systems for quick and easy annotation of sensory stimuli. The annotation involved symbols like wave lines, circles, spirals etc. and words, that were meant to indicate important sensory phenomena or thoughts. In some cases, the annotation of the sensory stimuli was related to spatiotemporal indicators (e.g. landmarks, points of the itinerary or time of the day). The annotation system was created by the participants and was adopted by a few of them; it is believed that the system would be further developed and more spread if more walks were employed. While text and language [36], but also video or film ([43], p. 58) have been criticised for being inadequate means to represent the sensory, embodied experience, this paper argues that texts, especially when combined with other media (e.g. sound and/or image), can be the most efficient medium of sensory transcription and can establish the clearest links to the storytelling embedded in the land. Moreover, during the memory and the performance walks the participants had the opportunity to creatively retell the stories they had heard before; in the first case through words and in the latter through their embodied performances. As noted by Schneider [55], the retelling of every story is rather a creative interpretation, than a plain recitation: “oral performance is the way people choose to create and re-create meaning in the stories they tell and in the ways, they interpret and retell them” ([55], p. 10). In this sense, the stories narrated during the memory walks were unique versions of the originals and left their own fresh marks in the land that was walked by the participants’ informants/ancestors. In addition to that, performance, a practice historically and organically related to folklore [7], with the capacity to reflect upon relations, symbols, meaning, codes and to generate new interpretations of reality [60], was the most effective tool in terms of re-working a folk narrative with a new audience. Another important aspect of the research project was the reinforcement of the sensory community/ies. With participants from different areas of the island, the walks offered the opportunity to experience different sensescapes, to create new ones during the performative walk and to situate imaginary (or historical) loci from

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cultural and folklore stories in different places on the island. Given that sensory communities rely on the consistent exposure to certain sensorial stimuli and they are delimited by the ability to experience the particular stimuli, walking, with its temporal character, challenges the existence of such communities. Leaving aside purposive walking, which is often repetitive, walking practices, such as the ones presented in this paper, introduce people to new sensescapes and allow them to create their personal sense of place with the limitation of a temporal presence in that landscapes. If soundscapes and their collaborative exploration through the practice of walking can consolidate communities [22], then the same principles apply to sensory communities. Furthermore, as Voegelin ([62], p. 23) claims that acoustic communities can originate a ‘sense of place’ when the practice of listening takes into consideration the historical and geographical features of the landscape; in an analogous way, the communities participated in our sense- and story-based walks, were able to create their own, unique sense of place. Typically, a community wouldn’t exist with just short visits to a certain location, as in cases of tourists and walking group practices of a similar kind. Yet, the project’s participants which were members of the local community had the chance to create bonds based on the sensory experiences they shared, and the dialogue initiated with their heritage and their memories. As indicated through their interpretations and the ethnographic observations, the participants of the walks, and most importantly the students’ group managed to form and be part of an all-encompassing and multi-local Kytherian sensory community, unified through walking and cultural storytelling.

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Dionysis Anemogiannis Ph.D. candidate in Museum Studies at the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of Aegean, Mytilene, Greece. He holds a Bachelor degree in Media and Communication from the National Kapodestrian University of Athens and a MA in Heritage Studies: Education and Interpretation from Newcastle University. He has published papers in journals and conference proceedings and has presented his research in conferences and research symposiums. He is the founder of NACUSSO, a learning, cultural and research organization in the field of acoustic ecology, oral history and storytelling. His research interests include: digital media, sensory studies, acoustic ecology, storytelling and museum studies. Angelos Theocharis Ph.D. candidate in Russian Cultural studies at the University of Edinburgh, studying transnational communities, cultural practices and identity construction. He holds a Bachelor degree in Law from the National Kapodistrian University of Athens and a MA in Cultural Studies and Russia from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. As a researcher, he participates in the Open World Research Initiative research project titled ‘Diasporic and Transnational Russophone Networks in the UK: in Search for Global Russians’ and the Academy of Finland’s project on “Cultural Statecraft in International Relations: The Case of Russia”, as well as in the Cost Action “Writing Urban Places. New Narratives of the European City”. He has published papers in academic journals and conference proceedings, has contributed with chapters in edited volumes, and has organised international conferences. He is a founding member of NACUSSO, a learning, cultural and research organization in the field of acoustic ecology, oral history and storytelling. His research interests include: cultural theory, community studies, digital humanities, acoustic ecology and sensory studies.

Chapter 2

Drawing Heritage: A Heuristic Approach to Ambiances Through an Urban Sketching Experience Mariana Kimie Nito

Abstract Interdisciplinary understanding of buildings preservation is an approach defended in the field of cultural heritage. In Brazil, the term ambiance is used by IPHAN (national heritage institute) in policies of buildings preservation through their surroundings. It is meant to refer to its symbolic and subjective features, but without any theoretical indications. As such, an urban research tool was developed, understanding ambiance as an integrating factor that allows the perception of the city in the spaces experienced. The method involves experimental walks and their logs by way of observation drawings. The drawing is thought not as an artistic activity but as the practice of looking and being in the space, close to an ethnographic practice. Walking and drawing is a form of engagement between the researcher, her/his perception and experience of the place and the local population interested in talking and seeing the drawings. This research method was applied in fieldwork of a Master’s research on Casa de Portinari (Candido Portinari’s former house). The goal of this chapter is to present the method and its use in an interdisciplinary exploration, establishing relationships between cultural heritage and ambiances in an urban setting. Keywords Experiencing ambiances Observational drawing Brazil




2.1


Cultural heritage
Urban sketching


Introduction

Since the 1930s, when the Brazilian government first began implementing heritage preservation policies, the extension of the protection to the surrounding environment has been present in those policies. Surroundings, neighborhood, buffer zones and settings are some of the names used by preservation agencies, legislations and heritage charters to formulate a concept that refers to the surrounding area of a listed M. K. Nito (&) University of Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_2

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heritage building, subject to usage restrictions to induce conservation through the relation of the heritage with its immediate space. In Brazil, the surroundings of heritage properties were already present in the proposals that preceded the Law no 25 of year 1937, which institutes heritage listing and creates the Institute of National Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN), which was then incorporated to Article 18 of that law. Legally codified as an area of possible disturbance of visibility of the heritage, meanings and values of what exactly constitutes these surroundings have varied over time and with the acquired jurisprudence, becoming defined as an area in which the ambiance must be retained. Recent developments on the subject of surroundings of heritage search for an objective definition beyond that of direct visibility and prominence with respect to the landscape. They include, besides visual parameters, “the ambiance and historicity of contexts that involve the listed heritage” (Motta and Thompson [1], p. 26). Internationally, the multiple dimensions that these surrounding areas can embrace are itemized in the Declaration of Xi’An, that resulted from discussions in the international symposium “Conservation of the Built Environment, Sites and Areas of Cultural Heritage” of ICOMOS, in 2005, in which aspects of landscape and visual perception and form of the buildings that constitute the surroundings were highlighted together with the social, spiritual and economic dimensions, among others, as elements able to enhance the preservation of cultural heritage. Since they involve a greater number of determining factors, the surroundings of cultural buildings bring about new challenges in thinking and dealing with them, in allowing and demanding new possibilities of actions and stances towards them that must be developed as means to promote the preservation of cultural heritage. In the field of cultural heritage preservation, there are few practices of urban analysis that abandon the aesthetic and stylistic control to select characteristics of the space to be preserved, mostly with respect to symbolic and subjective dimensions of heritage. Although many important advances were made with regards to aesthetic and historic criteria (critically and practically related to urban analysis, such as the understanding of the importance of land subdivision, building typologies, landscape morphology and building volumetry), there are few interdisciplinary studies that seek a cultural view on urban areas and their relations with individually listed heritage properties. It was in this scenario that, from an internal demand of the superintendency of Iphan in the State of São Paulo, an interdisciplinary research was developed during the Professional Master’s Program on Cultural Heritage Preservation by Iphan, between 2013 and 2015. The research studied the surroundings of heritage through the lenses of the notion of ambiance and sketched a heuristic process to approach the surroundings as a way of properly treating it for cultural heritage preservation. The term ambiance is used in institutional practice from the perspective of understanding the different aspects of listed heritage for ample preservation by means of their surroundings. It is used mainly to refer to symbolic and subjective aspects, but without further indications of theories or methods. This study of heritage through ambiance is interested in thinking the surroundings as an opportunity to articulate areas that are generally apart: tangible and intangible heritage, built

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space and living space. It is a view of the surroundings as an opportunity to approach city dynamics to foment preservation, and not as an obstacle to it. This can be made in a management process with affirmative policies on cultural heritage, not just with a normative role. The approach developed begins with the presence of the researcher in the field in an active way that involves walking, looking, drawing, being there and talking with people. It is an unconcerned walk around the city with an intent to search for another way to know the place. It is the investigative look, attentive to everything that is alive and concerned with the ground beneath one’s feet. The drawings made from observation are records of a gaze whose artistic result matters little in relation to the process of drawing, the time and the stroke as materializing experience. It is a silent dialogue with the city, and with curious eyes of those that find the presence of the researcher unusual, her/his attentive eyes; and yet, conversations usually begin with the drawing as a device. From this procedure of research, more than gathering information, it was possible to create situations for understanding existing processes in the surroundings of listed heritage from the multiple experiences and meetings between perceptions of those people that live the city.

2.2

Ambiances, Heritage Preservation and Drawing

The term ambiance is commonly used in the field of cultural heritage, having acquired importance in the preservation of properties of cultural interest, mainly due to the constant transformations that their surrounding areas have been through. It is usual in technical studies and institutional assessments of Iphan to find phrases such as: “the preservation of the ambiance of the listed property”; “The non-alteration of the ambiance”; and “the understanding that involves other dimensions, such as ambiance” (Nito [2], p. 143). The notion of ambiance comes tied to the relatively recent idea of linking preservation to the amplification of the concept of cultural heritage and, thus, the notion of surroundings. In Brazil, the term “entorno”, meaning surroundings, was associated, mainly after the jurisprudence established over the notions of neighborhood and visibility in the first years of activity of Iphan, to an amplification of the concept of visibility, understood beyond its literal aspect, but not excluding it, to the protection of the listed heritage. It could, therefore, from this amplification of meaning, include other architectonic and social relations. In the international heritage conservation charters until mid-twentieth century, ambiance is associated to a notion of harmony, in the sense of reconstitution of a secular ambiance to the listed buildings, linked to the creation of a picturesque landscape surrounded by green areas to highlight the heritage buildings. According to Motta and Thompson [1], the understandings in the Venice Charter, such as “modest works”, “cultural meaning” and the indissociable relationships of the buildings with the “environment in which they are found” were fundamental to the amplification of the concept of heritage and, for the first time, a clear discussion was

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held about heritage preservation by means of their surroundings, assisting the consolidation of the term ambiance in Brazil in the decades of 1970 and 1980. However, only in the Recommendation Concerning the Safeguarding and Contemporary Role of Historic Areas, written at General Conference of UNESCO in 1976, in Nairobi, this environmental notion comes with a clear definition. This Recommendation considers the diversities of existing sites both historic and traditional ones, defending the conservation of their integrity and understanding their ambiance as such: “The ‘environment’ shall be taken to mean the natural or man-made setting which influences the static or dynamic way these areas are perceived or which is directly linked to them in space or by social, economic or cultural ties.” (UNESCO [14], p. 3). In this Recommendation, some aspects that are essential to the understanding of heritage ambiance are already evident, as well as ways in which it can be linked to preservation: the cognition linked to existing relations in space and the physical elements and socio-cultural aspects that comprise it. These social interactions, inherent to the life that forms cities, produces everything that surrounds us as inhabitants of these spaces. Ambiance is not, however, a sum of things produced, and neither it is something static, it is part of the dynamics of living in the city. One can then refer to ambiances more accurately in plural form, because when referring to cities it deals with countless ambiances, their buildings and spaces of cultural interest and the social practices that exist there. When one mentions the ambiance of a listed heritage to be preserved, it is a reference to the characteristics that are not intrinsic to it, i. e., the existing relations that conform ambiances towards the heritage. Ambiances are, therefore, defined by the surrounding buildings and spaces and the relations established among them. This line of thought approaches the study of ambiances not in and of itself, but as an analysis of what are its conditioning factors and what makes them perceivable. Therefore, one must be part of the ambiance, more than observe or contemplate it, it is possible to feel it and live its daily experience. It is in sensible media, through ambiances, that one must seek to overcome the divide between subjects and objects. Thus, ambiance may be defined as “moral and material atmosphere surrounding a place or person, ambiance is precisely a notion which challenges such a divide and pushes for its deconstruction.” (Thibaud [3], p. 9). The wide and varied meanings given to ambiances in the field of heritage reveals the search for a new way to look at and act on cultural heritage. To understand the stance aimed by heritage conservation by means of ambiances, the research is based on theoretical reflections by British anthropologist Tim Ingold. The ideas he presents in Bringing Things to Life (2010) imply in thinking things, in our case built heritage, in a contemporary discussion that inserts them in an enlarged view to reflect on what is related to their life in the world. Ingold’s critique is for “an ontology that assigns primacy to processes of formation as against their final products, and to flows and transformations of materials as against states of matter” ([4], pp. 2–3). Ingold’s first argument, based on the work of Heidegger [5], is for the distinction between things and objects, being elements of opposite thoughts. While the objects

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are a fait accompli, especially when we think about the ones that were produced by human work, and restricted to waiting for agents or agency, they are “a place where several goings on become entwined”. In things many actions happen, they transcend their shape and extend over, inviting in to the gathering. They can be called a ‘parliament of lines’ which can be interwoven with other elements without the need for agents to have life and to live: “In a word, things leak, forever discharging through the surfaces that form temporarily around them”. Therefore, when studying a thing we are not looking at it isolated, we are part in the thing’ thinging in a worlding world”. That is, being in the world implies a constant experience of multiple relationships. ([4], p. 5)

Ingold formulates a fundamental critical approach aimed at rearranging and highlighting the inter-relations between movements and things. To exemplify, he reflects on how this line of thought applies to human made structures, such as buildings: “The real house is never finished. Rather, for its inhabitants it calls for unremitting effort to shore it up in the face of the comings and goings of its human inhabitants and non-human inhabitants, not to mention the weather! Rainwater drips through the roof where the wind has blown off a tile, feeding a fungal growth that threatens to decompose the timbers, the gutters are full of rotten leaves, and if that were not enough, moans Siza, ‘legions of ants invade the thresholds of doors, there are always the dead bodies of birds and mice and cats’. Indeed not unlike the tree, the real house is a gathering of lives, and to inhabit it is to join in the gathering, or in Heidegger’s terms, to participate with the thing in its thinging.” ([4], p. 5)

Ingold’s understanding applied to built heritage consists in an opening dynamics to preservation through their urban surroundings. Its helps the comprehension of the notion of ambiance that is intended to preserve cultural heritage in an unifying way, breaking up Cartesian dualisms, as well as reconsidering the place of the body in understanding the world. The notion of ambiance embraces these perspectives. As Thibaud ([6], p. 186) states, ambiance is based on conceptual categories that are inseparable from our sensorimotor activity. It can be seen that ambience has a promising potential to articulate areas usually separated on architecture and urbanism, and also cultural heritage, such as: tangible and intangible, theory and practice, living space and projected space. By placing the focus of this dynamic approach on structured sensorial modes of space and time, it defends the lived experience and diminishes the relevance of a unique static knowledge. Thinking things with respect to life brings us to another aspect of the relation between ambiance and preservation: its resonance, such that the cultural heritage building or place must also be understood and echo in civil society in more ways than being the result of State or market initiatives. It relates the elements of ambiance in composing spaces and their socio-aesthetic meanings as brought about by Thibaud [7], reverberating in the way of life. When thinking of resonance, the ambiance surfaces the sensitive perception of the city exposing its different forms of appropriation and resignification. Regarding ambiances and cultural heritage, is it possible to consider that built heritage is a phenomenon that emerges and appears according to its multiple ways of feeling and perceiving it?

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But what sets these experiences up is also part of the everyday life in the cities, of those who inhabit it, and part of other existing relations beyond the discourse of cultural heritage, modifying ambiances. In order to make explicit the theoretical investigations on ambiances, a practical case was selected allowing the formulation of questions related to the practical application of the ambiance notion in the surroundings of listed cultural heritage. The technical and scientific procedures commonly used in the disciplines of Architecture and Urbanism to document and analyse spaces have a certain degree of precision and follow Cartesian practices, producing maps, photos, plans, sections, elevations, etc. Information and data are extracted, but those of a subjective nature hardly permeate these readings, especially in the processes of qualifying them and of approaching other perceptions about what was researched. Many times one falls in the temptation of a panoramic view of the city, through a “bird flight” look that forms a totalising view of space, forming a map still based on a cartesian perspective. However, from experiences such as urban dérives, serial perception and city imaging, it is verified that this “panorama” hardly corresponds to the life in the city and the perception of those who frequent these spaces. This issue was also approached by Michel de Certeau in the 1970s and 1980s in criticizing the growing distance of political and cultural practices from everyday practices in the city. On The Practice of Everyday Life (1990), Certeau considers the daily practices conceived as a cultural plurality that is manifold and rooted on people. In general, Certeau defends that these practices are the means by which each subject interprets and deals with the culture, producing something new and proper. Culture is understood as something manifold and to comprehend it one also needs to look at the plural set of cultural practices. The notion of cultural practices of Certeau can be associated, in a critical sense to the totalizing vision adopted in urbanism. Certeau’s idea of a theoretical simulacrum is a criticism of urban planning developed by “looking from above”, only possible when made on a floor plan and from an exterior view (mostly in office rooms). Reflecting on walking in the city Certeau says: “The panorama-city is a “theoretical” (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility isan oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. […] The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms.” ([8], pp. 93–94)

Knowing the city beyond its maps and urban plans was also part of the criticism of the Situationists in proposing the tool of urban dérive and psychogeography. Drifting and lack of concern are part of a practice that removes people from their daily routes, invited to the voluntary walk along the city streets in an urban physical experience, a practice proposed to build knowledge from sensations of existing situations in the city. It was proposed to walk drifting, with no certain course, as a tool to enhance urban experiences that were part of the so-called psychogeographic studies developed by the situationists, such as Guy Debord and Michèle Berntein

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[9]. The Situationist movement used the dérives as a criticism of modern urbanism in the sense of making the urban environment a liberating living space to experience different sensations. An instrumental approach that is related to walking in the city to get to know the daily practices of its people is observational drawing. It allows a different architectural and urbanistic look that escapes from the totalizing perspective of maps, satellite photos and floor plans. Drawing by observation has references in the most diverse sources: in classic literature, in books on exploration and travel journals, illustrations in newspapers. It has, since ancient times, been the tool of painters, architects, anthropologists, and others (e. g., Le Corbusier, Eugène Delacroix, Frida Kahlo and Da Vince) as a way of knowing and registering landscapes, cities, people and objects. Such drawn references are records of their composition and artistic characteristics that reveal social, psychological and aesthetic aspects. In addition, the observation drawing allows, besides various forms of interpretation, the provision of data on components of the place drawn, as it is related to the existing landscape at the time. Drawing as an instrument of telling by hand has been recovered, investigated and defended by the anthropologist such as Ingold [10] and Kuschnir [11]. As a form of knowing cities, the observation design is defended as an experience of the place where the cities are being designed and lived because, unlike other means of capturing an image, drawing requires its time to look, to know and to produce it (in its act of drawing). Thus the drawing of observation can be more about experience than about the result itself, which opens it up as a tool that does not require prior artistic drawing techniques: “It is not as though the hand, in drawing, gradually empties out what first fills the head, such that the entire composition slides like a transfer from mind to paper; rather both hand and head are together complicit throughout in the work’s unceasing generation”, (Ingold [10], p. 127)

Drawing and walking in the city allows another approach to research cities, not being exclusive, but complementary to other methods. It is an alternative to the Cartesian view to enable, to explore and to register the subjective character of knowledges about city life and daily practices. In addition to the physical approach to the place, it is possible to establish relations with socio-cultural practices, as well as experiencing and being part of them.

2.3

Walking Through an Urban Sketching Experience

The theoretical repertoire developed on ambiance was applied to fieldwork done in the surrounding area of Portinari’s House. The house is located in the city of Brodowski, State of São Paulo, which has 24 thousand inhabitants and is 337 km to the west of the state capital (Fig. 2.1). Portinari’s House is a humble construction where the painter Cândido Portinari lived during his childhood and youth (Fig. 2.2).

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Fig. 2.1 Sao Paulo State map. Brodowski’s location in red and the City of Sao Paulo’s in pink. On the smaller map the State of São Paulo’s location in Brazil. Source Nito [2], p. 107, derivative from Raphael Lorenzeto de Abreu [15], (CC-BY-SA 3.0). In Wikipedia

Fig. 2.2 Portinari’s house, main house in the center, grandmother’s house, chapel and uncle’s house on the right and another house on the left. Source Nito [2], p. 69

As an adult, Portinari returned often to visit his family, having experimented with painting techniques on the walls of the house and painted a mural on a private chapel for his grandmother. After the house was classified as national and state cultural heritage, from 1970 onwards the city of Brodowski became known internationally as the “Land of Portinari”, mainly by the important role of the house as a museum, promoting tourism and cultural activities. Giving substance to the ambiances of Portinari’s House was intended to verify the possible challenges and means for its identification, and also to verify the practical reality of the considerations presented on ambiance. As Thibaud states: “Mettre la notion d'ambiance à l'épreuve de la pensée urbaine nécessite à la fois de

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tester sa portée heuristique et de faire oeuvre de clarification.”1 (Thibaud [6], p. 185). It was with that intention that, in working with ambiances in the context of urban heritage, it was sought to explore how and under what conditions it is possible to have a practical approach to ambiances, to evaluate what innovations it can bring to cultural heritage preservation. Therefore, the result of this research was the heuristic approach developed, the method that was formulated to know ambiances in the surroundings of heritage buildings aiming for the preservation of listed buildings. To that end, the field research made use of situations created to understand the existing processes in the surrounding area consisting of ethnographic incursions and experiences with civil society and government agents on dialogues and drawings. The fieldwork was structured in experiences of situations as ambiances. Considering that an ambiance is not amenable to observation or contemplation, the research was directed to a lived experience in which “situations form the basic units of all kinds of experience” (Thibaud [7], p. 204). Thus, in the situations created, the goal was to promote interactions with citizens that exchange perceptions and share knowledge about the city. Portinari’s House and isolated experiences were set aside as subjects, since it was about the perceptions related to the diverse forms of experience of those involved in the situations created. In addition to these situations, the field research also made use of observation drawing as a method of apprehension of the place combined with the experience of walking in the city, drifting to what attracts the researcher’s attention. It was mentioned that the observation drawing has been approached in different areas as a form of knowledge and record of an experience in the cities. It was in this sense of local experience that in 2007 Gabriel Campanario created an urban sketchers network that currently brings together people who like to draw in more than 50 countries. The group holds local and international meetings with the aim of drawing, living an experience together and sharing knowledge. The urban sketcher group has a manifesto which summarizes its goals: 1. We draw on location, indoors or out, capturing what we see from direct observation; 2. Our drawings tell the story of our surroundings, the places we live and where we travel; 3. Our drawings are a record of time and place; 4. We are truthful to the scenes we witness; 5. We use any kind of media and cherish our individual styles; 6. We support each other and draw together; 7. We share our drawings online; 8. We show the world, one drawing at a time. The manifesto revels the intentions of the group to know and to present the world through drawings as a rediscovery of looking and of investigating cities. The use of a simple notebook to draw emphasizes the defense of the drawing as a personal journal of everyday experiences and not only as something for artists. It reveals the perspective that drawing is a learned skill, as well as reading, writing or biking and therefore anyone is able to do it. The main interest of the observational

1

[Putting the concept of ambiance to the of urban knowledge thought requires both testing it heuristic scope and doing some clarification work].

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drawing is in experiencing the city and not in the results or the visual aesthetic qualities of the drawing, so that is not necessary to “know how” to draw. The training of the look and draw allows a unique posture to the researcher, a non neutral look over the space, which is being built over time: “If you make urban sketching part of your routine and continue with it in your travels, you will not only end up with a work of art in your hands, you create a de facto journal of your life, from mundane (fellow bus commuters, the view from your office window) to exciting (a day at ballgame or a once-in-a-life overseas trip).” (Campanario [12], p. 18).

The act of drawing in the cities combined with walking allows one to know and live its daily practices, according to the conception of Certeau. The characteristics of the use of space as a vital part of the city can be recorded in the notebook through the drawings. Observation and drawing creates another language about the city, recording the walking experience. It was in this sense that the observation drawing or urban sketching was chosen as a research tool for he knowledge of ambiances. This choice also had the intention of practical approximation from the fields of architecture and urbanism to anthropology through ethnographic incursions when using the drawing as experience of a place. It is worth noting that it is an interesting tool because it is close to the process of architectural training, being a familiar language within the field of architecture and urbanism. The term incursions was used because of the understanding that ethnography is an anthropology skill and since the researcher does not have such training, it was an experience made to approach this academic field. It is also understood that ethnography has had an opportunistic appropriation in several areas in which it is only used as a method of collection of qualitative data as a prerequisite to the development of other actions. Its uses in a reductive and trivialized way that leads some researchers to choose to use other denominations, as a way to rescue the broader understanding of people’s lives and daily life. Ethnographic incursions was a terminology used as a way of not separating it from its original field of thought and in defense of its essential principles. The observation drawing is, historically, a central tool for ethnographic researchers as a traveler's companion, recording urban and natural surroundings as much as the lives and customs of different groups of people (e. g., Langsdorff expedititon and Lévi Satrauss). In Brazil, the social anthropologist Kuschnir [11] is developing projects at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro about ethnographic drawings, in which drawing is a part of field research, a form of participant observation, where drawings are treated as material for analysis and presentation of the field results. It emphasizes that the observation drawing can contribute to enhance the field research in the way of seeing and knowing the city. The observation drawing was used as a tool and also as a fieldwork strategy. The researcher’s presence was perceived in the city, in the eyes of those who crossed the researcher and in the moments when she was approached by curious people while drawing or in other situations in the days spent in the city. On the first days in Brodowski, the observation drawings happened in a spontaneous way when drawing both Portinari’s House and its surroundings during the

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first contact with the local community. The drawings were also intended to know the environment in which the workshops with the civil society would complement the approach to understanding urban ambiances. Later, with more awareness of its use as a research tool, the streets around Portinari’s House were mapped and a few paths were chosen leading outwards from there. Along those paths, drawings were made of each point of interest and detail that caught the eye. The paths taken changed by freely exploring these new sights to draw and on the conversations had along the way. This approach is similar to the method developed by Richard Alomar on the workshop Unfolding a Sketching Story, that happen in the 5th International Urban Sketcher Symposium. This workshop was intended to document the experience of walking through a new space with quick observation drawings, words and additional observation records, that helps to fulfill the city map with daily life. In the fieldwork in Brodowski, fast and slow drawings were used in different approaches to the place. The drawings on the notebook evoke the lived experiences when we see them, in a way that they become a multidimensional mental drawing. The carefree and attentive walk added to the drawings also involved another look at the city. Drawings, quick sketches, written records were made of things that drag attention, things that were thought about and were heard on walks. The incomplete drawing of what was observed, the writing of what was heard, the walk that sought to record what attracted attention, with images or words, objects, sounds, smells, activities, people. When looking at the notebook, one may have the impression of disorganization between the fragments of drawings and texts, but these form a composition in order to reveal the lived dimensions that the reading of the notebook allows, also becoming a device of memory of that experience. The seemingly confusing result need not to be beautiful but efficient in evoking the experience of space (Figs. 2.3 and 2.4). To tell where the drawings were made, the street names were written next to them. It made possible to know the location and also to know the urban route of the researcher. Although walk and draw through the setting of Portinari’s House might suggest sunny days, it was the opposite weather that the researcher found. In the

Fig. 2.3 Sketchbook with observational drawings as a log of the experimental walks. Source Nito [2], p. 292

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Fig. 2.4 Urban sketches of Brodowski registers of experimental walk. Source Nito [2], p. 297

early days, weather conditions did not contribute to walking on the streets, rains and intense winds sometimes made it difficult to stay outside. So the incorporation of bad luck was also part of the process, soaking the feet and juggling with umbrella, notebook and pen, recording the sound of rain, the soaked and blurred drawings. Even knowing the city a little, many times the feeling of being lost in time and space is also another challenge. Another aspect of the fieldwork process was the people’s approach to what the researcher was doing. Some people just passed by looking curious and others started talking to the researcher about what they saw in the drawing that was being made, and what they think about the city. So, drawing in the city also can be seen as conversation devices. Anastassakis and Szanieck [13] understand the concept of conversation devices, in the context of design, as a possibility to combine the ways of production of design and anthropology in the creations of tools to facilitate dialogues and generate engagement and other forms of dialogue between researchers and other actors of the urban space. Drawing is a form of reading the spaces experienced, and can be used as hooks for interviews or as a resource in itself it to access people’s memories about a place, the interpretation and translation of the outer physical world made by an individual. The image is a product of the immediate sensation and continuous experience of the space, drawing is interpretation of information and a guide to action. The result of the fieldwork notebook is a narrative of the experience, a way to access the local memory and to permeate the conjectures of the city spaces, its experience and perception. In the analysis of the notebook and the sequence, it is possible to observe how people select, value and prioritize what they see and experience in the city.

2.4

Experience Drawing Heritage and Urban Ambiences

Through walking and drawing, a stance was take and an understanding was built from the field research to create a dialogue with the place and with people in a respectful relation when working the possible perceptions of ambiance, setting the

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experience of the city as a fundamental element to understand the preservation of Portinari’s House. The act of drawing and walking had a practical aspect, but also provided new and different experiences and knowledge the urban daily life around the heritage that gives new input to criteria and methods of preservation of the heritage. The drawing strengthened the situation of being in field and allowed access to an in-depth dimension that working with ambiances demands. If, on the one hand, the ambiance legitimizes the importance of feeling the place and knowledge of everyday life practices, this research also highlights the relevance of technical and institutional knowledge in the use of buffer zones as preservation instruments for built heritages. Institutionally there is a need for the surrounding area to be delimited and normalized, both as a form of public and political transparency—in the sense of an institutional stance. Although when we think of ambiances, we are immediately confronted with an opposite urgency, because there are things in the daily life that are beyond these and escape limits and rules. There are distinct knowledges that have different forms and ethics to know the world, but between gains and losses, each one has its space and can exist in mutual respect world for a shared procedure and not just participatory action. This allows the heritage surroundings to be an important field of action, not only to enhance preservation, but also to reestablish a relation and a dialogue of institucional rapprochement with state agencies and civil society in the cities where historic buildings are located. It also enables operational information about surrounding areas, with an opportunity for an instrument of public policies that correspond to the existing social demands. It is concluded that the urban heritage surroundings are not a secondary instrument of preservation, it is a mechanism that has its place and specificities in cultural heritage preservation, and also in these approaches through ambiances as part of an affirmative management of cultural heritage. Above all, it was verified the facilitating nature of surrounding areas for cultural heritage preservation. To act on such spaces is not to preserve the literal matter of the heritage, but it acts as potentiator of actions that indeed do it. By enabling the settings to enhance preservation, such perspective is taken so that the approaches presented on ambiance represent ways for the settings to exercise this potential. Especially if we consider the institutional reality in which very few listed heritages have delimited surrounding areas with urban norms implemented. For these reasons, experiencing ambiances has the capacity to hold different perspectives for cultural heritage preservation through their surroundings. It allows a renewed look on how cultural heritage has been treated, starting with the recognition of how institutional actions can be taken based on the resonance of existing relations in the cities, between the heritage building and its surroundings. Such relationships are not only tangible or intangible, but concern to an integrated approach that concerns a respectful way of understanding the different dimensions of living and being in the world of cultural heritage. Furthermore, it also makes it possible to take a stance on the heterogeneity of existing processes in the settings that may or may not correspond to preservation, but in which dialogue and collaboration are in terms of ambiances for its diffuse aspect.

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Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, Brazil) and previews support of IPHAN (Institute of National Historic and Artistic Heritage). And Professor Architect Yuri Teixeira for helping with translations and revisions of this chapter.

References 1. Motta L, Thompson A (2010) Entorno de bens tombados. IPHAN/DAF/ Copedoc, Rio de Janeiro 2. Nito MK (2015) Heuristics to urban setting of cultural heritage based on ambiance: an experience at Casa de Portinari in Brodowski-SP (Brazil). Master’s thesis. Retrieved from http://portal.iphan.gov.br/uploads/ckfinder/arquivos/Mestrado_em_Preservacao_Dissertacao_ NITO_Mariana_Kimie_Silva.pdf. Accessed Feb 2020 3. Thibaud JP (2012) The city through the senses. Revista PROARQ, Rio de Janeiro, vol 18, pp 1–16. Retrieved from http://cadernos.proarq.fau.ufrj.br/public/docs/Proarq18_TheCity_ JeanThibaud.pdf. Accessed Feb 2020 4. Ingold T (2010) Bringing things to life: creative entanglements in a world of materials. In: Realities working paper, University of Manchester, vol 15, pp 2–14. Retrieved from http:// eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/1306/1/0510_creative_entanglements.pdf. Accessed Feb 2020 5. Heidegger M (1971) Poetry, language, thought (Hofstadter A, Trans). Harper & Row, New York 6. Thibaud JP (2002) L’horizon des ambiances urbaines. Communications 73:185–201. Retrieved from https://www.persee.fr/docAsPDF/comm_0588-8018_2002_num_73_1_2119. pdf. Accessed Feb 2020 7. Thibaud JP (2011) The sensory fabric of urban ambiances. Senses Soc 6(2):203–215. Retrieved from https://cressound.grenoble.archi.fr/fichier_pdf/article/Thibaud_2011_sensory_ fabric_urban_ambiances.pdf. Accessed Feb 2020 8. de Certeau M (1984) The practice of everyday life. University of California Press, Berkeley 9. Knabb K (ed) (1995) Situationist international anthology. Bureau of Public Secrets, Berkley 10. Ingold T (2013) Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge, Londres/Nova York 11. Kuschnir K (2011) Drawing the city: a proposal for an ethnographic study in Rio de Janeiro. Vibrant—Virtual Braz Anthropol 8(2):608–642. Retrieved from http://www.vibrant.org.br/ issues/v8n2/karina-kuschnir-drawing-the-city/. Accessed Feb 2020 12. Campanario G (2012) The art of urban sketching: drawing on location around the world. Quarry Books, Massachusetts 13. Anastassakis Z, Szaniecki B (2016) Conversation dispositifs: towards a transdisciplinary design anthropological approach. In: Smith RC, Otto T, Vangkilde KT, Halse J, Binder T, Kjaersgaard MG (Orgs) Design anthropological futures. Bloomsbury, London, pp 121–138 14. UNESCO (1976). Recommendation concerning the safeguarding and contemporary role of historic areas. Retrieved from http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=13133&URL_ DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. Acessed Feb 2020 15. Abreu RL (2006). Map locator of São Paulo's Brodowski city. In Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SaoPaulo_Municip_Brodowski.svg. Accessed Ago 2015

Mariana Kimie Nito Architect and Urbanist, Ph.D. candidate in Architecture and Urbanism in the area of History and Fundamentals of Architecture and Urbanism at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Sao Paulo (FAU/USP), Brazil. Her current research focuses on cultural heritage and its relationships to urban polices, social practices, decision-making processes

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and cultural rights. She holds an MA in Management of Restoration and Practice of Conservation Works and Restoration of Cultural Heritage by the Center for Advanced Studies of Integrated Conservation (CECI) from Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) and a Master’s Degree in Cultural Heritage Preservation from National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN), where she developed the drawing method presented in this book. Nito also works as an educator and researcher in the heritage sector with works involving participatory inventory of cultural references and short-term courses for teachers and educators, both involving diverse drawing methods. She is a member of the management board of the Paulista Heritage Educational Network (REPEP), Brazil and also a member of ICOMOS Brazil. Her published works are about cultural heritage preservation, heritage and museum education, urban history and social rights.

Chapter 3

The Sonic Drifter: A Psychogeographic Approach to Understand a Re-emerging City Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Abstract Studying and perceiving a re-emerging city by listening to the sounds of here and now might be phenomenologically reductive in approach; so, how can one draw a framework for understanding the social formation of its urban atmosphere? This contribution describes a sound art project and examines its artistic processes in order to shed light on the methodologies for perceiving a re-developing and rapidly expanding city by engaging with its multilayered sounds of present as well as the past, and, subsequently, evoking the essential and characteristic ambience of the city through historically and spatiotemporally aware artistic practice. This contribution further investigates the project’s methodology to speculate on present urban conditions in countries like India that are still recuperating from the colonial rubbles while experiencing rapid growth. Devising an unfolding auditory situation of an Indian city in corresponding acts of drifting, listening, recording and composing, this contribution examines the processes of sensing an apparently chaotic and disorganized city with its multisensory complexity using psychogeographic drifting rather than sound walks. Keywords Sound studies Drifting Sound art




3.1


Psychogeography
Urban sound
Ambience


Introduction

The evolving vision of a re-emerging India from its colonial rubble has been one in which a majority of people will move from the countryside to settle in the cities. The potentially hyper-modernizing effects of an imminent urban life open up debates on the status of the city’s atmosphere, ambiance, and general appearance, particularly over the spatial dynamics that have contributed to a much larger set of B. Chattopadhyay (&) Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA), Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_3

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concerns about the India’s urban planning since its independence in 1947. Burgeoning between the rural hinterland and an evolving urban landscape, the contemporary design of Indian cities, however, undermines aesthetic choices by keeping its predominant interest in overwhelming growth and expansion in recent times. But, at the same time, the spatial dynamics of these cities are affected by phenomena such as globalization, decolonization, and convergence in which the historically old and the emergent new are constantly shifting contexts, and meanings. In the presently rampant and erratic urban development, the tension between tradition and modernization have been making one’s perception of a typical Indian city incomplete and lacking—though experientially overwhelming; urban planners and theorists associate these emergent urban spaces with words and expressions such as ‘unintended’, ‘continuously thwarted’, ‘hopelessly inadequate’, ‘chaotic’, and so forth ([4, p. 58], quoting). As urban planner Bhan further comments, ‘[Indian] cities […] do not look like their plans’ [4],1 perhaps shedding some light on the urban physiognomy of the rapidly expanding Indian cities. According to veteran urban planners such as Raj Liberhan, this disparity between the conceived scheme and the perceived appearance is largely due to urban design being kept on the margins [14]. Urban planners have come to rely heavily on rapid development and growth while ignoring the fundamental realities of the citizens’ wellbeing. However, basic tenets of urban design prescribe the creation of spaces that nurture a healthy relationship between people and the city via the creative processes that emerge from a subjective and playful understanding of a vibrant urban environment [24]. On the contrary, as Liberhan points out, ‘design was never a conscious primary consideration in the way the [Indian] cities were being planned. It was always a by-product, landing second or third on the [planners’] list.’2 This disparity explains the generally syncretic, chaotic, and inchoate structure of Indian cities. The effect is evident in the general disposition of the urban environment, particularly in the complex character of the everyday ambience of the city, with multiple layers of sound from pre-industrial and pre-colonial eras coalesce with sounds in the post-colonial or more precisely the contemporary decolonial moment. Drawing on the writings of Louis [1] and Gayatri Chakraborty [20], one can argue that historical evolution of a place, its social fabric and its atmosphere may not necessarily be a linear one, but it is a multilayered, multi-linear or plural process, which is open to multiple influences and peripheral interventions. These perspectives encourage the idea of social formation, which refers to a society, a social structure at any level such as an Indian city, with all its complexities, as it is historically constituted. Against the idea of a static society, social formation includes all the internal contradictions that exist in a city, all emerging and 1

Gautam Bhan made this comment in 2012 questioning the relevance of urban planning in Indian cities in a draft version of this paper, which was previously published as a working paper at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, entitled ‘Is urban planning relevant for Indian cities?’. 2 Liberhan made this comment at the Urban Habitats Forum Roundtable called ‘Re-imagining Indian cities—Design for urban spaces’ in Gurgaon, 2008.

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disappearing tendencies in the social relationships that comprise the ever-evolving atmosphere. Indian cities traditionally carry an ambience of laidback and indolent attitude towards social life as one can learn from pre-colonial documents and reports. This sense of ease was embedded in Indian’s pre-colonial economic opulence, which Europeans wanted to tame using imperialism and colonialism forces since fifteenth century. In more recent history, Indian cities have survived the odd 200 years of British colonial (mis)rule, which was marked by the astounding atrocities of the intruding troops and officers of the British Empire over civilian Indians, including plunder, mass killing and genocides, such as the notorious Amritsar massacre, and famines, e.g. the Bengal famines 1877 and 1943. During these genocides and famines, cities like Kolkata were covered with screaming of the bodies in hunger, poverty and death—sounds, which stood in stark contrast with the serene atmospheres of the sylvan landscapes of Bengal we read in the pre-colonial literature. These uneven histories tend to reflect in the nebulous social formation of the Indian cities. It is no wonder, that the sonic atmosphere of a typical Indian city is multilayered with historically embedded sounds being simultaneously active in juxtapositions or in contrapuntal relationships with one another, thus evolving in a spatiotemporal cacophony. Hence, it is sonically overwhelming and potentially disorienting for the listening subject. It might be argued that comprehending the nature and structure of the sound environment of a typical Indian city by relying on the lived experience of immediate and judgmental listening to everyday sounds of today could be considered a phenomenologically reductive exercise [10]. Following this argument, the goal of the present investigation is to find how the artistic practice of “sonic drifting” can be an apropos method capable of producing a comprehensive understanding of the historical dynamics in the atmosphere of an Indian city. Here, sonic drifting is a complex form of mental travels through times past and present outside of any cartographically oriented sound-walking as I will show. In this article, I will describe the development of a sound work elegy for Bangalore produced through extensive fieldworks conducted in the city of Bangalore in India, involving the artistic processes of contemplative listening, sonic drifting and field recording in the city.

3.2

Adaptive Perception

Contemporary India’s urban soundscapes suggest an amalgamation of overwhelming sensory interactions with the city’s shifting landscapes and atmospheres, encompassing the temporal flux of people and life, all of which are part of the ongoing narrative of multilayered auditory experiences. Many of these experiences are dominated by an interaction with the urban ‘noise’, which might be considered as layered in tone, texture, and depth along a broad spectrum of frequencies supplied by traffic, machines, households, and architectural vibrations. There are varied

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sounds from people’s speech and daily activities, media practices, and other kinds of sonic events; the noise content of a city thus offers a multitude of different sounding objects scattered over various sites within the urban landscape. According to traditional sound theorists such as R. Murray Schafer, sound abatement is necessary for a balanced soundscape [18]. I have argued in my doctoral thesis in line with many other sound scholars, that Schafer’s approach is non-inclusive in nature and unnecessarily burdened with the ethical ideas of urban pollution and sanitization [22]. I maintain here that it is important for the listening subject to hear the fuller spectrum of sounds, and incorporate it into the subjective experiences by ‘adaptive perception’, a term I use for the specific purpose of articulating an approach that suggests that sound pollution or an imbalance in the acoustic ecology of any given city can be considered as a lack of reciprocity manifest in a need for playful design and aesthetic mediation between sound sources and the human ear, where the individuality and selfhood of the listener is considered important. I further argue in this article, that a necessary prerequisite for an inclusive understanding of the urban atmosphere is the listener’s contemplative engagement with the urban setting. This involves site-specific exploration complemented with a subjective emergence generated by activities such as sonic drifting, which is a necessary prerequisite in this approach to gather knowledge about the sonic character and ambience of a city. I will now elucidate the idea of sonic drifting, which involves mindful walking through the urban sonic terrains as well as its traces on media, being aware of its times past and present, and gathering knowledge about the social formation of its atmospheres following historical developments of the city.

3.3

Tracing the Ambience

Given the specifically chaotic and disorganized nature of Indian cities, it is challenging for a city dweller to envisage the city before appreciating the ‘soft ambiance’ [17, p. 70], such as the sound environment, in order to mentally speculate on the ‘hard ambiances’, such as the outlines of the architectural and the built environments. We can think of a city as being a circular urban constellation with inner and outer peripheries. A contemplative and mindful listening would then involve a situated but deterritorialized sound-walking from inner to the outer, requiring to delve into spatiotemporal experiences and conjuring up sonic imageries by interacting with and reflecting upon the specific ambiences and the ‘auditory situations’ [6–8] with a historical awareness. In a similar fashion, the Situationists, who were active in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s and whose ideas have attracted the deep interest of urban theorists and artists, employed the concept of ‘psychogeography’ to describe the subversive and experimental practice of the subjective and mindful exploration of urban terrain by means of playfully walking or ‘drifting’ (French translation is dérive) across the city [3, 11, p. 12]. While to some the term psychogeography might encompass the

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personality of the place itself, to others it describes the ‘minutely detailed, multi-level examinations of select locales that impact upon the writer’s (or artist’s) own microscopic inner-eye’ [19, p. 11–12] or an ‘inner ear’ following various mental as well as bodily encounters. Some profound differences notwithstanding, the dérive or drifting is generally considered to be a chosen method for the psychogeographic exploration of a place, in a manner ‘in which the contemporary world warps the relationship between psyche and place’ [19, p. 11]. By drifting in such a way through an unfamiliar place and listening to the place with a wider, contemplative and inclusive perspective, one may indulge in a subjective analysis or mental journey through the urban sound environment as a psychogeographic exploration of the city in ‘an attempt to transform the urban experience for aesthetic purposes’ [11, p. 10]. One can take in and excavate a part of the acoustic geography without affecting it by ‘nomadic listening’3 or by drifting through the realm of sounds, altering the perspectives of the unfamiliar city into something creative or imaginative, which, according to Guy Debord, entails a ‘playful-constructive behavior’ [17, p. 77]. It is my contention that finding an urban imagery and speculating on the ‘hard ambiance’ through sound and listening can be achieved by exploring the specific artistic potential of psychogeography. The primary methodology of examining the ambience of a typical Indian city may therefore include the practice of psychogeography by playfully drifting through the sound environment—an experimental approach that can be complemented by artistic research, which include locating the historical constituents of the urban ambience. This process involves various methods of listening, archival research and field recording, followed by studio work of composing and sound production. I applied this trajectory of artistic processes following my ‘lived experience’ [10] of Bangalore and a personified sonic interaction with the shifting urban environment, which I could not have approached from a cartographic sense of a planned sound-walking. Instead of mapping the unfathomable and indiscernible city to specify its acoustic terrains, I preferred to act as what I term a ‘sonic drifter’—an auditory equivalent of enacting the dérive in a psychogeographic practice. In this connection, I find Simon Sadler’s articulation pertinent: As its name implied, psychogeography attempted to combine subjective and objective modes of study. On the one hand, it recognized that the self cannot be divorced from the urban environment; on the other hand, it had to pertain to more than just the psyche of the individual if it was to be useful in the collective rethinking of the city. [17, p. 77]

Being aware of these perspectives and keeping in mind the nebulous, unplanned, overly noisy and chaotic structure of an Indian city that demands an inclusive and adaptive perceptual mode (as explained above), I embarked on an artist’s residency in Bangalore4 in the summer of 2010. The project that I developed during the

My own term used in my article ‘Auditory situations: Notes from nowhere.’ Journal of Sonic Studies 4. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/269178/269179. 4 The BAR1 residency: http://www.indiaifa.org/bengaluru-artists%E2%80%99-residency.html-0. 3

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residency proved to be an engaging as well as a definitive contribution to my artistic practice. In the audiovisual installation project Eye Contact with the City as well as Elegy for Bangalore,5 an electro-acoustic composition stemming from the residency, I explored the re-emerging urban environment of Bangalore. The work was based on the everyday lived experiences through listening with an awareness of the manifold historical layers in its auditory social formation involving subjectivity. Infusing spatial auditory perception with a spatiotemporally experimental psychogeographic drifting, both the installation and resultant composition were intended to create a premise for in-depth observation and critical reflection on emergent urban sites in India. I explored the historically constitutive atmospheres of Bangalore bringing attention to the oppressive colonial sounds in the current decolonial moment to understand affective merging and assimilation of the times past into the present, and the complex ensuing social formation. As one of the outcomes of a large-scale project with varied forms of dissemination (from exhibition to publication), the composition work was released on CD by German label Gruenrekorder in 2013. In this article, I describe the development of the installation and the composition through an engaged fieldwork involving the artistic processes of sonic drifting and field recording. These methodologies led to the sound art project as an investigation into the sonic fabric of the urban sites outlining their spatiotemporal developments in a transforming India, examining how these sites are perceived in subjective listening, recorded on the field as ambient sounds, subsequently aesthetically mediated and produced in a sound artwork.

3.4

In the City

In order to locate the specific ambiance of the city, to limn the spatial span, and to frame the essential shape of an evolving urban landscape, I needed an effective approach and a methodology. Bangalore was undergoing dynamic metamorphoses at that moment and was still recuperating from the debris caused by the large-scale metro-rail constructions. The city had been affected by the metro alignments in various areas of its urban span, leaving major obtrusions such as the construction sites here and there. The catchment areas of these sites scattered throughout the city ceaselessly upset the urban constellation, disturbing not only its natural landscapes and historic bodies of water and greenery, but also the city’s collective memory, which was intruded by sounds from the rapid and rampant urban development. These disruptions were received, however, with a sense of languid idleness by the city dwellers, as is quite typical of Bangalore. If we follow the urban chronicles, in

5

The release can be found on the label page: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=9517. A broadcast version is available on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/budhaditya/elegy-for-acity-1.

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an anthology entitled Multiple City: Writings on Bangalore, many of the contributors talk about the ‘laid-back nature’ [12, p. xvi], ‘indolence’, ‘doesn’t matter attitude’ or ‘leisurely pace’ as a typical ambiance of the city. These writings describe Bangalore as a city that prefers an idyllic pace of social life. This indolent approach is reflected in my encounters with the city and in the development of the project. To understand such social, historical and the spatial dynamics of the city, I devised the project as a gradual development of a sound artwork through listening, drifting, and field recording, followed by the compositional phase of working in the studio. The point of departure for this process was the knowledge of how various modes of my contemplative listening responded to the ambience I encountered and the ways in which the experience was mediated artistically. The city provided the setting to exercise sonic drifting to capture its ambience through listening and rendered by field recording and composing. Such multilevel strategy was helpful in discerning an auditory social formation of Bangalore.

3.5

Site-Specific Listening

In his seminal work Listening, Jean-Luc Nancy has argued that the act of listening operates on the edge of meaning or understanding acoustic phenomena: To be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this margin. [16, p. 7]

My first sonic encounters with the urban constellation of Bangalore surfaced somewhat at this margin of understanding and edge of orientation when my flight landed at Bangalore Airport. In the increasing air pressure that was clouding my earholes, there was a cry of a child passenger that sounded like it was coming from an unfathomable distance. This perception of distance in the sound perspective dominated when I got out at the new airport terminal, built with large panels of soundproof glass and metal frames, leaving no space for noise and sonic discomfort. The sound world changed, however, when I was on my way to the downtown. When I opened the car window, a multitude of sounds entered the closed space of the car, one being very prominent: the sound of metal bells from the hand-cranked revolving pots that produce roadside candy juice; these devices were located on street corners, and they made me aware of the rural, pre-industrial past of the city juxtaposed with the contemporary urban to develop ‘layered identities’ [12, p. xiv] as sonic elements from the past converge with the present making them difficult to grasp at once. This experience of the city remained at the fringe of knowledge when, in the evening, the sound of temple bells reverberated in handmade loops within the small alleys of the middle-class neighborhood near where I was staying. In the immediate audibility, I could hear the apparently silent room tone of my empty apartment as

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having the presence of a deep and diverse frequency spectrum as well as numerous sound elements at the margin of hearing. While listening to the city, the first thing that struck me was the juxtaposition of sound elements within an elusive silence. The act of listening was situated on the surface of the urban constellation in which infinite numbers of sound events were taking place, enveloping and immersing the city dwellers into the sheer volume of sonic environment to take away their capacity to listen mindfully. Therefore, I maintained my position as a nomadic listener to remain at the margin of the sonic environment with an observational-contemplative distance throughout the development of the artwork. This was a strategy I employed, being aware of the problem in outlining the ambience of the overwhelmingly chaotic and nebulous urban sites in India—a strategy that was well reflected in the artwork. During the first three weeks of my stay, I spent time listening to the city from my residence, taking imaginary journeys to the streets of this unknown city as a sonic drifter. From the early morning onwards, the everyday environment of the neighborhood offered an overwhelming number of sound elements. I observed that the morning sounds were clearer, more distinct, and with finite beginnings and endings. I quote from the brief accounts of ethnographic notes that have previously appeared in the magazine Field Notes: Like an emerging sun, the sound events reflected over people and spaces without leaving any residue. As the day progressed, sounds began to elongate themselves, as if an event was stretching into mid-day when people lose their enthusiasm; and, as a consequence, indolence took its toll, and the lazy afternoon began to enter through the windowpane. As the sun passed overhead and made things conscious of their presence, the tone of the afternoon traffic inclined towards minor chords: the horn of a lone auto-rickshaw, the bells of a busy bicycle, the repetition of an impatient door-bell, a traversing crow, and an unwanted male cat all seemed to my drifting ears to be emitting minor chords at the peak hour of the working day [5, 9].

My imaginary but mindful travels through the sound environment of the city reached the late afternoons: It was time for lonely housewives to switch off the TV and black crows to appear on the terrace while the domestic parrots were excited about the coming of evening. A few unemployed youths were getting together on street corners and their motorbikes were waiting with their engines on. Exactly at this time, a street hawker was passing by to sell his handmade soap with melodious chants. This was the transition to a much-anticipated evening, an evening when most people would come back to their respective homes and prepare themselves for another working day. As evening was falling over the city like dispersing smoke, the absence of the sun was heard in the drone of traffic, sounds were stretched out in time, merging into one another; the whole city was emanating industrial music, which intercepted handmade loops of temple bells. Standing at the large window of my sixth floor apartment, I could see the city landscape at evening and hear the indistinct sounds of people coming home on the main street with their discreet moans of fatigue. The car horns in metallic chorus seemed to melt into halogen light, and the insignificant residue was drifting toward darker corners of the city, windowpanes, and eventually to underground basements. The evening was merging with the night-time in the way television sets engaged with shouts and claps from reality shows. Alleys of the city were becoming emptier; windows and doors were shut; stray dogs were

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moving around and fighting each other over food. Drunkards were searching for their homes and involuntarily faltering. As the sound events grew thicker, the broadband frequencies could be located. A large-scale urban drone emerged from machines and electrical devices, which were hiding within predominantly man-made sounds. In this late-night drone, subtle sounds were emerging from here and there: a mosquito moved around; a drop of water fell into the empty bucket in my bathroom; the creak of the window was becoming distinct and overly clear. This was when I became conscious of my own bodily presence in this unknown urban constellation [5, 9].

It is evident in these notes that I employed a contemplative mode of listening, which was not only subjective but also nomadic in nature from a psychogeographic perspective.

3.6

Sonic Drifting

Listening in this way led me to the margin of the circle of the nebulous urban environment of Bangalore; and, subsequently, I found the entryway into the circle. It was a process what Nancy calls participation of the self [16, p. 14]. In due course during this participation process, I indulged in random drifting through the city to encounter sounds of various locations. Such sonic drifting practices were essentially unplanned and far more complex than the traditional sound-walking which generally has a cartographic approach. While drifting through the city, I tried to understand people’s association with various sonic territories. I learned about the urbanism of Bangalore evolving from its colonial past, and certain sound-marks unique to the specific locale directed me to a number of zones where a pre-colonial history of the city was preserved in its particular sound environment. These zones offered sounds that belonged to a distant pre-industrial past, unchanged, undamaged by time and, in their purity, untouched neither by the colonial atrocities of the British Empire, nor by the currently frenzied urban developments. The zones were in the uncharted peripheries and the forgotten corners of the city, unattended by the crowds in their euphoria over a better urban living. These discreet zones allowed me to comprehend a possible ambience a pre-modern society by listening to the sounds that were no longer contemporary, but, rather, the echoes, resonances, or relics of nostalgia exemplified by the mythical ambience of temple bells, archaic overtones of voices from ancient ceremonies surrounding bits of memory, which were cultivated by earlier generations of city dwellers. In one of these sonic drifting sessions, I walked through my neighborhood following the clanging of a temple bell, and this led me to the door of a temple beside a large pond. There, while listening to the water lapping on the stones, I heard the splashing of older women taking a ritual bath, something that was mentioned in the urban chronicles and which has been performed at every sunrise perhaps since the advent of Bangalore circa 1537. The rhythmic sound of someone else washing clothes on the stairs led me to a collective laughter. I followed the laughter to a teashop where older generations of city dwellers gathered. Through

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their talk, I came to know about the Sunday market on the busiest street, where used and discarded reel-to-reel spools and audiotapes were sold at the roadside. Starting very early in the morning, the selling faded with the rising sun, as if it was an event in the twilight of a semi-darkened corner of urban subconscious, disappearing into memory. I started to collect a large number of spools and tapes from vendors with blurry faces, who seemed to come from the forgotten corners of the city. These spools had hazy handwritten scripts on them, informing about a mediated history of recording expeditions. By playing back these spools and tapes, I found samples of home recordings, radio broadcasts, speeches and half-erased tracks of sundry room tones, overdubs, and clichéd silences. Earlier, in search of a playback machine for reel-to-reel spools, I visited the lone curio shop with an audio section in the older part of the city. The section was a museum in itself, focusing on the heydays of the analogue audio revolution with the likes of Akai, Philips, and Grundig’s semi-professional home audio equipment, ranging from secondhand reel-to-reel players, turntables, and disk changers to used stereo tape decks and home speaker systems. It was evidently an environment alienated from the emerging global city of Bangalore. As an extension of my visit to the curio shop located in a dark alley, I finally ended up in a radio repair store to renovate a newly purchased spool player. The store housed junk radios, valves and transistor parts from the First World War in organised racks. Right beside rambling traffic, the constant clattering of mobile phone ringtones and everyday sounds of the city, the junk radios provided a stark relief, an urban refuge for indolent reflections. To Jonathan Sterne, ‘radio, film, and sound recordings become the agents of acoustic modernity’ [21]. My attempts to listen to, and record the ambience of the hyper-modernising city, considered these once active talking machines as the city’s auditory legacy, since they enhanced their sonic ‘objecthood’ involving memory and nostalgia, now blurred and unattended in the current mode of objectdisorientation.

3.7

Field Recording

In an interview published in the book In the Field, I discuss my specific approach to field recording. I engage in recording a project as a phenomenological development of listening. This involves my own intervention with a particular concern for the site and its historical transition over time [13]. As a psychogeographic exercise, sometimes the site itself directs me to find specific sources of sound that stand out; in other words, the sources seem to choose me to receive my attention. As I have already mentioned above, I do not approach a site in a cartographic sense, and my work does not try to ‘map’ or portray a place. Rather, my interests lie in formulating the psychogeography in which ‘I’ am the starting point of the methodology. Sometimes, I do not record at all: perceiving begins and expands over the process of listening and develops into an intuitive structure that I later use as a point of

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departure for further listening, formulating an acoustic geography through a process of subjective or ‘adaptive perception’ as discussed. For the first couple of months of being an artist-in-residence in Bangalore, I mostly listened to the city, waiting for it to unwrap around my ears. My recording machine (a Sound Devices 702) and two microphones (MKH 60 and MKH 30 as an MS stereo combination), along with a Rycote windshield, were mostly unused, left in the corner of my residence during those intense and compulsive listening sessions and directionless sonic drifting through the streets of Bangalore. Such drifting eventually motivated me to unwrap the surface of an immediate actuality of the essentially indolent nature and idyllic character of Bangalore, guiding me towards peripheries of the city—e.g. the construction sites for field recording to keep chronicles of my interactions with these hyperactive zones. From the very first day I went out with my recording gear to explore these parts of the city, my auditory senses became dominated by the imagery of rapid growth. The enormous metro constructions were ceaselessly striking like a whip on a large part of the metropolis. As a straightforward approach, the first thing that prompted me to record was the industrial drone-like sounds with a repetitive rhythm of machines at one of the busiest sites. Traditionally, in sound scholarship, the recording of sound is discussed in terms of dislocating sounds from their respective sources. Both Rick Altman and R. Murray Schafer have spoken about the ways in which recording displaces sounds in time and/or space [2, 18]. Field recording helped develop a repository of sonic events recorded from the site into the creative realm of composition. The rationale behind field recording was to search for the layered aural juxtapositions as well as the documentation of disappearing and newly found sounds. The act of field recording became more instinctive in its execution and the microphone increasingly became an extension of myself [15]. Once started, the process of field recording continued to evolve towards saturation: the sonic phenomena became repetitive. Recording transcended the mere effort of documentation to develop into the self-engaged impressions, participatory reflections, and musings of a field recordist. The city of Bangalore turned into a character appearing as multifarious and multi-dimensional in the layers of impromptu recordings of everyday traffic, machineries, rumbles, and vibrations. The periphery of construction sites at night particularly offered exclusive sounds of crickets, the wind’s reflection on tin sheets, fleeting sirens, and train whistles—all of these materials helped develop the composition.

3.8

Composing the Psychogeography

Following the arguments of composer and sound theorist Barry Truax, we can consider soundscape composition as a sound art form that stems from both location-specific sound recording or ‘field recording’ and subsequent studio processing of the ‘artistic material’ of recorded and disembodied environmental sound

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[23]. The field recordings gathered during my residency at different locations in Bangalore exemplified my interactions with the city as I experienced urban growth in terms of the enormous metro-rail constructions that were forcing the city to reorganise its spatial character. Informed by these experiential accounts and tracing the notion of composing with field recordings, the compositional work Elegy for Bangalore represents an indolent mood prevalent within the urban constellation of the city reflected in the recorded sounds from the sites. As artistic materials, these recordings shaped the composition to enable meditative and in-depth observations of the chaotic and ‘noisy exterior of the city.’ Further, they facilitated the finding of an entry into the city’s multilayered interiors to allow a perception of the transformative and complex sound environment as a whole. The sounds restored from the collected tapes and spools found at the flea market provided further insights into the city’s auditory legacy thereby forming another sonic layer. Stemming from this myriad of phenomenological experiences of the emerging Bangalore and its complex sound world, the work expresses the multilayered listening attitudes to a city that is undergoing a dynamic metamorphosis. Working on the assumption that the passing of time in a constantly emergent city can only be captured by employing a contemplative, detached and elegiac pace of listening practice, the composing explores the mood of indolence and the pace of idleness to facilitate meditative and in-depth observation to the site. The piece also reshapes memory associations disconnected from and erased through the process of listening and subsequent phase of composing in the two-year time span of its development.6 The strategy of composition has been a digital-acoustic mediation [5, 9, p. 226], the aim being to evoke a listener’s association, cognition, and imagination of the city. As mentioned above, in this piece, the keen sense of passing time works as a mode of slow contemplation rather than an immediate experiencing. Such mode of listening opens up the scope for examining the urban environment and studying the city’s spatiotemporal and historical dynamics in the current flux of economic growth. The method also helps to develop an understanding of the inchoate and rapid urban expansion by using the subjective intervention of the listener. The slow pacing and the indolent mood compositionally explored in the piece provide the premise for the evocation of a psychogeography, a premise from which the processes of knowing the sound environment of Bangalore evolve into adaptive perception and take a specific shape within the mind of the listener. This knowledge helps comprehending the nature of Indian urban atmospheres via methodologies and approaches undertaken by the listeners trying to perceive a re-developing and rapidly expanding city. This will involve, as I have shown above, engaging with its multilayered sounds of present and the past, and, subsequently, evoking the distinctive ambience through historically and spatiotemporally aware artistic practice of recording and sonically mediating the city in a sound artwork.

6

See: Gruenrekorder website: http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=9517.

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Concluding Remarks

Comprehensively perceiving a re-emerging city by listening to the sounds of here and now can be a phenomenologically reductive approach. In order to draw a framework for understanding the social formation of the historically constitutive urban atmosphere of such a rapidly expanding city will require engaging with its multilayered sounds of present as well as the past, and, subsequently, evoking the essential and characteristic ambience of the city through historically and spatiotemporally aware artistic practice. To speculate on present urban conditions in countries like India, which are still recuperating from the colonial rubbles while experiencing rapid growth, one needs to involve the artistic processes of contemplative listening, sonic drifting and field recording. Devising an unfolding auditory situation of an Indian city in these corresponding acts will create premise for sensing an apparently chaotic and disorganized city with its multisensory complexity. This process prefers psychogeographically oriented sonic drifting rather than cartographically planned sound walks by listening to a city in an immediate experience. The sound art project Eye Contact with the City and a resultant compositional work Elegy for Bangalore were based on sonic drifting through the city’s past and present and field recordings made at various construction sites in Bangalore. Materials also included retrieved audio from archival reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes found at the city’s flea markets with recordings from a colonial past. This extensive repository of field recordings and other audio materials eventually took the form of an elegiac composition, infusing spatiotemporal perception gathered through sonic drifting, reflecting on the perceived longing of the pre-colonial and pre-modern past prevalent in the rapidly modernizing urban experience. The work created a conceptual, practical, and methodological premise for in-depth observation of the historicity and passage of time, and psychogeographic reflection on emergent urban sites in India with their chaotic, noisy and hybridized sonic environments. This premise can be considered as a prototype for reading other re-emerging and re-developing cities, which have a complex colonial past currently reconfigured in a decolonial context. Starting with a mental journey through the acoustic geography of the city, the artistic methodology involving sonic drifting helped to give shape to the general outer appearances of the city that were registered in the mind of the listener as a personified construct within the subjective and adaptive auditory perception of a nomadic listener. The project’s artistic process propose a tentative methodology for understanding the urban atmosphere by engaging with the multilayered historical times, subsequently, composing the essential disposition of the city by the acts of listening, drifting, field recording and composing. The work encourages speculation on the present urban conditions in rapidly developing countries like India by examining the processes of perceiving an apparently chaotic and disorganized urban site with its multisensory complexity. In this work, spatial and temporal disjuncture lies at the centre of a compositional methodology imbued with a keen sense of history. Sounds restored from the shellacs and used tapes

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found at the flea market provide insight into this auditory history. Field recordings from the construction sites on the other hand, preserve the contemplations, and poetically detached musings of a listener navigating and sonically drifting through the urban present and the past. The strategy of the composition has been to create a fluid and malleable context within which recognizable environmental sounds and historical recordings may interact with each other to find a sense of transcendence. The aim has been to evoke the listener’s spatial and historical associations, and the imagination of the transient but consolidating urban nature of a re-emerging Indian city trying to sublimate the unsettling and gloomy colonial memories in the contemporary decolonial moment.

References 1. Althusser L (1976) Essays in self-criticism. New Left, London 2. Altman R (ed) (1992) Sound theory/sound practice. Routledge, New York 3. Basset K (2004) Walking as an aesthetic practice and a critical tool: some psychogeographic experiments. J Geogr High Educ 28(3):397–410 4. Bhan G (2013) Planned illegalities: housing and the ‘failure’ of planning in Delhi: 1947– 2010. Econ Polit Wkly 48(24) 5. Chattopadhyay B (2012) Sonic menageries: composing the sound of place. Org Sound 17(3): 223–229 6. Chattopadhyay B (2013) Elegy for Bangalore. Gruenrekorder, Frankfurt am Main 7. Chattopadhyay B (2013a) Auditory situations: notes from nowhere. J Sonic Stud Sonic Epistemol 4 (Special Issue) 8. Chattopadhyay B (2013c) Lane C, Carlyle A (eds) Interview in In the field: the art of field recording. Uniformbooks, London 9. Chattopadhyay B (2012a) Soundhunting in a city: chronicles of an urban field recording expedition. Field notes (3). Gruenrekorder, Frankfurt am Main 10. Cogan J (2006) The phenomenological reduction in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/phen-red/ 11. Coverley M (2010) Psychogeography. Pocket Essentials, Herts 12. De A (ed) (2008) Multiple city: writings on Bangalore. Penguin Books India, New Delhi 13. Lane C, Carlyle A (eds) (2013) In the field: the art of field recording, Uniformbooks, London, pp 49–59 14. Liberhan R (2008) Re-imagining Indian cities: design for urban spaces. Urban Habitats Forum Roundtable, India Habitat Centre. http://www.habitatsummit.org/pdfs/a_retrospective_of_ the_event_27jan.pdf 15. McLuhan M (2003) Understanding media: the extensions of man. Gingko Press, Berkeley 16. Nancy J-L (2007) Listening (trans Mandell C). Fordham University Press, New York 17. Sadler S (1999) The situationist city. The MIT press, London 18. Schafer RM (1994) The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Destiny Books, Rochester 19. Self W (2007) Psychogeography. Bloomsbury, London 20. Spivak GC (1988) Can the subaltern speak? Macmillan, Basingstoke 21. Sterne J (2003) The audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. Duke University Press, Durham and London 22. Thompson E (2004) The soundscape of modernity. The MIT Press, London

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23. Truax B (2007) Sound in context: acoustic communication and soundscape research at Simon Fraser University. http://wfae.proscenia.net/library/articles/truax_SFUniversity.pdf 24. Wall E, Waterman T (2010) Basics of landscape architecture 01: urban design. AVA Publishing, Switzerland, pp 14–84

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay Indian-born media artist, researcher and writer; he holds a Ph.D. in artistic research and sound studies from the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA), Leiden University, The Netherlands. Prior to the Ph.D, he has graduated from India’s national film school, specializing in sound recording, and received a Master of Arts degree in new media and sound art from Aarhus University, Denmark. Recently, Chattopadhyay has completed a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Arts and Humanities, American University of Beirut. Focusing on sound as primary medium, Chattopadhyay produces works for large-scale installation and live performance broadly dealing with the contemporary social and political issues such as the climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, urbanity, migrationrace, and decolonization. His artworks are released by Gruenrekorder (Germany) and Touch (UK). Chattopadhyay is a Charles Wallace scholar, Prince Claus grantee, and Falling Walls fellow; he has received several fellowships and international awards. Appearing in numerous exhibitions, concerts, conferences and festivals, Chattopadhyay’s works have been exhibited, performed or presented across the globe. His scholarly writings regularly appear in leading international peer-reviewed journals, most notably in Organised Sound, Journal of Sonic Studies, The New Soundtrack, SoundEffects, Ear │ Wave │ Event, Journal for Artistic Research, Leonardo Music Journal, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image (MSMI), and Leonardo Electronic Almanac, with two books forthcoming in 2020. Website: http://budhaditya.org/

Chapter 4

Scaffolding Walking Experiences Through Interactive Sound Design Nassrin Hajinejad

Abstract This chapter examines the design for walking fexperiences by means of interactive sounds that arise and evolve along the walker’s activity process. Interactive sound is enabled by interactive systems that track the user’s activity and provide sonic feedback in real-time. The chapter’s focus is on how the experience of different walking aspects can be supported depending on decisions in design of interactive sound. The chapter starts by arguing that interactive systems can be designed to promote different aspects of the activity at hand. It then provides reasons for using sonic feedback in design for physical activities and explains the basic technical components to implement interactive sound. The chapter continues with analysis of design approaches that use interactive sound to support different walking aspects including: navigation, the exploration of the environment and optimization of body movement. This way interdependencies are elucidated between: the specific walking aspect that is supported, the walking setting, decisions on walking information tracked and sonic material used. The second part elaborates on GangKlang, a concept to design interactive sound with the aim to enhance walking experiences in daily life. Finally, challenges and opportunities of designing interactive sound for walking in everyday life are discussed. Keywords Interactive sound

4.1


Walking experience
Everyday life

Introduction

Our walking experience is strongly affected by what occupies our attention. While walking, our attention focus and behavior can be oriented towards various aspects, such as reaching the destination target, the environment we pass or our own thoughts. Whatever aspect occupies our attention predominates our walking experience. The availability of smartphones fitted with a variety of sensors have N. Hajinejad (&) Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_4

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brought forward a range of mobile applications1 that track the user’s walking process and provide visual or audio feedback in real-time. This possibility of augmenting the walker’s activity is a powerful means to orient the walker’s attention and experiences towards particular aspects of the activity. A large number of mobile applications that purport to motivate walking can be considered part of the so-called ‘quantified-self movement’ [1]. Within this movement, applications with tracking functionalities are developed and used with the purpose to gain “self-knowledge through numbers”.2 Quantified-self apps use external stimulation principles and resources, effectively influencing the subject to follow a pattern of preset behavior motifs. Quantified-self apps model and mediate walking as a goal-directed activity and rely on users’ interest in self-optimization. While this approach is useful, e.g. for contexts when users are already self-motivated to achieve some personal performance or competitive measure, there are limitations to it when people lack motivation. The quantified-self approach focuses on utilitarian aspects only and neglects experiential aspects of walking that are decisive for users’ behavior [51]. This approach provides a lens that predominantly draws attention of the users to quantitative outcomes, promoting a mostly rationalized relationship with the walking activity. By foregrounding primarily utilitarian aspects of walking, these apps might diminish the user’s intrinsic motivation and have the opposite effect. In fact, recent studies on quantified-self applications point out that “[m]easurement is a powerful tool. But in addition to influencing output, it also impacts how we see and experience various activities. By drawing attention to output, measurement can make enjoyable activities feel more like work, which reduces their enjoyment. As a result, measurement can decrease continued engagement in the activity and subjective well-being” [15]. In contrast to this utilitarian perspective, designers and researchers in the emerging field of positive technology put the user’s experiences in the center of design and explore interaction strategies to support it [9, 20]. In this chapter, we elaborate on designing for the walker’s experiences by means of interactive soundscapes that arise, evolve and end with the walker’s activity. The aim is to provide an understanding for how interactive sound can be designed to strengthen the experience of different walking aspects. We further discuss key challenges and opportunities of the design process. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: we start with an overview on distinguishing peculiarities of the medium sound that make it valuable to design for the walker’s experience. We further provide an understanding on the basic technical components needed to enable interactive sound. After this, we compare concrete design approaches that use interactive sound to support the experience of different walking aspects. As a result of the analysis, critical design choices are identified and their interdependencies are discussed. Next, we present GangKlang [29] : a concept for designing

1

https://appgrooves.com/rank/health_and_fitness/running-and-walking/best-apps-for-running-andwalking. 2 https://quantifiedself.com/about/what-is-quantified-self/.

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interactive soundscapes to strengthen the walker’s immersion into the walking process itself. Finally, we conclude on key issues in design for everyday life activities and outline potential approaches.

4.2

Sound as a Medium for the walker’s Experience

Sound is an inherent dimension of our everyday activities mediating our interactions with the environment. There are two distinguishing peculiarities of the medium sound that make it particularly valuable to design for the experience of physical activity in the mobile context. First, addressing the sense of hearing is particularly suitable for interaction design in the mobile context. Using sonic feedback allows us to provide activity-related information while preserving the user’s mobility. Second, sound is an effective means to alter physical movement and transform experiences. Listening to music, many people tend to intuitively follow the rhythm by nodding their heads, drumming with their fingers or tapping with their feet. In a nutshell, this movement inducing effect of sound can be explained as follows: when we perceive sound, we do this by imitating mentally or physically the original sound-creating movement mentally or physically. Or in other words “[…] sound, musical as well as everyday sounds, is perceived on the basis of imagery of the way the sound process might be produced by movements” [24, p. 7]. We make use of the interconnection3 between sound, body movement and experience in our daily life, when we intuitively choose a specific kind of music to induce, sustain or modulate a particular degree of physical arousal and to fuel an aspired mood. We choose activating music to stimulate dancing and exuberance on a party, we select energizing beats to do sports exercises and fuel a fighting spirit, and we go for calming sounds to relieve tense muscles and quiet down. Drawing on the interrelationship of sound and body movement, scholars in HCI investigate the potential of sonic feedback to exert subtle influence on a person’s performance and experience of physical activity in general and on walking in particular. In this context, the type of support that is provided by interactive sound varies depending upon the field of application. In sports and rehabilitation, the movement inducing effect of sound is used as a means to guide and optimize walking movement [16, 54]. In computer games and virtual reality, sound is used to convey movement properties of the game character and material properties of virtual objects. Here, sonic attributes are used to “re-materialize” the player’s footsteps and to increase the player’s immersion into simulated environments. Artistic installations use sounds that react to the user’s physical movement to

3

The reciprocal effect of auditory stimuli and body movement has been long acknowledged and is subject to research studies in various disciplines such as music theory [22, 23], cognitive psychology [34, 39] and sports [38].

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influence the walker’s sense of place and as a means to support engagement with the environment and to facilitate immersion [52, p. 125]. The term interactive sound was introduced by Karen Collins in the context of dynamic audio design in computer games. Dynamic audio is an umbrella term for “non-linear, variable elements in the sonic aspect of gameplay” [10, p. 1] including interactive and adaptive sound. “Interactive audio refers to sound events directly triggered by the player, affected by the player’s input device (controller, joystick, and so on)” [10]. Interactive sound for walking is enabled by interactive technology that interweaves the user’s walking activity with sound. To produce interactive sound for walking, two technical components have to be implemented and integrated: one component that detects relevant information on the walker’s activity and another component that utilizes this information to trigger and modify sonic output. Integrating these components, the designer technically embodies relations between the walker’s activity and the sonic outcome. By walking, the user triggers sonic events that form a sound stream by the sequence of consecutive steps. The term interactive soundscape is used to describe the overall soundscape that evolves through the interplay of a series of interactive and adaptive sounds. The soundscape concept, as introduced by R. Murray Schafer [55], considers the whole sonic picture that evolves through the interaction of all sounds in a particular place and time. This concept focuses on the listener’s experience and puts a particular emphasis on sound as a mediator between the listener and the various sound sources in a particular environment. The soundscape concept has been proposed as important to design sonic feedback “as a coherent composition integrated with the context of the experience” [2].

4.3

Designing Interactive Sound for Different Walking Aspects

Through which design choices can designers influence the walker’s experience and support the experience of a particular walking aspect? In this section, we take a more detailed look on how decisions in design of interactive sound (the walking information detected and the interactive sonic parameters) are taken with regard to a particular aspect of the walking activity. Towards this goal, we compare different design approaches. All design approaches use interactive sound to support the walker’s experiences; however, they are tailored to facilitate different aspects: the walker’s engagement with the environment, the walker’s navigation process, the walker’s body movement. They provide insight into how decisions in design of the technical components of interactive sound are taken with reference to a particular aspect that is designed for. We present these different approaches focusing on the following questions and related design decisions: • for which purpose and application context is the interactive sound designed and which walking aspect is considered essential in this context?

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• what kind of walking information is detected and used for triggering and modifying the sonic outcome? • which sonic parameters are selected to change along the walker’s activity and how are they supposed to affect the walker’s experience? In design of Locative soundtracks (as introduced by Hazzard [32]) interactive sounds are used to enhance the experience of walking within a curated physical space. Walking in this particular context is named locative walking and describes for instance walking while visiting a sculpture park, or playing a location-based game. Locative walking requires that a set of point of interests (POIs) within a predefined space have been defined (e.g. by the game designer) which the walker explores and engages with, however without following a specific route: “locative experiences that have an ingrained purpose that take users on a journey in, through and out of engagement with a range of locales and points of interest” [31, p. 49]. The most important aspect of locative walking is the encounter and engagement of the walker with POIs. In accordance with this aspect, the relevant information that is detected is the user’s geographical position in relation to the predefined POIs. The process of locative walking is modeled as a sequence of phases that describe the walker’s spatial relationship to the POIs including approaching, engaging and moving away from them. This walking information is used to dynamically arrange and modify a soundtrack that the walker can hear while strolling within the curated space. The musical attributes of the soundtrack dynamically change along the detected walking phases and the current POI. The intended aesthetic is to deepen the walker’s experience of tension and relief while moving from one POI to the next. Towards this goal, pre-composed musical phrases are rearranged and layered in response to the walker’s locative movement. This way, the soundtrack addresses the walker on an emotional level by attuning his or her mood to the atmosphere of the POI and thereby focusing the walker’s attention to it. Situated soundscapes address a similar walking practice. Situated soundscape is a term used by Paterson and Conway [52] to denominate a number of artistic installations where interactive sound is used to facilitate walkers encountering experiences with the environment. In a situated soundscape there is no need for a curated space limiting the walking area and points of interest don’t need to be individually predefined by their specific geographic position. Instead, POIs are defined through specific environmental attributes that are detected by employing corresponding sensors. In Electric Walks [40] for instance, POIs are created by making electrical currents audible through a specific form of headphones. This way, naturally unhearable things and places become perceivable for the walker and mundane and unnoticed spaces turn into places of interest. Walking in this context is a practice of perceiving and interacting with newly perceivable sound sources. Exploring theses places, approaching, engaging and moving away from them is at the center of the walking experience. However, in situated soundscapes not only objects within the environment trigger interactive sound and thereby become worth exploring for the walker. In Sonic City [21], for instance the walker’s proximity to others is used to modify interactive sound, as well as walking events such as

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starting and stopping and walking properties such as pace are made audible. Here, interactive sound is used to encourage the exploration of unappreciated spaces and thereby provides new incentives for walking. The relevant properties of the sound source are communicated through the specific sonic attributes. In addition to musical structures, noise and foley are used to equip the newly audible source with a certain materiality. Moreover, the walker is encouraged to explore the own body movement and interactive sound is used to direct attention outwards and also towards the self. To support the walker’s wayfinding process in everyday life interactive sounds are incorporated in navigation guides [3, 37, 57]. As in the example of situated soundscapes, navigation guides use interactive sound to provide walkers with an awareness of their own location in relation to a place in the environment. However, in this setting, the target place is defined by the individual walker. Here, emphasis is put on effectively navigating to a destination rather than drifting and exploring the environment. Thus, the walking process is modeled as a spatial movement from a starting point A to a target destination B. Alongside this process, information on the walker’s position and orientation is detected and used to change attributes of interactive sound in order to direct walkers into a specific direction. In addition to distance, the walking model includes the walker’s orientation. To allow the walker to navigate effectively it is important that he or she gets a clear sense of the dynamic sonic parameters and understands how they are related to the own orientation. For this purpose, sonic parameters are chosen with regard to our daily experiences of spatializing effects of sound [42]. For instance, information on the distance to the destination is used to change the volume of interactive sound; information on the direction of the destination is used to turn the sound louder on the right respectively the left ear; or depending on whether the destination is in front or behind the walker to change the sound to be more (in the back) or less (in the front) muffled [33]. Mobile fitness applications that aim to support runners in optimizing their performance use interactive sound for training purposes. Training guides address the activity of running however their use of interactive sound can be applied to the walking activity too. Bauer and Kratschmar [4], Bauer and Waldner [5] provide an overview on existing training guides. In this training context interactive sound is used to regulate the physical strain and accordingly the training intensity. Here, the conditions that are relevant are the runner’s (respectively walker’s) body movement and the activity is modeled as a process of physical effort. These applications collect information on pace, physical condition (heart rate) and training phases. Although body movement information is used to trigger adaptive music, the primary intention is not to expand the walker’s awareness of their body but rather to influence their movement towards a desired tempo. In accordance with a target-pace music is adjusted by changing its tempo or volume to push the runner towards a faster pace or to slow him or her down. Application that use interactive sound to address the walker’s body movement are developed in the context of research studies. These experimental studies take an isolated view on the interplay between the walker’s body movement and sonic parameters and ignore conditions of the mobile context. In an early study, [7] used interactive technology to augment the walker’s footsteps

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with sound and thereby aurally simulate different ground surfaces. Their findings indicate that walkers change their walking pattern according to the sonic feedback they trigger with their footsteps. Tajadura-Jiménez et al. [59] used interactive sound to alter walkers’ perception of their own body weight. In this case walking is understood as a form of self-perception, as the sounds we produce through our steps hitting the ground, inform us on our body and physical appearance. The researchers modified the step sounds of the walker in real-time so that the walker would actually hear a lighter or heavier body moving. This way they could influence how walkers perceived their own body weight as well as their walking manner.

4.4

Synopsis

The examples above show different ways to consider the walker’s activity. Depending on the particular setting within which walking takes place, different purposes are attributed to the activity. This purpose may be experience-oriented such as exploring and engaging with objects and places in the environment, as in the example of locative soundtracks and situated soundscapes. Or this purpose may be performance-oriented such as reaching a target destination or training the body. In any case the attributed purpose serves as the top-level reference point. On the basis of this walking purpose a set of information is selected for modeling and capturing the walker’s activity process. The walking models above consider the walker’s activity process at different scales. For instance, focusing on a more gross scale on locative aspects (locative soundtracks) or on more fine-grained scale on single walking steps (training guides). In the case of locative walking, the reference point is the walker’s engagement with predefined points of interest. Accordingly, information on distance to objects is selected as crucial for the walker’s experience. Whereas essential factors in training guides are training phases and physical effort. The detection component in the interactive system is used to capture and monitor the state and development of these factors using data on the walker’s geolocation, spatial orientation or cadence. The result is a data-based process model of the walker’s activity. It is through this choice that designers decide which aspect is specifically important for the walker’s experience in a particular setting and by detecting and sonifying it put emphasis on. Noteworthy here is that in each case the walking activity is limited to a particular aspect. However, these different walking aspects are strongly intertwined. Another major choice concerns how change in these factors are expressed by sound. The designer may use from a range of possibilities to convey information by means of sound [62]. Like the decision on the walking model itself, this choice is made with regard to the walking setting and attributed purpose. In the case of locative walking within a sculpture park, the aim is to influence the walker’s emotional and narrative engagement. To evoke the experience of tension and relief,

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pre-composed musical phrases are rearranged and layered in response to the walker’s movement from one POI to the next. Here, musical structures such as key centers, harmony and rhythm are used to change along the walker’s activity. This strategy draws on findings that sonic structures, such as timbre and melodic contour, convey affective information [25] and musical attributes can be used to attune the walker’s mood to affective qualities. Situated soundscapes address the walker’s perception to influence the walker’s sense of place and as a means to support engagement with the environment and to facilitate immersion. Here, sonic attributes are used to convey material properties of unnoticed objects and processes and to increase the walker’s immersion into the environment. Navigation guides focus on the walker’s spatial awareness. Accordingly, spatializing attributes such as volume, panning are selected to be modified by the walker’s activity. The focus of training guides is on influencing the runner’s resp. walker’s body movement. Here, the movement inducing effects of sound are used as a means to guide and optimize walking movement. Different features of sound have been demonstrated to have an effect on the frequency of the walker’s natural footstep. Different features of sound have been demonstrated to have an effect on gait properties. The organization of motor behavior can be entrained to auditory rhythm [60]. This relationship is investigated in e.g. in sports [38] and used as a means to regulate and optimize the running performance [4] and walking cadence [18]. In addition to time-entrainment, expressive musical features have been shown to influence on the walker’s stride length [41] (Table 4.1). Let us return to the question with which we started: how do decisions in interactive sound design give direction to the walker’s experience? From the analysis above, we can say that there are generally two translation tasks through which designers give direction to the walker’s experience. The first translation task can be referred to as modeling: the process of translating the walker’s activity into a process model. The outcome of this decision is a process model. In the examples above, this translation process includes attributing a setting-specific purpose to the walker’s activity. What needs to be noted here is that

Table 4.1 Overview on approaches to design interactive sound for walking experiences Design approach

Walking purpose

Walking information

Functionality of sound

Locative soundtracks Situated soundscapes

Engage with POIs Explore objects and processes

Location change in relation to POIs Location change in relation to POIs, Change of movement

Navigation guides Training guides

Reach a destination Enhance physical fitness

Location and orientation change in relation to destination Change of pace

To attune the walker‘s emotions To materialize object and processes To facilitate spatial orientation To optimize body movement

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this attributed purpose is not what actually motivates the individual walker but what the designer sets to be the most important aspect within a particular walking setting. Based on this purpose the designer decides on context factors that are essential for the walker’s experience or for the walker’s performance. These factors are then used to create a model of the walking process. In an interactive sound system, the data set that is tracked by the detection component reflects the aspect that the designer has chosen to be most important for the walker’s experience of the activity. It is here that designer’s decide which aspect (for instance the process of navigation or body movement) is specifically important for the walker’s experience in this particular setting. Here it is important to keep in mind that the particular set of walking information limits the application’s view on the walking activity to a specific aspect while other aspects remain unconsidered. The second translation task is the design of a dynamic sonic expression: the process of translating walking data and its change into sonic material and its modulating parameters. Designing a sonic expression includes selecting sonic material and a set of parameters. This sonic expression provides the walker with a particular way to interpret changes along the process. All examples make use of the walker’s auditory channel to influence the walker’s experience. However, they use different sonic parameters and thereby address the walker’s experience on different ways including emotion, perception and body movement. Again, the decisions are strongly determined by the setting and purpose of the walking activity. Depending on the purpose, the sound parameters (and their according effects) are selected. Metaphorically speaking, we can say that the designer of interactive sound shapes a specific kind of lens for the walker’s experience. This lens gives direction to the walker’s experience by accentuating selected aspects of the activity and provides the walker with a particular way to interpret changes of this aspect. Concerning interdependencies, we can see that in all cases the particular setting decisively influences the choice of the aspect that is accentuated. Deriving from this choice, decisions are made regarding the selection of walking data to be tracked and dynamic sonic parameters that are mapped to it. The design examples above use interactive sound to support the experience of walking aspects which are relevant to a particular setting and the experience of an overarching activity. It should be noted that these experience-oriented approaches do not address the activity of an ordinary walker but rather the player’s or the spectator’s walking activity. That is to say, walking (and accordingly walking experience) is not considered and designed for as a self-contained activity but with regard to the overarching activity of playing a game, engaging with works of art or exploring the environment. These approaches understand walking as a means to an end and not as a self-contained activity that is enjoyable in itself. In the next section an alternative approach to design for walking as a self-contained activity is presented.

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Supporting Immersion into the Walking Process

Walking is a directed everyday activity. Besides its benefits to health, walking is primarily a means of transportation to reach a target destination [44]: we walk to get to work, to visit friends or to go shopping. Thus, our daily routines provide plenty of extrinsic motivation for walking. However, people’s motivation and decision to walk is not only based on pragmatic qualities but also experiential ones [14]. In the research project “Flow-Machines: Body Movement and Sound”4 (FM project), we focused on facilitating the walker’s experiences in everyday life. On daily routes, we are rarely engaging with the walking movements that we perform and the environment that actually surrounds us. Instead we are elsewhere with our thoughts and emotions, organizing our next appointment, ruminating over potential problem to come or reflecting about a previous conversation. In the FM project, the research and design activities were driven by the idea to design interactive sound that initiates and sustains the walker’s involvement with the moment-to-moment activity during ordinary walking. This design strategy draws on findings from flow research, which reveal that having positive experiences of an activity contributes to a person’s motivation for doing it. The concept of flow as introduced by Csikszentmihalyi [12] conceptualizes immersive experiences in games and in everyday life. The term flow is used to describe “[…] a subjective state that people report when they are completely involved in something to the point of forgetting time, fatigue, and everything else but the activity itself” [11]. The phenomenon characterizes the autotelic nature of an activity, a “[…] self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.” [13, p. 67]. What is particularly intriguing about the flow experience is that it provides “a powerful motivating force “ [11, p. 602]. On this account, the flow concept is applied in various disciplines ranging from activities of the working world to leisure time activities such as playing games and is one of the most prominent concepts underlying “the design and development of technology to support psychological wellbeing and human potential” [8, p. 2]. As flow fosters immersion and engagement, it serves as a basis for designing games (e.g. [50]) and rehabilitation systems [48]. The FM perspective is distinctive as it takes the walking process as a starting point for understanding unfolding experiences and to inform the design of interactive sound. We aimed for an enhancement that does not transform ordinary walking into a different activity but rather re-emphasizes the ephemeral and unique moments within the walker’s experience. The specific challenges arising out of our design goal are framed by our twofold aim to design (a) for the ordinary walking activity with all its unpredictable situations and (b) for a sonic expression that evolves in unison with the walker’s individual and changing situation. To meet these challenges, we developed GangKlang: a concept for designing interactive soundscapes 4

Supported by funding of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (03FH084PX2).

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to strengthen the walker’s experience of the walking process itself. In the following, we present our implementation of the concept in a mobile application. The app enables users to create and hear an individual walking-generated sonic expression while walking. In our presentation we put a particular focus on decisions regarding (a) modeling the walking process and (b) organizing the sonic response.

4.6

Modeling the Unfolding Walking Process

To realize the GangKlang concept, the walking model Walking Phrases [28] was developed. This model uses the walker’s movements to capture information on the walker’s attention focus and the locative context. In this model the walker’s movements are used as a key to access the conditions within which the activity takes place, as an alternative to predefining a walking setting. Walking Phrases encompasses a vocabulary of semantic walking sequences that allow to model the process of walking from an origin to a target destination. With Walking Phrases the course of walking in everyday life is segmented into a series of units, each framing a meaningful experiential building block of ordinary walking. Changing from one walking phrase to another, the walker corporally encounters changing conditions, while attaining the goal of reaching the target destination. Walking phrases can be detected as they unfold in the walking process, and provide insight into when walkers experience their contextual conditions as steady and undemanding, and when disruptions appear that involve them more strongly in their walking activity. It should be highlighted that walking phrases describe contextual stability, shift and instability based on the walker’s movements and thus from an individual perspective (Table 4.2). The walking vocabulary includes four walking phrases: Walk-along, Turn, Approaching, Stopping and Void (None). Walk-along phrases refer to sequences where the walker keeps a regular stride length for more than 4 s. Situations within which the walker performs a walk-along phrase may differ from an objective perspective such as the route, time of day, social conditions and so on. However, what these situations have in common is that the walker experiences a contextual stability within which he or she can continue walking in a steady manner with a steady stride length. This experienced contextual stability enables the walker to perform the physical walking task in an automated manner while mentally engaging with other things. The three walking phrases turn, approaching and stopping refer to short walking moments where the walker experiences a change within the context and a related attention allocation. The distinctive feature of the turn phrase is the concomitant new perspective. As the walker performs and feels the turning of her/his own body so does her/his perspective change. Thus, a turn phrase indicates at least a slight change of context, as the walker’s visual perspective changes, new objects become visible and new action opportunities are presented. When the walker stops walking, it is for a good reason: maybe the walker has reached a traffic light on a busy street, or maybe he or she met a friend. It may even be because the walker

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Table 4.2 Walking phrases, their characteristics and implications Walking sequence

Distinguishing feature

Framing conditions

Cognitive load

Example

Walk-along (>4 s)

Steady gait cycle duration

Stable

Low (wanderingmind)

- Straightforward route

Turn (*3 s)

Direction change

Shifting

Low–high increase

- Turn into side street - Turn around - Change mind

Approaching (*2 s)

Shortening gait cycle duration

Medium increase

- Unforeseeable route - Anticipating change

Stopping (*1 s)

Ending gait cycle

None

Variable gait cycle duration

Variable/ unstable

High increase

- At landmark

High

- At beginning of walk - Busy street

suddenly has an important thought which demands his or her full attention. In any case, the stopping phrase indicates that something relevant to the walker, catching his or her attention has occurred. Thus, the stopping phrase is accompanied with an increasing cognitive load. In an approaching phrase the walker slows down abruptly, indicating a sudden contextual change. Somehow the situation has become more demanding, for instance executing the walking movement became more difficult due to a busy street where the walker has to adjust her/his walking movements to other pedestrians or conditions of the place. The conditions are comparable with the ones of the stopping phrase but maybe not as demanding. The change might not be an obstacle, but it can be a new interest, maybe something else has caught the walker’s attention. Although these circumstances allow the walker to continue walking he or she is facing an increased load and can no longer perform as before. All other sequences that do not meet these walking phrases were associated with a highly variable context and accordingly a high cognitive load and are referred to as void.

4.7

GangKlang Application

We implemented a smartphone application that embodies the GangKlang concept [27]. The app detects the user’s walking phrases and translates these movements into layers of a soundscape in real time. This way, the user hears a sonic expression that evolves along his or her unfolding walking process.5

5

Animation illustrating the dynamic sonic expression as it evolves along the walker’s movements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJooGFZDkMU&feature=youtu.be.

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We designed the mapping with a particular interest in the soundscape that evolves through the interplay of all sound sources. The soundscape is organized in three basic layers, each reflecting a particular dimension of walking: a temporal layer, an event layer and a spatial layer. The central layer of the walking soundscape is the temporal layer. It reflects the walker’s movement rhythm and consists of percussive sounds that sonify each walking step with which the walking activity starts, evolves and ends. The spatial layer reflects the spatial extension of walking through textural sounds that form an acoustical background. Except for one (standing) all walking phrases entail the rhythmic movement of the gait cycle. Accordingly, the central layer of the walking soundscape is the temporal layer. This layer reflects the walking rhythm and consists of percussive sounds that sonify each walking step with which the walking activity starts, evolves and ends. The approaching and the walk-along phrase modify this layer. This layer becomes silent with the standing phrase. The event layer entails short sound motives that are triggered by distinctive walking events such as stopping or turning around. The spatial layer reflects the spatial extension of walking through textural sounds that form an acoustical background. Places that are meaningful to the individual walker are created through walking. Entering or leaving a place starts or ends the spatial layer of the walking soundscape. We chose a set of calming musical sound, all in one key, to provide a soundscape without dissonance. The sonic expression of the prototype includes a composition rule for structuring steady walking sequences (Walk-along phrase). When the walker’s stride becomes steady the sounds that are triggered by the walker’s steps change gradually over a period of 200 steps from percussive marimba sounds to spherical synthesizer sounds to silence.6 This way, enduring walk-along phrases are aurally structured in composition cycles (sonic structuring). Each composition cycle includes nine stages which can be divided into three phases percussive, spheric and silence. We studied how GangKlang influences walkers’ experiences in daily life. The prototype was used by participants on individual everyday routes. The analysis concentrated on the suitability of the GangKlang approach to facilitate the experience of walking as self-contained activity. In general, participants perceived the walking soundscape as some kind of “meditative” music with a psychologically calming effect. Most participants recognized a correspondence between the heard sonic expression and their walking movement. Most participants mentioned a shift of attention towards self and walking process as a striking difference when walking with the interactive sonic expression. The sonic expression influenced most participants’ flow of thoughts (e.g. rumination), redirecting their attention to the present moment. Our results confirm our assumption that interactive sound can be used as a means to influence the walker’s experience in daily life and aligns with the intention to facilitate a movement-oriented experience. The results show that the strategy of sonic reshaping is suitable to bring about a refocus on the walking

6

Animation illustrating the dynamically evolving composition: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=_Pto-MsU4So&feature=youtu.be.

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process. Furthermore, the results confirm our assumption that a design which strengthens the experience of the activity process (instead of concentrating on the outcome of the activity) can have a positive effect on the experience of the daily activity. Our findings align with our design intention to support the walker’s immersion into the walking process and are discussed in more detail elsewhere [27].

4.8

Conclusion

Designing interactive sounds poses a number of challenges, such as understanding how the sounds that are elicited by the walker’s activity affect the way the user perceives and experiences the activity. A challenge related to the mobile activity is to account for the changing context conditions and to design sonic feedback with regard to the user’s varying attention [46]. Another challenge is to design for aesthetic orchestration of various soundtracks that are dynamically composed in a particular use situation and may or may not be heard concurrently [53]. Generally speaking, the experience of interactive sound in a mobile setting is affected by a variety of factors and substantially differs from experiencing sound in a static setting. A particular challenge of designing interactive sound for the walker’s experience emerges out of the interplay of the walker’s movement, its mobile context and sound. Exploring and understanding these interrelationships is fundamental to make purposeful decisions in design of interactive sound. In this section, we outline these interrelationships and propose two potential approaches to deal with them: approaching the walker’s experience from an embodied perspective and taking a first-person perspective to design interactive sounds.

4.8.1

Designing for Everyday Life

The changing conditions within which daily movement activities, such as walking, takes place confront interaction designers with specific challenges. Knowing the conditions that effectively influence the walker’s activity is essential to design meaningful sonic interactions. Being on the move our behavior and experiences are influenced by all kind of changes, traffic, people, signs and noises. Ordinary walking is a multitasking activity in which the walker’s attention is distributed across various processes: coordinating walking movement, observing traffic, and sorting thoughts, to name a few. The changing conditions along the walking process can be more or less demanding, require more or less attention and as such impose more or less load on the walker’s cognitive system. Accordingly, the walker’s attention resources and receptivity for processing interactive sound varies. Knowing these changing circumstances [63] and how they affect the walker’s activity process and experiences is a critical point in order to provide interactive sounds that are supportive to a person in a current situation. Factors that have been highlighted in

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design for experiences in the mobile context are site-specific characteristics and the user’s cognitive load [47]. Today, the sensing capabilities of smartphones (inertial accelerometers, gyroscopes and GPS units) offer a wide range of possibilities to collect objective data on structures and processes that surround the walker’s situation, such as location and time (context-aware computing [56]). However, not all changes are relevant to the individual walker and his or her subjective experience. Walking situations that are similar from an objective point of view (such as geoposition, time of day, walking subject) have a different effect on the individual and do not result in the same walking experience. It should be noted that each situation is unique and that potential factors only become influencing conditions through the actor or as Svanaes puts it: “context is not a property of the physical world, but rather the horizon within which a user makes sense of the world.“ [58, p. 398]. Alongside the design and development of movement-based interfaces, scholars in HCI have started to acknowledge and study the relation between body movement and experience. The pertinent theme of embodiment in HCI is that the world reveals itself to the humans through their body and bodily capabilities and “our bodies and active bodily experiences inevitably shape how we perceive, feel, and think.” [35, p. 22]. Studies have demonstrated that the walker’s movement properties are influenced by external conditions such as sociocultural factors, traffic intensity or vegetation [6, 19]. At the same time, it has been shown that characteristics of the gait cycle reveal information on walkers internal states, as for example arm swing and stride length change according to walker’s emotional state [49]. These findings confirm the interrelationship between the walker’s body movement and conditions that organize the walking process. This interrelationship in turn provides new opportunities for design. It implies that the walker’s body movement can be used to capture individual walking conditions. At the same time, it points out that walker’s movements can be used for access to the walker’s experiences. Only recently, research within in HCI is investigating the relation between walker’s movement characteristics and their felt experiences. Tajadura-Jiménez et al. [59] altered the frequency of the walker’s natural footstep by sonic augmentation and identified a relation between the walker’s gait, perception of body weight and emotional state.

4.8.2

Designing Meaningful Sonic Expressions

Designing interactive soundscapes is challenging and differs from designing the soundtrack of a movie. The specific temporal arrangement of events is not predefined and the designer has to account for the dynamic interplay of various sounds. The designer needs to consider the overall soundscape that will evolve when different sounds are heard in succession, when they overlap, or when they are triggered simultaneously. Moreover, the contextual conditions within which interactive sounds are listened to are decisive for their effect. As set out above, movement elicited sounds can modify perception of movement, and the performance itself.

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At the same time that sound acts upon the walker’s body movement, so do a person’s activity and its contextual conditions influence the perception of sound. The particular context within which sound is perceived can be decisive for the sonic properties that the listener focuses on and hence color the perception and interpretation of sound. Embodied approaches to listening point out that perception of sound is dependent on the way the sound is involved in the situation and how we see its relevance to the context of interaction” [62]. Moreover, the listener’s body movement has an influence on the way sound is perceived [45]. The interplay of contextual conditions, the listener’s attention level and the effective listening mode has been discussed in the research field of soundscape studies [61, 62]. A person’s attention capabilities vary according to context conditions and lead to more or less receptivity for processing sound. Altogether, research findings in sonic interaction, mobile interaction, movementbased design emphasize the interplay of experience of sound, changing context conditions and the walker’s body movement. Considering this very interrelatedness in design of interactive sound is a specific challenge. Following this line of thought, we argue that designers need to consider the specific circumstances and how they affect the walker’s experience of sound. To put it differently: “The multisensory aspects of interactive sonic experience that SID is concerned with must be designed with consideration of the orchestration of the auditory, tactile, visual, and kinesthetic senses within real-world context” [17, p. xi]. Accordingly, designing interactive sound for walking involves designing sound with regard to (a) its influence on the walker’s movement, and (b) the changing conditions of the mobile context. Within the walking scenario this means that designers need an experiential understanding of how walking “feels like” when it is accompanied with a particular sound in a particular situation. We argue that, in order to inform the design for walking experiences, designers need to experience from a first-person perspective the interplay of sound, body movement and context. The necessity to include a firstperson perspective in the design process has been emphasized by researchers in the field of movement-based interaction design [36, 43]. To enable designers an experiential awareness for how their sound design unfolds in interplay with body movement in the mobile situation, rapid prototyping systems can be helpful [26, 30]. Experiencing their design ideas in the mobile context, designers will understand that walking states are accompanied by different conditions and they need to account for these conditions in sound design. Thus, the designer will engage in balancing complexity according to the walker’s situation. Interactive sounds and soundscapes offer a wide range of possibilities to design for the walker’s experiences. In this chapter, we discussed how designers shape a lens for the walker’s experience through the walking model and the choice of interactive sonic parameters. Furthermore, we emphasized the challenges posed by interrelationships between the walker’s activity, the mobile context and the experience of sound.

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41. Leman M, Moelants D, Varewyck M, Styns F, van Noorden L, Martens J-P (2013) Activating and relaxing music entrains the speed of beat synchronized walking. PLoS ONE 8(7):e67932. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0067932 42. Liljedahl M, Lindberg S (2011) Sound parameters for expressing geographic distance in a mobile navigation application. In: Proceedings of the 6th audio mostly conference: a conference on interaction with sound (pp 1–7). http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2095668. Accessed 16 May 2013 43. Loke L, Robertson T (2013) Moving and making strange: an embodied approach to movement-based interaction design. ACM Trans Comput Hum Interact 20(1):7:1–7:25. https://doi.org/10.1145/2442106.2442113 44. Longo A, Hutchinson WG, Hunter RF, Tully MA, Kee F (2015) Demand response to improved walking infrastructure: a study into the economics of walking and health behaviour change. Soc Sci Med 143:107–116 45. Maes P-J, Leman M, Palmer C, Wanderley MM (2014) Action-based effects on music perception. Front Psychol 4:1008. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01008 46. Marshall J, Dancu A, Mueller FF (2016) Interaction in motion: designing truly mobile interaction. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM conference on designing interactive systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 215–228. https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901844 47. Marshall J, Tennent P (2013) Mobile interaction does not exist. In: CHI’13 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems. ACM, pp 2069–2078. Accessed 14 Jan 2015 48. Middleton AM, Ward TE (2012) The pursuit of flow in the design of rehabilitation systems for ambient assisted living: a review of current knowledge. Int J Ambient Comput Intell 4 (1):54–65. https://doi.org/10.4018/jaci.2012010105 49. Montepare JM, Goldstein SB, Clausen A (1987) The identification of emotions from gait information. J Nonverbal Behav 11(1):33–42 50. Nacke L, Lindley C (2009) Affective ludology, flow and immersion in a first-person shooter: measurement of player experience. Load J Can Game Stud Assoc 3(5). http://journals.sfu.ca/ loading/index.php/loading/article/view/72. Accessed 3 May 2013 51. Ohlin F, Olsson CM (2015) Beyond a utility view of personal informatics: a postphenomenological framework. ACM Press, pp 1087–1092. https://doi.org/10.1145/2800835. 2800965 52. Paterson N, Conway F (2013) Situated soundscapes: redefining media art and the urban experience. Leonardo Electron Almanac 19(2). http://www.leoalmanac.org/wp-content/ uploads/2013/04/LEAVol19No2-Lodi.pdf. Accessed 4 Sept 2014 53. Pires D, Roque L, Alves V (2013) Dynamic enhancement of videogame soundscapes. In: Proceedings of the 8th audio mostly conference. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 16:1–16:6. https://doi.org/10.1145/2544114.2544131 54. Prassas S, Thaut M, McIntosh G, Rice R (1997) Effect of auditory rhythmic cuing on gait kinematic parameters of stroke patients. Gait Posture 6(3):218–223. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0966-6362(97)00010-6 55. Schafer RM (1993) The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Inner Traditions/Bear 56. Schmidt A (2000) Implicit human computer interaction through context. Pers Ubiquit Comput 4(2):191–199 57. Strachan S, Eslambolchilar P, Murray-Smith R, Hughes S, O’Modhrain S (2005) GpsTunes: controlling navigation via audio feedback. In: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on human computer interaction with mobile devices & services. ACM, pp 275–278. http://dl. acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1085831. Accessed 28 Oct 2016 58. Svanaes D (2001) Context-aware technology: a phenomenological perspective. Hum Comput Interact 16(2):379–400 59. Tajadura-Jiménez A, Basia M, Deroy O, Fairhurst M, Marquardt N, Bianchi-Berthouze N (2015) As light as your footsteps: altering walking sounds to change perceived body weight, emotional state and gait. In: Proc. of the 33rd annual ACM conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp 2943–2952

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60. Thaut MH, Kenyon GP, Schauer ML, McIntosh GC (1999) The connection between rhythmicity and brain function. IEEE Eng Med Biol Mag Q Mag Eng Med Biol Soc 18 (2):101–108 61. Truax B (1984) Acoustic communication. Ablex Pub. Corp, Norwood, NJ 62. Tuuri K, Eerola T (2012) Formulating a revised taxonomy for modes of listening. J New Music Res 41(2):137–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/09298215.2011.614951 63. de Sá M (2011) Designing and evaluating mobile interaction: challenges and trends. Found Trends® Hum Comput Interact 4(3):175–243

Nassrin Hajinejad is an interaction designer and researcher at the Competence Center Public IT (ÖFIT) at Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS in Berlin. She holds a PhD in Informatics from the University of Bremen and was formerly a research associate at the Bremen University of Applied Sciences and a lecturer and coach at the Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts. In her research, Nassrin Hajinejad focuses on the experiential and social implications of interactive systems. Her major research areas are embodied, experience-oriented and sonic interaction design.

Chapter 5

Combined Sound- and Lightwalks. A Novel, Mixed Method to Assess Sound and Artificial Light of the Urban Environment at Night Antonella Radicchi

Abstract In line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, cities in Europe have implemented policies for addressing economic, social and environmental sustainability. Noise and light pollution can be regarded as challenges to sustainability, due to the detrimental effects they can have on human health, wellbeing and the environment. Increasing levels of noise and light pollution in cities can lead to the loss of quietness and darkness, two qualities of the urban environment, that European policies attempt to protect. Most approaches to noise and light pollution reduction apply quantitative indicators and methods. A literature scrutiny showed a tendency to overlook human perception as a criterion for assessing sound and light phenomena and their interplay. Against this backdrop, this contribution presents a novel mixed method for assessing sound and artificial light of the urban environment at night—the combined sound- and lightwalks—that was envisioned in the attempt to fill this gap of knowledge. It outlines a case study where a combined sound- and lightwalk was conducted in 2019 in the Friederichshain neighbourhood in East Berlin. It illustrates materials and methods applied, explaining how acoustic and light components of the environment were assessed during the walk, by collecting perceptual responses and quantitative measurements. It presents the results and the study limitations. In conclusion it discusses how integrating qualitative perspectives and using citizen-generated data, planners and policy makers could make progress towards the creation of more inclusive and sustainable approaches for the protection of urban quiet and dark areas at night. Keywords Night walking


Artificial light
Sound

A. Radicchi (&) Technical University of Berlin, Institute of Urban and Regional Planning, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_5

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Introduction

In 2015, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted as a plan of action for people, the planet and prosperity, that includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals [34]. Specifically, the Sustainable Development Goals 3 and 11 are targeted at addressing health and well-being and at building sustainable cities and communities. In recent years, the European Commission has also increased its programs on urban sustainability. Particularly, the Priority Objective 8 of the 7th Environmental Action Programme, entitled Sustainable Cities: Working together for Common Solutions is designed to promote the sustainability of European cities so that all Europeans are “living well, within the limits of the planet” [11]. Accordingly, European cities have implemented policies for addressing sustainability and their performances have been under scrutiny by the European Commission, accounting for economic, social and territorial impact [12]. Nowadays, sound and artificial light can constitute environmental challenges, given the detrimental effects they can have on our health, well-being and the urban environment, however they are rather understudied in urban planning [27]. Road traffic noise, for example, is the second worst environmental stressor after air pollution in Europe, affecting over 125 million people every year [13]. Prolonged exposure to excessive noise can constitute a health risk, leading to premature death, cardiovascular disease, sleep disturbance, hearing loss and cognitive impairment [37]. Similarly, the increase of artificial light at night has negative impacts, including the disappearance of dark skies, which can cause a disruption to the daily cycle of night and day, potentially inducing sleep diseases and weakening of the immune system [24, 35]. Increasing levels of noise and light pollution in cities are leading to the loss of quietness and darkness, two qualities of the urban environment, whose importance for health and well-being is reflected at the policy level (e.g. EC [10]). However, literature review shows that traditional approaches to study noise and light pollution present methodological limits. On the one hand, quantitative measurements are usually applied for assessing sound and artificial light of the urban environment at night, overlooking how sound and light phenomena are perceived. On the other hand, the interplay between light and noise pollution is rather understudied in urban studies and planning, despite significant commonalities occurring between the sound and light phenomena. Light and sound are both natural and artificial physical entities, which can be objectively measurable as well as subjectively interpreted, both being processed by the brain. Light and sound are ephemeral phenomena changing over time, and, under specific circumstances, they can be potential pollutants, impacting the environment and human health1 (Fig. 5.1). The scientific interest for combined research on sound and artificial light arose in recent years [25, 29, 30], leading to the experimentation of a 1

Concerning the differences, light pollution is the negative by-production of the intended activity itself, i.e. the provision of artificial illumination. Conversely, noise is the by-product of activities, which are not intentionally implemented to produce noise pollution.

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Fig. 5.1 Diagram illustrating the commonalities between light and sound. Radicchi A, Meier J, Dietrich H [30]

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novel, mixed method for assessing sound and artificial light of the urban environment at night: the combined sound- and lightwalks.2 Combined sound- and lightwalks can be considered examples of “sense walking”, a method introduced in the 1950s and 1960s to “investigate and analyse how we understand, experience and utilize spaces” by focusing on sensory information gained through one or more senses. More in general, walking, as a mode of exploring the world, belongs to the history of mankind: the Bedolina Map—one of the most ancient topographic maps carved in stone during the late Bronze Age and the Iron Age (1000–200 BC)—depicts walking routes from one place to another [8, 26]. In modern times, especially during the 19th and twentieth centuries, walking in cities was acknowledged as a creative, reflective and sometimes subversive way of exploring and understanding the city [5, 16] by means of diverse practices such as “aural flânerie” [7], “nightwalks” [4], and the Situationist dérive [9, 22]. Walking as a sensing tool for environmental assessment and design can be found in the work of Kevin Lynch: in “A Walk Around the Block” Lynch and Rivkin focused on perception and memory of streetscapes [3, 18]. In the 1960s, the Swiss theorist and planner Lucius Burckardt established a new discipline, the so-called: “Promenadology”, aimed at studying the landscape through walking, using the senses as tools of investigation [20]. Similarly, “sense walks” use one

2

The experimentation was conducted by the author, an architect-urbanist and soundscape scholar (Antonella Radicchi) and by the author’s colleague, an artificial light scholar (Dietrich Henckel). Together, they first experimented with the combined sound- and lightwalks, within the framework of the design studio “Light- and Soundscapes of the Urban Night—Berlin/Florence”, which they co-taught at the Technical University in Berlin in 2016–2017. Then, they further tested this method at the XXXII Italian Congress of Geographers, where they guided a combined sound- and lightwalk in the Celio neighbourhood in Rome [28].

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particular sense at a time to focus on everyday urban life, and soundwalks, lightwalks and smellwalks [15] can be considered as examples of sense walking [26]. Another type of “sense walks” are “time walks […] which aim at increasing our attention towards the spatio-temporal aspects of the environment, making us discover hidden and unsuspected rhythmic structures and helping us appreciate their aesthetic potential” [21]. Soundwalks are the most advanced type of “sense walks” both in theory and practice. They were first practiced by Michael Southworth in Boston in 1967 [33], and subsequently formalized by Murray Schafer in the 1970s within the context of the World Soundscape Project [31]. However, the German-Canadian composer and musician Hildegard Westerkamp significantly contributed to popularize the soundwalks as “excursion[s] whose main purpose is listening to the environment [by giving] our ears priority” [36] and since the 1970s practitioners have experimented with soundwalks within different disciplines [22]. More recently, soundwalks have been introduced as a participatory method to assess the quality of the acoustic environment of cities in soundscape research and urban planning [1, 2, 6, 17, 26]. Conversely, lightwalks have a relatively younger history as a method to assess the nocturnal environment. They have been applied to sensitize people to light pollution and only recently to collect data about people’s perception of different light environments, under various degrees of natural darkness [14, 19, 32]. In 2016, combined sound- and lightwalks were firstly envisioned by the author and a colleague as walks occurring in the time-space of the night3 and focusing on two senses at a time (i.e. hearing and vision). Theory and practice of soundwalks were taken as a reference to position the combined sound- and lightwalks. A combined sound- and lightwalk was defined as any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment and looking at its artificially lit components. As a methodological reference, it was taken the “4 Variations” framework, which indicates how to perform silent soundwalks, commented soundwalks with “simple evaluation points”, “solo soundwalks” and “soundwalks with complex evaluation points” [26]. Against this backdrop, this contribution presents a combined sound- and lightwalk, that was conducted in Berlin to assess sound and artificial light of the urban environment in the Friederichshain neighbourhood. It describes materials and methods of the study, explaining how the six participants in the walk were guided along a predefined path composed of four stations, and how sound and artificial light was combinedly assessed by means of perceptual responses and quantitative measurements. It presents the data analysis’ results, that highlight the potential of the method for the integration of a qualitative perspective in the assessment of sound and artificial light at night. In conclusion limitations of this study and

3

For lightwalks the night is the obvious time-space, whereas for soundwalks the night is rather underrepresented [23]. In general, the temporal dimension, and especially the night, plays a quite neglected role in “sense walks”, although natural and artificial environments, routines and practices significantly change at day and night, as time lapse-based research shows.

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recommendations for future research are addressed. Specifically, suggestions include how integrating qualitative perspectives from combined research fields and using citizen-generated data could help to inform planners and policy makers about how to create more inclusive and sustainable planning and policies for the protection of both urban quiet and dark areas at night.

5.2

A Combined Sound- and Lightwalk in Berlin

The combined sound- and lightwalk presented in this contribution was conducted on November 28th 2019 in Berlin within the context of the 2019 Conference Stadt Nach Acht—International Nightlife. The walk was aimed at assessing the quality of sound and artificial light of the urban environment in the area under investigation, by means of questionnaires and measurement tools. The walk took place in the evening of a weekday from 7 PM to 8:30 PM in the Friederichshain neighbourhood in East Berlin. This neighbourhood belongs to the district of KreuzbergFriedrichshain, that has undergone vast changes in the urban and social structure, becoming one of the most fashionable areas of Berlin for young people, hipsters, night-life lovers and the international ex-pat community. Fifteen participants signed-up for the sound- and lightwalk, and six people attended the activity, including a vision-impaired person, suffering from low vision. The route (Fig. 5.2) of this combined sound- and lightwalk was predefined by the walk leaders and it comprised four stations, where the participants were asked to

Fig. 5.2 Map illustrating the Berlin sound- and lightwalk route and the four stations. Station (1) Schlesische Str./Falckensteinstr.. Station (2) Am Oberbaum/Stralauer Allee. Station (3) Warschauer Str.. Station (4) RAW Area. Image credits Antonella Radicchi 2019©

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make observations and collect data about the acoustic and light quality, by replying to a questionnaire. Selection criteria for the identification of the four stations included diversity in the acoustic and light components of the environment (Fig. 5.3). The first station was at the intersection of two streets: Schlesische Str. and Falckensteinstr. in a mixed area composed of medium-high residential buildings with commercial activities at the ground floor, such as bars, restaurants and clubs. The second station was along Stralauer Allee, a multi-lane traffic route, next to the Oberbaum bridge, a double-decker bridge linking the Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain neighbourhoods, which are separated by the River Spree. At this double-decker bridge, cars run on the lower part and trains on the second level. The third station was at Warschauer Str. on the bridge which spans over the S-Bhan trains and the regional railways. The fourth station was in the RAW area, formerly the German national railway repair workshop and today a hot-spot for Berlin nightlife, hosting famous clubs such as the Cassiopeia.

Fig. 5.3 Pictures showing the four stations of the Berlin combined sound- and lightwalk. From left to right, clockwise: Station (1) Schlesische Str./Falckensteinstr.. Station (2) Am Oberbaum/ Stralauer Allee. Station (3) Warschauer Str.. Station (4) RAW Area. Image credits Antonella Radicchi 2019©

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Before the start of the combined sound- and lightwalk, an introduction was given to the participants to contextualize the research activity, as to explain the procedure and the printed questionnaires handed out to be filled in during the walk. Then, the participants were guided in silence at a slow pace, along the pre-defined route. At each station, the group stopped and the participants were invited to listen and look at the environment for three minutes, in silence. Afterwards they were requested to assess the acoustic and light quality of the environment, by filling in questionnaires. While the participants were observing the environment, the walk leaders made light and sound measurements, and a student assistant made a video recording of the settings and the participants in action. Sound and light measurements were made while the participants were observing the environment in silence. Specifically, sound measurements were taken as dB(A)Laeq, using a SAUTER SU 130 sound level meter in a timeframe of 3/5 min. Light measurements were made using a testo 540 lx meter at different spots in the location, according to the diverse light sources. This procedure was repeated at each station. At the end of the walk, a group discussion took place: every participant shared their feedback on the combined sound- and lightwalk with the group and discussed the best and worse stations. The questionnaire was designed by the walk leaders, referring to questionnaires previously designed for a combined sound- and lightwalk led in Rome in 2017 [28]. The questionnaire adopted in the Berlin walk was composed of six questions, identical for each station (Table 5.1). A continuous five-point linear scale in combination with open questions were used to collect the participants’ responses at each station during the walk. The participants were asked to rate how dark and quiet the environment was, by using a continuous five-point linear scale: too bright— dark and too loud—quiet (Question no. 1 and 2, respectively). For the third and fourth questions the participants assessed the pleasantness of the light and the acoustic environment of the environment, by using a continuous five-point linear scale: very unpleasant—very pleasant. The final two questions were about what

Table 5.1 Table reporting the questionnaire used during the Berlin sound- and lightwalk No.

Question

Reply options

1a

How would you judge the lighting situation here? How do you judge the sonic situation here? How pleasant do you find the illumination here? How pleasant do you find the sonic environment here? What strikes you most about the lighting situation? Why? What strikes you most about the sonic situation? Why?

Continuous five-point linear scale (too bright-dark) Continuous five-point linear scale (too loudquiet) Continuous five-point linear scale (very unpleasant-very pleasant) Continuous five-point linear scale (very unpleasant-very pleasant) Open entry

1b 2a 2b 3a 3b

Open entry

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Fig. 5.4 From left to right, word-clouds of what struck the participants most about sound and artificial light of the urban environment at the four station along the walk’s route. Image credits Antonella Radicchi 2019©

struck the participants most about the light and acoustic environment: free responses could be provided by filling in a blank space. Data collected by the participants at the four stations were analysed applying mixed methods. A qualitative content analysis was used to synthesize: the responses given to the open questions no. 3a and 3b (Table 5.1) and the comments provided at the end of the walk. Replies given to questions no. 1a, 1b and 2a, 2b were correlated with the measurements made by the authors at the stations. The entries given to the open questions no. 3a and 3b were evaluated by applying a qualitative coding analysis and represented through word-clouds, as illustrated in Fig. 5.4.

5.3

Results

The results outlined in this section pertain the sound and light measurements and the subjective responses provided by the participants in the combined sound-and lightwalk conducted in Berlin for the 2019 Conference Stadt Nach Acht— International Nightlife (an overview of the results is illustrated in Fig. 5.4 and Appendix A. At the first station, at the intersection of the streets Schlesische Str. and Falckensteinstr., participants perceived the environment as too loud and fairly loud, mainly due to traffic noise. The perception of participants was consistent with the sound level measurements which reported high values of 70.4 dB(A). From the

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final discussion, it emerged that this location was perceived by a participant as the most unpleasant station, due to high levels of traffic noise. At this station, artificial light was perceived as either pleasant and unpleasant. A participant reported that the combination of variety and intensity of artificial light made the overall impression blinding at times, although the light measurements reported rather low values, i.e. 1–2 lx. A vision-impaired participant could not reply to the questionnaire, because this location was too dark. At the second station along Stralauer Allee next to the Oberbaum bridge, participants found the environment too loud and fairly loud, due to traffic, loud music and many different noises. This perceptual assessment was consistent with the sound measurements, which reported high values of 71 dB(A). Overall the acoustic environment was perceived as low-fi [31], characterized by the absence of acoustic perspective in the area. This impression was confirmed by a participant, who reported the feeling of being “lost [due to] too many different noises”. In terms of artificial light, the area was perceived as too bright, fairly bright, and overall as unpleasant by the participants, although the light measurements reported high or low values depending on the light sources, i.e. 8 and 1–1.50 lx at the Oberbaum bridge. Controversial comments were expressed by the participants, i.e.: “I loved the light from inside of the S-Bahn, warm, cosy” and “I don’t like these yellow street lights: they are too high and too shiny”.

A participant found the artificially-lit environment “chaotic, […] not help[ing] to orientate and create a mental image of the area”. At the third station, at Warschauer Str. on the bridge which spans over the railways, participants rated the acoustic environment fairly loud, just right and even fairly quiet, although the sound measurements reported rather high values of 68.5 dB(A). Comments about quality of the acoustic environment were overall positive: “I heard a group of people approaching and talking, that was nice”, “cars and trains – they were quieter, than I would think – especially trains – and then comes music – too loud”.

The presence of rhythms was also highlighted by the participants with appreciation: “the pleasantness when cars pass and quick moment of almost silence emerges. And then a sudden music from concert appears”, and “the acoustic environment is unpleasant due to the traffic along the bridge: when the cars stop, it’s beautiful listening to the S-Bahn trains passing by.”

In terms of artificial light, the environment was perceived as fairly dark, just right and even fairly bright, with light levels measured of 5 lx. Participants’ comments reported to explain how they evaluated the light environment were very precise:

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Nevertheless, the environment was perceived as too dark by the vision-impaired participant, who needed a lamp to reply to the questionnaire. In terms of pleasantness, participants reported inconsistent assessment of the light and acoustic environment, rating them both fairly unpleasant and neutral. At the fourth station, in the RAW area, participants found the artificial light mainly, fairly dark and dark, in line with the light measurements that reported values of 2 lx. Nevertheless, comments made during the final group discussion primarily focused on an extremely bright LED light on a building nearby (see Fig. 5.2, the fourth image from above left clockwise). “That light on the corner – it wasn’t very pleasant anyway”, and “the overall area is quite dark, and then, we have this big lamp which helps me write but it is annoying”.

Light measurements taken at the LED light reported very high light values of 320 lx. Despite the LED light not being appreciated by the participants, it helped the vision-impaired subject, who used this LED light to reply to the questionnaire. The acoustic environment was perceived as fairly quiet, just right and by one participant as fairly loud, with sound levels reporting values of 60 dB(A). Participants’ comments were somehow contradictory: “quieter place, [with] commercial activities”, “club – it was disturbing me”, “sounds from the clubs with traffic, [but] I can hear the sound of wind on leaves and it is pleasant”, “I like listening to people talking and laughing, it reminds me that there is life out there!”.

In this area, inconsistent feedback was given on the pleasantness of sound and artificial light: comments spanned from fairly unpleasant to fairly pleasant. During the final discussion a participant appreciated this location as the safest and the most pleasant place, with no commercial activities, no traffic, and even some vegetation. A qualitative coding analysis was applied to the open entries given by the participants to questions no. 3a and 3b (Table 5.1). The results are displayed in Fig. 5.4 by means of word-clouds: the size of the words displayed is equivalent to the frequency at which the words occurred in the replies. For example, in regard to artificial light (Fig. 5.4, word-cloud on the left), what struck most of the participants was the light emitted by restaurants, advertisements, the East Side Mall and street lights. Participants highlighted several qualities of the environment that impressed them, such as: the brightness, the variety and the warm colour of the lights. Regarding the acoustic environment (Fig. 5.4, word-cloud on the right), distinctive patterns emerged. For example, participants particularly appreciated the sounds of traffic, clubs, trains, music and people talking. Overall the environment was

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perceived very loud but also pleasant, a contradiction which reflects the results that emerged from the analysis of the entries to question 2b (Table 5.1 and AppendixA).

5.4

Discussion and Conclusion

In line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, cities in Europe have implemented policies for addressing economic, social and environmental sustainability. Noise and light pollution can be regarded as challenges to sustainability, due to the detrimental effects they can have on human health, wellbeing and the environment. Increasing levels of noise and light pollution in cities can lead to the loss of quietness and darkness, two qualities of the urban environment that European policies attempt to protect (e.g. EC [10]). Scrutiny of most of the approaches to reduce noise and light pollution showed a tendency to apply quantitative indicators and methods and overlook human perception as a criterion for assessing sound and light phenomena and their interplay. To address these limits, in recent years, scientific interest for research on an integrated approach to sound and artificial light arose, which led to the development of a novel mixed-method for assessing the sonic and artificial light components of the urban environment at night: the combined sound- and lightwalks. This contribution outlined the theoretical framework which sustains this method and presented the case study of a combined sound- and lightwalk conducted in Fall 2019 in the Friederichshain neighbourhood in East Berlin. Participants in the walk were guided in silence at a slow pace at four stations along the walk route. At each station, they observed the environment in silence and assessed its acoustic and light components, by filling in a questionnaire. While the participants were observing the environment, sound and light measurements were made by the walk leaders. The results of this case study showed the potential of combined sound- and lightwalks to reach more articulated and inclusive assessments of sound and artificial light at night, using human perception as an evaluation criterion. However, limitations related to the relatively small number of participants in this study recommend caution in interpreting the results, which are descriptive in nature and not representative of the Berlin population. Further research is needed to fully assess the potential of this method. For instance, it is recommendable to involve a higher number of participants and collect participants’ demographic data, e.g. gender, age, race, cultural background, that would allow for in-depth analysis of the results and casualisation. The participation in this walk of a vision-impaired person highlighted the importance of conducting combined sound- and lightwalks with both vision- and hearing-impaired people, who have different needs and resources to orientate themselves in space. Furthermore, future experimentations should test different rating scales for the perceptual assessment of both sound ad artificial light of the environment at night. An option to consider could be using only open-ended questions, which would

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allow for a more comprehensive collection of subjective and perceptual responses. Time and space should also be accounted as important variables in designing the combined sound- and lightwalks. Accordingly, different scenarios could be tested including: (a) a sequel of combined sound- and lightwalks with the same group along the same route at a different time of the night; and (b) combined sound- and lightwalks with the same group along the same route at the same time but with a reversal in the order of the stations. In conclusion, by implementing this method, a quantitative approach to measure the tangible aspects of the acoustic and light on the urban environment at night can be integrated with a social science perspective, considering qualities people value about nocturnal quietness and darkness [35]. In so doing, citizen-generated data can be produced and then used by planners and policy-makers for progressing towards the creation of more inclusive and sustainable approaches for the protection of ur an quiet and dark areas at night. Acknowledgements The author would like to acknowledge the contribution of her colleague Dietrich Henckel, an artificial light scholar, in the design and execution of the combined soundand lightwalk presented in this chapter. Together, they first tested combined sound- and lightwalks, as a research method, within the framework of the project studio course “Light- and Soundscapes of the Urban Night—Berlin/Florence”, which they co-taught at the Technical University in Berlin in 2016–2017. Then, they further experimented with this method in the occasion of the XXXII Italian Congress of Geographers, where they guided a combined soundand lightwalk, with a group of congress participants in the Celio neighbourhood in Rome. The author would like to thank: Lisa Henckel for the transcription of the questionnaires’ results; TU Berlin student Till Aumüller for his assistance with the video recording; and the participants in this combined walk for their enthusiasm and insights.

Appendix A Table reporting the most significant results of the evaluations and the sound and light measurements.

3. Warschauer Str.

4. RAW Area

Fairly bright (3) Just right (2) Fairly dark (1) Just right (1) Fairly dark (3) Dark (1) Too dark (1)

1. Schlesische Str./ Falckensteinstr. 2. Am Oberbaum/ Stralauer Allee

320 Lux (directly under a LED lamp) 2 Lux (spots)

8 Lux (max) 1-150 Lux (at Oberbaumbrück) 5 Lux (max)

Lux

1-2 Lux

Light

Too bright (1) Just right (2) Fairly dark (2) Too bright (1) Fairly bright (5)

Location

Sound Too loud (1) Fairly loud (3) Just right (1) Too loud (1) Fairly loud (3+1) Just right (1) Fairly loud (2+1) Just right (2) Fairly quiet (1) Fairly loud (1) Just right (1+1) Fairly quiet (2)

DB(A)Laeq

60,4 dB(A) (next to a club where they played music)

64 dB(A) 70,4 dB(A) (with traffic passing by) 71 dBA (main sources: music and traffic) 68,5 d(B)A (with traffic passing by)

Light Fairly unpleasant (3) Fairly pleasant (1) Very pleasant (1) Very unpleasant (2) Fairly unpleasant (3) Neutral (1) Fairly unpleasant (4) Neutral (2) Very pleasant (1) Fairly unpleasant (1) Neutral (2) Fairly pleasant (2)

Sound

Very unpleasant (1) Fairly unpleasant (2) Neutral (3) Fairly unpleasant (1) Neutral (2) Fairly pleasant (2)

Very unpleasant (2) Fairly unpleasant (2) Very pleasant (1) Very unpleasant (3) Fairly unpleasant (3)

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References 1. Adams M et al (2008) Soundwalking as a methodology for understanding soundscapes. In: Proceedings of institute of acoustics spring conference 2008, 10–11 April 2008, Reading, UK 2. Aletta F et al (2016) Soundscape descriptors and a conceptual framework for developing predictive soundscape models. Landscape Urban Plan 149:65–74 3. Banerjee T, Southworth M (1990) City sense and city design. Writings and projects of Kevin Lynch. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 4. Beaumont M (2015) Night walking. A nocturnal history of London. Verso, London 5. Benjamin W (1982) Das Passagen-Werk, vol 1. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 6. Brooks B, Schulte-Fortkamp B (2016) The soundscape standard. In: Proceedings of internoise, 21–24 August 2016, Hamburg, DE 7. Boutin A (2015) City of noise. sound and nineteenth-century Paris. University of Illinois Press, Urbana 8. Careri F (2002) Walkscapes: walking as an aesthetic practice. Einaudi, Torino 9. Debord G (1958) Theory of the Dérive. Internationale Situationniste 2(12) 10. European Parliament and Council (2002) Directive 2002/49/EC of 25 June 2002 relating to the assessment and management of environmental noise. Off J Eur Communities L189 (45):12–26 11. European Commission (2014) Additional tools environment action programme to 2020. https://ec.europa.eu/environment/action-programme/. Accessed 21 Oct 2020 12. European Commission (2020) Sustainable development in the European Union. Overview of progress towards the SDGs in an EU context. Eurostat, Bruxelles 13. European Environment Agency (2020) Environmental noise in Europe—2020. Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg 14. Henckel D (2018) Lichtsituationen/Lightscapes in Berlin Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Ergebnisse eines Light Walks im November 2017. http://unsichtbare-stadt.de/category/diestadt-und-die-sinne/. Accessed 21 Oct 2020 15. Henshaw V (2014) Urban smellscapes. Understanding and designing city smell environments. Routledge, New York, London 16. Hessel F (2012) Spazieren in Berlin. Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin 17. ISO/DIS 12913-2 (2018) Acoustics. Soundscape—part 2: data collection and reporting requirements. International Standardization Organization, Geneva 18. Jacks B (2004) Reimagining walking. Four practice. J Architectural Educ 57(3):5–9 19. Krop-Benesch A (2018) Hier ist zu viel Licht! Noch ein Lightwalk in Berlin. http://www. nachhaltig-beleuchten.de/blog/staedteplanung/hier-ist-zuviel-licht-noch-ein-lightwalk-inberlin/. Accessed 21 Oct 2020 20. Licata G, Schmitz M (2019) Lucius Burckhardt. Il falso è l’autentico. Politica, paesaggio, design, architettura, pianificazione, pedagogia. Quodlibet Publisher, Rome 21. Mayr A, Radicchi A (2013) Intermezzo: time walk. In: Henckel D et al (eds) Space-time design of the public city. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 87–96 22. McCartney A (2014) Soundwalking: creating moving environmental sound narratives. In: Gopinath S, Stanyek J (eds) The Oxford handbook of mobile music studies, vol 2. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, pp 212–237 23. McCartney A, Gabriele S (2001) Soundwalking at night. Soundscape J Acoust Ecol 2(1): 25–27 24. Meier J (2016) Schmutziges Licht: Die Abschaffung der Nacht. Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 1:112–120 25. Meier J, Henckel D (2017) Urban lightprints: all but static. Scapegoat Architect Landscape Polit Econ Night 10:224–227

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26. Radicchi A (2017) A pocket guide to soundwalking. Some introductory notes on its origin, established methods and four experimental variations. In: Besecke A et al (eds) Stadtökonomie – Blickwinkel und Perspektiven. Ein Gemischtwarenladen. Verlag Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, pp 70–73. https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-5910 27. Radicchi A et al (2020) Sound and the healthy city. Cities Health. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 23748834.2020.1821980 28. Radicchi A, Henckel D (2018) Combined sound- and lightwalks. A perception-based method to analyse and evaluate the acoustic and light environment of our cities as night. In: Proceedings of euronoise 2018, 27–31 May 2018, Crete (G). ISSN: 2226-5147 29. Radicchi A, Henckel D (2017) Lightscapes and soundscapes of the urban night. In: Presentation given at the 32nd Italian congress of geography, Berlin/Florence, 7–10 June 2017, Rome (IT) 30. Radicchi A, Meier J, Dietrich H (2016) Urban planning challenges: toward integrated approaches to sustainable lightscape and soundscape planning. In: Presentation given at ALAN the 4th international conference on artificial light at night, 26–28 Sept 2016, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (RO) 31. Schafer M (1977) The soundscape. Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. A. Knopf, New York 32. Schwendinger L (2013) Night seeing. Navigate your luminous city. www.nightseeing.net. Accessed 21 Oct 2020 33. Southworth S (1969) The Sonic environment of cities. Environ Behav 6:49–70 34. United Nations (2015) Transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20Agenda%20for% 20Sustainable%20Development%20web.pdf. Accessed 21 Oct 2020 35. Wartmann FM et al (2019) Towards an interdisciplinary understanding of landscape qualities: wilderness, tranquillity and dark skies. In: Mueller L, Eulenstein F (eds) Current trends in landscape research. Innovations in landscape research. Springer, Charm, pp 209–220 36. Westerkamp H (1974) Soundwalking. Sound Heritage 3(4):18–27 37. World Health Organization (2018) Environmental noise guidelines for the European region. World Health Organization, Geneva

Antonella Radicchi is an architect and urbanist, passionate about cities and different cultures, and over the years, has worked in the academic and practice sectors in Germany, Italy and the US. She is currently a Senior Research Associate in the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning at the Technical University of (TU Berlin). Her research work explores the relationships between people and the urban environment. Specifically, she experiments with creative and participatory methods and tools to study how human experience is affected by the urban environment and how this knowledge can be used to inform policy-making and urban design for healthier, more sustainable cities. Since 2017, she has been the inventor and curator of Hush City, an award-winning citizen science app, developed in response to an unresolved issue at the European environmental policy level: the identification and protection of quiet urban areas. Dr. Radicchi was a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar at MIT in Boston; a Post-Doctoral Marie Curie Fellow at TU Berlin; and a HEAD Genuit Foundation Senior Research Fellow at TU Berlin and at the New York University in New York. Her research work was awarded international recognitions and presented in international media such as BBC Future, World Economic Forum, The Atlantic, Citylab, Der Spiegel, WIRED. She is a licensed architect and holds a PhD in Urban Design and Territorial Planning.

Chapter 6

Smell Walks Suzel Balez

Abstract This work aims to report the specific interest of experiential walks for smell perception in environmental analyses, using a review of different methods and field actions. The first part of the chapter reviews the main difficulties when one wants to comprehend environmental olfactory phenomenon, emphasizing the importance of semantic considerations and the role of the context accounts (from in vitro to in-situ, including in vivo approaches). By the way, field studies on the topic are scarce, especially if compared to the in vitro experiments profusion. If in vitro approaches allow parameters controls and statistical analysis, they struggle to covert identified ordinary life smell phenomenon. However, expectations and implicit memories are critical in everyday smell experiences. Even in vivo approaches, such as store reconstitutions, often fail to appreciate the magnitude of contexts in olfactory interpretations, especially situational ones. The second part of the chapter therefore, considers the main assets of experiential walks for smell: an in-situ posture implying confrontation of heterogenic data and an in motion specificity. The first one may permit to go a little farer then the simple sources inventory often use in environmental smell analyses. The second one allows renew sensations for a sense for which habituation, that is the rapid and specific olfactory acclimatization when exposed to an odor, is a particulary important feature of everyday smell experiences and movements. The advantages and drawbacks of smell walks are then discussed, to clear some recommendations for smell walks applications. Keywords Odour


Smell walks
Olfactory environment

S. Balez (&) AAU Ambiances, Architecture, Urbanités - Unité Mixte de Recherche 1563 CNRS, École Nationale Supérieure d’ Architecture de Paris La Villette, Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_6

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Introduction: What Is at Stake in the Study of Perceptual Qualities of Olfactory Environment?

In a sight-dominated civilization like the Western one [1], a shift towards invisibility can be seen nowadays in many disciplines, such as history [2] or anthropology [3, 4] and urban design and architecture are no exceptions. For example, Pallasmaa [5] emphasizes the importance of non-visual sensations in everyday experiences of places, in high contrast with their sight-dominated conceptions and Pérez Gómez [6] suggests a design of environment attuned to the atmosphere of places. Considering some of the recently neglected senses (in history of place design) may nevertheless lead to an enrichment of our sensual experiences of built environments. Odors are part of our surrounding invisible world but remain little studied and taken into account within place design. Yet, smell has spatial aspects. For instance, smelling something while walking in a street, one may be able to tell if the odor comes from behind, left or right. Humans can also follow a scent’s track, just like animals [7]. Smell is also a great emotions trigger, so it may enhance the overall experience of places [8]. However, it is far from being a new topic for architects, as around the first century BC, for example, Vitruvius1 recommended for cities to be built far away from marshy places. In different civilizations, smell materials, such as odoriferous woods, were used to build palaces or temples, like in Japan where historically the fragrance of hinoki was one of its preferred feature as a building material [9: 15]. In modern times, as long as bad smells were associated with illness, fight against foul odors was considered as part of illness prevention [2, 10]. Nowadays, environmental olfactory concerns come from a renewed interest in felt qualities of places and (re-)newed anxieties about air qualities. In that case, smell is not a simple matter, and understanding smell perception in environment is even trickier. The present chapter intends to report the specific interest of experiential walks as a method to consider the perceptual qualities of olfactory environments, using a review of different methods and field actions. The first part will brush up the main difficulties when one wants to comprehend environmental olfactory phenomena. The second part of the chapter will then consider the main assets of experiential walks for smell: an in-situ posture implying confrontation of heterogenic data and in motion specificities, allowing to draw the attention on the importance of semantic considerations and on the role of the context in smell interpretation.

“The neighborhood of a marshy place must be avoided; for in such a site the morning air, uniting with the fogs that rise in the neighborhood, will reach the city with the rising sun; and these fogs and mists, charged with the exhalation of the fenny animals, will diffuse an unwholesome effluvium over the bodies of the inhabitants, and render the place pestilent.” Vitruvius, De Architectura, book I, Chap. 4.

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Part I: Towards an Understanding of Perceptual Qualities of Olfactory Environment An Unreliable Background: Smell Evaluation Challenges

General knowledge about smell is weak, especially if compared to other senses, and this has a lot of consequences, even in scientific approaches. Firstly, the ideas about smells and smell perception are scarce and sometimes blurry, even false or out of date. Secondly, the perceptual models used to analyze smell data are often visually (or over senses) based, neglecting the specificity of this particular chemical sense. The inter-individual differences are, for instance, very high when considering the sense of smell. We are all genetically (e.g. Verbeurgt et al. [11]) and culturally (e.g. Classen et al. [4]) different regarding olfactory sensations. It may explain some specificities of smell perceptions, and some scientific biases. There is indeed no specific vocabulary to talk about smells, so one will have to refer to a smell source to give a name to an olfactory sensation [12, 13]. There is also a problem with the definition of odor itself, as some studies consider any chemical sensation as odor [14], in spite of the fact that we have many chemical senses, and some of the chemical air qualities that have an impact on our sensations are not interpreted by our sense of smell. For example, carbon monoxide can have an unconscious (and potentially lethal) impact on human physiology through the respiratory system. Similarly, ammoniac, labelled as odorous in the common sense, is not detected by the sense of smell itself, but by the trigeminal nerve [15]. Finally, air humidity can be recognized by different sensory systems, including the skin [16, 17]. Furthermore, the visual domination is also riding on the perceptual models used to analyze smell data. For example, in his attempt to define olfactory unities, Fanger [18] considered smell sensations as a continuum, like a wave length, suggesting that an olfactory stimulus (e.g. the vanillin compound) could be equivalent to another (e.g. the hydrogen sulfide compound). The sensibilities to these compounds are nonetheless dissimilar, depending on the individual, and, more than that, when their respective concentration rises, the perceived intensities will unlikely rise in the same ways [19, 20]. The stimulus complexity, on the one hand, and the high variability of its perception, on the other hand, make the measurement of smell a complex matter. If the reference for odor definition is a mental representation triggered by molecules with ad-hoc proprieties to stimulate the sense of smell, then odor measurement should consider what compounds are present and how easily detectable they are for a human sense of smell. Therefore, chemical analyses suppose complex processes (from samples removal to their analysis) and is only the first step to figure out if all the sample compounds can be detectable by a human nose, and with what “average” intensity (as the sensibility is different individual by individual and compound by compound). In any event, chemical analyses can only show the nature and

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concentration of the stimuli and will not say how this stimulus is interpreted, in terms of quality and intensity. To that aim, some other measurement tactics have to be used. For instance, olfactometry is done with pools of assessors, to figure out average perceived intensities of odoriferous air samples [21]. Human panel members can also be used in field inspection when there is a potential annoyance due to the presence of odors, to determine odor perimeters in ambient air [22]. To this aim, a new European standard defined different approaches. One of these approaches is the Plume Method, used to determine the extent of detectable and recognizable odors from a specific source by members of a panel, under specific meteorological conditions. In its dynamic version, the Plume Method consists in zigzag movements of the panel members within the scent plume, to determine its extent, by recognizing “transition points”, i.e. transition of absence to presence of recognizable odors. The interest of movement, in this method, is linked to the habituation phenomenon: when exposed to an odor, the human sense of smell quickly loses its acuity, to perceive only new events. Moving in and out of an odor plume is accordingly a good way to continue to smell it.

6.2.2

In Vitro and In Vivo, Smell-Places Experiences

Maybe because common sense assigns a lot of power to smells, they are studied by numerous research teams in different scientific fields, such as neurology, psychophysics, human ethology… The concerns of these studies are focused on the influences of odors (or odors assimilated stimuli) on human beings, especially on health and mood and/or behavior. Classically, the experimentation protocol would take place in a laboratory where people (first-year students, most of the time) would be studied regarding their physical and/or psychological reactions to different olfactory (or assimilated chemical stimuli) stimulations. This kind of experiments allows parametric controls and statistical analyses. However, if they permit to understand a lot about smell, e.g. about habituation phenomena (e.g. Dalton and Sinding et al. [23, 24]) or about olfactory conditioning (e.g. Zucco et al. [25]), these in vitro approaches are struggling to account for smell phenomena within everyday life [26, 27]. To confront these difficulties, studies are carried out in reconstituted places or modified real places, in what could be call in vivo experiments. As an example, looking for an understanding of smell’s influence on shoppers’ behavior, Spangenberg and his colleagues reconstituted a University shop, selling usual items. They compared the odorized and non-odorized selling situations [28]. Some in vivo experiences use the same protocol but in real places, such as shopping centers [29], shops or supermarkets [30–32] or dancing places [33]. These experiments open a large ethical debate, as their aim is clearly the manipulation of customers [34]. At the same time, they regularly show high limitations, regarding their results compared to their questions: they repeatedly conclude on the necessity of congruency between smell and (selling) places, even if this term is often used in

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a rhetorical loop. The olfactory congruency would be a connection between the smell and the place where it occurs. However, these studies suggest a universality that is highly improbable. For example, increases in sales of men’s and women’s clothing, in an experimentally reconstructed retail store, have been attributed to ‘gender congruencies’ between gendered clothing areas and ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ smells thus disseminated [35]. These smells, previously evaluated by representative panels of young Americans visiting this commercial area, were considered as equally pleasant and rather ‘masculine’ or rather ‘feminine’. In this case, congruency might be more like the correspondence of scented odors with implicit memories, as described by Köster2 in different works rather than universals of ‘olfactory genres’, here related to the scents usually smelled in the United States on clothes worn by men or women. However, some experimenters of the olfactory marketing go as far as to consider that an increase in sales is precisely the manifestation of an ‘olfactory congruency’, presented as a universal. Researchers in sensory marketing enrolled in an ethnographic approach, Canniford and her colleagues are the few who consider that “what is pleasant or congruent may change depending on the time and context” [39: 11]. It should be added that it is possible that some places do not trigger particular olfactory expectations, they would then have no Reference Olfactory Image, or a silent Reference Olfactory Image [40], and, in this case, the question of congruency or “odorous misfit” [36] would not necessarily arise. Schifferstein and his colleagues note, for example, that the three smells they use do not have any differential effects on the evaluations of nightclubs and evenings that were thus odorized [33]. It is difficult to determine if this observation is related to the generic or trivial character of the scents used in this experiment and/or with a weak (or non-existent) olfactory nightclubs identity. The masking effect on body odors3 alone could also explain the positive evaluations of the evening increases, with no regard to the character of the diffused scents (“orange”, “peppermint’, “seawather”4). Another hypothesis could be the connection between odorous atmospheres and the apprehension of passing time, but it is a datum that has not been included in the protocol of this experiment.

“It is suggested that episodic information is an essential constituent of olfactory memory and that its function is comparable to that of form and structure in visual and auditory memory systems” [36]. See also [37, 38]. 3 Schifferstein and his colleagues refer to body odor as a new issue in the nightclubs smell atmospheres as a result of the widespread ban on smoking in these clubs. 4 The authors do not give much information on the odorant compounds bouquets implemented, it is likely that they are not extracts, but rather imitations or evocations: “The three scents that were used for the experiments were orange (no. 102), seawater fresh and salty (no. 306), and peppermint (no. 007) provided by RetroScent, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.” [33: 57]. 2

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6.3

Odours Within Space Sciences and Disciplines

From Vitruvius to Le Corbusier,5 place designers have never stopped being interested in air qualities, which was for a long time merged with smell characteristics [41]. As it will be studied here, the concept of smellscape may be a way to begin to question the links between smells and space. Confronted with the non-continuous character of everyday smell apprehension, with the historic absence of ‘objective’ measurement, with the naming difficulty and with the interpersonal variability of the sensibility, for a long-time space sciences and disciplines put the sense of smell aside. Many of them translated this renunciation into disdain towards a so-called minor sense, while it was more probably an abdication when confronted to the difficulties of the task. Either way, more than architecture or urban planning, geography, in its traditional search of superstructures, is a science that has explored the links between space and smells the most, even if superstructures are actually difficult to discern with regards to smells. For Tuan [42: 35], the sense of smell is a sense of proximity, as opposed to sight and hearing, senses of distance, whereas for Hall [43: 61], it is a sense of distance. A contact with odorant compounds is of course necessary to obtain a smell sensation, but it can come from far beyond what the sight is able to perceive. The categorization of smell as a sense of proximity is therefore to be reconsidered, some industrial (and sometimes natural) sources have ranges of several kilometers.6 The sense of smell can thus give information on very distant events. Seeking to qualify smell relatively to distances, is this not a classical expression of visual-centered cognition? This reflection deserves to be further developed, as not seeing the source of an odor may limit the possibilities of identification of the latter. Sight is present in another concept used in thoughts about smells in environment. Following Schaffer’s soundscape proposal, Porteous [44] suggested the concept of smellscape to think the overall smell environment. The geographer, and after him Henshaw, evokes an immersion in the smellscape. For Henshaw, we do not control our relationship with the latter: … we can see that the visual landscape is separate from our bodies and we have some control over our engagement with it. In contrast, we are constantly immersed in the smellscape as we breathe in and out; it is immediate and it becomes part of our bodies as an integral aspect of the act of detection [14: 10].

This is probably the reason why the author qualifies the “backdrop” of the smellscape as passive. Not only it is part of us, but it is quickly not perceived anymore. This qualifier is debatable: even if the sense of smell functioning implies a

Le Corbusier developed between 1926 and 1933 the concepts of “respiration exacte” and “mur neutralisant” to achieve an internal air conditioning in buildings [41]. 6 Henshaw [14] reports several episodes of odorous spreads (natural or man-made) over large distances, of the order of several tens or even hundreds of kilometers, for example from central Europe to the south of England. 5

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rapid erasure of the odorous sensation, our ability to perceive ‘background’ changes, even minor ones, when they befall, can be questioned. Even though the concept of smellscape remains debatable, Henshaw proposes a description of its structure inspired by the perfumers’ language7 [14: 171]. She postulates that urban smellscape can be understood as a composition of different smell notes. The “base note” of urban territory, or background odor, would thus constitutes the macro-level of the smellscape. The “mid-level notes” are blended within the background odor to establish an area-based smell, and finally the “high notes” of the immediate environment constitutes the micro-level smellscape. This description has the advantage of spatializing the fragrant apprehension, but it does not take into account the fact that, as in the sound field, a nearby source may be less perceptible than a distant source, depending on their intensities (or even their respective qualities). The proposed link between physical distance and sensation of olfactory proximity appears then a little hastily. Henshaw [14: 171] also links her smellscape structure description to the architects Malnar and Vovarka’s [47] attempt of a vocabulary to reflect common aspects of sensory responses related to time and space. Based on Piaget’s visual model, this “first step in a sensory typology” includes a duration vocabulary labelled as ‘involuntary/episodic’ in the case of odor. For Henshaw, the “involuntary” smells, in Malnar and Vovarka’s terms, would be the macro-level, while she links what she calls “high” fragrant notes (mid-level and/or micro-level notes) to Malnar and Vovarka’s “episodic” odors (referring “to that immediately experienced and that recurring through memory” [47: 244]). Such an approach may be a way to take the habituation phenomenon into account in the description of the smellscape organization. But as she does not provide more precision on what she intends as “high notes”, we are reduced to speculate: does it evoke the intensity of odors, or is it a way to qualify specific odorous qualities? For Henshaw, the foreground of the smellscape would be far more meaningful than the background. Yet, the olfactory identity of places does not rest only on the odorous events which are taking place there, but also on their odorous permanence; for example, a “swimming pool smell” consists of a rather stable background in space and time. In fact, in the case of olfactory sensation, temporal data is as important as spatial data, and mental images, including olfactory ones, contribute to overall sensible apprehension [40]. The whole idea of an ‘odorous landscape’ should therefore include a temporal dimension, in order to account for odorous stabilities and variations: exceptional events are probably not crucial, but repeated events and their frequency seems essential. It should be added that Henshaw, like Porteous, describes the smellscape as discontinuous, since it is not continually fragrant. The odorless places/moments could be nonetheless considered as constituting elements of the fragrant environment. In a study on (non-) hospital odors, Stenslund [48], for example, showed that

For perfumers, the scent of a perfume consists of “head”, “heart” and “background” notes, corresponding to the order of smelling of its various constituents [45, 46].

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“the presence of absence of smell” has, from a phenomenological point of view, a significant importance. The supposed discontinuity of the smellscape is therefore questionable, as smelling silence could be considered as a smell in itself, participating in the olfactory identity of places. The drawback of its visual origin is nevertheless the main asset of the smellscape concept: the familiarity of the concept of landscape gives a facilitated access to the overall olfactory environment thinking. To have a real efficiency, the concept of smellscape should therefore define its own specificities, idiosyncrasies of the smell sense and smell stimuli, with as much autonomy as possible from sight-guided concepts. As geographer Siegfried already underlined in 1947, concerns about smell qualities of places collide before all with methodological questions. He wrote: the geography… of the smells? That can we drag from it? (…) To what extent is it made? Only by scattered, not coordinated and often too subjective notations, without real geographical impact [49: 20].

The “olfactory dimension of geographical experience” [50: 53] interest, by some of the firsts geographers of the sensibilities like Tuan [51] or Porteous [44, 52] did take support essentially on their personal experiences, on the “common sense”, and on literature. Later, certain studies on smells of places implemented “smells pads” [53], interviews [14, 54], questionnaires [55] or mental maps [56]. The smell mental maps seem a promising approach to draw up olfactory portraits of places. The method of mental maps rests on the hypothesis of the existence of a collective image of any city, built from a large number of individual images [57]. Their experiences of the city (or of another scale of space) is asked to various individuals who have to represent it, most of the time commenting on it. In this case, it was asked of students to draw a map of Vienna and to locate the smells that spontaneously occurred them, by using colors or symbols to be explained in a legend. Diaconu deducted four main categories from the space distributions: “natural odors”, “food odors”, “exhaust fumes and industrial smells” and “smells produced by organic waste”. Natural odours were located in equal proportions along the Danube, on the Donauinsel and in the Vienna Woods, followed by the central parks (the Voksgarden, which boast a famous rose garden, and the Prater). Food smells clustered around the Naschmarkt (the Central market), which inspired the most complex list of odours, followed by the inner city. Exhaust fumes were distributed throughout the city, but particularly on the City Belt (Gürtel), in the Inner City and along the Ring which surrounds the first district. Under the heading of organic waste, smells were mentioned, as expected, horses (with the square of St. Stephen’s Cathedral at the top, followed by other stations for horse cabs), dogs (throughout the city) and human sweat (mainly at the University) [56: 225].

As can be seen, it is an already rather fine portrait, which the mentioned higher main categories (natural, food, exhaust fumes and industrial smells or smells produced by organic waste) were far from reporting. These main categories seem even counterproductive in the depiction of the specific olfactory identity of the city of

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Vienna, especially as Diaconu makes a debatable statistical analysis8 of it. The so drawn ‘olfactory portrait’ overtakes the caricature to become illegible: if the same statistics would appear in another city olfactory portrait, they could hide a very different odor identity. Other evocations that might seem anecdotal emerge from these mental maps: the atmosphere of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the smell of hospitals, apartments or staircases. They raise new questions about the olfactory apprehension of space and its mental representation, since the smelling places evoked are organized on very varied spatial scales—from the inside of a monument to a stairwell—and this despite an initial directive on city scale. The olfactory mental representation of space would be organized outside the visual spatial hierarchies and, indeed, even if they come from far away, smells are always close. From her mental maps, Diaconu draws very general conclusions about the olfactory image of Vienna, without underlining that her cohort of informants is very homogeneous and probably representative of only one part of a still finer olfactory identity of the city. She also highlights two striking omissions that could be explained in part by this very small sample. Schönbrunn, a major tourist site in the city, was more or less odorless, and the St. Marx cemetery, famous among Viennese for its lilacs, was not mentioned. It is possible that these shortcomings are consequences of the designers of these maps’ profile, their ages and status not making them often visit the most touristic sites or historical cemeteries. In addition, Diaconu does not specify in which season these maps were drawn, but the lilac flowering period being short, one can imagine that it takes several years of olfactory encounters for their perfume to be integrated into a mental fragrant map of Vienna. The mental map method, however, seems promising, especially since it is used in another sense area, that of hearing, in a fruitful way. Amphoux, who implements it in the sound field, points out that it is: an effective way to transgress the difficulty inherent in representing sound. It consists in putting the subject under the tension of a paradoxical injunction of the type ‘draw me what one cannot draw’ (of sound)! [58: 205].

This injunction then makes it possible to apprehend the represented space, that is to say, to draw mental maps as cognitive structures of the perceptions of space (here, odorous). Of course, since Lynch’s initial work, the method has been criticized: it has biases that need to be taken into account [59, 60]. The mental map, as a concept, also raises some questions: can we map our representations? What are the parts of the temporal and practical dimensions that can appear in mental maps? Critics point out, for example, the danger of stiffening of elements that are, in the reality, particularly labile. Works in the sound field, however, seem to promise an understanding of the impact of symbolism and mental representation on the perceptive organization of smell. The odorous mental map can probably complement other methods using empirical materials, such as interviews.

“Natural odors” 82%, “food odors” 75%, “exhaust fumes and industrial smells” 63% and “smells produced by organic waste” 59% [56: 224].

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Part II: Smell Walks to Comprehend Environmental Olfactory Phenomena?

In 1790, Jean-Noël Hallé was maybe the first to carry out smell walks or “olfactory walk surveys”, as Corbin called them [2]. A smell walk is, in many aspects, similar to any experiential walk: participants are taken individually or in a group through a designed (or non-designed) route, while they are encouraged to talk about their smell perceptions. Sometimes, the researcher walks alone, like Hallé did [61, 62], sometimes in pairs [40, 63], and sometimes in groups [14, 64]. In the last two cases, the attendant is there to encourage descriptions, details and explanations. After the walk, semi-directive interview can be conducted and all of the recorded words are transcribed. The analyses that follow can be quite different, even using the same iterative process suggested by the grounded theory [65, 66]. Some measurements can be made following the commented walk method [67], i.e. confronted with the ground perceived reality [40, 68]. Here, the different steps of the method and their potential drawbacks will be discussed.

6.4.1

How to Do Smell Walks?

“Where can we do smell walks?” is a question linked to the way places are used. Places visited in a static way have more chance to be non- (or weakly) odorous, especially indoors, because of the habituation phenomenon. As a consequence, all the places that are used in a dynamic way can be studied with walks, close to their regular uses.

Except when the walker is alone (like Grésillon was), the path is always predefined by the searcher, to be representative of a regular route in the studied place [40, 63], and/or to present contrasted olfactory atmospheres [14]. Some stopping points can also be predefined [14, 63] or let to the participants’ choices [40]. The predefined path has also the interest of the multiple “point of nose”, on different times, so it brings hypothesis on the most shared traits and on the variations and nuances of the olfactory identity of the place. So far, many different types of places had been studied with smell walks: classical town districts, mainly in Europe [14, 68, 69], a shopping center [40] and an intermodal transportation nod [63]. This last type of places has a very interesting potential as it is a place of transition from different smell atmospheres (at different spaces scales) and is visited by users with very different statuses toward the place; complete neophytes (like tourists) or ‘experts’ (like long-time regular users). “Who is walking?” is a very crucial question, because it leads to the problem of the representativeness of results. More specifically, one may question the representativeness when smell walks are made by researchers on their own. As an example, Dulau, geographer, specialist of India describes the crossing of the passage Brady in Paris, where the Indian restaurants are many:

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As inside progresses and according to the number of meals served within the passage, the odors, which can not be discriminated against, spread unevenly, they weave and loosen a fragrant veil, but always providing that subtle feeling, almost an impression of sweetness. These nomadic odors perceived in a hit way, sometimes become more sustained. In favor of a prolonged station due to the crowd and trampling, can we then for a brief moment be captivated by the halo of smells that emanates from dishes served on the tables outside. It is in the midst of this fluidity, this apparent impalpability, this almost “I do not know what” that fragrant poles emerge and then disappear, if one takes the time, that one devotes oneself to the slowness of things. These poles of scents, captured in the ordinary and confused matter of everyday life, flow into the fluidity of an already earlier present like exploded bubbles. They leave in suspension an olfactory trace, transient impressions that still carry in them the smelling message: remanence. We know that these odorous traces, apparently inconsistent and already forgotten, are deposited, like all other perceptions, in the simple experience of the intimate material, but we never know when they can reappear: reminiscence [70: 142].

Besides the lack of spatial information, and despite its expressive qualities, such a description, synthesis of individual surveys, presents a major disadvantage. Rodaway underlines: in our imagination and in the place descriptions of novelists, rich smellscapes can be synthesized, but this is not how we actually experience smells in everyday experience, where they appear and disappear as discrete ‘events’ [50: 57].

The researcher’s body has indeed a potential, as a ‘tool’, to collect sensations [71], and lonely sensory walks have the advantages of simplicity. Some lonely walks, moreover, do not synthetize different experiences. For example, Grésillon made separate accounts on her own smell walks in the Huchette district in Paris [54]. But even when smell walks’ accounts do not synthetize different times of a place, they have the major drawback of being limited to one ‘point of nose’ only. They draw olfactory portraits of places, but the matter of the sharing of these portraits is in question, especially for a sense that we know is little shared. The status vis-à-vis the place (resident or visitor) is crucial, both in relation to the detection abilities—because of the habituation phenomenon—and also in relation to interpretations—knowledge of the potential sources in the area. Staszak emphasizes: … it cannot be said that in such campaign the smell of manure predominates without specifying who smells it: probably the farmer, who is so used to it, does not smell it; for him, it does not exist. It is even more obvious that one cannot say whether it is good or bad without evoking a point of view (a point of nose?) [72: 56].

The methods that involve numerous and varied participants seem therefore more appropriate when it comes to smell, and especially as there is no recording or simple possible measure for odors. The now classic situation of multiple walks by an attendant and a speaker gives very interesting results, especially if the participants are carefully chosen (as representative of the place users for example). By confronting the different smell perceptions (and representations) described by the different walkers, olfactory identity in what is shared and what is not can be drawn.

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On that matter, group walks have advantages and disadvantages. Because the participants communicate with each over while walking, a first exchange in sensory interpretation can occur, but it is both interesting and risky. Interesting, because people may synthetize their different interpretations and risky, because the participants’ attentions can be directed to one interpretation or over another quite easily. Even when they underline the importance of the ‘sniffer’ status towards the place in smelling apprehension, few researchers take it into account in their analyses of the olfactory environment. There is however enough to wonder here: when we try to report this environment, do its most shared characteristics allow for an understanding fine enough, in particular with the prospect of a management (even of a design) of smell sensations in places? Grésillon notices for example that certain odor sources are more important in the speech of certain users than in others. In her study of a RER station in Paris, she notes that the young women evoke more willingly urine smells than the other users [69]. Distinction within homogenous cultural groups in smell interpretation has already been underlined by anthropologists ([73]; e.g. Classen et al. [4]). Hence the ‘point of nose’ should be carefully considered in any attempt to draw ‘olfactory portrait’ of place. Shared olfactory portraits of places are probably rare, considering olfactory differences between people, so any portrait should be linked to its ‘painters’ or types of ‘painters’. “When can we do smell walks?” is thus another important question, related to the discreteness of odours in places. First, as did Stenslund in her study of hospital smells, olfactory silence should be considered as any place-smell feature, constitutive of the placesmell identity [48]. Second, smells in everyday life have their rhythms and cycles. Daily rhythms of cooking smells or seasonally rhythms of recently cut grass smells are examples of discrete but important smell features of places. This is the reason why the moments of smell walks should be taken into account: to understand olfactory portraits limitations regarding the times they are made. Depending on the place olfactory features, the olfactory portrait will therefore be more or less complete if the smell walks cover enough situations, i.e. enough cyclic odors, at different time scales, regarding climate and human activities. As an example, field studies on industrial odors nuisances are to be made on long time periods (six to twelve months), to be representative of varied climatic conditions [22]. “How can we do smell walks?” Is not an insignificant question, since speaking about smells may present some difficulties. Most of the works on smell sensations underline the difficulties of verbalizations, what is called ‘tip of the nose’ phenomenon. In reference to the expression ‘tip of the tongue’, it indicates this feeling of not to be far from having found what we try to express, but to still have no words to express it [74]. The olfactory sensations are difficult to describe and do not result necessarily in a name (that is in a potential or known source). Most of the time, it is necessary to manage locating the smelling source to be able to name it (because in the western culture we name the smells according to their sources) [12, 13]. This struggle in smell denomination is nevertheless underlined mostly in in vitro experiments and in smell walks on the field, it was not as problematic as these in vitro researches suggested it. In field approaches, all the senses are involved and, as it will be seen, “what smells?” seems to be a less accurate question than “how does it smell?” because the in-situ source of odour identification is only a part of the smell interpretation.

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What to Do with the Data? Smell Inventories and Categorizations

Works on smell in built environment often settle for inventories of smelling sources evoked during interviews or detected during walks [53, 70, 75]. As the sources of odorant compounds are very numerous in our daily environments, the researchers make syntheses of their inventories in the form of categorizations by types of sources, most of the time, more rarely by smell sensation types (as an example, Roubin [76] distinguishes what she names “heavy scents” and “light scents”). Even if listing sources can have some interests, for example in a patrimonial approach, it is necessary to underline the dangers of categories that, due to their generalizing character, can hide fundamental differences, not only on the sources of the detected smells, but also on their qualitative characteristics and on their in-situ receptions. The categorization of the smell sources of the city of Vienna by Diaconu has been already mentioned. Similarly, Henshaw [14] made odour inventories in diverse cities in North America and in Europe: In the “cleaning materials” category, she integrates bleach and cleansing fluids. However, if it is rather easy to refer to the bleach smell (even if some re-odorised variants exist today) the qualities of the smells of cleansing products vary widely according to countries, in kinds and in intensities (and even in the way they are used). Likewise, the “food” category, often used in smell inventories, can also refer to cooking smells (frying, wire netting, oven cooking) as to stalls of fresh products smells, i.e. smells from fresh fish to fruits, including aromatic herbs and meats… The same denominations can consequently correspond to qualitatively very different smells, it would be without a doubt useful to take into account it in the categorization tasks.

6.6

Interpretations of People Categorizations

Categorization is questioned again within pleasantness or unpleasantness approaches of smell environments. When Henshaw [14: 176] proposes an urban planning intended to value “good” smells and to eliminate “bad” ones, through what she calls “restorative odors”, she divides these last categories into four: wind and air flows, trees, planting and the greenspaces, water and waterways and finally restorative odors from non-natural sources. These categories mix vectors of smell (air movements), potential sources of smell (the water or planting9) and finally only sources of smell from human activities in which she unfortunately includes the atmospheric

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Water in the city is rarely fragrant, let alone when it is moving. In the same way, traditional plantings in the city are traditionally (in nowadays) unscented.

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pollution (while it is most of the time odorless10). Such a categorization does not give useful insights to better understand smell-places links, not only because of the sometime blurry definition of odor it uses, but also because the idea of olfactory pleasantness is highly variable. Probably because the affective properties of objects and contexts play a vital role in behavior orientations, hedonic valence of odors has been repeatedly underlined has very important by in vitro works. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the judgment on pleasantness is more important for this sense than for the others, and field studies on sensory interpretations are nowadays often going beyond such a basic approach. It has to be reminded that the pleasing character varies according to the individuals, depending on genetic variations, cultural backgrounds and conditioning. For example, the degree and nature of differences in perception of smell, relative to experience, had been shown by comparing the responses of Japanese and German subjects to complex life smells in Japan and Germany, where hedonic evaluation (and that of the edibility of the source) were considerably influenced by the cultural context [78]. Odorants considered the most pleasant by a population were also those that were rated as most familiar, in agreement with other studies showing a correlation between familiarity and pleasantness ([79, 80], quoted by Ayabe-Kanamura et al. [78]). In fact, the degree of familiarity plays a key role in olfactory hedonic evaluation, although this is not a general rule since in the same research, for some very familiar odors (dried fish, beer and pine), the opposite relationship was found. The risk in pleasantness and unpleasantness approaches is therefore to see universalities where there are, most of the time, idiosyncrasies. In their attempt to develop a perceptual model for smellscapes, Xiao and her colleagues did take pleasantness as a perceptual quality dimension smellscapes [63]. Using smell walks in an intermodal transit space, they identified nine smellscape pleasantness indicators: intensity (strong-background), purity (pure-mixed), cleanliness (clean-unclean), freshness (fresh-stale), calmness (calm-annoying), liking (like-dislike), familiarity (familiar-unfamiliar), appropriateness (appropriate-inappropriate), naturalness (natural-artificial). The arguable character of pleasantness approach apart, these indicators reflect a classical difficulty of the grounded theory applications: they appear very close to their original place, social and cultural contexts. ‘Freshness’ and ‘cleanness’ indicators, for example, are probably evaluated according to several senses, but are, in the common sense of this cultural context summarized by smell perceptions. The perceptual model for smellscapes resulting in these indicators thus stays very close to the studied place (Sheffield Railway Station and Bus Interchange) and has little chance to be found in other contexts (of spatial, cultural and/or odorous orders). Consequently, it would be not easy to find, in the proposed perceptual model, clues for an olfactory-place design, outside the studied case.

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For example, indoors, 5% only of the compounds considered as pollutants (i.e. dangerous for human health) are odorous [77].

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Nevertheless, some of the indicators are consistent with other observations made using smell walks. The ‘familiarity’ and the ‘appropriateness’ had been indeed underlined as important in-situ smell features in different studies. They are interrelated with two important traits of smell perception: habituation and implicit memories. Familiarity results in previous olfactory experiences and is of great physiological consequence: the more an odor is smelled and the less it is detected. It is the reason why in order to smell the odor of our own home we need to get away from it for some time. The habituation phenomenon would occur to make us detect the olfactory changes only: the less familiar is an odor and the more easily it will be detected [24]. It may explain, with what Köster called ‘implicit memories’, the importance of appropriateness in the interpretation of a place’ odors. Sensory implicit memories of places or type of places combined with the long term habituation phenomenon result in olfactory expectations, or Reference Olfactory Images [40]. As Henshaw underlined: … the context of the area in which a smell is detected can affect how that odour is perceived, with odour expectation and acceptance both having a role to play. The active role of the individual in odour perception is therefore critical, given the potential for odours to be simultaneously experienced differently by different people [14: 111].

This kind of observation highlights again the non-intrinsic hedonic character of odors at average intensities (as strong intensities always tend to have negative evaluations [81]). Analyzing her own smell walks and some olfactory interviews, Grésillon similarly points out: The appropriateness of an odor to a place or situation therefore depends on the multisensory, hedonic and emotional characteristics of the memory awakened by the smelling, and not on the intrinsic nature of the smell and the place [69: 133].

When the in-situ smelled odors do not correspond with expectations, what Köster and his colleagues [36] described as an “olfactory misfit” phenomenon occurs. Henshaw similarly concluded, after many smell walks, that the association between people’s perception of odors and the environmental context in which they are detected: draw on participant’s previous experiences of those particular places and other similar ones: the busy road, the pedestrian precinct, the evening ‘strip’. Through such associations, smells become perceived as appropriate to specific places and times, and therefore they are more likely to be identified, expected and accepted in the correctly associated context, or perceived as ‘out of place’ when they are detected in a non-associated context [14: 139].

This ‘out of place’ phenomenon is therefore completely linked to implicit memories of the place or the type of place. For example, someone who is a London Underground user will be struck by Paris Underground olfactory specificities the first times he or she will enter it, while the common smell features of the two undergrounds will probably be unnoticed. Categorizations after smell walks may, for that reason, go further than smell inventories or pleasantness/unpleasantness approaches, taking interest in smell as events in places, and regarding these events’ modalities.

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‘Smell Event’ Categorizations

The Thibaud Commented Walk Method [67] recommend that after the walks and wile processing the participants’ speeches, a data collection, like metrological records, ethnographic observations… and material traces of observed phenomena, like photographs, recordings, here olfactory and air movements analyze… have to be made. As said previously, odor measurement is not a simple matter. Besides, associated with smell walks in a shopping mall, some olfactory survey, technical analyses and space measurements have been carried out [40]. The olfactory evaluations have been completed by a jury of ten trained people (with Jaubert “Field of Odors” training [82]). Technical analyzes were done to understand the main odor sources’ localizations, air flows and climate control orientations in the place and spaces dimensions, to classically have data on spaces variations (like enlargements, contractions…) (Fig. 6.1). Such a data collection makes it possible to contextualize the walkers’ speeches, in other words to situate them in the perspective of their physical (signal, architectural environment), temporal and social (uses) contexts. The synthesis of the different walks, call “polyglot walk” could then be confronted with olfactory and space data (see fig. 6.1). Using a conceptual tool call “olfactory effect” to analyze the smell situations described by smell walks participants, “olfactory configurations” could then be deduced from the synthesis with olfactory and technical/ space data. An olfactory configuration is the description of interactions between built environment, smell and user sensation, i.e. between technical and/or architectural devices, perceptual and/or user interpretations and the nature of the odoriferous sources and their physicochemical properties. The odor spreads in a built frame, possibly odorous itself, which directs the conditions of the diffusion. The materiality of the building also controls, on the one hand, the behaviors of its users, who are themselves involved in the management of this spatial and technical framework. Finally, these users smell and/or emit the odor, interpret it, and it can, in turn, guide their behavior. For example, there was an unintelligible mix of smells in the mall. This “white smell”, to use Weiss and his colleagues’ term [83], or “fog of smells” as some participants called it, is a scrambling effect, whose specific olfactory configuration can be thus deciphered: odorous sources, very diverse in nature, were present in the building at roughly equivalent intensities (olfactory dimension). These sources were dispersed in space and the indoor air was largely brewed by multiple technical devices, thus promoting the homogenization of the mixture (spatial and technical dimension). Finally, the users could hardly distinguish the subsets of the general olfactory maelstrom, for physiological reasons relating to the ‘whiteness’ of the mixture, or because they did not have the will, or because they were not ‘experts’ of the present smells (perceptive dimension). Another example is initial first contact with the smell, which is an essential moment in everyday olfactory perception. The entrances of the places turn out to be privileged places/moments for the olfactory apprehension of enclosed spaces,

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Fig. 6.1 Smell walks in a shopping centre: smell evaluations (using the field of odors), plan, odor effects and ‘Polyglot Walk’ (The “/” sign indicated a change in speaker (twelve potential speakers —those who have done the walk)) [40]

because the walkers instantly discover at the same time the general accord (olfactory identity of the site) and the specific olfactory sources, close to the entrances. The olfactory component of this configuration of a ‘synecdoche effect’ is very likely to be due to very different smelling distances. In addition to the fact that the general odor background is a mixture from multiple sources not necessarily obvious to distinguish, the remoteness of these sources implies that only some of their components are noticeable, the others being present in too low concentrations. In other words, the odors from the farthest sources are not only mingled, but also distorted, whereas in the vicinity of the smeller there are starting place of odors that may be more intense and also very visible, which is likely to help the distinction and identification of the sources of smell. Considering the way scents are met in-situ could therefore be a way to relate the olfactory interpretations with the material conditions of their occurrences.

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Conclusion

The quest for a more humanistic city goes through a rebalancing of the senses in place design, and smell sensations should be included in this multi-sensory conception. If studies on olfactory apprehension of places are currently too few, they nonetheless show the importance of this sense in the places’ identities. To better understand how places are smelled and, more specifically, to lead to a design of place-odor characteristics, smell walk methods appear very promising. The in-situ and in motion specificities of the method seem very accurate for smell studies. As for any sense, a smell walk takes place as close to the reality of the experience as possible. Because the olfactory interpretation can be different individual by individual, the crossing of different people’s sensations has the potential to make understand the olfactory experiences of the place, in what is shared and also in what is specific of different types of ‘sniffers’ (e.g. tourists or regular users). These olfactory identities of places are not smell inventories in themselves, but ways in which these odors are met and interpreted in these specific places and types of places. This is the second significant asset for walks oriented towards odors: motion is crucial regarding smell. Motion allows renewed sensations for a sense, for which habituation is a very important feature of everyday smell experiences and movements. An ‘in motion’ method is also a way to be less interested in the “what smells?” than on the “how it smells?”, i.e. on the modalities of olfactory encounters rather than on the smells inventories. The in-situ posture and in motion specificities of smell walks really express their potential when olfactory interpretations of the participants are confronted with the physical-chemical reality. Such confrontations have the potential to lead to an olfactory design of places.

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59. Lynch K, Banerjee T, Southworth M (1990) City sense and city design: writings and projects of Kevin Lynch. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass 60. Mondada L (2000) Décrire la ville: la construction des savoirs urbains dans l’interaction et dans le texte. Economica, Paris 61. Dulau R (2004) Deux Lieux, Deux Approches Du Champ Odorant: Pondichéry, Paris. In: Cobbi J (eds) Sentir. Pour Une Anthropologie Des Odeurs, pp 129–48 62. Grésillon L (1998) Le Paris Qui Sent. Les Odeurs Du Quartier de La Huchette. In: Géographie des odeurs, Géographies et cultures. L’Harmattan, pp 179–208 63. Xiao J, Tait M, Kang J (2018) A perceptual model of smellscape pleasantness. Cities 76:105–115 64. Bischoff W (2005) Nicht-visuelle Dimensionen des Städtischen: olfaktorische Wahrnehmung in Frankfurt am Main, dargestellt an zwei Einzelstudien zum Frankfurter Westend und Ostend. Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main 65. Charmaz K (2006) Constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. Sage 66. Kaufmann J-C (1996) L’entretien Compréhensif. Natan, Paris 67. Thibaud J-P (2001) Les Parcours Commentés. In: Grosjean M, Thibaud J-P, Amphoux P (eds) L’espace urbain en méthodes, Collection Eupalinos. Parenthèses, Marseille, pp 79–99 68. Balez S (1996) Les ambiances olfactives dans l’espace construit, mémoire de DEA (post-master thesis). Laboratoire Cresson, Grenoble 69. Grésillon L (2013) Sentir et ressentir Paris. L’exemple du quai du RER B à Châtelet-les Halles. Norois 227:11–24 70. Dulau R (1998) Exploration Du Champ Du Senti à Pondichéry. In: Géographie des odeurs, Géographies et cultures. L’Harmattan, pp 49–58 71. Thomas R (2010) Marcher en ville. Faire corps, prendre corps, donner corps aux ambiances urbaines. Editions des archives contemporaines, Paris 72. Staszak J-F (1998) Pistes Pour Une Géographie Des Odeurs. In: Géographie des odeurs, Géographies et cultures. L’Harmattan, pp 49–58 73. Beer B (2014) Boholano olfaction. Senses Soc 9(2):151–173 74. Lawless H, Engen T (1977) Associations to odors: interference, mnemonics, and verbal labeling. J Exp Psychol Hum Learn Memory 3(1):52 75. Bonnefoy B (1997) Perception et évaluation de l’environnement olfactif: le cas du métro parisien. Thèse, Psychologie, Université de Paris X, ParisBonnefoy, Barbara. 1997. Perception et évaluation de l’environnement olfactif: le cas du métro parisien. Thèse, Psychologie, Université de Paris X, Paris 76. Roubin LA (1989) Le Monde Des Odeurs: Dynamique et Fonctions Du Champ Odorant. Méridiens Klincksieck, Paris 77. Déoux S, Déoux P (2004) Le guide de l’habitat sain: habitat qualité santé: pour bâtir une santé durable. Medieco éd, Andorra-la-Vella 78. Ayabe-Kanamura S, Schicker I, Laska M, Hudson R, Distel H, Kobayakawa T, Saito S (1998) Differences in perception of everyday odors: a Japanese-German cross-cultural study. Chem Senses 23(1):31–38 79. Jellinek JS, Köster E (1983) Perceived fragrance complexity and its relationship to familiarity and pleasantness II. J Soc Cosmet Chem 34(2):83–97 80. Rabin MD, Cain WS, Cain J (1989) Attention and learning in the perception of odor mixtures. Percept Complex Smells Tastes 173–88 81. Köster E (1991b) Tonalité affective et maîtrise de la pollution odorante. In: Martin G, Laffort P (eds) Odeurs et désodorisation dans l’environnement. Tec & Doc, Lavoisier, Paris, pp 61–78

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82. Jaubert J-N, Tapiero C, Doré J-C (1995) The field of odors: toward a universal language for odor relationships. Perfumer Flavorist 20(3):1–16 83. Weiss T, Snitz K, Yablonka A, Khan RM, Gafsou D, Schneidman E, Sobel N (2012) Perceptual convergence of multi-component mixtures in olfaction implies an olfactory white. Proc Natl Acad Sci 109(49):19959–19964

Suzel Balez Architect. She has a Doctor of Sciences for Architecture and is a searcher at the Cresson Laboratory (UMR CNRS 1536). She is currently lecturer at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris la Villette (ENSAPLV), teaching mainly environmental stakes and ambiences perception and design in architecture or public spaces. During her Ph.D. about odor effects in the build environment, she organized smell walks in a commercial center (2001). Since that time, she made some works on dynamic indoor and outdoor places perception, primarily through the sense of smell. As she was trained in olfactory characterization during her Ph.D., she taught it for about ten years to chemistry students (University of Lyon). The ordinary sensory experience, especially in public spaces, remains at the heart of her concerns today, including her activity within the architects and urban planners collective BazarUrbain. She is currently working on an accreditation to supervise research, about smell and the implicit of atmospheres.

Chapter 7

Walking Together: Towards a Common Movement Ekaterina Shamova

Abstract This article is part of an on-going research that focuses on artistic projects that engage their participants in a collective walk. Proceeding from a hypothesis that a relation might be formed which would characterize a collective presence in a given situation that the author calls a common movement, an attempt is made to understand the ways of its development. This relation would be first anchored in an individual immediate experience in a multitude of its aspects (sensory, bodily, kinaesthetic, imaginary) as a manner of being in the world, in the surrounding space and with the others. There would then be a passage from an individual experience to something that is shared by a group of people walking together and that could potentially attest to the establishment of the common. The idea of the common would also embrace the initial demands and intentions on the part of the commissioners and the artists’ protocols. The interweaving of these elements and their foundation in the immediate lived experience in a given situation might help to characterize the complex relation that emerges as a common movement. Keywords Experience


Common
Walk

Referring to the title of the present article, I suggest zooming in on a process that underlies a certain number of projects that propose their participants an experience on a certain time span, under a protocol that embraces bodily and sensory dimensions, the relation to the environment, to the places and ambiences walked through, and to the others. In this chapter, I will speak about the projects of some artists (mostly choreographers or dancers), such as Mathias Poisson and Alain Michard, Robin Decourcy, Myriam Lefkowitz, the group La Folie Kilomètre, who work on these issues in their projects. Table 7.1 briefly outlines the practices of these artists. Basically, the experiences they propose take a form of a walk, and most often this walk is collective. This is the E. Shamova (&) LACTH Laboratory, ENSAP Lille, 2 Rue Verte, 59650 Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_7

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first part of the title—walking together. It brings us to a series of questions. How is a group formed? How do we walk and experience the surrounding world together? The part which is not mentioned in this title but is implied, concerns the experience of each individual participant making part of a collective walk. What kind of bodily, sensory, imaginary experience does a participant undergo? The individual experience and the formation of a group could be articulated with the question of movement. In my hypothesis, there would be an opening of an individual’s experience to something shared with the others which I would call a ‘common movement’. A common movement that would characterize the experience that underlies the collective presence in a given situation, in the immediacy of the relations formed with the space, with the others, and with the experiences proposed. It would rely on the multitude of features of an individual experience (sensory, proprioceptive, bodily, imaginary) and on the ways it ties in with the experience of the others. This notion would be linked to the idea of the common which would embrace a political perspective that is constituted through the different dimensions of the project (the demand of the commissioners, the concept and the protocol of the artists) and relies on its experiential implications (the lived experience and the presence together). I will try to approach this notion as well and the possible ways of its progressive formation. I will analyze several projects based on the materials collected (interviews with the different parties to the project), as well as with the theoretical background anchored in movement analysis, contemporary dance, anthropology, sociology and philosophy, which make part of my on-going research. Namely, I will address three projects which took place in France. They are ‘Promenades Blanches’ [White walks] by Mathias Poisson and Alain Michard and ‘Attention à la marche!’ [Attention to walking!], a collaboration of several artists produced by the Bordeaux-based Bruit du Frigo and the Bureau des Guides from Marseille. The third project, ‘Toile d’écoute’ [Hearing net] by Myriam Lefkowitz, will help to understand the modalities of a one-to-one interaction and the experience that emerges between two people walking together [26–31]. The reasons of interest for this research lie in the observation of the recent attention, both on theoretical and practical scales, to the questions of walking, the issues of bodily and sensory experience, the relation to the surrounding space. In this respect, to name some of the references in the field, the works of Julie Perrin, a French researcher in dance, can be mentioned. She has written on such projects as ‘Promenades Blanches’ (on the question of the relation between experience and its graphic representation) [15], or on the project ‘Walk, Hands, Eyes: a City’ by Myriam Lefkowitz and the elements that underlie its experience [16]. She has also reflected on the aesthetic implications of walking in contemporary dance [17]. Other researchers, such as Elise Olmédo or Mathilde Christmann, have also studied the projects of Mathias Poisson, the latter focusing on his scores [23], and the former on sensible maps [25]. Alix de Morant, art and theatre historian, has studied extensively the contemporary choreographic practices in situ, including some projects of choreographic walks [3, 4]. Marie Bardet, another French researcher in dance, has studied the qualities of walking in the domain of contemporary dance [1].

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Table 7.1 Represented artists and their respective practices Artist(s)

Short bio

Alain Michard

Alain Michard is a choreographer. Taking contemporary dance as a starting point, he works with different media (cinema, music, photography, text). His themes of predilection are voyage and walking, a research of a community, art history and the living memory. Many of his productions take place in public space and are based on the perception and the imaginary of cities and landscapes. He has collaborated with such artists as Nicolas Floc’h, Jocelyn Cottencin, Stalker, and choreographers Mustafa Kaplan, Loïc Touzé. He has also participated in the productions of Odile Duboc, Marco Berrettini, Boris Charmatz, Xavier Marchand (theatre) and Judith Cahen (cinema). One of the vectors of his work is the active engagement in the education of young dancers, but also of non-professionals, students or artists. Source http://www.alainmichard.org/BIO [26] Mathias Poisson is a visual artist, performer and dancer. Initially graduated as a graphic designer, he pursues choreography studies. He works first as a set designer and then as a dancer. He collaborates with such choreographers as Anne Collod, Catherine Contour, Pierre Droulers, Emmanuelle Huynh, Xavier Marchand, la Revue Éclair (Corine Miret and Stéphane Olry), Manolie Soysouvanh and David Wampach. Since 2001, he has been developing the practice of urban walks where he draws on different artistic techniques (drawing, sensible maps, text, plastic arts, dance) both in order to represent the experience of the urban space and to incent it. Source http://poissom.free.fr/?browse=Mathias%20Poisson [37] Robin Decourcy is an artist, choreographer and performer. His first solo performances were influenced by the themes of habitat and voyage, as regarded to a physical and biological being as the first vehicle. Many of his projects take the form of shared experiences with the public and question the norms of social organisation by transforming certain uses of professional techniques, health, economy or spectacle. His work covers a wide range of body techniques, such as contact improvisation, instant composition and continuous composition which he also integrated to create the concept of Trek Dance. Inspired by the Fluxus movement, Butoh dance, walking artists and the history of nomadism, it is a participatory practice that engages through various body states into a dialogue with the landscape settings, natural or urban. Source http://www.documentsdartistes.org/artistes/ decourcy/repro2-9.html [29] http://trekdanse.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_201.html [38] Myriam Lefkowitz is a choreographer. Since 2010, she’s been particularly interested in the questions of attention and perception. She starts a project that engages a participant and a performer in an immersive manner through vision, touch, walking, and liminary states in-between dreaming and idle state. It is in the continuity of this research that she initiates the project ‘Walk, Hands, Eyes: a City’. Sources http://www.leslaboratoires.org/artiste/myriam-lefkowitz-0 [33] https://www.lafermedubuisson.com/presentation/centre-d-art/residences-centredart/myriam-lefkowitz [31] La Folie Kilomètre is an art collective formed and based in Marseille since 2011. Its members come from the horizons as different as live performance, plastic arts or urban design. Their productions often take form of performances, expeditions, walks or workshops, blending disciplines and their frontiers. Rooted in an immersive study of the site and a dialogue, their artistic creations propose a writing of the landscape and engage the public to experiment a situation, thus developing a collective imaginary. The collective is interested in the questions of displacement (on foot, in a car, etc.). Source http://lafoliekilometre.org/accueil/infos/qui-sommesnous/ [32]

Mathias Poisson

Robin Decourcy

Myriam Lefkowitz

La Folie Kilomètre

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The surge of such research seems to coincide with the interest on the part of institutions of different horizons (cultural, municipal, territorial) to associate walking practices with different objectives (revealing the city or the territory, drawing attention to the specificities of some places and their social and geographic contexts, drawing out new approaches to the city planning from an artistic perspective). Just to mention some recent examples, we can name such projects as ‘Academie de la marche’ launched in 2017–2018 by the Magasin des Horizons of Grenoble, the project ‘Les Marches’ in the framework of the biennale ‘Panoramas’ in Bordeaux, the Suburban walks and since recently, the ‘Sentier des Terres Communes’ [Common Land Trail] of the Bruit du Frigo in Bordeaux [39], or the initiatives of the Bureau des Guides on the territory of the Marseille region in the framework of the GR2013 track [30]. Table 7.2 retraces the main features of these projects. These processes are nourished by the interest of artists or choreographers towards these issues in their respective practices. For the purposes of this chapter, I will try to approach two aspects of experiential walks: experience and its interpretation. The question of experience will be regarded as an individual’s immediate being in the world and the ways in which one structures the space by one’s movements, one’s body, one’s sensations, one’s imagination, one’s memory. In my approach, this experience would correspond to the idea of spatiality that reflects the immediate situation of a sensing subject in a certain time and space. I will then try to move on from this individual immediate experience to a one that is developed in a group of people walking together. In the chapters that will follow I will present the projects and their contexts. I will further do some analyses of the individual experience of some participants of the named projects, opening up an idea of an experience that is potentially shared. I will then focus on the intentions of the commissioners and those of the artists suggesting that the ways of conceiving a project presuppose a certain idea of the common. Through these insights, I will try to understand the processes of the emergence of a common movement that would embrace, among other aspects, an individual experience and the ways that the individual and the collective experiences might co-exist.

7.1

Three Projects: A General Description

This chapter will be devoted to outlining the respective contexts of the aforementioned projects. The project ‘Promenades Blanches’ was initially conceived by the artists and choreographers Mathias Poisson and Alain Michard in 2006 in Bordeaux while working with visually challenged people. Since then, they developed a concept that uses plastic goggles that blur the vision and engages the participants on a silent walk in a city. The project which I participated in was held in Nantes in the framework of the festival ‘Primavera: Jours de Danse’ [Primavera: Dance Days] organized by the National Choreographic Centre of Nantes on the 12th and the 13th

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Table 7.2 Some projects of walks Project

Description

Académie de la marche [The Walks Academy], 2018

The Walks Academy was a large-scale project organised by the Magasin des Horizons Art centre (Grenoble) taking walking as the overall theme. By introducing the dimension of walking in a variety of its meanings (as an issue of migration and displacement, as an artistic practice, a social phenomenon, a sport, etc.), the aim was to cover the widest spectrum of questions through a diversity of events (screenings, exhibitions, walks, etc.) and create a cohesion between the artists, the community partner institutions, the audience and the territory of Grenoble. Source http://www. magasin-cnac.org/exposition/5a0edf429b94911657d9066f [34] Les Panoramas is a biennial organised since 2010 in the Parc des Côteaux as part of the Grand Projet des Villes [Big Urban Project of the Cities] of Bassens, Lormont, Cenon et Floirac, on the right bank of the Garonne river (Bordeaux). The 2018 edition was centered on several walks proposed by artists, as part of the program, which spread across the aforementioned territory and also reached the Nouvelle Aquitaine region. The biennial draws on the issues of the urban development and renovation of a controversial zone of the Garonne right bank (Rive Droite) and aims at changing the image of this territory to attract new audiences through a series of artistic events. Source http:// panoramas.surlarivedroite.fr/ [36] The Bruit du Frigo association based in Bordeaux has been developing the concept of suburban walks which are exploratory walks of the urban peripheries. The overall initiative was launched by Yvan Detraz, the artistic director, who identified the places and zones of the urban and suburban territory that represent its diversity and potential for discovery (deserted places, allotments, urban voids, factory sites, highlanes, etc.). The project then consisted in ‘creating a continuity of public places in the suburbs’ [5] by means of displacement and walking. The Bruit du Frigo conceived and produced 11 Suburban Shelters which serve as reference points to connect the metropolitan area of Bordeaux. The Suburban walks are two-day walks that inaugurated each of these artworks. They are also organised in order to permit to connect the fragmented and dissociated landscapes of the territory. ‘Sentier des Terres Communes’ [Common Land Trail] is a new concept developed by the association which covers 300 km through 15 loops, each proposing a one-day walk through different suburban landscapes of the Bordeaux territory. Sources https://xn%2D%2Drandonnespriurbaines%2Dh2bd.fr/ [39] The GR2013 track is a series of itineraries that was conceived in 2013 on the occasion of the Marseille Provence Cultural Capital of Europe. It’s a sustainable project that invites to explore 365 km of itineraries that connect 38 municipalities around Marseille. The project was initiated by the Bureau des Guides with walking artists and hikers and now also unites other actors that develop a poetic approach to the territory and the different ways of inhabiting it. Source www.gr2013.fr [30]

Les Panoramas [Panoramas], 2018 Les Marches [Walks]

Randonnées Périurbaines et le Sentier des Terres Communes [The Suburban walks and Common Land Trail]

GR2013

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of May 2017. It was double-fold: the first walk took place on Friday evening, and the second one on Saturday morning, with around thirty people participating in each walk. The project began with the announcement of the protocol enumerating the rules of the walk and pointing out the crucial elements. The walk was to be made in silence. The participants split in pairs, one of the persons received the blurred goggles. The other person guided the first one. In the middle of the walk the participants exchanged their roles. Both walks finished in the studio of the National Choreographic Centre. The project ‘Attention à la marche!’ took place on the 8th and 9th of July 2017. It was an opening project in the framework of the festival ‘Eté métropolitain’ [Metropolitan summer] organized by the Bordeaux Métropole. The project was co-produced by the Bruit du Frigo (Bordeaux) and the Bureau des Guides (Marseille). This two-day walk punctuated by a night in a camping was accompanied by such artists as Mathias Poisson, Robin Decourcy, Laurent Petit and the art group La Folie Kilomètre. One of the highlights was the passage through the so-called Suburban Shelters [Refuges périurbains] that make part of the suburban landscape of Bordeaux. These artworks were created by artists or architects with the financial support of the Bordeaux métropole and the production and conceptualisation provided by the Bruit du Frigo. Practically, they serve as temporary accommodation in spring and summer time. From a larger territorial and artistic perspective, they make up reference points of the Bordeaux territory and help to link its parts together, through the experiential, aesthetic and discovey potential that they propose [5]. The heterogeneous nature of this two-day walking project should be mentioned. It consisted of experimentations proposed by the aforementioned artists that take on their respective practices, or on their collaborations (for example, between Robin Decourcy and Mathias Poisson), included narrative and fictional sequences, shared activities, the opening and closing ceremonies, etc. Geographically, the almost 30-km track started off on the campus of the Bordeaux Montaigne University and finished near the Dravemont tram station, having covered a large portion of the agglomeration of Bordeaux and both banks of the Garonne river. The last project studied here, ‘Toile d’écoute’, was an experimentation proposed by the choreographer Myriam Lefkowitz in the framework of the study days ‘Promenades sonores et chorégraphiques en question’ [Questioning sound and choreographic walks] that took place at the National Dance Center in Pantin (CND Pantin, Paris region, France) on January 12–13th 2018 [35]. These study days were focused on the aesthetic implications of sound and choreographic walks in terms of situated experience, on the place of walking in relation to the notions of landscape, ambience and attention, the ways in which such projects inscribe themselves in the context, the perceptive ecology of a multimodal experience and methods of analysing it. The project ‘Toile d’écoute’ represented a part of the protocol of a larger project initiated around ten years ago, ‘Walk, Hands, Eyes: a City’. The research behind the latter led the choreographer to question the notions of relation and attention, the processes underlying the perception when walking with the other, the interaction of two bodies and ways of its formation, the place of the urban

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environment in this relation, etc. [24]. Formally, our version in Pantin consisted of the exercises in the dance studio, guided by the choreographer, and the exploration of the city in duos afterwards. Table 7.3 retraces the main features of each project mentioned here. The three projects would differ on a number of points: the goals for soliciting the projects, the artists’ protocols, the configuration of the proposed experiences. The project ‘Toile d’écoute’ was not a collective walk per se, but a walk in a duo. However, the sensory, imaginary, bodily experience in this project, the relation to the other and to the surroundings offers important elements that are coherent with the analysis of the experience in the projects ‘Promenades Blanches’ or ‘Attention à la marche!’. Lived experience: some elements of individual experience as premices for a common movement. Having outlined the frameworks of the projects constituting the corpus of this study, and in order to understand the nature of the collective experience which would presuppose the emergence of what I refer to as ‘common movement’, I would like to zoom in on some examples of immediate individual experiences. Here, I follow my primary hypothesis according to which it seems important to proceed from the very core of experience, which would be first individual, to be able to draw a vision of the overall experience that might potentially be shared, and to understand the processes which underlie the emergence of something that is common. For the purposes of my research, I have interviewed several participants of the projects on their bodily states (physical, sensory, imaginary), on their relation to the environment and its qualities, to the other and to the group. As I myself participated in these projects, it seemed to me that certain elements can be comparable. These reflections raise such questions as: What is the nature of our sensations, our bodily, physical and imaginary experience in a certain kind of a project? If it happens to one person, would it be the same for the others? And then, what would happen to a whole group? Although resurfacing differently from one participant to another, certain elements of various natures (proprioceptive, sensory, bodily) can be identified. For example, a participant of the project ‘Promenades Blanches’ in Nantes describes her sensations that would point to her overall proprioceptive awareness that emerges in the process of walking: ‘I was so glad to rediscover my feet: my feet were talking to me, my knees were talking to me, my thighs were talking to me, everything was in conversation with me, my hand – everything was receptive […] I had an impression that I touched, that I touched with all of my body’ ([47], unedited, author’s translation). Progressively, the participant becomes aware of her own bodily state, which in turn would influence her attention and permeability towards the surrounding world—for which she uses the metaphor of touch. That same participant, in another part of her conversation with me, concentrates on the way that she was hearing the city during the walk and how, it opened her up

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Table 7.3 Corpus study and its key elements Project

Artists

Date and location

Commissioner and institutional framework

Protocol description

Elements of analysis (non-exhaustive)

Promenades Blanches

Mathias Poisson and Alain Michard

May 12– 13th 2017, Nantes (France)

National Choreographic Centre of Nantes; in the framework of the second edition of the ‘Primavera : Dance Days’ (Primavera : Jours de dance) festival

The walk starts with the announcement of the protocol. Then the participants split in pairs where one person puts on the blurry goggles and the other guides them. In the middle of the walk (approx. 45 min.) the roles change

Individual bodily, sensory, kinaesthetic experience One-to-one relation Passage individual experience – duo - collective experienceQualities of the environment Relation to the city and its ambiences/spacesNotion of the form of the groupQuestion of the rhythm Connection between the protocol and the lived experience

Attention à la marche!

Mathias Poisson, Robin Decourcy, La Folie Kilomètre, Laurent Petit

July 8–9th 2017, Bordeaux (France)

Produced by Bruit du Frigo (Bordeaux) and Bureau des Guides (Marseille), in the framework of the ‘Eté métropolitain’ festival

A two-day walk that proposes experiences that originate from the respective practices of the artists, as well as narrative and fictional sequences, staged situations, shared moments

Individual bodily, sensory, kinaesthetic experience Temporalities/ rhythm through various landscapes (urban/ suburban/natural) Qualities of the environmentDifferent protocolsInclusion through the protocolDifferent modes of address Degrees of attention/presence Collective presence

Toile d’écoute

Myriam Lefkowitz

January 13th 2018

In the framework of study days an the CND Pantin ‘Questioning sound and choreographic walks’

On the basis of the protocol of the ‘Walk, hands, eyes: a City’ project

Individual bodily, sensory, kinaesthetic experience Preparatory stageProgressive experienceOne-to-one relation Relation to the urban environmentNotion of attention and of touchImmediate composition

to what was surrounding her: ‘I smiled a lot because I told myself – normally I don’t hear this at all. Even though I’m quite attentive. I take my time to listen. Usually, when I’m waiting in the city, I listen, I like to do it. I like to observe. Now, it was no longer in vain! Everything was allowed to me, I was allowed to listen, as if I had a permission to be fully available’ (ibid.). The hearing dimension was a prominent aspect of this walk (as our vision was obliterated by the blurry goggles).

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In this particular excerpt, the participant might also refer to the overall protocol of the project: being open to the surrounding world because we are proposed to do so, and entitled to, through the organised character of the walk (which would make legitimate our presence in a particular way in the city). I will speak at length about the notion of protocol later in this chapter. The notion of hearing in this respect, could be understood in a multimodal perspective. As I lived it, the bodily and experiential implications of hearing the city were triple fold. On an individual scale, it was experienced in movement and jointly with other senses—hearing something and reaching out towards it, my bodily orientations found themselves transformed, my motricity was solicited in a different way. To enlarge the perspective, in relation with my partner, I could be fully open to the sounds that come to me and be attentive. To address the scale of the relation with the environment, the passers-by, the cars coming and going, a distant sound fading or augmenting, etc. permitted to measure the distance and the volume of the space that surrounded me, the space opening up to me in a progressive, fluid way, orienting me and making me aware of its vastness, shallowness, saturation, etc. These bodily states and sensations would render us more open and available in our experience, in an immediate way, and thus propose the potential of the common. To take on another element of individual experience, the question of the ground and the relation to it was also evoked. It was about the quality of the surfaces, the cladding, the inclinations, and the bodily orientations and postural adjustments that emerge with them. As for my own experience, in the three of the projects it started from my very first step, though it was experienced differently. Being guided by my partner in ‘Promenades Blanches’ I felt a certain lightness, the surfaces and the weight of my steps were somehow alleviated, being led by my partner. During the two-day walk around Bordeaux, for the most part of the walk, the sensation of my own feet and their contact with the ground, were more pronounced, globally. More particularly, these sensations depended on the different temporalities and the experimentations proposed, and were heterogeneous all along the way. For my partner in Nantes, ‘when the ground is even, it’s easier, because I feel sure; when there were stairs or we were going downhill […] it became more difficult’ ([47]: unedited, author’s translation). A participant from Bordeaux told me about his perception when walking on the pavement: ‘In general, the most invigorating moments for me were when we were walking through the forest. The most tiring ones were when we had to walk on the pavement’ ([47]: unedited, author’s translation). Another example links the sensorimotor aspects and the affective relation to the materialities of the city, potentially through a certain feel of the ground: ‘Rather than recognizing places, I recognized things like the entries of the escalators, all those nice sensations that one would have in relation to the urban equipments’ ([47], unedited, author’s translation). This description might as well point to the ground relation (how the surface changes, our relation to our own balance, how it impacts our perception of the surrounding space) as to some other sensory aspects of experience (the particular sound that an escalator emits, the change of level, etc.). Drawing on my own experience in the project in Nantes, I remember walking an escalator with my partner and the sensation of adjusting my

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balance, the slowing down of pace, minor adjustments of posture, and then the sensation of almost floating, augmented by the fact of having goggles and being led by my partner. The relation to the ground and to the surfaces, although treated differently in these projects, might as well attest to a certain bodily and sensory predisposition that develops gradually, in relation to the other or the others, and the environment, which would open up to something that would be shared by the others. Another example of a spatial and corporeal experience of a participant of ‘Promenades Blanches’ in Nantes gives an account of her gradual coming to terms with the manner of movement that was proposed in the framework of the project: she was first guiding, and then guided herself. She told me that this way of entering into the experience was especially important for her. This helped her to establish the relationship with her partner and to adjust her manners of moving and being. This would not have the same effect if she was first guided. This is how her relation to the space found itself evolving, together with her sensations, bodily orientations and states. For instance, when a part of the walk took place in a park, she made a parallel between the openness and the vast size of the space and her desire to open herself towards it: ‘It’s especially when we entered a park with a big green space and in silence that I became aware of the open space in front of us and how pleased I was to perceive it. I wanted to make vast movements and to breathe more freely’ ([47]: unedited, author’s translation). These pieces of experience question the different layers that are intertwined in the immediacy of one’s bodily and sensory relation to the surrounding space and the others, thus forming a dynamic and porous entity, bearing the potential of becoming shared by the others and with the others. By making an accent on its immediacy, I would first characterize the experiences presented here in terms of individual spatiality. To lay the theoretical foundation of such manner of being to the world when a person is walking in a specific space-time, here and now, I will call on the theory of spatiality understood as unity of sensing and movement by Erwin Straus, a German neuropsychiatrist, and present some of its premices. Individual lived experience from a theoretical standpoint. Towards a shared experience. More specifically, this point of view is presented in the book The sense of sensing initially published in 1935 in German. Spatiality is understood by Straus as a unity of sensing and movement of a person, in the immediacy of their presence to the world in a particular time and space, that he calls the ‘relation of totality’ [rapport de totalité (Fr.)]. In my study, I sustain that the individual experience of the participants of the aforementioned walks would be one of spatiality, i.e. a specific presence to the world where the sentient subject is a being in becoming. The unity of sensing and movement should be seen as something that is constantly renewed, and this way of presence permits to be in communication with the world and in the world [21]. For the purpose of this article I will only stress out some aspects of this definition, which help to formulate the idea of what an individual experience in the

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framework of projects of walking is. The individual dimension of the experience is particularly emphasized, and this is something that becomes clear through Straus’s reflections. It is only applicable to a particular person, hence, for ‘me’: ‘the hic et nunc is uniquely for me, in my world, but the two aspects are a specific delimitation of the totality of my personal relation with the world’ (ibid., author’s translation). My question then is: how can I analyze a collective experience, by basing myself on a comprehension of an experience that would be first individual? And then, how can I understand that the collective experience, that of a group of people who walk, would also be that of the immediate communication with the world? In order to find the keys to understanding this issue, I would like to resort to the theory of Tim Ingold, a contemporary English anthropologist, and especially to his notion of correspondence, without insisting on the link between the two theories. I came across this notion in Ingold’s book The Making. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture [10]. In his vision of the world, the anthropologist sticks to the idea that the world would be a ‘continuous process’ [12] where one would rather speak about matters than objects, i.e. fixed entities. Life, then, would be an ‘intermingling which is not formed by connected points but rather by lines that intertwine with each other. It’s a question of a meshwork and not of a network’ [11], author’s translation). To insist on the ever-changing character of the world, Ingold makes a reference to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in what he calls ‘the relation not between matter and form, but between materials and forces’ [9]. He prefers then to speak simply about things in the world: ‘It is about the way in which materials of all sorts, energized by cosmic forces and with variable properties, mix and meld with one another in the generation of things’ (ibid.), and the ways that things appear would be a ‘particular gathering together or interweaving of materials in movement’ (ibid.). Thus, in Ingold’s theory, there is an insistence on the way that things communicate, which would not be ‘the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming. In the phenomenal world, every material is such a becoming, one path or trajectory through a maze of trajectories’ [10]. This is what he calls correspondence. Ingold underlines the fluid character of matters and the dynamic relation between things. In the projects I dwell on, a relation would be formed between a particular person and the world, and between several people in a group and the space around them. This relation would develop through movement and rely on various dimensions (kinaesthetic, proprioceptive, sensory, bodily, imaginary, spatial, temporal). The examples treated above from an individual experience’s standpoint also showed the progressive opening of one’s experience to the other. Would it be one of correspondence? And then, would and how would it lead to a common movement? Opening up to the Other. From Individual Spatiality to an Enlarged Perspective: Case of One-to-One Interaction In order to embrace the two perspectives presented in this theoretical framework, I would like to address the project ‘Toile d’écoute’ by Myriam Lefkowitz. Certain elements of experience that underlie a one-to-one communication in this project

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could potentially characterize the manner of being present to the world which would be that of spatiality as described above, and susceptible of opening up to the common. The experience that we had during this project followed the protocol of the larger project mentioned above, with some modifications. The morning of the experimentation, on the 13th of January, we were about 20 gathered in one of the dance studios of the CND. We split up in pairs. The actual walk in the city was preceded by a time of immersion in the studio. Guided by the choreographer, we gradually entered in contact with our partner through a series of exercises that continuously helped us gaining us some confidence between each other. It was a work on one’s own corporeality, on the manners of being solicited by the world, on the sensations that emerge through this experimentation, and at the same time, it was an experience with the other. Through engaging the touch, the attention, the relation to the space and the objects in it, through moving in the space and with the others, the aim was supposed to make us aware of our own body and the body of the other through one-to-one interaction, considering the implications of the spatial configurations in this process, the relation that forms through this interaction and the environment, etc. This ‘preparatory’ phase lasted for a little bit more that an hour, after which Myriam gave us the instructions for the walk in the city which roughly followed her protocol developed for ‘Walk, Hands, Eyes: a City’. However, the difference with the original protocol was the more limited time of the walk (about 20 min for each participant) and the fact that we were not guided by the trained guides. In fact, in the same pairs we walked out into the neighbourhood surrounding the dance center where each participant guided his or her partner from the studio, exchanging the roles in the middle of the walk. This implied to compose one’s itinerary almost on the spot, being informed by the surrounding environment, its qualities, its intensities, and by the relation with one’s partners. In an interview on her project ‘Walk, Hands, Eyes; a City’, Myriam Lefkowitz speaks about the notion of particular attention. It arises through being with the other and would first be that to oneself and to the other, and then to the surrounding space. She insists on the fact that ‘[…] if the other is not there, I wouldn’t have that much attention towards the environment that I traverse. I think that it’s the relationship that produces this particular kind of attention’ [24], author’s translation). When I asked my partner in walking about the continuity of the experiences that we had, he especially stressed the gradual development of the whole. It was about a certain state of openness, of availability, that is established first towards the partner, and then has its repercussions on what emerges in the city. He ‘discovered to which extent, by a progressive physical contact […], confidence and complicity can be installed. [..] they add the density and the body (in all the meanings of this term) to the urban walk that followed this adaptive phase, this enlarged state of receptiveness’ ([43], author’s translation). To go further with the implications of one-to-one interaction and to approach the hypothesis on the establishment of the common and on the emergence of a common movement, I propose to analyse the project ‘Promenades Blanches’ in this sense. If one-to-one relation formed in ‘Toile d’écoute’ is prepared by the steadily

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Fig. 7.1 ‘Promenades Blanches’ as part of the ‘Attention à la marche!’ project, July 9th 2017, photo by Bruit du Frigo

attunement to one’s partner’s presence in the studio and then a walk in the city in a duo, it would be insightful to compare it with the ways in which binary interaction develops in the project ‘Promenades Blanches’. The accent made in this project is double-fold: it is made on the collective experience as a group, but il also starts with each and everyone’s implication in the process first as a duo. The analysis of this relation in a duo might inform us on the changes in the bodily and sensory experience of a participant, through a presence with his or her partner, but also, on the progressive interweaving of this augmented presence with that of the whole group, and the surrounding world. The Fig. 7.1 represents a moment of the second day of the project ‘Attention à la marche!’ in Bordeaux where the protocol of ‘Promenades Blanches’ was integrated. The participants split in pairs walk through the suburban areas of the city, guided by their partners, but also forming a group that displaces itself as a whole. When a participant of the walk in Nantes was talking to me about her relation with her partner, she mentioned that she was feeling confident and protected by her partner’s presence. It predisposed her to a more attentive and at the same time spontaneous experience of the environment: ‘I will be able to live my experience to the fullest. […] I felt that she was not going to pull away, she was also living this experience fully. I liked that she was giving me the freedom and that I didn’t feel the void, I was secure. It was an exceptional feeling as […] suddenly it was like a magnetic field where all one’s capacities of attention open up’ ([47], unedited, author’s translation). With the partner’s presence, the immediate

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experience is unhampered, the participant feels fully available to welcome what emerges, in a reciprocity with what surrounds her, and potentially the others. In the book on this project, Alain Michard underlines: ‘The walkers dance, a dance of the walkers. Simultaneously, another dance is created, the one of the duo of the guide and the guided. Together, they invent their own bodily language, through contact, in the intimacy of the body-to-body relationship, as well as through confidence and attention. One feels safe protected by the situation, by the goggles and by the reassurance of the guides’ ([19], author’s translation). Thus, several dimensions find themselves imbricated through the walk: one’s own corporeality, the relation to one’s partner and the others, which in their turn find themselves in correspondence with the surrounding space and its qualities. This is also possible with regards to the proposed protocol of the experience and its components, which I will comment on further in this chapter. Proceeding from the analyses of the relation in a duo through these two projects, some insights can be made. There is an idea of a reciprocal exchange between two persons who walk. It seems possible to say that the one who guides gives a certain form to the movements and to the sensations of the other, which, in turn, reverberate in the guide. Such a relationship in constant renewal seems to be corroborated by a notion of ‘blindsight’ [regard aveugle (Fr.)] [20] (which M. Lefkowitz also mentions in her interview cited here) introduced by the French movement analyst and dancer Hubert Godard whose stance on the bodily movement and on the ways in which a body establishes a relation with the other and with the space have much informed my analysis of the lived experience from a kinaesthetic and sensori-motor point of view [6, 7]. According to him, there exists a mode of vision that wouldn’t try to name what one sees, but would rather open up to the world: ‘the blindsight is the one that helps to engage completely in the things of the world before giving them a fixed interpretation’ ([20], author’s translation). Godard links the blindsight to the relationship with the other, in order to welcome the other assuming one’s own corporeality: ‘[…] to let the other person enter in you. […] I cannot but only perceive in my own body the influence of this vision of the other […]’ (ibid., author’s translation). There would be a porosity in this openness to the world that a blindsight allows to experience in one’s connection to the other. I would argue that such kind of relation would open up to the notion of spatiality, as I defined it here, in the immediacy of the communication with the other that passes by one’s own bodily, sensory and imaginary states. Further questioning would be to understand what the implications are of this way of being as to the collective experience. How can we then characterize the emergence of what we have called a ‘common movement’? Through the permeability between the two people a relation is established with the surrounding space and manners of being together in the environment, which, in turn, is a reciprocal relation. As the researcher in dance Julie Perrin puts it, ‘the displacement serves the sensible experimentation and the way that I’m walking tailors my perception of the environment, and vice versa’ [16], author’s translation). I would argue that the relation that is formed through movement and through other dimensions (sensory, proprioceptive, bodily, imaginary, spatial) when the two

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persons communicate with each other, with the surrounding space and the world, would be that of correspondence, as in Ingold’s definition. ‘The hand is the interface by which the two bodies are in sync, […] as they walk side by side, at times in unison […] Through the mediating hand, the urban body in which we find ourselves immersed touches and traverses us in turn’ [22]. It would only be possible through an immediate communication of the two people between them and with the world.

7.2

Establishing the Common, Towards a Common Movement

The pieces of analyses of the individual experience and its elements in the projects that constitute my corpus study have pointed to a certain perspective that would presuppose, in the ways of one’s presence to the world, the gradual installment of something that could potentially be shared by and with the others. Further, in the framework of a collective presence in a space-time of a particular project, something that I called a common movement, might be formed. It is now important to see the formal perspective of these projects that includes the demands of the commissioners and the protocols and intentions of the artists. In my hypothesis, we can identify an intention of the common in these which would complement the emergence of a common movement as part of the immediate individual and collective experience. In order to lay the theoretical framework of this reasoning, I will first introduce some prerequisites as to the idea of the common.

7.2.1

Towards a Definition of the Common

I will propose two (non-exhaustive) perspectives: the one that considers the notion of the common and the landscape from a sensitive perspective, and another that addresses the common from a socio-political point of view. One of the 2018 editions of the journal ‘Carnets de paysage’ was entitled ‘Paysages en commun’ [Common landscapes]. According to Jean-Marc Besse, the French philosopher, this edition aims at responding several questions, namely: in ‘which way the landscape can be considered as being part of what is called ‘the commons’?’ and also, ‘in which way does the landscape fall within a political interrogation on the construction of what is called ‘the common’?’ [2], author’s translation). Some points seem to be coherent with my reasoning, as, for example, referring to the landscape as the commons by the experience that it proposes: The landscape corresponds to an ensemble of sensory contacts (visual, olfactory, acoustic, tactile) that we have with the surrounding world. And the quality of these contacts […] plays a decisive role in what we can call a ‘good life’ for the humans. The sensitive

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experience of landscapes is part of the commons, in a strict sense of this term: it’s non-exclusive (everyone can have access to it), but it’s rival, and so the question of the politics of the sensitive arises. It means the reflection on the organisation of sensory conditions of an individual and collective existence of humanity (luminosities, sonorities, etc. are part of the questions that planners have to deal with). (ibid., author’s translation)

The question of the common touches on the nature of the experience with the surrounding space, and potentially with the others, and in this it would join my reflection on the question of individual spatiality and the ways in which the immediate individual experience could become part of something that would be shared collectively. Another point is raised—that of creating the specific conditions for the experience. That might come in line with my hypothesis on the demand of the commissioners and the artistic protocols that might influence the construction of the common. The definition of the common, in a politico-sociological sense, states that it would ‘be fundamentally a work of the common by an effort of thinking and of action essential […] to constructing an inappropriable reality that is accessible to everyone, according to democratically established modalities’ [13], author’s translation). To continue, ‘when the ‘common’ starts to designate the desire of the individuals to get together in order to develop, in an autonomous manner, their life project and activities, this common never stops being experimented’ [14], author’s translation). The author insists on the common that would be an open entity governed collectively through the ways that are always adjusted, in continuous development. This ever-changing dimension of the common might be potentially explored in the projects that are dealt with here. In joining the two aforementioned perspectives, the basis can be laid down as to the exploration of the common in the presented projects, and to approaching the possibility of the emergence of a common movement. It would have to deal with the intention of the common, as I hypothesized it, in the ways of putting people together (on the part of the commissioners) in order to propose them something (protocols developed by artists). It would be the immediate experience, both individual and collective, through a multitude of its dimensions (kinaesthetic, bodily, sensory), with the surrounding space and the others.

7.2.2

Commissioners’ Perspectives

As I suggested, in the initial construction and choices for the project there would already be elements that tailor the eventual experience of the participants. These choices might potentially contribute to the establishment of the common. The project ‘Promenades Blanches’ in Nantes was held as part of the festival ‘Primavera: Jours de Danse’ organized by the National Choreographic Centre in Nantes. This edition was primarily open to the city and proposed the public the exploration of the city by movement. With this, the organizers of the festival wanted to show the openness of the centre and its connection with the city, to attract

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those who wouldn’t go to a dance performance, but rather do something in the city ([46], unedited, author’s translation). In her conversation with me, Erika Hess, the co-director of the choreographic centre, underlined that the notion of sharing [partage (Fr.)] is at the core of the activities of the centre, that also goes in line with the politics of its new director, Ambra Senatore (ibid.). The commissioners envisaged a number of choreographic interventions in the city, ‘Promenades Blanches’ being one of them. They wished to create the conditions for the inhabitants of the district around the centre, as well as the city, for a hazardous encounter with an artistic intervention in one’s street, making it part of their everyday life (ibid.). And for this, there was also an intention of proposing something that could be shared by a group of people. In Bordeaux the context of the project was different, but the intention of proposing a project that could be shared and that would take place in a specific territory was one of the main concerns of the commissioner’s demand. It should be mentioned that a program of the rediscovery of the urban and suburban territory of Bordeaux is already in place, and makes part of the larger socio-political intentions of the Bordeaux métropole (a governing body that administers the city of Bordeaux and the adjacent municipalities). Some of these initiatives take place around the Suburban Shelters in the framework of the Suburban walks conceived and organised by the Bruit du Frigo association. But, according to Clotilde Pascaud, head of large-scale events, metropolitan amenities and Suburban shelters department, and the commissioner from the Bordeaux métropole, these artworks are more often perceived as a place where one can come and spend some time, and not as landmarks of an itinerary to discover the territory ([45], unedited, author’s translation). The idea was to make this territory visible, and the question that defined the choice of an artistic dimension was: how to connect the different parts of the territory, how to create a mobility? (ibid.) With the initial call for 200 persons, there would be an attempt of establishing a relation between the people and the territory, the conditions for a collective presence, during the time of the project. Both the commissioners and the organizers, when proposing an itinerary, wanted to give a diversified overview of the territory—‘urban, suburban, natural sequences’ [44]. One of the obligatory aspects was to walk on both banks of the Garonne river: the Rive Gauche, and the Rive Droite which is less known and more natural. According to Clotilde Pascaud, the goal was not to see the ‘beautiful’ landscapes, but to provide the participants with an ‘exhaustive’ overview of the territory ([45], unedited, author’s translation). Such choice raises a question of the rhythm that would play on the relation with the spaces, on the temporality of experience, and on the immediate presence with the others.

7.2.3

Artists’ Perspectives

Lets now address the artistic protocols. I previously supposed that the ways in which the project is conceived might potentially create the prerequisites of the

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common. On the web-site of Alain Michard, we read the following description of the ‘Promenades Blanches’: The city itself is the main material for the performance for which the public is invited to experiment a sensitive reading of it: long, silent and collective walks in the city through a very simple but strong device enable the participants to open a new imaginary. The walkers become a cohesive group connected to the body language. It is an intense experience, both intimate and collective [26].

The walks that are proposed by the artists engage in an individual way, at the same time aiming at a collective experience, through a sensory exploration of the city augmented by blurred goggles. Furthermore, a ‘cohesion’ of the group would be anchored in bodily experience. The choreographer uses the term ‘collective’ to designate the intention behind the project. How, then, do we slide from the individual to the common, as our hypothesis formulates it? What are the prerequisites for an emergence of a common movement in the ways of conceiving and leading the project? Some insights into the development of the protocol might suggest this shift. Mathias Poisson told me about the evolution of the project since its beginning in 2006 and the ways in which the artists started to use choreographic figures in their walks. How, through the introduction of choreographic figures, the artists can think the ‘form of a group’ ([40], unedited, author’s translation). It would be exemplary of how a group can be represented and how an experience of a group can be thought of. It has to do with the surrounding space, its qualities and the relation to it, and with the ways of moving in this space together. So, one of the ways of forming a group might be that of giving it a form—would it be aligned or dispersed, would it be a circle, would it be a slow walk or a run, would it be a reverse walk or not. If a certain form is given to a movement of a group, will it also be something that informs a common movement? The question of the form of a group is also related to its size. M. Poisson spoke about a ‘phenomenon of a group’ that can arise with a certain number of participants: ‘Between 15 and 23 persons is the ideal number.[…] We can do farandoles in the city, we can form a line, we can move backwards, intermingle, stretch out. It creates collective forms’ (ibid., unedited, author’s translation). In my point of view, it might be a partial indication to the ways a common movement can be suggested. I argued that it is something that emerges through an individual experience, but also forms with the others through a collective presence. It would also embrace the protocol of the project and the ways that a collective presence is thought of by the artists. The figures that we could perform together during the walk were a remarkable element for me. Slowly forming a circle in a vast park, being close to the others in silence for a period of time, or aligning in straight line, eyes blurred, in front of a vague city landscape, feeling the opening of this space through the quality of air or movement of wind on one’s skin. The individual bodily orientations and motricity, sensory experience would be unfolding in a particular way because our partner is there and we are in a group. So, there would be a double underlying of this

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individual and collective experience which is also made possible through a specific protocol, the whole susceptible of giving rise to a common movement. To continue with this idea and to draw on the underlying of the common as something in constant renewal, as it was stipulated earlier, the foundations of the protocol can be further analysed. On the one hand, the form of the movement, the experiences proposed are thought of at the stage of the preparation of the project. On the other, they are also addressed in the present, during the course of the walk. To sustain this idea, I would like to speak about the question of the rhythm which could be understood both in terms of the primary protocol and in terms of the immediate experience. There would be first the change of places, atmospheres and qualities of spaces traversed: interiors/exteriors, open spaces/narrow streets, noisy environments/silent sequences, etc. In another sense, the rhythm, as M. Poisson indicated, is in giving the participants successive times in the experience that is emerging. The role of the artists is to assure the progressive stages of the experience, by finding the right balance between what the participants can do and feel and guiding them sufficiently, ‘accompanying them but not helping’ (ibid., unedited, author’s translation). In this respect, the idea of the gradual evolving of the walk might contribute to the reflection on the quality of the immediate individual experience, and on the ways that a common movement ties in with this experience. There would be something of a co-construction of experience, in the present. This idea might also be corroborated by the presence of the so-called ‘flying guide’ during the walk who ‘observes the whole group and transmits the information to the main guide who […] is the one who will decide on the rhythm, on the figures employed and the way they should be performed. […] This is one of the ways to make a group’ (ibid., unedited, author’s translation). I would argue that this kind of relation which is developed through the walk would potentially contribute to the emergence of a common movement. For the project ‘Attention à la marche!’ in Bordeaux, the artists proceeded from their respective practices which envisage the inclusion of the participants in the walk and propose experiences that aim at creating something that is shared. Nevertheless, compared to the project ‘Promenades Blanches’, it was on different terms, due to the size of the itinerary, the duration of the walk, the number of the participants, the passages between different experiences. For example, as M.Poisson puts it, their goal was not to ‘make sure that our propositions should be fulfilled by everyone. It was to accept that not all the people will listen to us and will follow our propositions’ (ibid., unedited, author’s translation). Robin Decourcy, another artist for the project, told me that he was first worried by the fact that there might be a partial implication in the experiences that he proposed, but that he accepted this state of things. In his experiences, a collective aspect is taken into account, through a certain vision of the body and of a collective presence that is potentially shared, and through an idea of a gradual, progressive experience that emerges implying the bodily and sensory aspects, presence to the other, presence in a group [41]. For example, Fig. 7.2 taken during the first day of the ‘Attention à la marche!’ project represents a part of the experimentation proposed by Robin Decourcy that was at once focused on one’s bodily experience and the relation to the others as a group,

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Fig. 7.2 ‘Attention à la marche’, July 8th 2017, photo by Bruit du Frigo

through a series of exercises (to follow a collective movement that does not discriminate between the guide and the guided, to let oneself be carried by the movements of the other, to connect to the bodies of the others n a spontaneous way): Taking into account the number of the participants and the duration of the project in Bordeaux, the artist accepted that the experience as it is envisaged by his protocol, would not always be appropriated as envisioned, or at least, not by everyone: It is my responsibility to propose the techniques that develop […] by a progression of sensory layers in order for all the bodies to be immersed in it. Where the bones, the organs, the whole body, the nervous body, everything helps to become free, in order to get acces to something that wouldn’t be theatrical. So perhaps it was one of the difficulties of this project for me – to be able to put the whole somatic work in place. And with 200 people, it’s not an easy task. ([41], unedited, author’s translation)

The question that I will only outline here will imply a deeper analysis of experiences as they were presented here, and will concern the different modes of presence/attention (being open and present to the experience, but also a whole palette of other temporalities and intensities of one’s spatiality: tiredness, a distraction of attention, absence, etc.) during a project of a collective walk. If we speak in terms of immediate individual experience, will and how these different modes of attention question the idea of the common and subsequently of a common movement? Another question is, how can I qualify the range of these different situations and ways in which they might limit the idea of the common movement as I proposed it here?

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In the proposal of the group La Folie Kilomètre, the collective aspect was also one of the dominant elements. They were working on the logistics of the project as an artistic matter and ensured the preparing of the camping site, the mounting of the tents, the writing of the titles of the itinerary chapters, the distributing of the pages of the road-book, the taking in charge of the welcoming activities, etc. In the ways the artists proceed for their projects, the consideration of the participants as a whole is inherent. It is already inscribed in the protocol. As Abigaël Lordon of La Folie Kilomètre told me, they ‘write it. The way we will welcome people, the way we address them, the way we think the rhythm of the walk, the way we consider them. […] There is an idea of what we share, how each one reacts to what is proposed’ ([42], unedited, author’s translation). This thinking would embrace at the same time each individual participant and their ways of being engaged in the whole, with the others. Also, they ‘propose a framework and let it live inside’ (ibid., unedited, author’s translation), thus insisting on the spontaneous aspect of experience. The potential lack of presence, or attention, was also taken into account, assuring the inclusion in another way. Hence, the distribution of the pages of the road-book or the postcards, putting the tents in the camping in a chromatic circle, in order to ‘be able to address everyone, to welcome each person individually […] which makes that even if it’s a big group, everyone will be part of it in one way or another’ (ibid., unedited, author’s translation). To go back to my questioning on the different modes of attention/presence that was briefly outlined earlier, such factors as the duration of the walk, its contents, the nature of experience envisaged, should be taken into account in further analyses. In case of this particular project, one can not be attentive all the time, in terms of sensory, bodily, kineasthetic experiences. It should be mentioned that globally it was not thought of in this way neither. The project was rhythmic in this sense too—sensible experiences, but also games, fiction, performances, or moments when we just walk. That’s why the overall framework was important—to be hospitable, to be able to address everyone, in different manners. In this sense, the notion of the common movement should at length also be considered throughout these different levels of experience. The indications on the part of the artists and the commissioners and the way they think the question of the group and of the collective experience when conceiving the project, renders it relevant to deepen the analysis of the connection between the protocol, the lived experience and the idea of an emergence of a common movement put forward.

7.3

Conclusion

In this article I have elaborated on the experience in a certain type of projects of walking in its individual and collective dimensions. The three projects: ‘Toile d’écoute’, ‘Promenades Blanches’ and ‘Attention à la marche!’, have been studied from several perspectives. I proceeded from the idea of an immediate individual experience that would also be shared, thus potentially giving rise to a common

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movement. Through the analyses of several elements of such experience in terms of individual spatiality, I proceeded in developing the further idea of something that could emerge as a common movement, through one’s bodily, sensory and kinaesthetic experience, relation to the surrounding space, and the others, during the time of the project. To go back on the question of the individual spatiality in a project of walking, as it was treated in this chapter, I would eventually speak of an experience that is unfolding beyond the simple distance that is walked. It would be an enlarged experience that proposes a dynamic and ever renewing relation with the world, and with the others, in movement. As Tim Ingold writes about the ways of displacement and the experience that envelopes the walker: […] the traveller’s movement – his orientation and pace – is continually responsive to his perceptual monitoring of the environment that is revealed along the way. He watches, listens and feels as he goes, his entire being alert to the countless cues that, at every moment, prompt the slightest adjustments to his bearing. [8]

Such a definition of the relation to the world in movement might dialogue with what Julie Perrin calls a ‘sensitive expansion’ [expansion sensible (Fr.)] as a way to respond to the solicitation of the world (in her article on the ‘Promenades Blanches’): ‘One must lose one’s landmarks and geographic orientations in order to invent a new way of situating oneself. This will no longer be in geographic terms, but in terms of a sensitive expansion, with no destination’ [15], author’s translation). This experience would be the one that unfolds in terms of volume, through a multiplicity of sensations and through the different relations that are formed on the way: the relation to the ground, to the surrounding ambiences, to the climatic conditions, to one’s partner in walking, to the other walkers and the passers-by, to the configurations of the spaces. This expansion would also be imaginary and spontaneous. As Mathias Poisson points out, ‘it’s a floating space.[…] It opens up to those who take their time to observe what they feel in a specific place using all of their senses. Taking one’s time to let the imagination react to the sensations’ [18], author’s translation). This ‘blurry’ space that the artist evokes might correspond to the relationship with the world that is anchored in one’s immediate experience and that would not try to name or to explain one’s sensations, bodily orientations, the visible, the tangible. It would rather mean being present to the surrounding world in an immediate way, this only being possible when the other is there, in a dynamic and reciprocal relation with them, in a state of availability that potentially opens up to a shared experience with the others and with the world. Moving on from this idea, I then proceeded to the definition of what can be considered as the common and which passage exists between the immediate individual experience and the common movement. This reasoning led me to a vision that embraces the initial demand for the project, its artistic elaboration and the concrete experience in a given situation. From the artists’ and commissioners’ standpoints, some elements were identified that would allow speaking about a certain projection onto the collective experience and onto the common, already contained in the initial intention and the manners of conceiving and leading a project. My further interest would be to deepen the reflection on this complex and

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multifaceted relation and to understand how it contributes to the emergence of a common movement, of something that happens to a group of participants, being at the same time an experience of each individual participant.

References 1. Bardet M (2011) Penser et mouvoir: une rencontre entre danse et philosophie. L’Harmattan, Paris 2. Besse J-M (2018) Paysages en commun. Carnets de Paysage 33:5–13 3. De Morant A (2012) Marcher pour voir. Marches et démarches chorégraphiques en milieu urbain. In: Mourey J-P, Ramaut-Chevassus B (eds) Art et ville contemporaine. Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, Rythmes et flux:167–190 4. De Morant A (2017) Et si on dansait en ville? Nectart 4:120–128 5. Detraz Y, Gazeau S, Lanaspeze B, Latherrade F, Lortie A, Maestraggi S, Mahey P, Pascaud C, Pétrillo C, Zimmer M (2019) Les Refuges périurbains. Wildproject, Paris 6. Godard H (1994) Reading the body in dance: a model (Newton A, trans). In: Rolf Lines, October 1994:36–41 7. Godard H (2006) Phenomenological space: interview with Caryn McHose. Contact Q 31 (2):32–38 8. Ingold T (2007) Lines: a brief history. Routlegde, New York 9. Ingold T (2010) The textility of making. Camb J Econ 34:91–102. https://quote.ucsd.edu/sed/ files/2014/05/Ingold-2009-Textility-of-making.pdf. Accessed 13 March 2017 10. Ingold T (2013) The making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge, London 11. Ingold T (2016) La vie dans un monde sans objets. Perspective (1). http://journals. openedition.org/perspective/6255.pdf. Accessed 5 Feb 2018 12. Descola P, Ingold T (2014) Etre au monde. Quelle expérience commune. Presses universitaires de Lyon, Lyon 13. Nicolas-Le Strat P (2014) Le travail du commun: un mot/notion encore et toujours à l’épreuve. Blog de Pascal Nicolas-Le Strat. http://www.le-commun.fr/index.php?page=textesen-lecture-libre. Accessed 17 Sep 2018 14. Nicolas-Le Strat P (2016) Agir en commun/ agir le commun. http://www.le-commun.fr/index. php?page=agir-en-commun-agir-le-commun-2. Accessed 19 Sep 2018 15. Perrin J (2016) Sensibilités hodologiques. In: Després A (ed) Gestes en éclats: art, danse et performance. Les Presses du réel, Dijon, pp 28–38 16. Perrin J (2017) Traverser la ville ininterrompue: sentir et se figurer à l’aveugle. À propos de Walk, Hands, Eyes (a city) de Myriam Lefkowitz. Ambiances J (3). https://journals. openedition.org/ambiances/962. Accessed 10 Sep 2018 17. Perrin J (2019) Des oeuvres chorégraphiques en forme de marche. Repères, cahiers de danse 42:11–14 18. Poisson M (2017) Marcher à la vitesse d’homme. Nectart 4:30–34 19. Michard A, Poisson M (2018) Du flou dans la ville. Eterotopia, Paris 20. Rolnik S (2005) Regard aveugle. Entretien avec Hubert Godard. In: Clark L, Fédida P, Gil J, Godard H, Louppe L, Pedrosa M, Rolnik S, Scovino F (aut), Lygia Clark de l’œuvre à l’événement. Nous sommes le moule. A vous de donner le souffle. Editions du Musée des Beaux Arts de Nantes/Les Presses du Réel, pp. 73–78. https://www.academia.edu/19772699/ Regard_aveugle.pdf. Accessed 15 Mar 2018 21. Straus E (2000) Du sens des sens. Contribution à l’étude des fondements de la psychologie (trans. Thinès G, Legrand J-P), 1st ed. 1935. Editions Jérôme Millon, Grenoble 22. Vicente A-L (2017) Eyes filled with water. Espaces 117:44–53

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Online Resources 23. Christmann M (2015) La partition entre cartographie et chorégraphie, ou l’expérience tracée, June 16. https://partitions.hypotheses.org/199. Accessed 26 July 2018 24. Lefkowitz M (2015) L’expérience (4/5): Faire l’expérience sensible de la ville (presque sans les yeux), 2 Feb. https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/les-nouvelles-vagues/lexperience-45faire-lexperience-sensible-de-la-ville-presque-sans. Accessed 20 Feb 2018 25. Olmédo E (2012) Cartographier les interstices de la ville, 8 May. http://strabic.fr/MathiasPoisson-Cartographier-les-interstices-de-la-ville. Accessed 3 Jan 2017 26. Alain Michard (n.d.) http://www.alainmichard.org. Accessed 5 Nov 2019 27. Promenades Blanches (n.d.) http://www.alainmichard.org/Promenades-blanches. Accessed 5 Nov 2019 28. Primavera Nantes (n.d.) https://accn.fr/calendrier/155_PRIMAVERA-NANTES. Accessed 26 Aug 2018 29. Robin Decourcy (n.d.) http://www.documentsdartistes.org/artistes/decourcy/repro2-9.html. Accessed 5 Nov 2019 30. Le GR2013 (n.d.) http://www.gr2013.fr/accueil/le-sentier-gr2013/. Accessed 29 Aug 2018 31. Myriam Lefkowitz (n.d.) https://www.lafermedubuisson.com/presentation/centre-d-art/ residences-centre-dart/myriam-lefkowitz. Accessed 10 Nov 2019 32. Qui sommes-nous? (n.d.) http://lafoliekilometre.org/accueil/infos/qui-sommes-nous/. Accessed 5 Nov 2019 33. Myriam Lefkowitz (n.d.) http://www.leslaboratoires.org/artiste/myriam-lefkowitz-0 34. http://www.magasin-cnac.org/exposition/5a0edf429b94911657d9066f. Accessed 10 Nov 2019 35. Les promenades sonores et chorégraphiques en question (n.d.) https://musidanse.univ-paris8. fr/spip.php?article1418. Accessed 6 Jan 2018 36. Le Parc des Côteaux en biennale (n.d.) http://panoramas.surlarivedroite.fr/. Accessed 12 Nov 2019 37. Mathias Poisson. Biographie complète (n.d.) http://poissom.free.fr/?browse=Mathias% 20Poisson. Accessed 5 Nov 2019 38. Trek Dance (n.d.) http://trekdanse.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_201.html. Accessed 2 Sep 2018 39. Sentier - s’informer (n.d.) https://xn–randonnespriurbaines-h2bd.fr/. Accessed 15 Nov 2019

Corpus 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Conversation with Mathias Poisson, Marseille, 31 May 2018, unedited Conversation with Robin Decourcy, Pertuis, 30 May 2018, unedited Conversation with Abigaël Lordon, Marseille, 30 May 2018, unedited E-mail exchange with Gilles Malatray, Jan 2018, unedited Phone conversation with Yvan Detraz, 25 Sep 2017, unedited Phone conversation with Clotilde Pascaud, 05 Apr 2018, unedited Phone conversation with Erika Hess, 10 Sep 2018, unedited Interviews with several participants of the projects ‘Attention à la marche!’ and ‘Promenades Blanches’, spring-summer 2017, unedited

Ekaterina Shamova PhD at the LACTH laboratory at the School for Architecture and Landscape Architecture (Lille, France), under the supervision of Pr. Catherine Grout. First interested by the notions of walking and displacement as aesthetic means of expression and artwork production, she has focused her research more specifically on the artistic projects of collective walks proposed by

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choreographers. In her study, she works on the experience that underlies them from both individual and collective points of view. Since 2017, she teaches research methodology for 3rd year students in architecture at the ENSAP Lille.

Part II

Experiential Walk for Representing and Communicating the Urban Experience

Chapter 8

Experiential Media in Urban Design Peter Bosselmann

Abstract Architects and planners trained in the design of cities acquire the skills necessary to represent what exist and what might become reality. However, the richness and complexity of the real world cannot be fully represented, thus the designer is forced to select from reality. If the selection emphasizes the concept of space, the outcome is abstract, like theory, and open to interpretation. If the selection emphasizes experience, representations are equally open to interpretation, but show conditions that speak to the human senses. The historian Rudolf Arnheim has called the gap between thought and sense a deficiency disease of modern man. Some designers have taken up the challenge to create representation that overcome the split between concept and experience. This chapter exams their work, their motivations, the strength and the limitations of their representations. The discussion leads us to knowledge domains of psychology, how we perceive the world around us and how we become cognizant, what we commit to memory and how our perceptions shape our values. The discussion also leads us to methods of representation. To show experience, the designer has to overcome the static nature of representations, not to show the world frozen in time and place, but in motion and through time: representations that take the viewer on a walk. After review of work by Gordon Cullen, Kevin Lynch, Donald Appleyard, Benedikt Loderer and others, the chapter ends with a discussion about response equivalence. The chapter reports on experiments that compare responses to walks in the real world to responses from identical, but virtual walks generated by electronic media. The results reveal the challenge posed by the need for response equivalence and makes suggestions how to overcome some of the limitations.







Keywords Representation of movement Perception of experience Perception of time

P. Bosselmann (&) University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_8

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According to the architectural historian Spiro Kostof [30] designers communicate through images, and that is all they do. Designers rarely build their own designs, others do. Certainly urban designers do not decide if their design should get built, clients, investors and public officials do. Every type of design representation, the visual, numerical and verbal, is an abstraction of what actually exists, or what is intended, and like all abstractions, representations follow their own logic because they are based on a selection from what is whole. As representations they “talk back” to the designer thus cloud the relationship between concept and experience [8]. Experiential media in urban design fall into a special category of professional discourse. Unlike the more common conceptional professional communications, which in their abstract form do not communicate well to nonprofessionals, experiential media help to overcome what Rudolf Arnheim [5] has called a deficiency disease of modern man, the split between sense and thought. Indeed, the distinction in design communication between concept and experience is of ancient and lasting importance. In representing what exists and what is envisioned, the choice exists to emphasize the abstract or the concrete. Abstract communication represents the underlying structure of things, their geometries and dimensions; but the quantities and their distributions remain abstract and do not do justice to the complexity that results from design decision making. Representations that emphasize human experience are more concrete in that they show what it is like to be in a place, to stand, sit or move through space. They show the experience of being alone or with others, to enjoy privacy, or to be on a public stage. Experiential media show the deeper psychological and social implications of design. This chapter focuses on the strength and weaknesses of experiential media as a tool to aid critical thinking in city design. Designing essentially means decision making and critical thinking should be at the heart of urban design. “Creativity without critical thinking can easily be hijacked by non-critical forces. On the other hand, pure criticality alone is insufficient” in addressing how to create better life experiences [4]. What does critical thinking mean in urban design? Critical thinking developed out of Kant’s 1781 seminal work, Critique of Pure Reason. Max Horkheimer, the founder of the Frankfurt School reminds us: “Kant understood that behind the discrepancy between fact and theory there lies a deeper unity, namely, the general subjectivity upon which individual knowledge depends” [23]. The question about critical thinking in urban design is important in the context of this essay that focusses on the motivation of those urban designers who have used human experience as a measure to evaluate urban form and how proposed alterations to urban form would alter human experience. The literature on critical theories varies depending on their origins in different fields, but is united in challenging perceived knowledge. The Critical Theory of Horkheimer’s Frankfurt School maintains that ideology is the principle obstacle to human liberation [20]. Critical thinking tries to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them [23]. Indeed, the influences of Karl Marx’s philosophy on the members of the Frankfurt School were strong; social issues that

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define working and living environments are a direct consequence of class struggle and the production of wealth that formed society [20]. But given the ancient roots of city design, critical thinking must have given meaning to urban design prior to socio-political and economic ideologies that originated in the 19th and 20th centuries. Then and now, designers engage in critical thinking with societal values, but also reason with transactional values. There is no use denying that urban design in much of the world is practiced in a laissez-faire or neoliberal economy. The current usage of the term neoliberal has elevated transactional values to an ideology that claims economic freedom as an overreaching social value by reducing state functions and oversight. Certainly Alexander Rüstov, who coined the term neoliberalism in August of 1938, would question whether the reasoning with transactional values in its current neoliberalist form qualifies as being critical enough. For Rüstov and others at the Walter Lipmann colloquium in Paris neoliberalism was a response to the failed classical liberalism that has led to the world financial crisis of the 1930s [6]. Neoliberalistic reasoning is certainly not critical enough if it does not question the merits of extending the rights given to private interests over publicly defined needs and values based on a social contract that sacrifices some individual freedoms for protection by the state. Apart from critical thinking about transactional values, the need to critically exam all other societal values remains long. It might be the increased frequency of humanly induced disasters due to climate change that will help to re-articulate a social contract, when the state is forced to limit urban development in low-lying coastal areas that are subject to flooding, or in areas prone to devastating fires that have taken human lives. The list includes to this day the need to critically think about the role of cities as hosts to the expansion of the human potential through interactions with others. Equity and equal access, at times brutally suppressed in cities, required critical thinking throughout history. How to create a sense of community remains subject to critical theories because of the need to activate others, when empathy is needed. So is the attachment to places and to people in places. The value of physical comfort and health remains on the list. The value of symbols, cultural, religious or otherwise requires critical thinking. Indeed the list of values is long, it included the stubborn difficulty with the value of better integrating city functions. City design still values the separation of work places from places to live, resulting in ever increasing hours spend commuting and in the contamination of air and atmosphere. For some time now continued economic growth as a value needed critical examination in light of diminishing natural resources. The same is true for the ability to adapt, to repair, to reform and to sustain city form. All items on this list are subject to critical thinking that inform policy debates with the goal to clarify what might be serving the public interest. Designers of urban places interpret such policies through the work they do, and design communication is critical in the process. Different design interpretations are possible, but the role of city design is to demonstrate how policies can be implemented, and to show the implications of policy on city form. Design governance is easily lost in the debate about the reasoning with codes and norms, why they exist in the first

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place and why codes are applied without regard to outcome. Matthew Carmona’s definition of design governance remains relevant: “the process of state-sanctioned interventions in the means and processes of designing the built environment in order to shape both processes and outcomes in a defined public interest” [14]. However, the literature on design governance rarely acknowledges the fact that decision making about city planning and design is based on abstract representations shown to clients in boardrooms, or to elected and appointed officials in courtroom type settings. By nature, such representations portray plans and designs with a strong bias. The bias of the proponent or the opponent, whoever is trying to impress or persuade decision-makers in their task to vote in favor or against. It follows that professional media play an essential role in facilitating, or limiting critical thinking in city design. A commitment to communicate how human experience will be effected by plans and designs involves a larger range of people, who critically exam proposals. Current verdict would be that involving a greater number of evaluators would slow down planning and design processes, possibly be detrimental to the professions, even slow growth. For the environment in general and the people in it, however, a more critical examination of long-term values instead of short-term opportunities would be beneficial.

8.1

Representing Experience of What Exists and of What Could Exist in the Future

I have not combed the world just to make a picture book that can be picked up and put down. The examples are assembled for a purpose. The purpose is to expose the art of environment which, had it been understood and practiced, could have prevented the disasters mentioned. The reason for this book is to reach out to people like you to try to show you what you are missing and to try to implant a growth point of what could be. [15]

For Gordon Cullen the disasters mentioned address the monotony and conformity in the renewal of cities in Great Britain after WWII. The motivation for his work becomes clear through his drawings and photographs that he called general studies. For Cullen there can be art in the environment, because the world around us addresses our senses through experiences that trigger reasoning and emotions. His is a world that can be fun and full of drama. The word experience in Middle English and Old French usage means “a test or attempt”. The current usage is defined as: “the process of getting knowledge or skill from doing, seeing, or feeling things” [17], and has its origins in the Latin word experientia sharing its roots with “experiment” and “expert”. In the post WWII decades, Cullen was not alone in stressing human experience as a criterion for evaluating design proposals for their fit, when decisions about city form are made. To this day, students of city design read the writings of those who theorized about the value of human experience in city design and voiced opposition to the

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functional planning and design theories that resulted in forced regularity, an overly hygienic approach to city design. Kevin Lynch [32] laid the foundations, even more so in his later book on good city form [34]. Christopher Alexander et al. [1], together with colleagues created a language of interconnected value statements in support of human life in buildings, towns and regions, and called such statements ‘patterns’. Opposition to slum clearances, to urban renewal, and to the construction of urban freeways was made prominent by Jane Jacobs [25]. There would be a huge irony in still recommending these classics to current students, should planning and urban design education questions their relevance for today’s practice [10]. Jane Jacobs [26] said it well in her last book: At a given time it is hard to tell whether forces of cultural life or death are in the ascendancy. Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true.

Jacobs makes an appeal to the profession to self-regulate. Back in 1961, Cullen said with his pointed sense of humor: “Until such happy day arrives when people in the streets throw their caps in the air at the sight of a planner (the volume of sardonic laughter is the measure of your deprivation) as they now do for footballers and pop singers, a holding operation in two parts will be necessary”. According to Cullen, the holding operation would last ten to twenty years, then things could possibly improve; but they have not. Back then he said: “The main endeavor is for the environment maker to reach their public, not [only] democratically but emotionally” pp. 15–16.

8.2

Representing the Experience of Movement

Before we leave Cullen, there is the need to remind us that he invented what he called ‘serial vision’, a method to show movement through space in the media of print. Serial vision is a cinematic tool that animates the view in front of the observer through a sequence of line drawings, and when they are read as a row, the observer moves through space (Fig. 8.3). Following Cullen came experiments with notation systems [37] like Lawrence Halprin’s [22] visual language for choreographing movement and meaning of places. Urban freeway construction during the post WWII decades made possible the movement at accelerated speed through urban environments. This new experience of perceiving a city, and structuring its form led Donald Appleyard together with Kevin Lynch and John Meyer to experiment with notations of movement in The View from the Road [3] (Fig. 8.1). However, like with all notation systems, an interpretive key is required to understand the code. In retrospect, both Lynch [33] and Appleyard [2] found their work idiosyncratic, with an iconography too personal for others to understand. The work cited thus far originated well before computer graphics made possible to use the type of eyelevel visualizations now commonly used by professionals.

148 Fig. 8.1 The view from the road. A notation system to represent the experience of moving through space. Early studies of movement by Appleyard, Lynch and Meyer, 1964 (Appleyard estate)

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Early experiments with computer generated movement through city scape came from Peter Kamnitzer [28]. His early cartoon like simulations found significant improvements when interactive simulators became available for military training, automobile manufacturers, and airline pilots, and for special effect studios in the motion picture industry. Such innovations helped the advancement of computational technology in the 1980s [12]. Not until image processing and spatial modeling techniques became available in formats that would no longer require mainframe or supercomputers, which had to be housed in extensively air-conditioned rooms, did city designers benefit from rendering capabilities at a reasonable cost. Indeed, digital technology has improved various driving, flight and navigational simulators, where responses predict real world performances. Experiential media suitable for decision making fulfill a different task; they direct attention to proposed structures in an existing physical and social context. Here observers judge both the proposed and the existing with their own concerns in mind. Thus, the question, “How good are experiential media in urban design require more nuanced answers. Technology alone has not improved critical thinking about design and planning proposals. The widespread availability of digital visualization techniques have chiefly responded to the necessity to sell designs and plans. The rendered views taken at eyelevel, or somewhat from above, generally show well-dressed people under blue skies in settings that are too clean to be true. It is not the aim of this chapter to trace the use of experiential media in the marketing of design. The focus remains on the strength and weaknesses of experiential media as a tool to aid critical thinking in city design. The Swiss author Benedikt Loderer developed a graphic system that explains walks through the ‘urban rooms’ of Fabriano, a mediaeval town in the Marche Region of Italy. Using a hybrid of axonometric and aerial perspectives to look into the urban fabric from above, he clearly communicates the three dimensional spatial definition of urban space and the size of a person within it as this person moves from space to space [31]. Two authors from Sheffield, in the United Kingdom, authored a book entitled “Experiential Landscapes” [38]. They were interested in using experiential media to show the locational qualities of space in order to clarify when the properties of space are worthy of the label ‘place’. They discover the importance of moving from place to place through episodes of non-place. For places to have an emphatic locational character there needs to be a transition with weaker locational character. The experience of a region was recently captured for its policy implications by Fritz Palmboom [35]. These sources open up the potential for experiential media to critically thinking by those who produce designs (Fig. 8.2). In the following I want to return to the use of experiential media in the evaluation of designs and plans by others, decision makers in private and public settings. The first critical evaluation of experiential media was carried out at a laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The laboratory was established to address the question: to what extent is it possible to simulate a true experience of the real world through visual media; and would viewers respond to a simulated experience as they would respond to a direct experience of the real world. The first part of the question can easily be answered with ‘no’. Experiential media can only partially

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Fig. 8.2 a Before. b After. It is possible to imagine the quality of human experience through a type of drawing that gives sufficient information about the three dimensional world by folding open two axonometric views. The drawing was done to show a street design that can balance the needs of all users, pedestrians, cyclists, public transport, car traffic, and the protection of local residents, a complete street

replicate an experience of the world around us. A positive answer to the second part of the question about response equivalence is a prerequisite for critical thinking in urban design. The results of the Berkeley experiment showed that the responses from viewers who saw a 22 min simulated drive were nearly equivalent to the responses from viewers who saw a movie taken of the same drive in the real world, and those who took an actual drive of the same length through the same environment. The important caveat in this comparison was that such equivalence could only be established for subjects who had a first-time encounter with the environment they saw, simulated or in reality. Responses from subjects who knew the area were colored by an understanding of its context, largely the social context [12]. Donald Appleyard who conducted the experiment together with the environmental psychologist Kenneth Craik summarized the criteria for simulations suitable in the review of planning and design proposals: simulation should be realistic and

8 Experiential Media in Urban Design Fig. 8.3 Simulated drive. Views of a simulated drive produced at the Berkeley simulation laboratory after the validation study from 1972. Here an imaginary viewer follows a truck through a suburban neighborhood. In order to create the sense of progression, the reader should read the sequence of images from bottom to top

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accurate; viewers should be able to evaluate them with their own concerns in mind. Simulations should be comprehensible, engaging, cheap and flexible. Ideally, simulations should be in motion (Fig. 8.3). Clearly the experiment with views in motion, when compared to still views, revealed an increased understanding of the context that is shown. Cinematographers distinguish between objective and subjective camera recordings. They use the term ‘objective’ when a camera takes the role of an outside observer; as opposed to the subjective camera recording, where the viewer becomes a ‘subject’ as the camera records the movement through space from the viewer’s perspective (Fig. 8.2). This engages the viewer; the viewer becomes part of the scene [27]. But there are limitations to a continuous recording of a ‘subjective’ eyelevel view. The field of view of a single station point perspective is too narrow when compared to bifocal vision. Of course, a wide angle view can be employed, but that changes distance perception; objects appear further away than in reality. This observation is true for views generated through computer algorism or recorded in analog fashion through an optical lens. Linea perspectives from a single station point are a convenient geometric fiction invented during the Italian Renaissance. Multiple station point perspectives come closer to human vision because in the visual perception of a scene in the real world, the eyes scan the scene in front creating a new perspective with each movement of the eyes. By doing so the eyes scan spatial references that provide the human mind with a more accurate perception of distances to the objects in view [21]. Multiple station point perspectives have been used to aid judgements about the true scale of proposed structures (Fig. 8.4). For example, an observer can make a more accurate judgement about spaciousness or confinement, the private or public nature of a space in view [9, pp. 250, 256]. Multiple station point perspectives recorded in continuous motion, however are too costly for professional applications in planning and design. Such techniques remain limited to motion picture productions to be shown in specially equipped theaters. Instead, the early professional simulations used a convention that the filmmaker John Dykstra called ‘anticipating a turn’, which he defined as a shift of the perspective towards a change of direction prior to executing a shift along the movement axis. This equates to a movement of the head in anticipation of the body’s movement prior to making a turn [16]. If done correctly, the viewer’s position in front of a monitor or screen remains stable with respect to the human body’s kinetic sense. For the viewer the movement is virtual, but unless carefully controlled could lead to a loss of bearing and can result in motion sickness. The experiential media of the design and planning profession are still limited to those available for print or for projection onto screens. Shigeru Satoh [36] reports on how community groups could become active by watching simulated walks in the Ginza districts of Tokyo. The group members realized they could visualize the future of their district at a time when the owners of the large department stores started to initiate extensions to the floor-space and height of their buildings. On the narrow side streets of the district visitors of the Ginza encounter a highly varied building typology accommodating small high-quality stores that orient towards the narrow streets. Through the simulated walks, landowners and local merchants

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Fig. 8.4 Two alternative methods to show the true size of a monumental building. a The Multiple Station Point Perspective clarifies that the human mind is tasked to combine 12 perspectives to comprehend the true size of the building. b A red horizon line and the size of known objects indicates the true size of the building. (Color figure online)

realized the interdependence of the two Ginza environments, small and large. The merchants argued successfully with the property owners that the economic vitality of the district depended on a symbiosis of the large department stores and the small specialty shops. These meetings were carried out in a single room; site specific concerns could be discussed in the presence of computer screens that showed the simulated walks and a scale model of the Ginza district that allowed participants to model the consequences of their discussions in a site specific manner.

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The author [11, pp. 130–131] recorded a walk using 30 eyelevel drawings through the historic center of Jiangmen, a town in Pearl River Delta of China. The work was done so town planners could visualize how infill of vacant sites with new construction could improve the historic center instead of the demolition of the entire district that had earlier been considered. Earlier, the author used the same technique [8, pp. 51–89] to record a 4 min walk through Venice through 39 sequential eye level drawings that allow the reader to ‘walk’ down lanes, cross squares, and climb up and down bridges to cross canals. This is accomplished by asking the reader to hold the book closer to the eyes than usual and to scan the drawing from bottom to top in order to experience a sense of progression through space. He then superimposed the length of the Venice walk onto plan drawings to compare the length of the Venice walk to 14 different urban settings. In these different urban settings the perception of time appeared longer or shorter than in Venice, or as Jan Gehl [19, pp. 126–127] concluded from the experiment, there are longer and shorter minutes in people’s experience of time depending on urban places scaled to human dimensions and the number of people encountered on such walks.

8.3

Laboratories Dedicated to Reasoning with Change

Not only did the call for accurate and realistic experiential communication of plans and designs originated at a time of technological improvements, but also at a time of growing environmental awareness. In cities like San Francisco, the call for experiential media came at a time of revolt against top- down planning. The mid 1960s and throughout the 1970s citizen groups rebelled successfully against the completion of urban freeway networks that threatened to divide communities. Citizens, not professionals or politicians started a movement that led to the prevention of land–reclamation around San Francisco Bay. Citizens voted in favor of limits to high-rise construction in the city’s financial district. Professionals and politicians had no choice, but to respond to well organized community groups. Such groups were started by middle and upper class citizens, favored folk as Richard Walker [39] called them, but concerns for equity and environmental-friendly urban districts have spread through the social strata as voting patterns suggest. The point being that Bay Area politicians could count on widespread support for introducing laws that bridle freewheeling capitalism, but without community support the call for greater transparency in design and planning governance would not have been heard. The experiment with experiential media that are accurate, realistic and evaluable would have remained a San Francisco Bay Area phenomenon had it not been adapted by academics who visited from other universities. Since 1991 an Environmental Simulation Center exist in New York City. The center started at the New School for Social Research at the 14th Street campus (www.simcenter.org accessed 11/7/18). Two such laboratories emerged in Tokyo first at Keio University and later at Waseda University (Fig. 8.5). Another

8 Experiential Media in Urban Design Fig. 8.5 A sequence of simulated views approaching the Garibaldi Republica development at Porta Nova in Milan done in 2007 (a) prior to construction of the project in 2012 (b). A sequence of simulated views which were done as a composite of real-world photography with images generated from a 3d digital (GIS) model (c). The model was texture-mapped with realistic photography of building facades

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laboratory came into existence at the Milan Polytechnic University in 2007 (www. labsimurb.polimi.it). The fact that the laboratories mentioned are housed at universities is related to an educational mission that encourages critical thinking. The first principle therefor is that simulation should provide the most accurate and comprehensible information possible to assist those who are evaluating plans and designs at all stages in the process. The second principle calls for openness to evaluation for accuracy. The materials and methods used in simulation must be open to independent tests. A third principle applies to assignments when those who perform the simulation work are asked to produce simulations for public hearings. In such cases the laboratory staff members shall not involve themselves in the decision making process through negotiations that would draw them into discussions with proponents or opponents about the merits of what is shown. And finally, all information produced is owned and protected by the governing board of a university. The information shall not be used selectively nor shall it be distorted in any form. All information is subject to Public Record Acts and Freedom of Information Acts, and has to be disclosed fully upon request. Together these statement might appear obvious to the reader, but every single one has been challenged by those who have used the services and have tried take advantage for their own benefits (Fig. 8.6).

8.4

Conclusions

Despite significant improvements to computational and communication technology the combined use of concept and experience in design communication is still underdeveloped; but from the beginnings of geographic information science (GIS) there has been the hope for a better union of conceptional and experiential thinking. The cartography presented in the 1989 Atlante di Venetia was a forerunner of a computerized geographic information system now commonly used for referencing a multitude of activities, services and natural conditions to the spatial structure of cities and landscapes. When the new cartography came into existence the authors of the Venice atlas anticipated how the new tool might change the modes of planning and city design: “It might help to bridge a split in the history of town planning which goes back more than a century,” wrote one of the authors in the introduction. She was referring to the split between those who are guided in their work by the quantifiable aspects of cities, seeking the best standards possible for activities and structures, and those who are guided by an advocacy for the visual world, by their understanding of cities as formally complete wholes [13]. The split has of course been bridgeable with or without geographic information systems (GIS), but authors claimed that the then new GIS cartography made “a useful contribution to the discourse of concept and experience by helping clear up not only professional uncertainties, but also the cultural doubts underlying the split” [24].

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Fig. 8.6 (continued)

JFig. 8.6 Critically thinking about the future of a landscape. A story told through images of an

experience in an Ontario, Canada landscape, 30 miles from Toronto. The drawings show the transformation of the landscape over time from the past to the future. The first three views, 1, 2, 3, should be read from the bottom to the top of the column. They show the experience when walking through a former agricultural landscape that was abandoned when plans were made for a new airport for Toronto. Farmers were compensated and moved away, and land transformed slowly but surely back to a primeval state. When plans for the airport were abandoned in 1975, for a period the neighboring town pursued plans for the development of a new town. Drawings were made for the Seaton Airport Lands competition in 1994. In view 1, 2, 3 the viewer walks towards a ravine shown by the dip in the landform and the tall dense tree canopy in the distance. In view 4 the lane through the overgrown bush landscape is replaced by a new road (never built) in the location of view 1 (note the tree to the right; the same tree also appears in view 1). Plan views 5, 6, and 7 show the transformation of the landscape from its former agricultural use to the beginnings of a town with a new school, and a town at a later stage. Due to major public opposition, none of the designs were ever built, instead the Canadian government designated the area shown here as the Rouge National Park in 2015. The lane shown in its 1994 condition, views 1, 2 and 3 can still be walked. The figure should read from bottom to arrow

Combining concept and experience in representations improves the accessibility of project information and makes proposals for change open to public evaluation. But the combined representation can also be employed to communicate proposed changes more persuasively and this raises important questions about the

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documentary quality of representations, the environmental values and biases representations encourage or discourage. The authors of the Venice Atlas agreed: “representations are never objective: as a purposefully constructed system of information they are a tool of power for those who promote them. But in the case of the Atlas the power wishes to render itself explicit – a form of power that is both self-aware and open to verification” [18]. The combined conceptual and experiential media invite critical thinking.

References 1. Alexander C, Ishikawa S, Silverstein M (1977) A pattern language. Oxford University Press, New York 2. Appleyard D (1977) Understanding professional media, issues, theories and a research agenda. Hum Environ Behav. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-0808-9-2 3. Appleyard D, Lynch K, Meyer J (1964) The view from the road. MIT Press, Cambridge 4. Araabi HF (2018) Schools and skills of critical thinking for urban design. J Urban Des 23 (5):763–779. https://doi.org/10.1080/13574809.2017.1369874 5. Arnheim R (1969) Visual thinking. University of California Press, Berkeley 6. Boas TC, Gans-Morse J (2009) Neoliberalism: from new liberal philosophy to anti liberal slogan. Comp Int Dev 44(2):137–161. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116=009-9040=5 7. Bosselmann P (1993) Dynamic simulations of urban environments. In: Marans R, Stokols D (eds) Environmental simulation, research and policy issues. Plenum Press, New York, pp 279–302 8. Bosselmann P (1998) Representation of places, reality and realism in city design. University of California Press, Berkeley 9. Bosselmann P (2008) Urban transformation, understanding city design and form. Island Press, Washington, DC 10. Bosselmann P (2018) Adaptations of the metropolitan landscape in delta regions. Routledge, London 11. Bosselmann P (2018) Kevin Lynch and his legacy on teaching professional planners and designers. J Am Planning Assoc. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2018.1528172 12. Bosselmann P, Craik K (1987) Perceptional simulation of environments. In: Bechtel R, Marams R, Michelson W (eds) Methods in environmental and behavior research. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, pp 184–185 13. Calabi D (1989) Atlante di Venezia (Heffer C, Kerr D Trans). Marsilio Editori, Venice 14. Carmona M (2016) Design governance: theorizing an urban design subfield. J Urban Des 21 (6):705–730. https://doi.org/10.1080/135774809.2016.1234337 15. Cullen G (1961) Concise townscape. Architecture Press, London 16. Dykstra J (1977) Miniature and mechanical special effects for star wars. Am Cinematographer (58), 702–705, 732, 742,750–757 17. Encarta (1999) World English dictionary. Bloomsbury Publishing, London 18. Feletti E (1989) Atlante di Venecia (Heffer C, Kerr D Trans). Marsilio Editori, Venice 19. Gehl J, Svarre B (2013) How to study public life. Island Press, Washington, DC 20. Geuss R (1981) The idea of critical theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 21. Gibson J (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin, Boston 22. Halprin L (1969) Motation. In: Progressive architecture, pp 123–133 23. Horkheimer M (1982) Critical theory: selected essays. Continuum, New York 24. Ibid. (n.d.) 25. Jacobs J (1961) The death and life of great American cities. Random House, New York

8 Experiential Media in Urban Design 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

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Jacobs J (2004) Dark age ahead. Random House, New York Jacobs L (1970) The movie as medium. Farrar, Straus and Giraux, New York Kamnitzer P. (1969) Computer aid to design. Architectural Des:507 Kepes G (1956) The new landscape. P. Theobald, Chicago Kostof S (1977) The architect: chapters in the history of the profession. Oxford University Press, London Loderer B (1987) Stadtwanderers merkbuch. Callwey, Munich Lynch K (1960) The image of the city. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Lynch K (1976) Managing the sense of a region. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Lynch K (1981) A theory of good city form. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA Palmboom F (2018) IJsselmeer, a spatial perspective. Vertil, Amsterdam Satoh S (2007) Creating community through matchidukuri with the help of visual simulation. Territorio 24–26 Thiel P (1962) Experiment in space notation. Architectural Rev 131:326–329 Thwaites K, Simkins I (2007) Experiential landscape, an approach to people, place and space. Routledge, London Walker R (2007) The country in the city. University of Washington Press, Seattle Wright R, Bosselmann P (1996) The transformation of a landscape. Places 10(3):26–37

Peter Bosselmann works nationally and internationally on urban design and planning projects. He established urban simulation laboratories in Milan, New York City, and Tokyo, modeled after the Berkeley laboratory that has been under his direction since 1983. His publications have appeared in a wide range of academic and professional journals. His former book, Representation of Places: Reality and Realism in City Design, University of California Press, found much acclaim among scholars in fields as diverse as history, psychology, journalism, geography, film, architecture, and planning. Bosselmann has produced numerous educational films about urban design issues in San Francisco and New York City; memorable ones include Times Square, narrated by Jason Robards, and New York’s Upper East Side, narrated by Paul Newman. He is the recipient of numerous design awards, including awards from the AIA, ASLA, and ACIP for his work in San Francisco, an Urban Design Institute Award for his work in Oakland, California, recognition for the Seaton Airport Lands design competition in Ontario, Canada, two Progressive Architecture Awards for urban design research for work in San Francisco and on the Toronto Downtown Plans, an award from the American Planning Association, and an invited exhibition of his work at the Triennale in Milan, Italy. Bosselmann teaches studios and seminars in architectural, environmental and urban design as well as design theory and research methods.

Chapter 9

From “la Dérive” to Virtual Reality: Representing the Urban Walk Between Reality, Senses and Imagination Rossella Salerno

Abstract The aim of the chapter is to investigate on different forms of representation for visualizing and communicating urban space experience by walking: for example, the International Situationists collages, the “observational sketches”— drawings quick or more detailed done along the route of the walk—the Gordon Cullen’s “serial visions”, videos and lastly digital tools, like virtual reality, comparing their different features in depicting the environment by views in motion. Such investigation arises from a need of qualitative representations both to describe the real urban space and to visualize changes, visions and project solutions in urban and environmental design projects. In fact, beyond the conventional ways to represent the city on the map—and overall by quantitative parameters—the subjective views, taken along a walk, can merge, perception, memory and imagination, so reconnecting the topographical components to the psychological ones and definitively exploring the relationship between people and places. Keywords Conceptual Representation


Perception
Traditional and digital tools

In such perspective, the different and various ways to represent the urban walk are not only graphic outputs but also vehicle of ideas, views, and practices of the city. In other words, it is possible to look at those forms of representation as conceptual representations, able to see, analyze and describe reality and beyond, and to express both the tangible and intangible in an urban context, employing senses, memory and imagination. So the chapter, assuming such point of view about representation, will take in consideration some traditional and digital techniques, tools and outputs used in depicting urban walks, showing their theoretical background as well. A further consideration about the potentialities of virtual reality will be done, analyzing and comparing their differences in respect of the traditional ones. As conclusion, the chapter intends to focus on the usability today of such forms of representing urban walks, the traditional and innovative ones, or their possible R. Salerno (&) Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_9

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combination, in order to better express experiences and visions of the city. This contribution intends to investigate the main graphic forms closely connected to the urban walk. This will be achieved by analysing their communicative characteristics, their use in the field of urban projects and, last but not least, by attempting a comparison between their common and divergent expressive potential using traditional and digital techniques. The “subjective” representation, which characterises the crossing of a city, expresses a predominantly qualitative analytical dimension of the objects, of the relationships and of the memories that places arouse. This involves the senses and activates the perception in the broader spectrum of functionalities, therefore not only visual but also olfactory and tactile. The consequence is indeed a subjective reading, individual and sometimes capable of provoking imaginative processes, which can sometimes complement, other times oppose, the description made with the tools of the cartography. This is based on the supposed objectivity of the measure, on the geometric description of the elements depicted and on the highly abstract symbolic codes.

9.1

The Situationist Urban Stroll and Maps

The overview here proposed, identifies as a starting point a discussion of some graphic forms adopted by the Situationist psycho-geographers. They, unlike the flâneurs, for example, support the aesthetic practice of urban drifting not only on literary narration but also on specific representation techniques, entrusting in this way the critical interpretation of an urban context to figurative expression. The sociologist Mădălina Diaconu relies in part, on claims made by Guy Debord the charismatic leader of the movement, to summarise the specific approach of the group: «Instead of evoking emotions in beautiful works of art, the situationist strollers were driven by the ambition to shape the humans’ behaviour and this required to develop new methods to explore the city. The main one was dérive, a technique of purposeless changing of place “under the effect of the scenery” [5], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances [6], and the practice of a passional journey out of the ordinary through a rapid changing of ambiances [6]». In this exploratory process, the forms of representation are not only a graphic output, but also a conceptual value, which can better guide the understanding of the interpretative analysis conducted by the Situationists through urban walking. Among the notable contributions on the topic [10, 13], an interesting point of view on Situationism, has been proposed by the work of Mc Donough [12]; it shows that the crucial element, inherited from this movement, resides in an unprecedented conception of urban space. This is expressed through attention to architecture and urbanism considered as a unit, through the interest in detecting the atmosphere and the local environment, and finally promoting a new structure of social space, conceived through nomadic forms of transformation.

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To quote Debord, «spatial development must take into account the emotional effects […]. That free, new architecture will […] firstly be based on the atmospheric effects of rooms, halls, streets, atmospheres linked to the gestures they contain […]. Architecture must progress by considering emotionally touching situations as […] work material» [5]. The urban program of the Situationist International explicitly recurs in the construction of maps, including the most famous, The Naked City (1957) (Fig. 9.1). Giuliana Bruno defines it as the result of an assemblage of fragments, «whose montage playfully transforms the urban topography into social and affective landscapes» [2]. The main object consists of nineteen clippings of a map of Paris that, through the creative intervention of the détournement, produces new relationships between the areas of the city and their inhabitants-passengers, generating an urban re-orientation, highlighted by red directional arrows connecting the various cut-out figures (plaques tournantes). The turntables describe a new view of the subject in the urban landscape, which is the result of the psycho-geographic approach and the identification of different “atmospheric units”. Again, Mădălina Diaconu highlights how the graphic support represents the starting point of the urban stroll: «The Situationists started by drawing so-called psycho-geographical city maps, on which they recorded the itineraries of their drifting. Occasionally they even stated that the city should be divided into states-of-mind quarters (areas with different atmospheres and emotional intensities),

Fig. 9.1 The Naked City, in Debord G., A. Jorn, 1957. Guide psychogéographique de Paris

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so that each district would be designed to provoke a specific basic sentiment to which people would knowingly expose themselves» [6]. Giuliana Bruno dedicates a large space to the aesthetic and urban experience of the situationist group, underlining their particular interest in the Carte du pays de Tendre (Fig. 9.2)—a map of the tender country—that had been included by Madelaine de Scudery in her novel Clélie (1654). The Carte de Tendre acts as a leitmotiv the themes explored by Bruno. They concern the interpretation of places and spaces, the dimension of travel and the dynamic vision of the description. They serve as a prelude to the narrative and sequential representation through images, which are typical of cartography. In addition, the term “tendre” used in the Scudéry map is an explicit clue to the emotional and therefore experiential component in the reading of places. This allows for the evaluation of the distance between what was recorded in the cartography from the 18th century—namely its growing anchorage to hard sciences— to the mathematics and geometry that laid the solid foundations for topographic surveying and geodesy. Instead, the Scudery map traces “the motion of emotions”—that particular topography described by the “moving” image that seems to pre-empt cinematographic technique. Bruno again adopts the analogy between the emotional outline described in the map and film sequence when analysing the graphic form of the Psychogeographic Map of Venice by Ralph Rumney (1957) (Fig. 9.3).

Fig. 9.2 Carte du pays de Tendre, Madelaine de Scudery, 1654. In Bruno [2]

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Fig. 9.3 Psychogeographic Map of Venice, Ralph Rumney, 1957. In Bruno [2]

The aesthetician sustains that: « The [Rumney] map is a collage of photographic views of city sequences, inaugurated by a bird’s eye view and accompanied by “intertitles”. It is the attempt to translate urban movement into filmic writing, creating an analysis of the filmic montage frame by frame» (Bruno 2015). Thus in this suggestive interpretative hypothesis, the cinema would take the form of a modern cartography, a film mapping that is directly inspired by the art of drawing in Carte de Tendre. The key interpretation proposed by the American aesthetician is particularly interesting as it combines art and film theory, haptic theory, the physiology of Tactilism, welding sensory emotions and mnemonic travel archives. It ultimately transforms the “collection” of images in “recollection”. In short, the geo-psychic mapping, which is at the centre of the Situationist experience, results in a curious mutation that sees the device of the map migrating to those of the wall and screen; where the voyageur reveals itself as passenger crossing a haptic, emotional terrain.

9.2

Serial Visions “in Motion” in the Context of Urban Studies

A few years later, a series of images correlated by temporal scanning (a technique similar to the sequence of film frames) becomes a method used in the analysis and design of urban contexts. It is, in fact, British architect Gordon Cullen who became the first to use serial visions. Townscape [3] is a representation of an urban context

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realised through a succession of sketches, of partial views in sequence, carried out during a walk on foot. The serial visions (Fig. 9.4) aim at an experiential representation of place, describing their recognisability through captivating watercolours, where the environment is characterised even in its most minute elements. For example, a curved wall, an unexpected dissonance between nearby objects, a difference in street level, urban scenes that fade away into the distance, and changes in flooring materials. All become crucial elements in the perception of an urban scene and are capable of restoring the sense of a living dimension. The serial visions—which give a graphic form to the townscape—allow annotations to the fabric of city using colours, textures, different scales and identifying characters: «We discovered – as Gordon Cullen sustains – three gateways, that of motion, that of position and that of content. By the exercise of vision, it became apparent that motion was not one simple, measurable progression useful in planning, it was in fact two things, the Existing and the Revealed view. We discovered that the human being is constantly aware of his position in the environment, that he feels the need for a sense of place and that this sense of identity is coupled with the awareness of elsewhere» [3].

Fig. 9.4 A series of sketches of a journey through a city, in Cullen [3]

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One of the fundamental parameters in the complex experience of an environment is therefore constituted by the subject who explores the “moving” environment in order to “see” and “foresee” the transformations of the urban context. This happens while taking into consideration the meaning of identity for the place itself: the graphic support to the experiential path therefore presupposes “a before and after”, oriented to a vision yet to be realised, but strongly anchored to the uniqueness and sense of place. The analytical method of Gordon Cullen set the precedent, especially in Northern Europe, where it is still adopted in the training of young architects and planners. Evidence to this is the attention recently shown by Allison Dutoit, a teacher in Copenhagen and a member of Gehl firm, who devotes an interesting analysis to the observation of the urban environment as a research method [7]. Dutoit, starts from observing that our perceptions of a particular space change according to the hour of the day and the seasons, although the physical characteristics of the place remain the same. She then goes on to recall the technique of Cullen’s series visions, proposing to accompany the map of a particular path with the perspectives taken along the road. The result is a form of film, which focuses on a sequence instead of a single image. We thus look at qualities from a plurality of aspects, rather than as a result of a single factor and, since cities are usually disordered agglomerations, the method is aimed at investigating both what is implicit and what is evident. The result is the freeing of another dimension: the sensory and affective experience of walking. This is once again able to consider the «lived space», preferring it to the abstract, rational, homogeneous and measurable space of objective quantities. In addition, the interesting contribution of Alexandros Daniilidis, Urban Drifting: An Approach to City. Comprehension and Mapping resumed fifty years later, the investigative methodology of the English architect: «One essential method that can potentially derive from urban drifting/dérive is “observational sketching”. By this, we mean a sequence of sketches drawn (either quick or more detailed) along the route of our walk that can depict on paper the revealed urban environment (Fig. 9.5). The whole idea is also partly based on Gordon Cullen’s theory of “serial vision”» [4]. Observational sketching claims to study the specific aspects revealed by an environment; sketches are compared to “movie frames”; they function as “snapshots” that fix the areas of interest by detecting materials, textures, colours, use of light and shadow, margins, crossings, borders, building types and once again, the proximity to the cinematographic technique is underlined [4]. In this overview of urban studies that refers to experiential walk as a practice of environmental analysis, we cannot fail to mention the American school that has Kevin Lynch as its fundamental reference. In The Image of the City (1960), the main objective of individual exploration proposed by Lynch seems to be directed towards the production of clear, almost “Cartesian” images, images capable of guiding citizens within their city. As reflected in the words of the town planner: «A clear image allows one to move around easily and quickly whether it is to find the home of a friend or a policeman or a shop of buttons. But an orderly environment

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Fig. 9.5 Serial visions, in Farrelly L (2011) Drawing for Urban Design. London: Laurence King Publishing

can do more than this: it can function as a broad system of reference, it can organise activities, opinions, knowledge» [11]. Focusing on how the theme is addressed in contemporary contributions however, we see Peter Bosselman’s position, as depicted in Representation of Places [1], as referring to the tradition of studies inaugurated by Lynch. In Bosselmann’s approach, to represent an urban context from his perspective requires a multi-sensorial and dynamic experience, such as the one he himself created in Florence, “wandering” around Santa Maria del Fiore: «Much of the experience of such a stroll is taken in with the eyes. But all the senses work together in the experience of the square. The sense of touch registers the condition of the paving between the cathedral and the Baptistery. Body orientation conveys a sense of the proximity of walls even those outside the field of view. Hearing is involved. Sound is reflected back by the buildings that frame the square. After taking such a stroll, one can look at baptistery from different angles and judge its dimensions more accurately than before, because now relate to the dimensions of the body» [1].

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Thus, we move from the serial visions directed by a path to an “immersive” experience, enveloping, aware of one’s own corporeity in the exploration of an environment.

9.3

Realistic Photo Images, Renders, Walkthroughs for Urban Simulation

Bosselmann’ observations allow us to make a further observation which, from the awareness of bodily and sensorial exploration of the urban environment, pushes us towards the last frontiers of technology. Today the exploration of a context can be made possible by one of our avatars. These carry us through places no longer real or perhaps, more correctly, “not yet” real but prefigured in the design phase and simulated in the three-dimensional virtual space. It is an urban drifting through geometric-digital models, coated with textures and equipped with chromatic information that reproduce in detail a context, real or imagined. In this environment the subject visually interacts with different immersive and sensory levels “moving” within a virtual space. This is also made possible with the aid of different interfaces, from gloves to wearable headsets, inducing through “spatial embodiment”, a greater participatory involvement by the user [8]. In particular, Game Engine Technologies allow the creation of virtual environments, integrating interactivity, movement and sound and reaching levels that can be used even outside forms of entertainment. It can link multiple information levels, even when there is heterogeneity between them. The photo-realistic simulation and the sensory dimension, however, require considerable processing time and adequate IT equipment. Yet their use in planning at the scale territory and landscape scale, is already a valuable tool. In the process of environmental simulation, the integration with information and data of varying nature and provenance today constitutes the great challenge underlying the modelling of virtual environments. This liberates a new type of immersive exploration which, in addition to visualisation, already allows for the simultaneous testing of fields of audio-visual interaction and interpretation, as well as the flow of data related to specific sites (Fig. 9.6) [9]. Recently the American Society of Landscape Architects has identified in Virtual Reality (VR) an effective tool for the architects and planners profession [14]. In fact, the immersive nature of VR makes it possible to enjoy a simulated 3D landscape, redesigning streets and neighbourhoods and offering real and imagined views of possible urban developments. In addition, the VR views of data processed in CityEngine can also be used on smartphones, viewers and in general on devices already in the possession of users. These models allow navigation through flythrough or walkthrough, obtained with render sequences able to capture bird’s eye views or to explore a model as if

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Fig. 9.6 VR/AR Technology, in Fricker P (2017) Digital Landscape Architecture Laboratory: “Landscape in Transformation—Interactive Data-Sets in Virtual Reality”

you were walking inside of it. This stimulates the user to “move” in a virtual space completing a walkthrough experience, albeit entrusted to a user avatar.

9.4

Conclusions

Urban walk representations, in the various typologies explored in this contribution, highlight a constant reference to the use of cinematographic techniques. These are used both where they assemble graphic fragments to make a new montage, and for the use of sequences and serial visions, movie frames and snapshots. In other words, representations tend to express forms that include the dimension of traversing and overcoming the exclusively visual approach, in order to also understand the sensory contribution and emotional involvement. The recent use of sequences of realistic photo images and the use of render for three-dimensional models that simulates the path (through walkthrough or flythrough) appear as an element of continuity of forms experimented by traditional representation techniques. The interesting aspect that should be highlighted for the future concerns the possibility of visualising the environmental data today available employing new digital technology. This could lead to a virtual experience of traversing urban contexts, being able to take greater account of both of the

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individual perception and quantitative data, thus making the representation of information richer and more complex.

References 1. Bosselmann P (1998) Representation of places: reality and realism in city design. Berkeley, University of California Press 2. Bruno G (2002) Atlas of emotion: journeys in art, architecture and film. Verso, New York 3. Cullen G (1961) Townscape. The Architectural Press, London 4. Daniilidis A (2016) Urban drifting: an approach to city. comprehension and mapping. Sociol Study 6(7):417–435 5. Debord G (2002) Report on the construction of situations and on the international situationist tendency’s conditions of organization and action. In: Knabb K (ed) Situationist international anthology. Bureau of Public Secrets 6. Diaconu M (2010) Urban drifting as a work method of the creative class, proceedings of the european society for aesthetics, vol 2, pp 100–112. Debord’s works mentioned by the author are: Debord G (2002) Potlatch 1954|1957. Informationsbulletin der Lettristischen Internationale. Mit einem Dokumentenhanhang. Berlin, Edition Tiamat; Debord G (1958a) Definitions. Internationale Situationniste Nr. 1 (June 1958). http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/ si/definitions.html; Debord G (1958b) Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action. Internationale Situationniste Nr. 1 (June 1958). http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/report.html 7. Dutoit A (2008) Looking as inquiry: drawing the implied urban realm. In: Treib M (ed) Drawing/thinking: confronting an electronic age. London, Routledge, pp 148–159 8. Forte M (2018) Virtual reality modeling. In: López Varela SL (ed) The SAS encyclopedia of archaeological sciences. Wiley 9. Fricker P (2017) Digital landscape architecture laboratory: “landscape in transformation – interactive data-sets in virtual reality”. In: 6th International alvar aalto meeting on contemporary architecture technology and humanism, 14–15 Sep 2017, Seinäjoki, Finland 10. Hollevoet C (1992) Wandering in the City, ‘Flanerie’ to ‘Derive’ and After: the cognitive mapping of urban space. In: The power of the city/the city of power. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art 11. Lynch K (1960) The image of the city. Cambridge, MA, London, MIT Press 12. McDonough TF (1994) Situationist Space. In: October, pp 59–77 13. Pinder D (1996) Subverting cartography. the situationists and maps of the city. Environ Plan A XXVIII(3):405–427 14. Stone A (2018) How immersive virtual reality can be a boon to city planners. Accessed on 18 Aug 18 2018. http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/How-Immersive-Virtual-Reality-Can-Bea-Boon-to-City-Planners.html

Rossella Salerno Doctor of Research in “Survey and representation of Buildings and Environment” in 1991 with a thesis on the representation of landscape. Researcher since 1992 now she is Full Professor of Theory and Techniques of Representation in the School of Architecture, Urbanism and Built Environment of the Politecnico di Milano. The outputs of her research have been published in essays and volumes closely linked to the field of representation although related to interdisciplinary approaches to architecture and environment. Her scientific contributions are mostly on Representation of the territory, Cultural Landscapes, Urban Simulation. She has taken part in several international and national research programs. Head of the PhD Program in “Territorial and Design Government” of the Politecnico di Milano (2010–2016).

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She is currently taking part in “Urban Planning Design and Policy” PhD Program at Politecnico di Milano. She is member of the advisory board in several architectural reviews and series of books. Main educational exchanges with the DESS at the École d’Architecture de Versailles, the Université Lyon III, the École d’Architecture de Lyon, the École d’Architecture de Paris-La Villette, the École d’Architecture de Grenonble, Universidade Technica de Lisboa, Bauhaus Weimar Universität, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura ETSA Madrid, TU Delft.

Chapter 10

Sensitive Wanderings in the City: Exploring the Spatial Empathy in Urban Contexts Bárbara Thomaz L. Nascimento, Ethel Pinheiro Santana, and Cristiane Rose de Siqueira Duarte Abstract The ambiances that submerge and impregnate us, as we walk, are the means to explore the idea of Spatial Empathy: a concept understood as the basis for strengthening the experiences in urban places (Duarte et al. in Uma ambiência urbana à luz do conceito de “Empatia Espacial”: a Pedra do Sal, no Rio de Janeiro. Anais do 1o Congresso Internacional Espaços Públicos, EDIPUCRS, Porto Alegre [8]). In order to understand what would lead to a spatial bond, as a result of a user’s affectation in urban ambiances, Spatial Empathy emerges as embodiment of the opportunity to experience the other (in this case, the physical space itself). Basing on the studies of Einfühlung (Vischer in on the optical sense of form: a contribution to aesthetics. The Getty Center for History of Art and Humanities, Santa Monica, [22] and Lipps in Aux origines de l’empathie: Fondements et fondateurs. Ovadia, Nice, pp 105–127, [10]), Spatial Empathy explores our emotional attachment to the world, our propensity to project our feelings into the inanimate and our self-identification with urban spaces. Taking the body as the tool of experimentation itself, this paper seeks to show how the concept of Spatial Empathy has been studied in experiences of urban exploration—an erratic or a ‘free walking’ experience developed in Grenoble, in 2017. The outcomes from the walking exercises guided to outline the method presented in this article. The different epistemological positions considered supported to identify common elements involved in the collective actions in urban spaces. Each of the experiences required different approaches and types of urban experiences, including that Spatial Empathy should

B. T. L. Nascimento (&) Architecture, Subjectivity and Culture’ Laboratory—LASC/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil E. P. Santana Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism and Permanent Professor at the Graduate Program of Architecture, PROARQ of the ‘Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro’, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] C. R. de Siqueira Duarte Graduate Program of Architecture, PROARQ of the ‘Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro’, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_10

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not only be taken as a principle but also as medium for insertion of people into the urban experience. Finally, this article validates the identification of three moments related to the process of walking/wandering that outlines a method to explore the empathic process in the spatial context: resonance, sharing and engagement. Keywords Spatial empathy

10.1


Ambiances
Walking experience

Introduction

The way we perceive the physical world is a fundamental question for every architect and urban planner dedicated to urban and social issues. Perception and sensation are interdependent processes, but they do not act in an aligned way: we use our entire internal body to get information about the environment; to this, we call ‘sensation’ [6]. Perception, on the other hand, is the way that the brain organizes and interprets these sensations and is influenced by several factors, such as perceptive selectivity, previous experience, and conditioning of the phenomenon experienced [23]. The different dimensions of the context—where we are, what we do and what is around us—is an integral part of the perceptual activity [17]. So, the fact that we do not perceive things, but ‘according to’ things is what makes the initial question even more intriguing. The awareness of our bodies during the perception process becomes important for engagement and bonds the physical spaces that surround us. In addition to the five senses pointed out by Aristotle in the fourth century (B.C.), and set until today as a counting mark, we may add more than twenty senses that keep us operant and aware [13]. Amongst these senses is the sense of proprioception—the capacity to recognize the spatial location of the body, its position, and orientation in the physical environment—that leads us to different experiences, as motion beings. To illustrate the different experiences that the motion actions can provide us, this article presents the construction of a method based on wandering exercises in which exposure to different types of urban experiences. The experience of wandering, as presented by Certeau [5] and Careri [4] in the unraveling of bonds to the city inspired series of sensitive wanderings carried out in Grenoble in 2017. The experience gave rise to a ‘Walking Journal’, made up of some diverse tools: writing, photography, video/audio recording and sketches, which later provided a method for investigating the relationship between people and the environment from a spatial empathy perspective. Putting yourself in the place of the other, which is the general definition of Empathy, indicates a sensible connection materialized through bodily actions/ reactions. Thus, we set out to explore what was coined by Duarte et al. [8] as Spatial Empathy: a term that describes the embodiment of being placed in the other, in this case, the physical space. The existence of Spatial Empathy as a possible element associated with the translation of ambiances has been explored in other fields of research [9, 8].

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However, an application in the intended context—the foundation of the collective experience—was not a recurring approach at the time. The walking Journal is based on the observation of collective experiences (without value judgments) in public spaces where attitudes, behaviors and, mainly, the reactions of those who take part in collective contexts and situations are observed. The walking Journal is made by the researcher, but it counts on the participation of the various people who appeared during the walk. The walk experience is usually initiated by a researcher, who pretends to not know the city, and sometimes may even not know it. The idea is to discover places, observing and trying to engage (when invited and/or feeling comfortable) in collective social practices. The subject who constructs a transdisciplinary critique during the Walking Journal procedure— as the reflections of a walk—transforms the city into a text, in which the subject is “captured” and “becomes a part of it” [1: 596]. While using the Journal as a mapping qualifier and text a collector, we proceed with a general view of Spatial Empathy though observations that lead to sketches, writings and contacts with people. After the method is explained to people who join this experience, we proceed to the three moments of walking, bringing the analyses of the information collected during the experience. In addition to reinforcing the study of Spatial Empathy—in conceptual and methodological ways—the experience also contributes to explore the ambiances that arise and affect us through walking processes.

10.2

Sensitive Space and Empathic Experience

The first mention of the relationship between empathic experience and sensitive space was focused on the translation of urban environments and was aimed at the observation of public spaces, their dynamics and ambiances. In their field research, Duarte et al. [8] observed that being exposed to an urban environment—which would theoretically instigate collective engagement—necessarily did not lead to the foundation of a collective experience. It was also the first time that the word ‘empathy’ was adopted in field research to explain what would be the pre-disposition to collective engagement. The term ‘Spatial Empathy’ was coined taking as a premise the philosophical studies centered on Einfühlung [10, 22]. Einfühlung refers to a special way of our emotional bond with the world and our propensity to project our feelings to what is outside us, in specific the inanimate objects. Due to the interest in the feeling awakened by objects, works of art became the field of study of the Einfühlung. Architecture was included in the Einfühlung’s studies through exploration of the relationship between aesthetic appearance and feeling. In America, the word Empathy was adopted by Titchener (1909) as a translation of Einfühlung, corresponding in architectural studies to what is nowadays known as aesthetic empathy.

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According to the theoreticians of Einfühlung, works of art could be examined through empathy’s perspective due to a fusion between what we see and feel [22]. This would be the proof that we have the propensity to project our emotions into elements that we take as symbolic [11]. As a human artifact, the city, and especially its collective public spaces that shape collective actions, also have this predisposition to affect us and promote the most varied shared synesthesia. Thus, we understand that Empathy could be related to both the fabrication of such spaces and the collective experiences that we are led to experience. As well as the aesthetic objects studied by Einfühlung, each space of the city emanates a kind of tone, known as ambiance, which relates to aesthetics. Aligned with the various sensations derived from the Place, the ambiances, as described by Augoyard [2], derive from the junction of the physical aspects and the senses that perceive them. When we admit that spaces awaken in us the need for a bond, which not only internalizes it but also projects ourselves in it, we are describing an act that is equivalent to the construction of empathy. It delimits, therefore, the term ‘Spatial Empathy’ such as the embodiment of ‘being placed in the other’ (in this case, the physical space), and the urban ambiance. The empathic experience stems from the sensitive apprehension of the subject which brings the body to the core of the development of theoretical and methodological approaches. In relation to the urban spaces, this would be no different since spatiality is also recognized and engaged in empathetic processes. Thus, the experience in Grenoble in 2017 was based on an active body engagement and participation of the researcher. The body that goes through various ambiances, and gets affected by them, was taken as a way to explore and observe these special bonds.

10.3

Body and Experience of Sensitive Wanderings

The Body is a way through which we experience ourselves and the world, producing an act called self-recognition process [14]. In the search for spatial bonds and empathetic experiences, the body becomes a medium for experimentation, an instrument for measuring Spatial Empathy. In studies conducted by Duarte et al. [8], the signals emitted by the body immersed in urban ambiances helped raise hypotheses about Spatial Empathy in a Public Space in Rio de Janeiro. However, for the experiment driven in Grenoble in 2017, we rehearsed other parameters: the body would not be an indication of the occurrence of Spatial Empathy but as a means through which it occurs. It was necessary to let the body be caught up by the collective ambiances, guided through collective social practices to stablish special bonds. For this, the researcher should experience a freely and engaged walking, letting the sensitive tones guide the body and, afterwards, construct the sense of appropriation. Walking as an exploratory method is a recurring approach in social studies, especially in Geography and Architecture. It has been worked by Walter Benjamin in “Passages” [3], whose original work of 1927 deals with the characters performed

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by the flâneur, the prostitute, the gambler and the collector as polyphonies of the city-metropolis; also by Careri [4], whose original studies match those of Guy Debord’s in “Situationist Drift” [7]. In cartography and corpography, as well as in the study of ambiances, the adoption of walking may be seen in several types of researches developed by Thibaud [17] and Thomas [19], taking as a parameter the ‘Parcours Commenté’ (Fig. 10.1). In the Grenoble experience in 2017, the act of walking was initiated as a way of knowing places. It was guided by the sensations and quoted as written and drawn codes. The walking, as well as the Journal produced, were conducted by the seminal inquiry “how can we fit into collectivity”? In other words, it would be: “Which spaces are able to promote a collective interaction and how do spaces bind me? In what way do the spaces make me feel and be supported as a part of it”? This kind of doubt seems out of question in the Pandemic situation that most of us, in the world, have been facing in 2020, but it remains necessary. This is why we proceeding to present the steps that have led the ‘Grenoble experience’ as a walking trajectory for discovering possible ways to develop Spatial Empathy in cities, by the a so-called ‘Walking Journal’. The experiment, so forth, is always initiated by the researcher, on a journey alone to discover places and paths that lead to collective practices. An important point to be set about the walking experience in Grenoble is that it was carried out by a foreigner who had just started the experiment within the first hours of arrival, in August 2017. Then, it was necessary to walk to discover and interpret the city, as well as to ask people for information about places and ways to get there.

Fig. 10.1 A page from the ‘Walking Journal.’ Source authors (2017)

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Surprisingly, people would not only indicate places and paths but constantly offered to take the researcher to the indicated place. The Walking Journal has, so forth, been carried out around three times a week during five months. During the experiment the researcher got to know the city but, as a strategy, continued to ask people for information about places and paths. It was common to hear, after an explanation “you know what, I’ll go with you to show the way to get there”. The journal became a report of the daily life of the places through the eyes of a foreigner who had just started to live in the city and had been in search of any kind of connection with it. This is one of the richest points in field experience: the notes and drawings made in the journal did not only show the first contacts with a different cultural context but also the impregnating power of the ambiances [16]. To raise new outcomes, the experience would follow a natural course, including the inscription of moments of discomfort, fear, estrangement and many other impressions or sensations—be it positive or negative—while walking. It was part of the process to adapt the journal to the type of experience, documenting the process as it was possible during the walking. The need to not disturb the process of walking (especially when being guided by someone) and the freedom in documenting the facts allowed the information to be gathered in most diverse forms: writing, photography, video/audio recording, sketches. The Walking Journal also emphasized different types of experiences that involves walking: since the wanderings to discover the city up to the walking routine that guided habits, meetings and disagreements in the places where the researcher was invited/prohibited to remain/pass by. The discoveries started with the first understandings about the city and continued to be conducted by the routine of the researcher in the daily life of the city, the spatial bonds and collective practices witnessed. In the end, the outcomes from the journal helped to outline an exploration method, built from the act of walking and the information received from that process.

10.4

Walking as a Method

As an exploratory walking process, the method of Sensitive Wandering was constructed intuitively from the results of the experience. The paths, the itinerary changes and the decisions taken, to remain or to follow, were guided by environmental stimuli and the people. The experience of walking was carried out on different days and times for more five months, while the paths, routes or places conducted by the stimuli and interactions were found. The reports attached to the situations, events and sensations are associated with the sharing of social and collective practices. The daily record of this experience arose through reports, as an expression of the rhythms and tones of ambiances. The motivation was to be part of the city, to be

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part of the dynamics and places, and consequentl be one of the actors of those visited spaces. At the beginning of the experiment the goal was to discover the collective practices and willing places to be in. In the first week of walking, it was necessary to stop frequently to document what was experienced. Consequently, many stopping points were noticed and the first records were texts and drawings. To gather all the information that appeared during the walk, especially when people joined this action with the researcher, made it necessary to record the narratives so as to grasp the explanations and directions given to the routes were taken. In the end, the way the reports were done in the Walking Journal was a result of an individual experience enlarged by a collective one—a consequence of what was felt and lived. The five-month-walking-journal experience (July–November/2017) allowed the researcher to outline a method for exploring Spatial Empathy, focusing on the study of collective experiences. It also made possible to assure different moments in this process, amidst the journal reports: individual walking conducted by many pause moments in which spatial bonds and collective practices appeared. It was also possible to perceive that the moment the path was chosen by the researcher, the first-person narration appeared, described as “my speak moment”. The goal was to respect the rhythm of the experience conditioned by the affected body. There were moments in which the body would move calmer, faster or even stop for long time. So as to characterize the short pause moments from walking or the long stay, there were also brief records, pieces of information called “key registers”: photographs, videos, and free words which serves to complement the report. The long stops were made intuitively during walking experience and present more elaborate reports and, mainly, sketches. In the moments of long stops the researcher would describe the people, events, and sensations experienced in the place, forgetting the “first-person narration”. It was the moment to hear and feel the place, as a collective body, thus characterizing the third-person narration, the “his speak moment”. However, alongside the lonely path and first/third-person narration, there were some interruptions. Thus, in some moments of the first/third-person narration, a second-person was added, especially during the stops or pauses, where the narration could be interrupted: sometimes it was the researcher who felt the need to start a conversation, other times it was a random person or group who would take the opportunity. This moment of speak has been incorporated in the method as “it’s you who speaks” and signaled as an openness to a social interaction. Therefore the walking method is called wandering, for it means walking without any clear purpose or direction. In the first wanderings, the moment of speech of “it’s you who speaks” promoted an openness to engagement. However, throughout the experience and after the analysis of the first walks, it was realized that it could also be an interesting point to explore “the speech of the other”, the one that interrupts or is invited to speak. Whenever the “it’s you who speaks” moment came up, the researcher asked the person to indicate a public place, which represented a feeling or a sensation felt at

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that moment. The walking movement could be done in a lonely way by the researcher, but in general the people volunteered to go along making it a shared way. When reaching the indicated place (endpoint), the path could be explained. If the researcher was alone, the voice-narrative should report the feelings and impressions. If it was a shared walk, the person would explain his/her decisions and sensations during the experiment. During the process, the researcher, besides recording the person’s narration, would also pay attention to the reactions and bodily actions manifested: the variation in the walking rhythm, the stops, as well as the sensations and feelings expressed. This moment was called the “our speak moment” since the path was taken by two people who now could construct a narrative of a shared experience. It is important to emphasize that the choice to stop or to continue, or even to walk faster, was always led by the accompanying person. In the end, with the analysis lifted by the journal, it was evident to notice three moments, which interestingly can be related to the phases of the empathic process. These three stages were developed more closely in the theoretical set on Spatial Empathy presented in a Thesis developed in Brazil [20]. However, due to the continuity of this chapter, it will not be theoretically developed here. The three phases—resonance, sharing, and engagement—will be explored only as part of the sensitive wanderings hereby mentioned.

10.5

The Three Moments of Walking

Once ambiances impregnate us, we are inundated with sensations that may lead us to be attempted (or not) to establish spatial bonds and engage in social practices. During the analysis of the walking experience in Grenoble, it was possible to notice three moments that were part of the walking process: the first one was identified as a ‘Resonance’ that is the factor that leads to the close up or to the move away from the other [15]. In empathetic processes, Resonance appears as a way between the capture of feelings and the projection, being a link that occurs unconsciously in the solidification of manifestation [15]. We can say that the idea of Resonance is closely related to the sensitive elements of the environment. Relating to Spatial Empathy, as we were seeking for the motivation to be in the place of the Other—the physical space—moments of resonance were expressed in the report of places that led to slowing the rhythm of walking, culminating to the intervals of stops. The second moment, the Sharing, was noticed when the first-person or third person of the narrative (researcher/space) moved to another person. Although that fact indicated the beginning of “our speak moment”, it was also considered the moment of sharing, since there was a connection. The acceptance of the person to

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participate in the sensitive wandering also illustrated a predisposition for both sharing and engaging in a joint experience. That is why the third moment, the Engagement, can be characterized by two occurrences: the first would be the decision of the researcher to remain in a place; this moment is characterized by “his speak moment” (the space). The second moment would be the sharing of the narrative with another person during the walking so as to lead to his/her indicated place. An interesting point about these three moments are the sensitive elements that characterize them. According to Stern [15] Resonance is associated to the way in which we are affected by the visual range, the sounds, and the forms in a sensorial way. There were moments in the production of the Walking Journal where the narratives and the pieces of information emphasized more visual elements, in others, they tended to go towards a sonorous narrative and even olfactory. From the analysis of the reports of the journal it seems that Spatial Empathy is closely related to acclimatization [18]: it works as part of the ambiances translation, passing through the visual (colors and forms), the sounds (sounds) and then reaches the olfactory system (smells). The colors that appear in the journal based on the sketches made are also a strong indication of collective engagement. Places whose colors have been represented in pastel and/or cold tones correspond to fast walking, while warmer colors are associated with slow and leisurely walking times, as well as the tendency to remain in place. In almost all narratives made by people in the walking experience, the aesthetic factors related to places experienced appeared related to the memories of life, such as childhood or youth, as well as architectural elements. Whenever elements related to their personal history were described, people slowed down the pace. The places that were most likely to occur in the “it’s you who speak moment” were described much more from their personal events, their activities and experiences than their aesthetic elements. Finally, we can say that the rhythms of walking were strongly related to the elements that had been apprehended. Since the body is the means through which Spatial Empathy is experienced, we understand that the rhythm of walking is related not only the way that our body is affected by stimuli but also to the rhythmic unfolding of experience.

10.6

Conclusions

When revealed from their everyday use, the urban spaces present themselves to us well beyond their physical characteristics, as we are first led to believe. Many visible and invisible, sensitive and intermediated factors influence not only what we see in places, but how we interact with them and, consequently, modify our actions.

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In addition to being motivated by the local ambiance, the emotional bond between human and space produce a universe of possible experiences that emerge from spatial, proprioceptive and wandering exploration. It is in this space of sensory experience, individually and collectively, that a ‘root’ can happen so that certain senses emerge positively/negatively, building an association between each other and also to the place, in an intense way. From the experience of a sensitive wandering it was possible not only to gather outcomes that led to outline a method, but also to identify elements associated to the impregnating power of ambiances. Thus, we can say that although this walking experience was conditioned to a sensitive relationship of emotional nature, Spatial Empathy was also related to the rhythm of walking and movement, both associated with kinesthetics. Stein [14] agrees, that there are several factors guiding the subject in this process of perceiving something, but, for the author, the “take-off” happens through feeling it. In fact, the experience cannot be neglected, since it is through it that the body interprets the world and that the learning-process takes place [12]. When we feel something, whether by an object or a person, we are willing to open ourselves to the sensitivity that emanates from this something and consequently open ourselves to understanding. The feeling, says Stein [14], is what instigates us while empathy provides the continuation of the process: When I grasp a value and remain indifferent before it, then there is no feeling that I can abandon with an attitude change; I find myself internally empty. So I wonder how it would be possible to estimate value if it lacks this foundational material that is the feeling. [14].

If we assume that through the sensitive wandering Spatial Empathy is produced, then it is possible to say that we engage with the Other (known as a space) as a result of an emotional bond. We experience emotions as a direct and immediate result of our involvement and interaction with the world. In other words, we establish this emotional bond with physical space as we assume that the commitment of our personal space may provide us with information about the intensity of our engagement in a community, by walking. The sense of Place, in this research, is so forth related to the connection of our body with the other, with the space and with ourselves.

References 1. Agrest D (1988) À margem da arquitetura: corpo, lógica e sexo. In: Nesbitt K (org) Uma nova agenda para a Arquitetura: Antologia Teórica 1965–1995. Cosac Naify, São Paulo, pp 585– 599 2. Augoyard JF (1979) Essai sur le cheminement quotidien en milieu urbain. Du Seuil, Paris 3. Benjamin W (2007) Passagens. EDUFMG, Belo Horizonte 4. Careri F (2013) Walkscapes: o caminhar como prática estética. Gustavo Gili, Barcelona 5. Certeau M (1980) Marches dans la ville. L´invention du quotidien. Gallimard, Paris

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6. Colston HL (2007) What figurative language development reveals about the mind. In: Schalley AC, Khlentozs D (eds) Mental states: language and cognitive structure, vol 2. Jonh Benjamins, Philadelphia. PA, pp 191, 212 7. Debord G (1958) Theory of the Dérive. Internationale Situationniste 2:2015 8. Duarte C, Pinheiro ES, Uglione P, Lira E, Nascimento BT, Guerra JM (2015) Uma ambiência urbana à luz do conceito de “Empatia Espacial”: a Pedra do Sal, no Rio de Janeiro. Anais do 1o Congresso Internacional Espaços Públicos. EDIPUCRS, Porto Alegre 9. Duarte C, Pinheiro E (2016) Ambiances as Translators of the Urban Culture. Conferência apresentada no 3ème Séminaire du GDRI, Volos—Grécia 10. Lipps T (1905) Empathie, imitation interne et sensations organiques. In: Elie M (2009) Aux origines de l’empathie: Fondements et fondateurs. Ovadia, Nice, pp 105–127 11. Pallasmaa J (2014) Space, place and atmosphere: peripheral perception in existencial experience. In: Borch C (ed) Architectural atmospheres. Birkhäuser Basel, Berlin, pp 42–59 12. Pinheiro E (2010) Cidades ‘Entre’:Dimensões do sensível em arquitetura ou a memória do futuro na construção de uma cidade. Tese de Doutorado. proarq/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro 13. Sacks O (1997) O Homem que confundiu sua mulher com um chapéu. Cia das Letras, Rio de Janeiro 14. Stein E (1964) On the problem of empathy. Oxford University Press, Estados Unidos 15. Stern D (1989) Le monde interpersonnel du nourrisson. Puf, Paris 16. Thibaud J (2018) Les puissances d’imprégnation de l’ambiance. Communications 102(1):67– 79. https://www.cairn.info/revue-communications-2018-1-page-67.htm 17. Thibaud JP (2002) Une approche des ambiances urbaines: le parcours commenté. In: Espaces publics et cultures urbaines sous la direction de Michèle Jolé,Paris, Certu, pp 257–270 18. Thibaud JP (2014) Petite archeologie de la notion d’ambiance. In: Coloque des Espaces publics, Paris 19. Thomas R (2007) La marche en ville: Une histoire de sens. Espace Geographique, Éditions, Belin, pp 15–26 20. Thomas B (2018) Da Ressonância ao Engajamento: Percursos sensíveis para a análise da Empatia Espacial em contextos urbanos. Tese de Doutorado. proarq/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, pp 15–26 21. Titchener EB (1909) Lectures on the experimental psychology of the thought processs. Macmillan, New York. 22. Visher R (1853) On the optical sense of form: a contribution to aesthetics. In: Mallgrave HF (1994) Empathy, form, and space. The Getty Center for History of Art and Humanities, Santa Monica 23. Yantis S (1998) Objects, attention, and perceptual experience in Ricard. In: Wrigh D (eds) Visual attention. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 187, 214

Bárbara Thomaz L. Nascimento graduated in Architecture and Urbanism (2004) from the Federal University of Alagoas—UFAL, Master in ‘Dynamics of Inhabited Spaces’ (2008) from DEHA-UFAL and Ph.D. in Architecture (2018) from the Graduate Program in Architecture at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro—Proarq/UFRJ, with an interuniversity exchange doctorate at “Centre de Recherche sur l’Espace Sonore et l’environnement urbain”—CRESSON / ENSAG in France. Col-laborative researcher at the Research Laboratory “Architecture, Subjectivity and Culture”—LASC, and executive coordinator of the secretariat of CADERNOS PROARQ Journal. She is currently professor and coordinator of the Architecture and Urbanism School at UniRedentor. Her interests lie on the following themes: Public space, urban image, memory, urban environ-ments, Spatial Empathy, urban ambiances, as well as sensitive methodologies for space exploration.

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Ethel Pinheiro Santana graduated in Architecture and Urbanism from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2001), with Magna Cum Laude title of honor. Master (2004) and Ph.D. in Architecture (2010), both from the Graduate Program in Architecture of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro—Proarq/UFRJ. She is cur-rently Coordinator of Proarq/UFRJ (2020–2021) in addition to acting as Chief Editor of CADERNOS PROARQ Journal and coordinator of the Research Labo-ratory “Architecture, Subjectivity and Culture”—LASC. She works as Associate Professor at FAU/UFRJ and as Permanent Professor at Proarq/UFRJ. She acts as an Ad hoc reviewer in funding national agencies in addition to being a member of Scientific Committees in indexed journals. She has been working as advisor in several Assessment Committees and has accumulated prizes in national architec-tural competitions. Experience in architectural representation with an emphasis on urban space design, coded drawing and sketch drawing, currently addressing the ethnographic and contemporary spaces. She has been advising several undergra-duate students and PhD theses in architecture and urbanism. Cristiane Rose de Siqueira Duarte graduated in Architecture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (1981), Graduated Architect DPLG at the School of Architecture of Paris-La Villette (1983); D.E.A. at the University of Paris XII (Paris-Val-de-Marne) (1985) and Ph.D. (University Doctor) at the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) (1993). Postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Berkeley (2014). Researcher 1A at the National Council for Scientific and Technolo-gical Development. She was Full Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (1983–2017). Currently, she works as Permanent Professor in the Graduate Program in Architecture—Proarq / UFRJ where she coordinates the research Laboratory “Architecture, Subjectivity and Culture”—LASC—as well as the research group “Pro-Acesso”. She has experience in architecture and urban design, emphasizing the cultural and subjective dimensions of space, accessibility and ethnography of the city. She is currently coordinator of the Architecture and Urbanism Board of FAPERJ (Research Sponsoring Foundation of Rio de Janeiro). She has published several books, articles and has supervised several Ph.D. theses in architecture and urbanism.

Chapter 11

Experiential-Walk: Experiencing and Representing the City for Urban Design Purposes Barbara E. A. Piga

Abstract This contribution presents an experimental methodology for sensing and communicating the city for urban design purposes. More in detail, the goal of the experiential-walk method developed by the author is mainly directed at improving the designer’s attitude and ability in considering the multisensory and dynamic environmental conditions from the very beginning of the design process thanks to a personal immersion in motion and in place. The methodology consists of three main phases: (i) direct experience and observation, (ii) self-reflection and interpretation, (iii) data collection, representation and communication. The aim of the first phase is to feel what the place is and what the place might be or what the place is in nuce. The second phase is about mulling over the experience and interpreting the nature of the place. The last phase is directed at representing and communicating the experience and the place criticalities and potentialities. The entire (recursive) process can be intended as a sequence of interconnected actions to increase sensory awareness. It eventually aims at discovering and sharing the said and the unsaid of places. Besides the methodology description, some case studies applications and results are presented together with the lessons learned. Keywords Experiential-walk

11.1


Sensory design
Methodology

Introduction: What You Perceive Is What You Get

The chapter presents a methodology for sensing and communicating the city for urban design purposes. The approach was first developed and applied in architecture and urban planning university courses at Politecnico di Milano (from 2011) and then further refined and employed in the interdisciplinary research “Translating

B. E. A. Piga (&) Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Laboratorio di Simulazione Urbana Fausto Curti, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_11

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Ambiances” (2014/2017) by the International Research Group (GDRI)1 within the framework of the International Ambiances Network.2 Its application in these two academic fields, i.e. education and research, was helpful to refine the approach itself and evaluate the efficacy of the method applied with professionals at a different career level. Some considerations and lessons learned regarding the application of the sensory experiential-walk have been outlined from the application of the method in the last six years and they are presented in the chapter. By interpreting the famous Rubin’s vase3 as a metaphor of urban perception, it is possible to assert that what we perceive is what we get, at least in the first encounter with the environment [2]. In the second encounter and beyond, as for the vase, understanding can be extended and deepened, even though the impressions of the first encounter continue to play a role. As for Rubin’s vase, mind and senses collaborate in perceiving and comprehending the space we are experiencing. Rubin’s vase is part of a vast array of perceptual studies where the visual experience has a key role, as urban and architectural representation typically does by adopting visual language to describe the environment. Despite a common architectural oculocentric approach, the environmental experience is intrinsically multisensory [35]. Indeed, it is difficult for the individual to evaluate the effect of one single sense separately from the others and correlate it to a single facet of the global personal impressions of a place. Understanding and envisioning the ambiance of places, intended as “the physical atmosphere processed through human senses, culture and personal experience” [24, p. 8], is thus crucial for studying and designing the urban experience. Moreover, in Rubin’s vase, as happens for architectural plans, sections, and perspectives, the representation is of a still moment, while the only way to perceive and understand places is through motion [15, 32]. Indeed, the overall impression of an urban place is induced by the sensory4 experiential stream, i.e. the experience in time and space occurring in the evolving relationship between the person and the environment [15, 38, 39]. In this duality, each extremity of the continuum, i.e. object and subject, has its own peculiarities. This framework is further described in Piga and Morello [24] where, within an urban design perspective, we propose a synthesis of the environment as consisting of (i) permanent and controlled by design, e.g. buildings and streets, (ii) recursive and semi-controlled by design, e.g. trees and shadows, (iii) semi-permanent and controlled by design, e.g. benches and signage, (iii) temporary and semi-controlled by design, e.g. flow of people and cars; each element evolves in a different manner and with a 1

Project scientific officers: Jean-Paul Thibaud and Daniel Siret. For more information. www. ambiances.net/seminars/gdri-translating-ambiances.html. 2 For more information about the international network, please refer to: www.ambiances.net/home. html. 3 In 1915 the Danish 28-year-old Edgar Rubin, defended the doctoral thesis “Synsoplevede Figurer” [Visually experienced figures] at the University of Copenhagen. The thesis, focused on the analysis of the visual experience of figure and ground and the related psychological phenomena, had a relevant influence in perceptual psychology. 4 Sensory is always intended as the collaboration of the different sensorial-spheres.

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different speed. Analogously, each person is unique and has peculiar characteristics determined, for instance, by past experiences in the short and long term, expectations, cultural background, and so on [12]. The way different individuals perceive, feel, and interpret even the same environment is then varied and multifaceted [6, 27]. As architects and urban planners, the way we design is affected by our personal sensitivity and understanding of the social and urban context to design, which may result in a professional skill that can be defined as ‘ambiance empathy’. So, what is the role of the designer’s urban experience in defining the urban design solution? In this chapter, I argue that the active role of observation and interpretation of the existing urban condition is crucial in outlining the final architectural outcome and potentially fostering an experiential approach, i.e. a human and sensory-centered design approach. Indeed, this process of in-motion understanding of the environment collaborates to shift from the traditional urban design and planning approach to what Thiel [38] named as “envirotecture”, i.e. a “synoptic, inclusive, time-based, user-centred experiential concern” [38, p. 5]. Even if the issue of an atmospheric design seems to have gained increasing attention in recent years [7, 10, 16, 31], several authors address the need to better focus the sensory dimension in architecture and planning [10, 18, 22, 41]. Experiential-walks are only a tool in this direction, a procedure that aims to increase the designers’ consciousness in the conception phase, a piece of the mosaic towards a conscious sensory urban design, and, ultimately, towards sustainable environmental outcomes and well-being of the population [13, 23].

11.2

Method: Experiential-Walk for Urban Design and Sensory Awareness

Contemporary cities often suffer deprivation of meaningful sensory experiences, especially non-visual ones. Moreover, too often unpleasant sensory conditions, such as noise pollution or heat islands, impact the urban experience [1, 9, 34]; as a reaction, citizens routinely tend to enact coping strategies to face or avoid unpleasant stimuli [37], sometimes without even realizing the impact they have on their quality of life. For instance, our brain acts to a certain extent as a sound equalizer and this in fact enables us to focus and clearly hear the voice of a person speaking even in a noisy environment; unfortunately, this clever natural solution requires mental energy and might lead to personal stress and discomfort [14, 29]. Moreover, if traffic noise is too loud when two people are chatting outside their office entrance before going home, they will probably shorten the conversation [11, 21]. These and other types of environmental discomfort, e.g. cold or hot places, too windy spaces, glaring materials and so on, reduce the occasion for social sharing in person, a precious asset to be preserved and fostered. If these and other disturbing conditions are common and recursive, their implications might induce a reduction

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in the quality of personal and social life, an aspect which should not be underestimated. An increasing sensory environmental awareness is crucial for fostering conscious city policies and design with a careful approach towards well-balanced environmental and sensory outcomes in the logic of a ‘healthy city’ promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO).5 Citizens’ awareness is also crucial in supporting Public Administrations in this relevant transition to a human/ environmental-centred approach. The proposed ‘experiential-walk’ method aims to foster sensitivity towards a sensory perspective and increase awareness of its importance in urban policies, plans, and design projects. The methodology is grounded on a series of approaches based on the person’s direct experience as a pivot concept. Yi-Fu Tuan, in his masterpiece Space and Place [39, p. 9], asserts that “to experience is to learn”; Schön [30] argues about the importance of ‘learning by doing’; those can also be intended as tools of ‘reflective learning’ practice, i.e. “a purposeful framing and reframing of material in internal experience with the intention of learning” [20, p. 99]. Representing the object of study plays a crucial role in understanding it, which is especially relevant in the architectural field, where visual representation acts like language for poets. In the ‘envirotecture’ perspective [38], the representation of the complex sensory environment and its atmosphere is crucial for sharing environmental ambiances of today and tomorrow. Visual and other kinds of representation play an essential role in the conceptualisation process (reflective learning) and communication of the personal experience. In this regard, Peter Bosselmann argues that “visual arts can serve as a method to interpret urban transformations” as it is a “mutual reinforcement between detailed observation and the knowledge of causes that influence art as a form of seeing, expressing, and interpreting” [8, p. 271]. Following these concepts, the overall proposed method is intended as a ‘learning process’, that is partially also a ‘reflective learning’ [20], that happens in two partially overlapping main phases: the embodied and in-motion experience onsite (‘learning by experiencing’) and the process of creative restitution of the experience (‘learning by doing’). The entire procedure is conceived as a tool for fostering the sensory exploration of places, with a twofold goal. On the one hand it serves as a means for investigating a specific context and exploring its sensory characteristics in order to arrive at an informed urban design conception and development; on the other hand, it aims at instilling a renewed sensitivity when experiencing the environment, beyond any specific scope of the exploration. Indeed, when we learn to perceive differently or with a new perspective, it is then difficult to ignore it. As for Rubin’s vase, once you are aware that the figure can be perceived and interpreted in two different ways, you cannot help but consider both of them. The two phases of the proposed method are achieved in practice by means of three main activities: (i) direct experience and observation, (ii) self-reflection and interpretation, (iii) data collection, representation and communication (Fig. 11.1).

5

www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/environment-and-health/urban-health/who-european-healthycities-network/healthy-cities-vision.

PHASES PROCESS

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(Reflective) Learning recursive process of internal framing and re-framing learning by experiencing embodied and in-motion experience onsite

learning by doing artistic restitution of the experience

sensing instinctive walk direct experience & observation

ACTIVITIES

shaping rational walk self-reflection & interpretation

shaping data collection walk

sharing metaphorical walk

environmental features multimedia representation & communication & multimedia grabbing techniques Fig. 11.1 Scheme describing the process of (reflective) learning of the ‘experiential-walk’ method proposed by the author. The process consists of the two main phases of ‘learning by experiencing’ and ‘learning by doing’. These phases are organised in activities. The dark blue indicates when the main activity is happening in relation to the phase/s, while the light blue indicates that the activity might run in parallel with the main ones even if as a background and secondary one. Credits: the author

The aim of the first activity is to feel what the place is, with some insight of what the place might be, or in other words, what the place is in nuce [28]. The second activity is about mulling over the experience and interpreting the nature of the place. The last activity concerns the representation of the experience and its potential; it is then intended as a tool to grasp and elaborate the essence of places and as a particular mode of communication. To do this process of analysis and restitution, it is necessary to collect and post-process data. The entire process can be understood as a sequence of interconnected actions for increasing sensory environmental awareness. Even if the process is described as a linear path, some phases or activities can be repeated if necessary. It is worth noticing that it is not that easy to distinguish clearly between the phases and activities, especially the first two; indeed, as it is almost impossible to distinguish between the reception of the sensory stimuli and its interpretation by the mind, the same might be said about the observation and interpretation of places [23]. At any rate, each part of the overall process collaborates in achieving the final goal, that is to discover, disclose, and share the said and the unsaid, or the visible and invisible, of places.

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The articulation of the method in specific and distinct phases is also functional to its presentation and first applications in practice. As the ability of employing this process of sensory attention, observation, interpretation, and representation becomes more natural, the distinction between the phases becomes more fluid and their strict application as a sequence is less essential. For this reason the adoption of the method is especially useful for educational purposes [25]. Another interesting application is for developing explorative studies within structured activities, such as workshops with groups of people, regardless of whether they are students, professionals, or ordinary citizens. The author has applied the experiential-walk method within university architecture and urban planning courses since 2011, even in the form of one-day intensive workshops with students, and as a tool for discussion within workshops with researchers from different disciplines. The chapter will focus specifically on the experience in the educational university practice in the field of urban planning and architecture. Our experience of the environment differs if we are alone, in a couple, or in a group [36]. The proposed experiential-walk method is mainly intended as a personal and individual sensory exploration of the environment, i.e. an individual experience. This is needed for focusing the attention on the relationship between the person, the environment, and their mutual influence. Participants are hence asked to walk alone. Before starting the walking experience, the main goal, approach, process, phases, procedures, and tools are briefly presented to the audience. The instructions start from a description of the overall goal, which is investigating the ambiances of places through a process of sensing, shaping, and sharing. They are also informed to bring with them all the instruments they are able to use and are confident with, and that they consider appropriate for capturing the environmental experience. Before explaining the phases and the activities in detail, it is essential to focus the participants’ attention on the approach. This should be the North Star that guides their entire experience, the criterion that steers it. It is then relevant to highlight that the entire walk is focused on the sensory experience, stressing the importance of the interaction between the different senses. The persons should be immersed in and concentrated on their own experiences in that specific environment. Perception is the primary means of investigation. The participants have to activate and pay attention to all the senses, including the kinesthetic one. Body and mind act together in living the experience in motion [33]. The walker is at the same time part of the environment and an individual perceiving it. Every sense collaborates with the others inducing the different kinds of physical sensations. For instance, the skin makes it possible to perceive the microclimate around us and can even inform us about the sun’s position. The skin also enables us to sense the soil’s grain and texture through the shoes. While walking we produce sounds that change according to the pavement material and what might cover it, e.g. autumn leaves. What we perceive influences our physiological and psychological state and vice versa. As result, no one perceives the same thing in the same way [26, 38]. For instance, from a thermal perspective, different persons feel the same place in the same moment as comfortable or uncomfortable, or other nuances between the two

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[40]. In addition to differences among individuals, the personal perception of the same individual can evolve in time and there is no definitive impression of a place. This is even clearer if we consider that space also evolves in time, in the short and long period [9, 24]. Rather, the direct perception of places can be conceived as an evolving condition occurring through time and space. Sensory perception can even act as a gate to past personal experiences and related emotions [12]; nevertheless, the atmospheric essential structure of a place often lasts in memory as a general connotation of a place. At any rate it is common to find similarities and even trends in people’s perception of places; for instance, a place can be labelled as romantic or scary. These pervasive, structuring, and intangible conditions, together with the more ephemeral and temporary circumstances, are the main elements to address through the experiential-walk. Operationally, participants are asked to walk by themselves without any disturbing external elements, such as a smartphone in hand or headphones in ears. As a first activity of ‘direct experience and observation’, they simply have to feel the surrounding environment while walking. This first walk in the place can be intended as the ‘instinctive walk’. The route can be predetermined or freely chosen depending on the goal of the exploration; it is relevant to highlight that the focus is on the path and its surroundings since the context is crucial in determining the experience. Once the first walk is done, participants can stop to reflect on the experience, and try to organise their thoughts. If the route was not predetermined, the participant has to take note of the route followed. In this first re-elaboration process, they are encouraged to take notes, sketches, or whatever they prefer to record some relevant impressions. The following round of direct experience is the second activity which can be intended as the ‘rational walk’. The goal, in this case, is to figure out at the rational level the relationship between the experience just had and the different place conditions, e.g. the physical environment, its activities, the vitality of the place, the social context, and so on. In this process of investigation, some of the perceived characteristics are deepened and connected to their origins [8, 17]. Any observer is free in defining the proper way for structuring their experience framework. Of course, it is also possible—and might be useful—to refer to a theoretical framework as a support for organizing the ideas. These frameworks can of course rely on different disciplines. For instance, in the architectural field, Appleyard [3] suggests three main categories in urban perception: operational, responsive, inferential. Boffi and Rainisio [5] suggest other theoretical constructs developed in the field of psychology that are consistent with such approach. The third activity of ‘data collection’ is to register the main elements that characterised the situated experience. The goal is to connect an ephemeral concept, such as the ambiance, to the main physical features of the environment that had a role in generating the personal experience. Such connection can be referred to a single element, to several elements and/or to the relationship existing among them. In other words, participants are invited to reflect on the gestaltic features of the environment that gave origin to the ambiance. This activity can be also carried out together with the second activity (‘rational walk’), that is while reasoning about the

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‘instinctive walk’, or can be executed as a third independent activity; in this last case, if the data collection does not take place immediately after the rational walk it is essential to consider that the environmental conditions might be pretty different when going back to the place. The fourth activity of representation and communication consists of mentally recalling the previous walks and depicting the in-motion ambiances. The goal is to produce a similar impression in the audience, in other words enabling them to go for a ‘metaphorical walk’. It is important to stress again that participants should freely choose their preferable tool to record and depict the environment. Inviting participants to choose a familiar tool is a key aspect since it enables them to follow the natural flow of thoughts without effort— otherwise spent on getting acquainted with the tool itself—contributing to enhancement of the quality of the outcome. Indeed, personal sensitivity and representation ability might strongly impact the final result, but the process is a goal in itself. The media and language to describe the experience are not defined, indeed paintings depicting the inner and outer experience, declaiming poetic verses written after the experience, playing an ad hoc script, or other forms of representation, even less codified, are all useful if consciously employed. Representation is a fundamental part of the process of discovering and interpreting the place, and every person should be encouraged to find his or her own way of describing it. Since urban design and planning processes often happens in teams, the method applicability to collaborative work was studied as well, thus focusing in particular on a group solution which goes beyond an entirely individual process. In this case, each group member, generally three to four people, do the ‘instinctive walk’, ‘rational walk’, ‘data collection walk’ individually, as in the method described before. After this, each group discusses every member’s experience and shares the collected data. A group discussion follows, figuring out the most relevant characteristics and a collective perspective shaping the urban (or landscape) experience. This common perspective leads to the determination of the proper tools to apply for depicting the environment. In parallel, a draft design of the final outcome is shared within the group. A field survey and data post-processing is then put in action to get to the final and shared outcome. Then the ‘metaphorical walk’ is the result of group’s shared vision. The individual or collective vision will of course influence the following design development. Some relevant and explanatory cases of both individual and group experientialwalk are presented below.

11.3

Case Studies Application

By reconsidering the outcomes of the several ‘experiential-walks’ done over the years, it is possible to notice some recursive elements. Significantly, among the walks done within university courses with international students of urban planning and architecture, it is possible to find two main types of reactions by participants.

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In the first case, participants find it quite challenging to disengage themselves from the technical approach; they tend to interpret and reproduce the subject of investigation by forcing it into the technical perspective, thus practically skipping the ‘instinctive walk’ and going directly to the ‘rational walk’. By doing this the experiential perspective is hardly considered in the analysis, thus reducing its impact on the final design. In the second case, participants easily adopt the proposed non-conventional architectural approach, sometimes with outstanding results. Even when adopted, this path is generally perceived as more challenging since most students are not trained for it. This non-conventional approach has always been encouraged and supported by the instructors during the entire experiential-walk process, and even after as a tool for representing the atmosphere of their design solutions. As a matter of fact, the final outcome quality depends on two main professional skills: participants’ sensitivity, that is the ‘ambiance empathy’, and their creativity and capability in depicting the experience, i.e. their ‘representational ability’. The types of case studies dealt with in past years were addressed to urban spaces, including streetscapes, squares, pedestrian areas, university areas open to the public. Not surprisingly, most outcomes were images or sequences of images (e.g. pictures, sketches, paintings, and other kinds of still images) and videos, generally with sound, i.e. the sound of the city or music. A smaller number were physical models, treated in several forms. In some cases only other forms of representation were used, such as interactive web-pages and social media, theatrical performances, diaries, and interpretation of mind-maps by final users. Some of these outcomes focusing on the city of Milan (Italy) with international students from around the world are presented below; these are shown according to the types of places, that is from the smaller, i.e. a street, to the biggest areas investigated, i.e. blocks of two neighbourhoods in Milan.

11.4

Street-Scape: Via Celoria, a Road from the Early Nineteenth Century

The focus of the experiential-walk was via Celoria in Milan, Italy. The street is now in the compact city and it appears as an urban boulevard with plane trees. It was designed in Beruto’s Urban Plan at the beginning of the XX century. It is located in the Città Studi neighbourhood, one of the university districts of the city. It has tremendous potential but, unfortunately, it has been used mainly as a parking area for many years. The experiential-walk was conducted individually by each student, and in some cases, the elaboration was developed in groups. Some examples of the outcomes are reported below; a brief description and other references, e.g. the link to the videos, are in the captions (Figs. 11.2, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5, 11.6 and 11.7).

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Fig. 11.2 Via Celoria (Milan) interpreted by Nguyen Thi Bich Nguyet (2014). The drawings show the atmosphere of loneliness and chaos that characterize the street. Even if the street has great potential, it is now used mainly as an open-air and unregulated parking area

Fig. 11.3 Via Celoria (Milan) interpreted by Prap Chaiwattana (2014). The progressive abstraction from the picture to the paintings shows the environment’s scarce livability, where cars block the view and trees are perceived no longer as natural elements

Fig. 11.4 Via Celoria (Milan) interpreted by Giulia Gocalek (2014). The uncontrolled car parking is perceived as an aggressive invader that makes regular use of the street difficult, despite its potential. Due to the presence of two major universities in the city of Milan, the primary users are students, but their presence is visible only in the background of the images

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Fig. 11.5 Via Celoria (Milan) interpreted by Alvarez et al. (2017). The image shows some screenshots of the students’ experiential-walk presentation based on an abstract and interactive physically augmented map (video recording: http://bit.ly/exp-walk_augmentedmap_2017). The path along the street has been divided into relevant sensory segments, and each of them is described according to its main sensory characteristic. The cases vary from the touch, sound, and smell of a person walking on dried leaves on the ground to the uncomfortable traffic noise pollution, and so on. The progressive discovery of the street’s main characteristics enables the user to perceive the comprehensive sensory experience in time

11.5

Block-Scape: Garibaldi-Repubblica, the New High-Rise Porta Nuova District

The Garibaldi-Repubblica area, approximately 30 hectares in the centre of Milan, has been unused and partially abandoned since the 1950s, even if repeatedly affected by disputed redevelopment policy which ended with a mixed-used large-scale project. The first Integrated Intervention Program (PII Porta Nuova) was indeed approved in July 2004, the second PII (Isola Lunetta) was approved in 2006, when the building permission of the Varesine area was also approved [4]. The transformed area is now almost complete. The experiential-walks presented below were conducted during the building site construction (Figs. 11.8 and 11.9).

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Fig. 11.6 Via Celoria (Milan) interpreted by Pietro Cavalleri (2014). The image presents the screenshots of the three main parts of the street’s video interpretation (video: http://bit.ly/expwalk_3times_2014). The video velocity and the music stressed the rhythm of the street along the day. The comparison of three moments in a day focuses on the three different (recursive) conditions that characterise the area during working weeks

11.6

Block-Scape: Public Spaces in Milan

Other public spaces in Milan have been investigated over the years. Below a sample of some outcomes, in particular a square and a small park in the Città Studi neighbourhood (Fig. 11.10) with its compact city pattern design by the Pavia Masera urban plan (1912), and two markets, a weekly street in the same district (Fig. 11.11) and a permanent municipal market located in the west part of the city (Fig. 11.12).

11.7

Comments on Results

By comparing the outcomes of the experiential-walk method application in different types of urban case studies along the years it is possible to highlight some relevant frequent aspects as summarised below. Mono-sensory experience and analysis: The ability and sensitivity of the walker influence the perception of spaces. Of course, designers tend to read the environment through professional lenses, and their subjective perceptual sensitivity influences where to direct the attention. Indeed, most participants were mainly visually oriented, both in sensing the environment and in communicating the experience, but some of them were responsive to other senses as well. Hence, the role of education

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Fig. 11.7 Via Celoria (Milan) interpreted by Karandi et al. (2018). The image shows some screenshots of the Instagram page “Via Giovanni Celoria” (www.instagram.com/via_giovanni_ celoria) created ad hoc for representing the outcomes of the experiential-walk providing information for the preliminary design project by students. The street itself expresses the outcomes in the first person through some images, comments, and tags. The scroll of the posts enables one to perceive the overall conditions and atmospheres of the place. The posts on different days enables some key-characteristics over time to be followed (in this case, a short time)

and training in urban design are crucial for giving more space to all the senses that contribute to defining the sensory experience in time and space. Traditional sight-based representation: Since non-visual urban characteristics, such as smell and sound, are not traditionally depicted in the urban and architectural field, participants have to face a difficult task when they have to represent these elements, especially when they want to express their sensory atmosphere; moreover, urban representation in most cases is static therefore it addresses time only implicitly. Representation has always had a significant impact on design project development, so the use of multimedia representation, now made easy by technology, can support the shift towards more multisensory design projects evolving through time.

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Fig. 11.8 The Porta-Nuova project and its surroundings interpreted by Rosa Magri (2012, during the Porta-Nuova project construction). Images folded in the physical map present the experience of the neighbourhood. Indeed, different realities coexist in the area, and there are visual perspectives showing high-quality urban elements in an undervalued environment. By opening and closing the map, it is possible to discover these hidden realities that sometimes generate a pleasant surprise while experiencing the place

Non-conventional approach: Participants generally perceived the entire process as a challenging but useful learning tool, and it is possible to notice that they continuously refer to this experience from the design concept to the final solution. The introduction of experiential and less conventional approaches to urban design phases can be beneficial for supporting a reflective practice focused on the human \environment relationship, and hence it seems relevant to investigate nonconventional modes of further investigation, representation and communication. It is not surprising that common trends can be found in the ease with which technical or non-technical approaches are adopted depending on the university of provenance since these are often skills and abilities learned in the educational process. It would be interesting to investigate the existence of this correlation between educational approaches in architecture and urban planning and the design projects’ outcomes. This poses a crucial question on the relevance of the environment- and human-centred approach in university courses in urban planning and design.

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Fig. 11.9 The Porta-Nuova project and neighbourhood interpreted by Maged Magdy (2013). The iconic towers of the Uni-Credit Bank offices and other shops are perceived as an out-of-scale structure forced to fit the site; it seems to swallow the surrounding space leading the contextual neighbourhoods to ask for more space. The mass of this commercial puppet struggles with the context causing visual blackouts when approaching it from the nearby Garibaldi station

Fig. 11.10 The image is a screenshot of the interactive website created to show the outcomes of several experiential-walks by Brambilla et al. (2016). The website (sample video at: http://bit.ly/ exp-walk_interactivediary_2016) shows the impressions of two areas in the Città Studi neighbourhood, namely, piazza Piola and the Romano swimming pool park. The experiential-walk led to a series of observations, with impressions noted on a diary by each group member. Some multimedia recording has been done to show the environment and its main characteristics. Some hidden spaces emerged only after the repetition of the experiential-walks along the months

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Fig. 11.11 The image is one of the outcomes of the experiential-walk and analysis of via Valvassori Peroni (Milan) during the weekly street market by Krsmanovic et al. (2016) (video of the entire ethnographic work: http://bit.ly/exp-walk_marketlife_2016). The representations describe the complex sensory atmosphere that characterises the street life during this weekly pop-up space. The overall work describes the sensory organisation of the space from the visual (e.g. colours of selling items), smell (e.g. food odours), hearing (e.g. voices of vendors and buyers), and taste perspective

Fig. 11.12 The sketches are combined in a video that shows a walking sensory experience in Wagner market (Milan) from above. Interpretation by Zucchini and Tovaglieri (2019). The black and white drawings, colours, sounds, and emotions induced by the Wagner market and its urban context progressively appear consistently with the walker location. The work highlights the flows of the sensory experiences in motion (video: http://bit.ly/exp-walk_approachingwagnermarket_ 2019)

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Conclusions and Further Developments

To conclude, it is interesting to notice that today this experiential-walk approach is applied to current conditions only; indeed, it would be quite relevant to use the same procedure to investigate future environments’ experiential outcomes. As a matter of fact, experiential sensory simulation for anticipating people’s reactions to design projects can be applied for pre-assessing the human\environment relationship. In particular, Augmented and Virtual Reality are technical solutions that are rapidly becoming affordable and easy-to-use both for the professionals preparing the scenarios for the (virtual) users’ walk experience and the final users. To reach more reliable and consistent conclusions on the experience of places, a reiteration of the procedure at different times, e.g. hours of the day, weather conditions, season, would be preferable when possible. At the same time, an experiential-walk conducted by a number of people belonging to different target populations relevant for the study would surely enrich knowledge of the location and thus the overall design process. Of course, these possibilities depend on the goal, available time, and resources. To save time, reliable simulations guaranteeing a proper response equivalence, i.e. “the applicability of the results of laboratory analogues to non-laboratory, real-life settings” [19, p. 169], would facilitate this analysis over time and with different conditions. Nevertheless, the cost of such a procedure would increase. As described in the project management triangle of triple constraints, three dependent variables influence the final results: resources (cost and human resources), time, scope/quality: ideally, the three variables should always be balanced, hence, to keep the same desired result, if one variable decreases the other should increase accordingly. Despite this, indubitably the benefit of pre-assessing the experiential outcomes before going to construction has a value hard to estimate.

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6. Boffi M, Riva E, Rainisio N, Inghilleri P (2016) Social psychology of flow: a situated framework for optimal experience. In: Harmat L, Ørsted Andersen F, Ullén F, Wright J, Sadlo G (eds) Flow experience: empirical research and applications. Springer, Cham, pp 215–231. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28634-1_14 7. Borch C (ed) (2014) Architectural atmospheres: on the experience and politics of architecture. Birkhauser, Cham 8. Bosselmann P (2008) Urban transformation: understanding city form and design. Island Press, Washington, DC 9. Böcker L, Dijst M, Prillwitz J (2013) Impact of everyday weather on individual daily travel behaviours in perspective: a literature review. Transport Rev 33(1):71–91. https://doi.org/10. 1080/01441647.2012.747114 10. Carmona M, Tiesdell S, Heath T, Oc T (2010) Public places, urban spaces: the dimensions of urban design. Routledge, London 11. Cassidy T (1997) Environmental psychology: behaviour and experience in context. Psychology Press, London 12. Degen MM, Rose G (2012) The sensory experiencing of urban design: the role of walking and perceptual memory. Urban Stud 49(15):3271–3287. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980 12440463 13. Fumagalli N, Fermani E, Senes G, Boffi M, Pola L, Inghilleri P (2020) Sustainable co-design with older people: the case of a public restorative garden in Milan (Italy). Sustainability 12(8):3166. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12083166 14. Graig E (1993) Stress as a consequence of the urban physical environment. Handbook of stress, 2nd edn. Free Press, Mumbai 15. Heft H (2003) Affordances, dynamic experience, and the challenge of reification. Ecol Psychol 15(2):149–180. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326969ECO1502_4 16. Holl S, Pallasmaa J, Gómez AP (2006) Questions of perception: phenomenology of architecture. William Stout, Richmond, CA 17. Jacobs AB (1985) Looking at cities. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 18. Malnar JM, Vodvarka F (2004) Sensory design. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/sensory-design 19. McKechnie GE (1977) Simulation techniques in environmental psychology. In Stokols D (A c. Di) (ed) Perspectives on environment and behavior (1°, pp 169–189), Plenum Press. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-2277-1_7 20. Moon JA (2004) Handbook of reflective and experiential learning: theory and practice. Psychology Press, London 21. Moser G (1988) Urban stress and helping behavior: effects of environmental overload and noise on behavior. J Environ Psychol 8(4):287–298. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(88) 80035-5 22. Pallasmaa J (1996) The eyes of the skin: architecture and the senses (1°). Academy Editions 23. Piga BEA (2017) Experiential simulation for urban design: from design thinking to final resentation. In: Piga BEA, Salerno R (eds) Urban design and representation. A multidisciplinary and multisensory approach. Springer, Cham, pp 23–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-31951804-6_3 24. Piga B, Morello E (2015) Environmental design studies on perception and simulation: an urban design approach. Int J Sens Environ Archit Urban Space. http://ambiances.revues.org/ 647 25. Piga BEA, Salerno R (2018) Non-conventional representation for urban design: depicting the intangible. In: ICGG 2018—proceedings of the 18th international conference on geometry and graphics, pp 1694–1705. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-95588-9_ 152 26. Radaelli R, Salerno G, Villani V, Piga BEA, Morello E (2011) Designing child-friendly urban environments: a proposal for a method of investigation based on visual simulation. In: Envisioning architecture: proceeding of the 10th conference of the European architectural envisioning association. Envisioning Architecture, Delft

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27. Rainisio N, Boffi M, Riva E (2015) Positive change in environment: aesthetics, environmental flow ability and well-being. In: Inghilleri P, Riva G, Riva E (eds) Enabling positive change: flow and complexity in daily experience. De Gruyter Open Poland, pp 91–104. https://www. degruyter.com/document/doi/10.2478/9783110410242.6/html 28. Rossetto A (2017) The model as experience. Experience with models. In: Piga BEA, Salerno R (eds) Urban design and representation. A multidisciplinary and multisensory approach. Springer, Cham, pp 103–115. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51804-6_8 29. Schnell I, Potchter O, Yaakov Y, Epstein Y, Brener S, Hermesh H (2012) Urban daily life routines and human exposure to environmental discomfort. Environ Monit Assess 184(7): 4575–4590. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-011-2286-1 30. Schön DA (1987) Educating the reflective practitioner: toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. Wiley, Hoboken 31. Scuderi M, Rahm P (2014) Philippe Rahm Architects: Constructed Atmospheres. Postmedia Srl, Milan 32. Seamon D (1980) Body-subject, time-space routines, and place-ballets. In: Buttimer A, Seamon D (eds) The human experience of space and place, pp 148–165 33. Seamon D (2012) Merleau-Ponty, perception, and environmental embodiment: implications for architectural and environmental studies. In: McCann R, Locke PM (eds) Carnal Echoes: Merleau-Ponty and the flesh of architecture, p 16 34. Southworth M (1969) The sonic environment of cities. Environ Behavior 1(1):49–70. https:// doi.org/10.1177/001391656900100104 35. Spence C (2020) Senses of place: architectural design for the multisensory mind. Cognitive Res Principles Implications 5(1):46. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-020-00243-4 36. Staats H, Hartig T (2004) Alone or with a friend: a social context for psychological restoration and environmental preferences. J Environ Psychol 24(2):199–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jenvp.2003.12.005 37. Stansfeld S, Haines M, Brown B (2000) Noise and health in the urban environment. Rev Environ Health 15:43–82. https://doi.org/10.1515/REVEH.2000.15.1-2.43 38. Thiel P (1997) People, paths, and purposes: Notations for a participatory envirotecture. University of Washington Press, Seattle 39. Tuan Y-F (1977) Space and Place: the perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 40. Wang Z, de Dear R, Luo M, Lin B, He Y, Ghahramani A, Zhu Y (2018) Individual difference in thermal comfort: a literature review. Build Environ 138:181–193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. buildenv.2018.04.040 41. Zardini M (2012) Toward a sensorial urbanism. In Thibaud J-P, Siret D (eds) Ambiances in action/Ambiances en acte(s), pp 19–26. http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/74/50/41/PDF/ambiances2012_ zardini.pdf

Barbara E. A. Piga, An Architect by education, she is Assistant Professor at the Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI), where she is also Coordinator of the Laboratorio di Simulazione Urbana Fausto Curti—labsimurb (POLIMI—Department of Architecture and Urban Studies) since its foundation in 2007. At labsimurb she is also the project leader and responsible for the experiential simulation and sensory design research. She is part of the Board of the interdepartmental research laboratory i.Drive—Interaction Between Driver, Road Infrastructure, Vehicle, And Environment since 2019, where she is responsible for mobility experiential simulation and the urban/landscape environment design guidelines. She is the POLIMI Coordinator of two recent European Projects H2020 EIT Digital (Digital Cities) “AR4CUP: Augmented Reality for Collaborative Urban Planning” (2019 and 2020), where she is responsible for a novel co-design methodology through Augmented and Virtual Reality. Within these projects, she developed an innovative methodology for pre-assessing

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the experience of people in space through simulation: “Experiential Environmental Impact Assessment—exp-EIA©” (Copyright BOIP N. 123453—06.05.2020 and Copyright BOIP N. 130516—25.02.2021). She works in particular with dynamic simulations of the urban environment as a design and evaluation tool. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from POLIMI (2010).

Chapter 12

Capturing Chromatic Effects in Urban Environment Anne Petit, Daniel Siret, and Nathalie Simonnot

Abstract To consider the multiple colour variations under the light, climate and movement, we propose the notion of sensory chromatic effect. Between pure colour analysis and broader visualscape approaches, the chromatic effect is a tool to handle the ordinary perception of coloured architecture in everyday situation. It is analogous to the notion of sonic effect defined by Augoyard et al. [2]. In order to detect such chromatic effects, a survey was conducted in the city of Nantes (France) using experiential walks. It involved 12 people during 2 days with bright sky. Each participant was granted with a camera worn around the neck with video mode ON. While walking, the camera recorded the position, the views and the sounds. The instruction given to participants was: “When you walk, pay attention to the colours that surround you. When it’s interesting, take a picture and explain the situation orally.” The methodology inspired by commented walks [14] requires (1) the full transcription of each participant’s words; (2) establishing the links between words and pictures taken by participants; (3) identifying the chromatic effects perceived by participants from words and pictures; (4) making a fusion of all individual discourses into a single one; (5) building a synthesis of shared chromatic effects along the route. By this way, a repertoire of about twenty chromatic effects has been defined in several categories. Some major detected effects are for instance visual appeal effect, pushing colours effect, flicker effect, black hole effect, etc. Based on these results, two kinds of graphical representations have been proposed to handle the chromatic effects in the context of an urban or architectural project: expressive photomontages, based on the pictures taken by participants, that exaggerate the effect in order to make it intelligible; analytic cartographies that illustrate the spectrum of chromatic effects along the route. Keywords Colour planning


Urban landscape
Chromatic effect

A. Petit
D. Siret (&) Graduate School of Architecture of Nantes, AAU UMR CNRS 1563, Nantes, France e-mail: [email protected] N. Simonnot Graduate School of Architecture of Versailles, LéAV, Versailles, France © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_12

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Perceiving Colour in Motion with the Concept of Sensory Effect

For more than thirty years, the concept of sensory effect has been proposed and experimented as an inter-disciplinary tool to analyse our experience of space. Since the 1980s, Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue have established the sonic effect model, as well as the Répertoire des effets sonores [2]. This repertoire of sonic effects aims at meeting the need for a tool specifically adapted to the soundscape analysis, with an operational value, and which use would complement quantitative tools. Sonic effects represent a model for urban ambiances analysis and design, and invite the development of other similar tools. We can mention the repertoire of visual and light effects [4] and the repertoire of olfactory effects [3]. The proposition for a repertoire of chromatic effects, which is the topic of this paper, is part of this research. It continues a body of work on the rules and effects of colours, which started at the beginning of the nineteenth century [5, 7, 11, 12] and progressed through the twentieth century [1, 8]. While they are well-known and used in the artistic world, the effects of colours have a different dimension on the urban scale. Indeed, we must consider new parameters that alter the stability of coloured appearances: the weather and light conditions, depending on the hours and seasons, the relations between foreground and background, the viewing distance, the citizens’ movements, the dimensions of the coloured areas, etc. The approach of coloured effects within the urban environment is complex, and the lack of knowledge of architects and planners lead to visual effects that are not designed. These effects cannot be apprehended by common tools such as chromatic charters. They are particularly present in European peri-urban areas, where unusual and ultra-coloured architectures have been appearing since the 2000s. Our experience of the coloured city thus switches between fascination (constant surprise, aesthetic emotion, brightening up of the space) and confusion (loss of bearings, cacophony of landscapes, spectacularisation of architecture). Urban designers and planners lack tools and methods that are able to capture and communicate the sensation that the colours vibrate, move forward from the materials, create visual bearings or draw the attention of the viewer. The development of a repertoire of chromatic effects fills this gap. In order to start this process, gradually building a relevant analytical tool, we developed an investigation method based on walks [10]. To consider the situated perception of colours in space and time, this method consists in analysing the perception of a group of people while moving through an urban journey, and to distinguish the main colour perceptions. The method relies on the graphical interpretation of the observed effects, as to integrate and disseminate them within urban projects. In this article, we present the method and the results obtained after a practical application carried out in Nantes (France) in 2014.

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209

Presentation of the Site and Proposed Walk

Our study site is located between two joint development zones (ZAC) in the urban centre of Nantes. In these zones, there is diversity in colours, materials, programmes, building morphologies, as well as the presence of new materials with noticeable visual effects through motion. It includes the north–east part of ZAC Île de Nantes, dedicated to housing and sport facilities, and the south part of ZAC PréGauchet (north of the Loire), mainly dedicated to housing. The two areas are connected by the Willy Brandt road bridge, of around two hundred metres and over the Loire (Fig. 12.1). ZAC Île de Nantes is characterised by past ports and industrial wastelands. Designed to be deployed over twenty years, the urban project is based on the strong political desire to create a new urban centre integrated into social and economic dynamics. ZAC Pré-Gauchet is located on past wastelands. The urban community

Kanopé, housing (2010)

Nouvelle vague, mixed program (2013) Chroma, housing (2010)

Axeo, office building (2010) Sophie Germain, School (2010) Point of arrival, end of the walk Skyline, office building (2011) Le Henner, office building (2008) Phare des Alizés, mixed program (2010) Old urban fabric (1960s) Marcel Saupin, stadium and office building (2009-2010)

Malakoff district, housing (1969-1971, 2013) Les étoiles de Loire, housing (2009) Old urban fabric (1960s) Railway Willy Brandt Bridge (1995)

Tours Vulcain, housing (1973) Palais des sports, sports hall (1967-1979)

Veterinary clinic (2006) Arboréa, mixed program (2006)

Résidétapes, housing (2009)

High school (2014) Playtime, housing (2007)

Yleo, mixed program (2010) Starting point of the walk

Fig. 12.1 Plan of the case study application and main buildings along the way. The two base maps do not have the same perspective, as they come from two different sources (Atelier Ruelle and SAMOA). We combined them on the illustration to ensure a better understanding of the itinerary. Graphic work by Anne Petit

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of Nantes Métropole is working on the reintegration of the Malakoff-Pré-Gauchet site into the city dynamics of these neighbourhoods with an approach that reconnects the geographical and social elements. Both ZACs’ planning documents do not provide specific indications on colours. The itinerary for our study was established according to several criteria. It stretched over 1200 m, which roughly corresponds to a twenty-minute walk (one-way). Separated by the river Loire, the two areas are connected by the Willy Brandt road bridge, which the respondents cross by foot and on which traffic is significant. Before undertaking the study, the site’s colours (built site and environment) have been surveyed using the standardised NCS (Natural Color System) colour chart. This step, which is common to most chromatic studies, allows to carry out an “objective” survey, to be able to compare it later and to complete it with sensory approaches. The production of several chromatic patterns of buildings was done after the NCS survey. This representation method is inspired by Jean-Philippe Lenclos’ work, from Géographie de la Couleur [9]. It provides a sample of all colours used on a studied site, simplifying their application on buildings. The patterns graphically sum up in a square of a few centimetres the colour shades used per building, their number and their chromatic associations (Fig. 12.2). These are then integrated into a map that allows to apprehend them within their urban context (Fig. 12.3). Compared to Jean-Philippe Lenclos’ work, the chromatic patterns better adapt themselves to contemporary architecture, whose scale, outlined mouldings, and diverse and original composition elements make the synthetic representations more complex (no information on the number of floors, scale, materiality of colours).

Fig. 12.2 Proposition of chromatic pattern (right) that sums up the shades used, their number and their chromatic association. Illustration by Anne Petit

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Fig. 12.3 Chromatic patterns along the path produced from the NCS survey. North is on the right, and turning the map at a 90° angle helps reading the itinerary. Illustration by Anne Petit

12.3

Survey Protocol

The study aimed at confronting volunteers to the urban environment’s chromatic effects, at recording their in situ commentaries and at allowing them to take pictures of the locations. Jean-Paul Thibaud’s method of commented walks was the main inspiration, as it enables to report on perception in motion, thus calling upon three simultaneous activities: walking, perceiving and describing [14]. However, we chose not to walk with the participants. They walked, perceived and described their path through the urban space on their own. The surveys took place on Monday 15 and Tuesday 16 September 2014 between 12 pm and 5 pm, with a clear sky. The weather constant is an important piece of data that conditions the perception of effects, even if it is impossible to ensure a stability in light conditions. Twelve individuals, six men and six women of around 30 years, participated in this survey, with six individuals studied per day. Our aim was to record the participants’ in situ commentaries and to allow them to take pictures of the locations corresponding to their impression. We chose to use digital cameras set on video mode, as to follow their movements within space. The device is hanging around the participants’ neck, and we asked them to ignore it and

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walk normally. The device captures the position within space and continuously records the participants’ voices and commentaries. The selected cameras enable to take pictures without exiting the video mode and without having to use many commands. Beside the technical material, a map was given to the participants to allow them to find their way on the itinerary proposed for the survey. After technical explanations on how to use the cameras and a presentation of the itinerary, the instructions given were as follow: I am carrying out a survey on colour within the urban space. During your walk, pay attention to the colours that are around you. When something associated with colours interests you, take a picture and explain the situation out loud.

No further instruction was given, as to ensure that each respondent was free to express their own sensitivity to colours.

12.4

Analysis of Recorded Speeches and Pictures Throughout the Itinerary

Once the walks were done, the cameras were collected. The speeches that were uttered during the survey of each twelve people were completely transcribed. All the pictures were included in the personal transcriptions. A synthesis was then produced to present all the speeches as a collective commentary of the itinerary. Divided according to representative sections, it is composed of the twelve participants’ words, re-situated into the description. It was used as a base for a spatialised restitution of the walk, close to the “polyglot walks” proposed by Jean-Paul Thibaud, which is a part of the commented walks ([14], pp. 79–99). It supports the first phase of the analysis and allows to condense the commentaries and to highlight some consensual phenomena. As Thibaud [14] explains: “it is the redundancy and recurrence of commentaries of the same nature, from different observers, that attest to a certain community of perception”. The itinerary restitution was thus composed based on the selection of the most significant fragments about the local sensitive context, while respecting the speaker’s localisation and the direction of the itinerary. From these elements, the chromatic effects perceived are analysed and compared. We added graphical documents to the analysis, enhancing the perceived chromatic effects. They are photomontages, based on the pictures taken by the volunteers during the walk. They allow us to represent some consensual effects that were perceived in situ and that are not possible to transcribe with the original pictures only. Indeed, during the survey, photography as it was used was not able to convey the complexity of the in situ perception. The participants had some difficulties capturing with the camera what they really perceived. Visual acuity is infinitely more sensitive than photographic documentation, which implies potential problems

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of backlight, distance and contrasts. The eye interprets and reorganises the perception of chromatic information. In order to make visible the information associated with the chromatic effects that are perceived during the walks and verbalised by the participants, we carried out graphical studies on the representation modes of chromatic effects. We aim to propose a graphical expression of the impressions associated with chromatic effects through the production of revealing images that are usable in the urban development process. We propose to reuse and rework the pictures taken by the participants to produce a series of pictures that represents the consensual effects of the itinerary. After choosing the most explicit picture amongst those taken by the participants, we decided to exaggerate, to broaden or to caricature their rearrangement. The verisimilitude of the picture is not crucial, as the objective is rather to give it the biggest demonstrative power possible with graphical processing. The proposed graphical language aims at finding a balance between the explicit addition of graphical operations and the preservation of the similarity with reality, since the approach should be easy to replicate by other users.

12.5

Proposition of a Chromatic Effects Repertoire in Urban Environment

Table 12.1 presents our results. This study allowed us to propose the first version of a repertoire of chromatic effect in urban environment. To illustrate the uncovered effects, we developed graphical interpretations based on the pictures taken by the participants, as explained previously. The length of this article unfortunately does not allow us to reproduce their words, which illustrate the perceived effects as they were uttered during the surveys (recorded monologues with the continuous video capture). The different chromatic effects that are presented in Table 12.1 are proposed as hypotheses, which we base on the existing directories of effects (sound, visual and light, olfactory effects). These three reference directories propose categories of sensory effects. Some of them are applicable to chromatic effects.

12.6

Summary and Perspectives

The repertoire of chromatic effects proposed in this article highlights the diversity of impressions that motion can bring into the perception of urban colours. Considering the conditions for the displacement of the observer into space and the variations of natural light, the effects are replaced by one another (a shimmering effect can be replaced by a mass effect) and can superimpose one another (a visual appeal effect can lead to a heat effect, a physical attraction effect and a visual

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Table 12.1 Proposition of a repertoire of chromatic effects from the study carried out in Nantes in 2014 Effect

Description

Visual appeal

Appears when bright colours, in contrast with their environment, produce a coloured effect that attracts and “catches” the eye. In urban space, this effect is created by the use of bright colours on the façades of contemporary architectural works, sometimes visible and noticeable from far away The colourful beam goes through the different landscape plans, until it reaches the viewer’s eye While pictures do not successfully translate the visual impact of those colours, the commentaries highlight the high visibility of these coloured patches in the landscape. The participants had to zoom in with their camera to show the impact of the yellow balconies, whereas the eye notices them immediately By seeking to attract, capture, challenge or invite the eye, the appeal effect implies body movement, head and eye movements: we look up, we come closer, we watch Optical phenomenon that leads to believe that the colours detach themselves from the landscape or the buildings, appearing in relief and moving closer to the observer The bright colours, often radiant, tend to “move toward the eye”, whereas the darker ones seem to recede. This phenomenon is particularly noticeable on one interior part of the Marcel Saupin stadium and on the Chroma buildings, rue du Cher. In both cases, the façades’ backgrounds are dark (medium grey coating or plastic materials up to dark grey, sometimes heightened by a backlight phenomenon), the bright colours are radiant, saturated and citrus-like (orange, green, turquoise) Is defined by the presence of one bright colour located at the top of a building, which then acts as a signal

Overhang of colours

Lighthouse

Illustration

Visual appeal effect produced by the Playtime building (top) and by the yellow balconies in one of the buildings in Malakoff

Colour overhang effect on the stadium, observed in backlight and on the Chroma building

(continued)

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Table 12.1 (continued) Effect

Domination

Resonance

Erasing

Description in the urban space. Visible from very far away, it follows the movement of individuals and can be noticed from many different places. Its presence creates a large visual beam that crosses the landscape. Displayed to everyone, its height and coloured power give it a strong effect of visual domination over the surrounding spaces, which, even if they are strongly coloured as well, seem plain and dull Occurs when one colour imposes itself to everyone in the landscape and draws the exclusive attention of the viewer. It can be from one colour contrasting with the general harmony or a strong nuance applied largely to wide urban perspectives. The erasure of surrounding colours in the field of vision happens next, benefiting the main colour Chromatic resonance occurs when apparent colours correspond to one another between the elements within the surrounding space Often unconscious, the chromatic correspondence is tightly connected to the concept of visual comfort, harmony, balance, coherence and aesthetics. The participants described these connections extensively, which bring coherence to the spaces they are in Corresponds to the perceptual evacuation of one or several chromatic elements in an urban area. When a coloured source dominates the visual panorama, the attention is focused on this source, leading to the disappearance of some of the context’s colours In the Pablo Picasso Mail, there is an access to a visual perspective towards this light spot along the built front, which glosses over some colours, even bright ones, present in the same field of vision

Illustration

Lighthouse effect from the Le Phrase des Alizés building

Domination effect at the stadium: the bright colours cancel the chromatic element of the surrounding spaces

Chromatic resonance between the red colour on the balconies, the shop signs, the canopies and the fire hydrants This effect was verbalised during the walk, but the participants did not take pictures. Producing a photomontage was thus impossible

(continued)

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Table 12.1 (continued) Effect

Description

Fading

The fading, or mimicry effect (Serra Lluch and Juan [13], appears when a building has the same colours as the sky, vegetation or the urban surroundings, which thus gives the impression that it is disappearing into the environment Clad in blue material and reflecting enough light, some buildings disappear into the sky and the landscape. If the sky is blue, the blue buildings disappear and the white ones appear. If the sky is white, the white buildings disappear and the blue ones are more visible Represents a visual pause and a slowdown when the eye sweeps the environment without being harshly stimulated by colours. We talk about “breathing” as this state occurs around vegetation and around open locations, such as the sky Change in a building appearance under a powerful direct natural light. Similar to theatre spotlights that highlight only one object on stage by hiding the rest in darkness, a building appears and unveils its colours under the light When the weather is cloudy, the objects “appear” and “disappear” according to the light, as mentioned by the participants about the stadium. The coloured sun visors light up with the sun, without which the building “turns off”, loses its colour, becomes dull and leans toward a grey colour The space appears to warm up with the addition of warm colours and to grow cold with the addition of cold ones. The perception of the ambiance is influenced by the colour temperatures The study shows that the heat/cold effects are mainly felt from the very presence or absence of colours in that space. Colours that are usually considered as cold (blue, purple, some green shades) can bring some

Visual breathing

Flashover

Heat/Cold

Illustration

Fading effect between the Vulcain towers and the sky. It is due to the different blue and luminous colours of their coating

Similarly to the erasing effect, this one was expressed by the participants, but they did not take pictures

Flashover effect on the Marcel Saupin stadium according to the sunrays and the sky

Heat effect produced by the use of red-ochre colours on white. Moreover, the “hot” base colour is a reminder of the south of France (continued)

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Table 12.1 (continued) Effect

Immersion

Attraction/ Repulsion

Description warmth to a space, associated with the idea of comfort. While a coloured space is perceived as warm, the lack of colours within it can lead to a cold effect, also associated with the concept of discomfort Represents the action of literally entering a space where only one colour prevails. For example, it happens in a street or a neighbourhood where we can feel like we are surrounded with only one colour (white, green, etc.). The viewer thus feels immerged in the colour. It is sometimes hard to identify the elements’ colours from one to another This effect is partly influenced by urban design, the density of the built fabric and by the continuity of the line of façades facing the street. It is less sensitive if the location is not a built enclave where the effect can be contained. The Pablo Picasso Mail, and its tall white buildings, creates an immersion effect in the colour white because, even though this avenue is long, the built front remains compact and continuous, and can thus “contain the colour white” into the space. At the end of the Mail, several immersion effects occur in the colour green. This impression comes from the buildings’ green colour and the big presence of vegetation Psychomotor effect according to which, in an uncontrolled and unconscious way, a colour draws and polarises the attention until it completely mobilises the entire behaviour (see the attraction effect in [2]). For example, it deals with surfaces or coloured details that are present in human-scaled spaces, such as alleys, and in partly concealed places, such as façades that mobilise atypical materials, inviting to look closer, coloured façades that are far away and streaked, façades releasing

Illustration

Immersion effect in the colour white when we enter the Pablo Picasso Mail. The white buildings represent an ambiance that is almost achromic

Immersion effect in the colour green in the Pablo Picasso Mail

Attraction effect in front of the Seil de Mauves alley. This effect is partly due to the warm colours, such as green, to the presence of vegetation, the animation of the architectural composition, the presence of wood (continued)

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Table 12.1 (continued) Effect

Black hole

Mass/ Lightness

Brightening

Description

Illustration

a sensation of warmth, spaces offering a landscape viewpoint, spaces lit up by the sun, and thus colours under the light Comparatively, the repulsion effect occurs when, in an uncontrolled or conscious way, a chromatic phenomenon triggers a rejection, as well as an escape behaviour that are outlined or real In the urban landscape, black holes lead to the creation of unknown areas. The lack of natural or artificial light does not give any information on the nature, texture and form of the object Those areas can be created by dark architectural objects or located in the shade, exposed on lighter forms or, as it is most often the case, created by all sorts of carved hollows in built volumes (windows, doors, balconies, alcoves, terraces). Associated with light effects, the black hole effect is temporary, as it is subjected to the changing conditions of insolation The dark colours seem “heavier” than light colours. These interpretations of the objects’ visual weight refer to the unconscious mimicry effect between the (clear, blue and aerial) sky and the (dark, earth-ochre and heavy) ground On the itinerary for this study, the mass effect produced by the Palais des Sports de Beaulieu comes from the black envelope, the flared shape of the base, the lack of windows, the visual assault and visual discomfort. In contrast, the stadium can produce a lightness and transparency effect Addition of colours (surfaces or coloured accents) that leads to diversifying the reading of the environment and to bringing a positive aspect to the less attractive spaces, such as parking lots, basements, roundabouts, etc.

on the façade, the human scale of the alley

Black hole effect on the Arborea buildings, contrasted by a fading effect on the lateral sides of the building. The effect here is due to the depth of the wooden terraces and their wired aspect

Lightness effect due both to the fading effect with the sky, the coloured patches reminding us of the shape of the clouds, the reflecting and vibrating glass material

(continued)

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Table 12.1 (continued) Effect

Description

Colours give the possibility of animating, energising and making attractive a space, from a visual and social point of view. This role is understood on both the optical and symbolic levels. For instance, colourful planters can animate a dull-looking façade in an optical way by adding bright colours, and in a symbolic way by describing the signs of inhabitants, which demonstrates the appropriation of the place Greyness Negative perception of an urban space that is incorporated into a chromatic ambiance with a dominant grey colour. This is created by the presence of common urban elements in grey, to which we usually give a “trivial” value, such as the bitumen, the pavements and other ground development devices, roundabouts, concrete, ground coverings, stones, materials that have been shaded by time and dirt, etc. It is mainly about heavy materials that belong to the static colours category. The greyness effect is related to an immersion effect in the colour grey, usually associated with a negative judgment (sad, dreary, monotonous, dull, plain, etc.) Graphic work by Anne Petit based on the pictures taken

Illustration Brightening effect of the parking lots in the buildings’ undergrounds. The underground spaces that convey a gloomy image are here dealt with colours

Greyness effect in a homogeneous and grey space that is dominated by static colours

by the participants during their walk

comfort effect). They can stay together according to the observation perspective (the Arborea buildings produce a fading effect with the sky on the south side and a black hole effect on the west side) or blend together on one building (the Marcel Saupin stadium presents a wide diversity of effects depending on the angle of view). They can compete visually (on the bridge, the stadium’s shimmering effect competes with the lighthouse effect of the Phare des Alizés building). They also depend on one another (an erasing effect comes from a lighthouse effect or visual domination). This study thus demonstrates the nature of these effects, both permanent and impermanent. Research on colour in the urban space show that the impermanence of colour perceptions mainly depends on weather conditions and seasons, on the observation distance, on time, which dulls the colours. Moreover, this study considers the perception in motion, the parameters associated with the individual perceptual organization and cultural conditioning. Our results highlight these

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variability factors and show that the impermanent aspect of the effects seems to represent an added value to the in situ experience, which reveals the complexity and richness of urban ambiances. Similar to the floor plan, which is usually used in colour planning strategies, we produced a cartography of the effects that were indexed during the study (Fig. 12.4). The specificity of this representation is that it maintains a chronological and directional reading of the itinerary. The information is thus only readable within this itinerary and the particular conditions for its realisation (time, month, weather conditions). The black line represents the itinerary followed, the effects are connected as if they followed the eye of the observer. The cartography accounts for the complexity of the perception in motion and of chromatic phenomena that are perceived in co-presence throughout the walk. It highlights the situations of visual competition between buildings from a unique point of view. The representation system that is proposed sums up and enhances the concept of accumulation of effects and the complexity of colour perception in the urban landscape. Such a tool could thus help urban planners to anticipate and express the colour planning desires for new projects in the same area [6].

Fig. 12.4 Cartography of chromatic effects surveyed according to the commentaries from the participants on the proposed urban itinerary. Graphic work by Anne Petit

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The ongoing repertoire of chromatic effects highlighted by this study aims at understanding the apparition of effects, and the graphical interpretations proposed (photomontages and cartographies) allow for a discussion and a project around these effects in the urban space. The graphical and cartographic explorations of chromatic phenomena in the urban space must be continued, particularly through the crossing of different points of view, which could enrich the implemented mode of information. This system could help to anticipate the impacts of future colourful buildings on the landscape. It would also be interesting to explore this tool during consultations with inhabitants and citizens, for example as interactive cartography.

References 1. Albers J (1963) Interaction of color. Yale University Press, New Haven 2. Augoyard J-F, Torgue (1995) A l’écoute de l’environnement: répertoire des effets sonores. Marseille: éditions Parenthèses. English translation (2005): Sonic experience. A guide to everyday sounds. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal 3. Balez S (2001) Ambiances olfactives dans l’espace construit, Perception des usagers et dispositifs techniques et architecturaux pour la maîtrise des ambiances olfactives dans les espaces de type tertiaire. Thèse de doctorat en architecture, école d’architecture de Grenoble 4. Chelkoff G, Thibaud J-P (1992) Les mises en vue de l’espace public: les formes sensibles de l’espace public. Rapport de recherche, CRESSON, école d’architecture de Grenoble 5. Chevreul ME (1839) De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs. éditions Pitois-Pivrault, Paris 6. Cler M, Cler F, Schindler VM (2011) Colour and light in urban planning: policy, palettes and the sense of place, mood and movement. In: Procolore (ed) Proceedings of AIC 2011 midterm meeting, Zurich. Interaction of colour and light in the arts and sciences, pp 348–351 7. von Goethe JW (1810) Le Traité des couleurs. Traduction française Henriette Bideau, introduction et notes Rudolf Steiner. réédition Triades Paris, 1986 8. Itten J (1967) Art de la couleur. réédition Lethielleux, Paris, 1996 9. Lenclos JP, Lenclos DR, Georges H (1982) Couleurs de la France: géographie de la couleur. éditions du Moniteur, Paris 10. Petit A (2015) Effets chromatiques et méthodes d’approche de la couleur dans la démarche de projet architectural et urbain. Thèse de doctorat en architecture, école d’architecture de Nantes 11. Runge PO (1810) Farbenkugel. réédition Ravensburg, Hamburg, Maier (1994) 12. Schopenhauer A (1816) Sur la vue et les couleurs (Über das Sehn und die Farben). rééditions Vrin, Paris 13. Serra Lluch J (2013). La arquitectura contemporánea y el color del paisaje; entre el mimetismo y la singularidad. Expresión Gráfica Arquitectónica. Universitat Politècnica de València, pp 110–205 14. Thibaud J-P (2001) Les parcours commentés. In: Grosjean M, Thibaud J-P (eds) L’espace urbain en méthodes. éditions Parenthèses, Marseille

Anne Petit Visual artist and professional architect. She holds a PhD in architecture from the CNRS AAU (Ambiances Architectures Urbanités) Laboratory at the Graduate School of Architecture of Nantes, France. Her thesis, from which her article in this volume was taken, deals

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with the effects of colour on urban space. She developed her practice as a colourist in architecture at Atelier Chroma, which she founded. She carries out research in this field simultaneously Daniel Siret Architect, PhD in engineering sciences and accredited as research director (HDR). He is a senior research fellow at the Graduate School of Architecture of Nantes where he also heads the CNRS AAU (Ambiances Architectures Urbanités) laboratory. His work deals with the ways in which sensory dimensions are taken into account in the built environment, especially with regard to the architectural and urban expression of solar radiation. He was a visiting scholar at the Fondation Le Corbusier (2005), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (2012) and New York University (2013). Nathalie Simonnot PhD in history of architecture, she is a researcher at the LéaV Laboratory at the Graduate School of Architecture of Versailles, of which she is the Director. She is also co-head of the Master’s degree “Architecture et ses territoires” and publishing director of the fabricA journal. Her research works revolve around museum journals, the processes of heritage-making and the popular representations of architecture. She recently edited the collective works L’architecture au quotidien: regards sur des représentations ordinaires, Profils. Revue de l’Association des historiens de l’architecture, n°1, March 2018 (with É. Monin) and Architectures et espaces de la conservation (1959–2015). Archives, bibliothèques, musées, Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018 (with R. Lheureux).

Chapter 13

Ambiance Partition: An Interdisciplinary Reading, Measurement, and Notation of in Situ Experiences Claude M. H. Demers and André Potvin

Abstract An Ambiance Partition suggests a representation medium that provides an insight of simultaneous experiences occurring during an urban experiential walk. The Partition has emerged from an interdisciplinary research seminar on the reading, measurement and notation of in situ experiences, which also refers to well-known activities in music. This exploratory research generated a structure for the atmospheric translations of the complexity of existing environments. Keywords Environmental survey

13.1


Lighting ambiance
Thermal experience

Introduction

When acting upon the existent, architects are faced with complex dynamic multisensory spaces that should inform the design process with more evidence-based data on physical ambiances gathered through in situ environmental transitions. However, architectural culture and design are far more familiar with the qualitative expression of ambiances than with quantitative numerical data. An urban experiential walk. An Ambiance Partition suggests a representation medium that provides an insight of simultaneous experiences occurring during an urban experiential walk. The Partition has emerged from an interdisciplinary research seminar on the reading, measurement and notation of in situ experiences, which also refers to well-known activities in music. This exploratory research generated a structure for the atmospheric translations of the complexity of existing environments. It addresses the methodological processes that led to the creation of the visual representation, namely the “Partition”, as a synthesis of the results gathered during the C. M. H. Demers (&)
A. Potvin École d’architecture, Vieux-Séminaire, 1 Côte de la Fabrique, Université Laval, Québec G1R 3V6, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_13

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collective field studies of urban walks from researchers, students and professional participants interested in the build environment. The Ambiances Partition provides an insight of collective field observations through almost simultaneous experiences of a public space. It tackles both notions of an in situ activity: the field study itself, as well as the representation of ambiances. The paper discusses the methodology, which has been benchmarked within the International Ambiances Network during the CNRS GDRI Second Seminar on Translating Ambiances, held in Montreal, Québec. The seminar aimed to explore interdisciplinary reading, measurement and notation of ambiances through workshops involving hands-on activities happening in an existing space. The research hypothesises that an Ambiances Partition could become an interdisciplinary research activity, fostering discussion on ambiances arising from multiple perspectives. Moreover, it proposes that such discussion could materialise into a collective survey experiment, whereas ambiances would be synthesized and represented into a commonly searchable visual tool connecting ideas about experienced spaces. Ambiances issued from experiences of the sensory world, such as experiential walks, have attracted a growing interest amongst researchers of various disciplines for the past thirty years [4]. Norberg-Schulz [17] discusses ambiances through sensitive and poetic terms as interactions between landscape and architecture in his seminal book Genuis Loci. He argues that one of the fundamental human needs relates to rich sensory experiences and that the more sensitive we are to our environment and landscape, the more we can reinterpret it in poetical terms. The notion of ambiance is similar with the concept of atmospheres [25]. “It seems to be just a question of stressing particular aspects of subject-object relationships: ambiance tends to emphasize more the situated, the built and the social dimensions of sensory experience while atmosphere is more affective, aerial and politically oriented. Also, ambiance already has a long tradition of fieldwork, interdisciplinary tools and design activity while atmosphere is more grounded on philosophical, ontological and geographical issues” [25]. In the built environment, atmospheres appear in theories of phenomenology, illustrated through architectural works from Holl [13], Zumthor [29], Pallasmaa [18, 19] and philosophers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty [15]. Bachelard [7] uses poetic descriptions as images to offer possibilities to re-imagine the reality of space in phenomenological terms. Atmospheres bear a certain “unfinished quality” as, according to Dufrenne and Mikel [12], they are “perpetually forming and deforming” and therefore “never static or at rest” [1]. The notion of ambiance has evolved from its original discipline of discussing measurable physical parameters of the environment to include “sensory perception, social practices and aesthetics experience” [25]. At the core development of ambiance theories lies an ambition to gather and discuss complex interpretation levels of the multisensory world obtained through plural approaches [1] and even pluridisciplinarity, which should involve social sciences, architecture and urban planning, as well as engineering and applied physics [26]. In the current quest for a more sustainable built environment, the question of the experiencer, the inhabitant, is central to develop low-energy design strategies, clearly indicating the

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necessity to bridge human perception and building science [7]. In architecture, the synthesis of ambient phenomena relates to the experience of space at a certain time and involves several approaches: signal, perception, spatio-temporality, morphology, interaction and representation [5, 6]. These approaches may result in different but complementary ambient translations depending on the diverse viewpoints offered through disciplines. Such differences in translation could thus potentially contribute to more comprehensive definitions of ambiances, and even add value to the synthesis of an ambient phenomenon. The subject of translating ambiances offers promising avenues to expand theories on ambiances, which acknowledge the plurality of spatial experiences and favour a diversity of interpretations through collaborative processes [26]. More specifically, architectural and urban ambiances could be investigated through a series of experiential walks that, when assembled and shared, clearly exceed the literal meaning of their individual translations. Such a common knowledge on ambiances recognises the benefits of disciplinary differences and therefore promote bridges between art, architecture, and science. The diversity of reading, measurement, and notation forms are clearly influenced by languages, procedures, and means of expression associated with various discipline cultures. The reading, measurement, and notation of ambiances therefore consist of activities that could jointly establish the basis for genuine transdisciplinarity. Reading addresses the understanding of possible ambient interpretations by highlighting issues of language in their different forms. In actual spaces, reading usually involves the identification of relevant environmental cues that could be assessed. Measurement requires tools that capture ambient data into a comparison system featuring quantitative units such as scale, dimension, volume, distance, and tension. Measurement can also integrate qualitative aspects, addressing Kahn’s [14] notion of the measurable and the unmeasurable in architecture by introducing other types of scales especially well developed in arts and humanities (Demers 1997). Notation involves issues of symbolic systems as well as the inscription of signs leading to the reproduction or transmission of an experience. The notation process, consisting of a series of graphical symbols confers subjective and expressive values to objective measures, such as those represented in music. Representation constitutes a privileged mechanism to explore the transdisciplinary translation of ambiances [2]. The representational translation of the diversity and connectivity of multisensory parameters into spatio-temporal bi-axial coordinates, such as expressed in environmental walks (see example in Fig. 13.5), provides the framework to potentially associate a variety of experiences into a single format. The notion of Partition is inspired from storyboard representations that belong to cinematography, which potential has been exploited into urban design and architecture by architects such as Tschumi [28], [21]. Previous research indicates that graphical synthesis of dynamic qualitative and quantitative in situ measurements enable conclusions that are connected to the reality of the tangible built environments [19–21, 23, 24]. Such research may inform on the actual physical parameters that can be acquired through measuring devices, as well as a series of analytical images, questionnaires, and other specific representations associated with architecture, urban design and engineering. Dynamic representations of ambiances are unique means of expressing

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complexity and the experience of environmental diversity in an urban environment. The Partition could potentially connect a series of associated singular ambiances through transversal and longitudinal experiences. This research defines transversal experiences as events that occur over the course of a certain period of time, in a specific fixed point of space. In contrast, longitudinal surveys include a series of points experienced through movement such as walks, and have a greater potential to disclose some of the complex parameters that link the human apprehension of the city with comfort parameters [18, 20]. A strategically designed experiential walk constitutes an essential basis to observe, measure, and analyse ambiances in a multisensory manner to meaningfully speculate on the possible extent of new ambiances. The partition can therefore become a tool to analyse existing conditions and inform professionals in terms of future urban design solutions to develop. The research proposes that an Ambiances Partition could act as a common representation of the synthesis of spatial ambiances, and address the following questions: How can ambiances be represented and evoked through different systems and mediums? How can such varied forms of representations and evocations bring disciplinary approaches together? Such questions related to the diversity of systems and representational approaches of ambiances could only be addressed through the common experience of space and time. The spatio-temporal dimension of ambiance representations through the Partition aims to connect experiences and identify common “intersections” that may occur between disciplines during in situ surveys. The present interdisciplinary research acknowledges the richness and complexity of existing spaces in studying ambient phenomena on common grounds across disciplines. More specifically, the Ambiances Partition was developed as a research activity to provide an insight of collective field studies gathered through almost simultaneous experiences that have occurred over the course of a defined period. The next section presents the methodology that led to the development of the Ambiances Partition, describing the processes that have initiated the interdisciplinary activity, including the generation of the hypothesis of its representational synthesis. The result section addresses the transformation of the initial idea of the representation into a graphical support to discuss ambiances experimented collectively.

13.2

Methods

Diversity in reading, measuring and notation methodologies remains a key challenge in disciplinary translation of ambiances, but it also offers new possibilities for innovation. The interdisciplinary research seminar provided a unique opportunity to experiment such issues of translation and develop the collaborative sharing of methodologies regarding reading, measuring and notation of ambiances. About thirty international researchers from a diverse array of disciplines such as architecture, anthropology, cinematography, dance, engineering, geography, art performance, philosophy, sociology, urban design and visual arts, met in Montreal for a

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specially devised collective experience. The seminar provided a rare array of research expertise, creating an opportunity to experiment ways to address ambiances on a common object of study through in situ field work. This research particularly addressed urban spaces as a common basis for the discussion of perceived and measured ambient approaches since they are easily accessible and part of daily transactions with the environment. The research also provides insights into collaborative work between disciplines and favours encounters that would normally not happen. A collective experiment involving hands on activities of reading, measuring and notation is explored through a graphical synthesis, the Partition, in response to the first research question related to the representation of ambiances through different systems and media from sketches to written contributions. The Ambiances Partition therefore provides a tangible means to explore applications that may connect a majority of participants that were already involved or interested in using survey tools in the translation processes of atmospheres but also welcomes any other type of participation. Although focusing on the importance of the representational synthesis as a result of the common experiences, the research acknowledges the importance of the activity as a live public art performance from an outside observer. As both observed and observers, the Partition participants also become actors in the generation of the ambiance. The structure of the collective experiment or performance and the hypothesis for a collective representation of ambiances are thereafter described.

13.2.1 The Partition as a Performance The Partition as an activity consists of researchers using a diversity of methods to explore interdisciplinary reading, measuring and notation of in situ experiences. The Partition therefore aims to discuss those varied forms of representations and evocations that could favour connections between disciplines or methods. Bringing together disciplines that are not necessarily connected brought a certain challenge and level of complexity in the organisation of the collective investigation. An initial hypothesis stated that the Partition could explore potential intersections between ambient approaches in terms of common measures and research tools. Researchers were invited to prepare a workshop proposal, consisting of a short paragraph that exposed their interest in sharing a survey method. Some researchers preferred not to send any proposal or were not familiar enough with such direct enquiring methods involving fieldwork, but still wanted to participate. The Partition as a methodology was introduced in general terms, without privileging any particular tool or method, nor limiting the number of its accepted proposals. In fact, organisers wanted to explore how diverse were the interests gathered through participants, and how perhaps less formalised interactions would enable dynamic exchanges over a common field of work. The Partition workshop reverses previously explored disciplinary approaches, which have traditionally focussed on particular ambient modalities or

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methodologies, selected according to survey objectives and expected results. In fact, the concept of accepting the diversity of all approaches poses several methodological questions, which the Partition should highlight. Classification of ambient approaches into categories of workshop participants aimed at identifying possible connections with an Ambiances Partition in terms of notation amongst the nineteen workshop proposals that were received (Fig. 13.1). It offers a preliminary hypothesis on actual diversity of participants that will take part in the partition, and therefore aimed at presenting the diversity of the approaches, tools and methods that would be covered. Moreover, it allowed for envisioning the integration offered by all workshop ideas within the logistic imposed by time constraints of the two-and-a-half-day seminar. The classification (Fig. 13.1) shows that methodologies and tools used by participants mainly differ in two aspects. The first difference addresses the actual measured ambient objects and responses related to the question: What is measured? The second aspect emphasises the diverse tools and methods to achieve the evaluation and translation of an atmosphere when addressing the question: How to note? Tools and methods, whereas qualitative or quantitative, are clear indicators of sensory approaches privileged by researchers. Interestingly, the classification highlights that the measured ambient parameters are not essentially disciplinary but may represent potential connections between researchers of different fields. For instance, researchers involved in multisensory ambiances includes artists in performance and dance, as well as urban designers and architects. Single mode ambiances attracted the widest range of disciplines, from cultural geography, anthropology, mathematics, and artists in photography, music and graphic design. Favouring intersectoriality means that participants should ideally range from the widest diversity of disciplines combining research fields of human and social sciences with engineering, science and technology fields to take advantage of the process. In the described collective experiment, the majority of the researchers came from artistic disciplines but the ordering principle remains essentially valid for other corpus of participants. Figure 13.1 therefore proposes a preliminary identification of main sensory aspects linked with each experiment, even identifying tools used to address the ambient notation. In our particular group, some participants were clearly specialised in a particular sensorial modality, the

Fig. 13.1 Classification of team approaches to read, measure and represent ambiances

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majority of participants were involved in the exploration of a single sensory modality, whether visual, acoustical or thermal, whereas a minority was focused on the combined sound and visual ambiances. The remaining participants were interested in multisensory translations with a majority involving body movement through spaces. The classification also highlights that notation involved varied forms, from text, data, to line drawings, images and video. The majority of participants measured ambiances in qualitative ways, using descriptive or written media whereas a minority were involved in quantitative measurements of environmental variables. A wider range of participant disciplinary fields in terms of social & human sciences versus natural sciences and engineering would clearly have led to a completely different partition, which should eventually be investigated. It was expected that the dichotomy between those fields could be reduced when using a common language. An especially promising avenue for future research would for instance connect researchers on a common ambient parameter to discuss possible interactions that would be perhaps more easily communicated. The Partition responds to a data acquisition process that aims to discuss ambiances that are almost simultaneously experienced on a site. It may involve a variety of tools and methods, especially when sharing approaches is at stake, and more importantly, a diversity of research cultures. The approach benefits from working with “experiencers” which are prepared to use and share tools to measure, note and translate ambiances. Perhaps more commonly practiced amongst artists; it also appeared that some experiencers are themselves captors of ambiances, therefore relying on their own sensibilities to generate results of analysis. Conversely, a few researchers were mainly relying on such measuring tools and technologies as meters to capture ambiances and propose an interpretation of the results. This diversity corresponds to the complexity of mixing research approaches applied to a single survey of the environment, especially when working intersectorially. The Partition as a performance proposes to find possible common grounds or intersections between these research cultures. The process of acknowledging this diversity is therefore challenging, and in that regard, a common image of the methodology had to be presented to ensure at least a common vision of possible outcomes. The Ambiances Partition as a performance is similar to sections of an orchestra that practice together a single stave or sets of staves. In this regard, the activity (reading sections) and representation (notation) become complementary research opportunities that interact within a framework that can only arise through the simultaneous presence of participants. Practice through reading ambiances of a space offer opportunities to exchange ideas and knowledge about tools and methods to collect environmental data. The synthesis of the collective experience through a common notation of collected ambiances had to be organised to ensure coherence of research outputs. Inherent limits to the experience addressed time constraints and important logistic issues, which are always present when gathering an important number of participants working on a single object. Available allotted time for the entire process therefore aimed to focus on ways to generate a common visual representation of the results: the Ambiance Partition. The in situ method was therefore also developed to address those issues. It involved a methodological

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Fig. 13.2 Partition as an activity: task groups

approach that was used to collect the data, analyse and represent results in a rather restrained time frame. Two types of teams were needed to generate the Ambiances Partition synthesis: sections and ensemble (Fig. 13.2). The organisation of sections into small survey groups aimed to favour transdisciplinary encounters between researchers that had not previously worked together. These groups consisting of about five people included at least three researchers willing to share and apply their methodology to the survey site. In the Ambiance Partition, each team forms a section, but unlike a classical partition, some researchers may choose to take part in using several instruments or methods. The section group associated with transversal survey methodologies, referring to data collection localised in space and experimented several methods for capturing ambiances. These teams were thus offering the most daring combination of methods. The ensemble group consisted of the four remaining members that would be in charge of selecting an urban walk, experiencing it using state-of-the-art reading/measuring tools, and generate the basis of the Partition. The team was also responsible for the generation of a visual hypothesis for an interdisciplinary partition integrating transversal notation results obtained from sections at specific locations. The ensemble was therefore assigned to the individual data collection from all teams after the survey and gathering them in the graphical synthesis: the Partition. Physical limits of the site were chosen to allow a certain diversity in terms of open and enclosed public spaces, ensuring that a variety of tools and methods to express potential transitions could be tested. These variations were particularly important to obtain a large array of potential discoveries in terms of environmental diversity. Researchers, depending on their methods and objectives of notation of ambiances, address the physical environment in many different ways: some will search for an entire urban area using non-determined free movements or non-linear

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Fig. 13.3 Spatial limits of the urban site, with linear experiential walk of team Partition (red + blue)

forms of inhabitation while others are more determined to develop ambient analysis at localized spaces. These distinctions added another level of complexity in the definition of the physical limits as connectivity between experiences may become difficult to intersect, but they clearly illustrated that main elements related to the construction of an ambiance are also used to describe and construct a space. The limits included a series of diverse public and commercial spaces from open exterior spaces to enclosed interior ones that shelter pedestrians. Experiential walks included exterior public spaces that connect with an interior semi-public space (Place Desjardins) as well as an underground space consisting of commercial spaces and an underground public passage connecting to the metro line and the Art Centre (Fig. 13.3). Defining experimental limits was also meant to ensure that all members of the project could intersect ambient data with other groups. In the present experiment, limits were defined in physical as well as temporal terms. The temporal limit aimed to favour intersections between results of notations of ambiances, and practically responded to the short duration of the organised seminar. The investigation time was limited to an afternoon to provision for data gathering and discussion time on notation and representation methods.

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Fig. 13.4 Integrating space and time in the Ambiances Partition

13.2.2 The Partition as a Representation The hypothesis of an Ambiance Partition as a representation was elaborated from the space and time framework. Whereas longitudinal surveys address the complexity and diversity of the continuum of transitions through several spaces experienced one after the other, transversal surveys are mainly concentrating on a certain location of specific points. Notations relative to elements of space become graphical connections presented in the plan (Fig. 13.4) to illustrate potential locations of ambient investigations. They propose that a common representation should eventually emerge from the proposed structure and even indicate where actual representations could eventually be connected to the study site. Graphically, locations of survey areas closely relate to architectural elements that construct space: points, lines, and planes. They correspond to the spatio-temporal notation of the diverse trajectories or particular areas experienced by survey teams: • point: punctual survey areas (green dots) • line: linear walk (red line) • plane: free movement areas (pale green/yellow surfaces) The longitudinal survey developed for the experience included a linear walk, performed by the ensemble team (base layer), is composed of a predetermined stroll corresponding to line that crossed the length of the site almost entirely (Fig. 13.4, in thick red line and Fig. 13.3, in red + blue). The walk aimed to optimise the number of potential interactions with section teams and ensured that at least one team would survey most locations of the defined city space, addressing environmental diversity

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theories. Full description appears in chapter entitled “Interior-Exterior Ambiances”. Researchers were informed of the itinerary in advance and were invited to intersect the longitudinal survey area whenever possible. Intersections between investigation areas correspond to locations where teams were prone to meet each other, therefore providing connections between diverse methodologies to measure and note and the commonly experienced ambiance. An example of such intersection appears as a yellow rectangle in Fig. 13.4. Transversal surveys were composed of all other teams, for which the organisers had little knowledge of their exact intentions. Ambient approaches that address punctual events (points) are defined within a specific location and illustrated as green dots in the plan view of the public space (Fig. 13.4). Such punctual ambiances refer to more focus atmospheric captions obtained at a single location in the public space. For instance, a team might be interested in capturing soundscapes while sitting on a bench in the public square. Some researchers prefer choosing to define limits of their survey location in relation to the experience of the site itself, which does not necessarily involve linear movements of the body in space. Those larger survey areas that do not necessarily involve a trajectory are illustrated by pale green rectangles corresponding to non-linear movement of experiencers. The representational hypothesis of the Ambiances Partition proposes that the structure should gather all results obtained from different methodologies. The structure suggested in Fig. 13.4 proposes an order that follows the rules of music staves of an ensemble partition, a system whereas all instruments are played simultaneously. The horizontal axis expresses temporality while its vertical axis, which includes all notation methodologies of the survey, refers to ensemble staves each corresponding to a musical instrument of the partition. This vertical axis originates from its lower end with the quantitative or measured variables obtained from survey tools, consisting of environmental data. The graph develops towards the top including more interpretative, somewhat qualitative variables, notably drawings, recordings, artistic photos and videos. This graphically represented hypothesis explores a structure that connects a complex set of ambient parameters in space and time. It also proposes a preliminary reflection on experiential investigations of an existing site. It should be mentioned that the longitudinal survey team included an unplanned return promenade that occurred indoors, encompassing the underground public commercial and tunnel spaces represented in blue in Fig. 13.3. The idea of the over/underground spaces, specific to the actual physical context of the Montreal Place des Arts and its underground city, later invited a reflection on the representation of those superimposed ambiances and ways to represent simultaneously on a single graphical scale those spaces that are adjacent but somehow disconnected in the city. The next section therefore addresses the development following this conceptual framework based on actual investigation results.

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Results: The Ambiance Partition as a Common Synthesis

Notation results of ambiances were brought to the builder team (base layer), continuously testing and developing the representational hypothesis presented to the participants during the elaboration of the partition. The first results came from the partition team (refer to Fig. 13.2) responsible for the longitudinal survey of physical measurable variables. This team had conducted the walk which included exterior as well as interior commercial spaces in accordance with other teams interested in such diversity of places. Numerical data corresponding to a selection of environmental variables measured with a portable multimeter, namely air temperature, wind speed, relative humidity and light, were gathered in a graph (Fig. 13.5, centre). The vertical axis consists of the combined scales of environmental data, whereas the horizontal scale represents time. These environmental parameters are therefore used to provide the climatic context characterizing ambiances during the investigation period. Although it is not the aim of the paper to discuss comfort probabilities in cities, such environmental data are recognised as affecting experiences of ambiances in urban spaces [1], [10]. Photographic data added above the graph relates to visualisation tools that were used to capture ambiances including:

Fig. 13.5 Environmental measures (graph) and visual data captured during the walk

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acoustical recordings of noise intensity, thermal camera, and luminance maps obtained from high dynamic range imaging techniques (Fig. 13.5). Fisheye lens photography encompasses the visual information gathered in an entire 180° view field. The transposition into the false colour images (Fig. 13.5, circular images) provides an accurate brightness measure in the view field by an observer. Thermography (Fig. 13.5, coloured rectangles) offers another perception of the footpath, whereas different materials absorb heat differently. These visualization representations offer interpretations of contextual environmental parameters, and may not only be discussed in technical terms, but also imply other more subjective knowledge of urban spaces. The ROSE of ambiances represents results of a questionnaire addressing four sensory environmental experiences [9]. The organisation of the information, from quantitative graph that incorporates the environmental data, growing upwards to the perhaps more “realistic” photographs of the visual field, followed by abstract false colour images (luminance maps) initiates the structure of the partition, and constitutes an analogy to the bass section of a musical score. These data were therefore recorded as an initial basis in the partition along the horizontal axis representation of time to gather and structure other types of contents. Vertically, the partition itself develops from quantitative measurable recorded sets of numerical data (graph) to the photographic information, as suggested in Fig. 13.5. The partition team had the most complete set of environmental data of the physical context. As described in the previous section, the team had to walk across the site to enable potential juxtaposition of spatial and temporal connections. Selection of the specific survey points occurred during the experience of the walk, along a loosely pre-defined walk. The plan view (Fig. 13.5, bottom) illustrates the final walk which was confirmed while experiencing the site with instruments, expressed as a dotted line, and the measured survey points, circles. In walk, red corresponds to the walk that occurred in the exterior spaces that led to Complex Desjardins. The partition vertically stretches as the vast array of subjective material was gathered through diverse approaches and because there were many teams that addressed similar objects and spaces in multiple ways (Fig. 13.6). Horizontally, time was limited to three hours, consisting of the duration of the activity (Figs. 13.5 and 13.6). The elaboration of the Ambiances Partition as a graphical representation is illustrated in Fig. 13.6a, b, c, here simplified into three main stages. Overall, the vertical spatial axis relates to results, stretching from the most quantitative data to the most upward results relating to perhaps more poetic or abstract representations. The first stage (Fig. 13.6a) presents the initial positioning of the preliminary ambiance data, applying the graphical hypothesis developed in Figs. 13.4 and 13.5. It mainly involved those previously discussed environmental data, which created the initial structure of the Ambiance Partition, enabling other teams to connect their notation results to the representation whenever applicable. The second stage proposes a new interpretation of the spatiotemporal representation which emerged from the experience of the site, suggesting that ambiances data should jointly explore over and underground spaces (Fig. 13.6b). Linked with the plan representation

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(b) Over and underground

(c) Integration of all teams

Fig. 13.6 Stages of the generation of the Ambiance Partition: from early hypothesis to final structure, a basis b over and underground, c integration of all teams

(Fig. 13.3 and plan view of Fig. 13.5), it proposes that a “return” walk, which occurred underground, would need to be graphically connected in the partition since several urban features, such as a large skylight and an entrance to Place des Arts, were also physically experienced. Intersections consisting of vertically aligned above and underground spaces needed to be expressed through the Partition. In other words, it is proposed that a pedestrian experience shown in plan from the exterior space is superimposed on its underground counterpart. This connection of space with time naturally suggested the need to graphically use the vertical bi-axial representation (over and under) to connect experiences in that regard. These physical links, or connections, were also confirmed since some teams gathered ambiance signals experienced in underground as well as over ground exterior spaces. The partition structure was therefore established to address this complexity of the public space, jointly illustrating the above (Fig. 13.6b, white background) and underground spaces (Fig. 13.6b black

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background) that were experienced in relation to time. In a sense, the representation considers that connecting experiences through space was more important than deploying those data horizontally solely on the time axis. Interestingly, the representation could be used to gather complex arrays of data that have a sense of spatial organisation, and more easily separated those specific ambiances that occurred in exterior (above) and interior (under) spaces. The graph of environmental data was accordingly superimposed on both sides of the vertical axis (Fig. 13.6b) to illustrate the corresponding environmental characteristic of those spaces. This allowed the recognition of potential intersections between methodologies since all data were recorded within the relatively short time of a single afternoon. The last stage (Fig. 13.6c) was freely developed since the diversity of contributions in terms of notation, especially towards the upwards location in the partition, was more artistic and exploratory. Interactions between the base group gathering numerical and measurable data with other groups were firstly identified as privileged. These unplanned interactions consisted of teams simultaneously applying their method of capture and data collection and meeting each other when performing their tasks, allowing to connect ambient results in space and time. Because both axes of spatiality and temporality were generally addressed by several teams, such results also suggest new areas for the development of future knowledge. This hypothesis could be further planned and integrated within the structure, ensuring that all teams would intentionally connect with other teams. Since one of the aims of the workshop was to open the participants to new reading approaches, connections were not imposed, to avoid impairing more creative and intuitive actions linked with the experience of the site. Moreover, because intersections between teams were not mandatory but rather randomly happening, they more profoundly remained affective and subjective. The research has acknowledged this sensitive interpersonal constraint of the partition. Finally, other ambiance results were added to at least connect spatially with the survey area.

13.4

Conclusion: Towards an interpretation of the Ambiance Partition

The Ambiance Partition has enabled exchanges to initiate a common dialogue amongst disciplines, offering promising avenues such as its representational potential to discuss ambient “intersections” that favour transdisciplinarity. The workshop activity explored experiential walks that led to a graphical representation creating a canvas or structure to discuss and favour methodological exchanges on in situ ambiances. The analogy to musical partitions is explored for its potential to associate a series of data that have been translated into measures whether quantifiable or not, in relation to a common temporal axis. The analogy to the Partition certainly bears limitations but remains useful to illustrate the framework of combining sensory knowledge into its common conceptualisation, which is also found

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in music. Although perhaps more familiarity is associated with classical representations of musical scores, there exists new types of notation that address more complex sounds, when combined, produce a series of experiences for listeners. Future developments and possible interpretations of the partition should be explored. Methodological and representational aspects should be further discussed to integrate new technologies, as well as the possible creative ideas that could emerge from its interpretation. The research addresses the visual synthesis of ambiances experimented during the CNRS GDRI Groupe de recherche international Second Seminar on Translating Ambiances, which included in a very schematic way, a diversity of dynamic means of representation. The Ambiance Partition could potentially connect seemingly independent representational approaches and identify intersecting experiences to foster a common knowledge and genuine transdisciplinary. These representations could become more developed in future explorations to attach a vast amount of data over its spatio-temporal structure. This presently discussed partition of collective investigations shows that spatial relationships were more important in terms of providing interaction between methodologies than the temporal axis. In that regard, the Ambiance Partition offers an insight into the built environment as an integrator of ambiances and methodologies. Although more dynamic means of representation involving sophisticated technologies should be envisioned with more time and effort, the structure provides a conceptual framework to connect complex ambient data to the core components of the representation of an in situ ambiance through experiential walks: space and time. The Ambiance Partition becomes a powerful pedagogical tool involving university students to address survey results in a broader discussion about the built environment. The workshop experience suggests that such a partition, resulting from the work of an international interdisciplinary team of researchers could potentially expand into a useful tool to read, measure and note ambiences, interesting city stakeholders and urban design professionals. The Ambiance Partition constitutes a unique repository of the instantaneous reading of a specific urban form at a specific time. Its historical value should therefore not be overlooked in rapidly transforming urban environments and societies. Acknowledgements Funding sources: CNRS-GDRI Groupe de recherche international, Translating Ambiances/Ambiances en Traduction, International Ambiances Network. Second Seminar on Translating Ambiances, held in Montreal. Organized by Mario Côté and Claude Demers. Special thanks to Jean-Paul Thibaud and Daniel Siret for their wisdom and suggestions.

References Adolfe L (1998) Ambiances architecturales et urbaines. Éditions Parenthèses, Marseille Amphoux P Eds (1998) La notion d’ambiance. Editions du PUCA, Paris Anderson B (2009) Affective atmospheres. Emot Space Soc 2(2) Augoyard JF (1995) L'environnement sensible et les ambiances architecturales. L'espace géographique, Tome 24, n°24

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Augoyard JF (1998) Éléments pour une théorie des ambiances architecurales et urbaines. In Adolphe, Luc (ed), Les cahiers de la recherche architecturale 42/13 - Ambiances architecturales et urbaines, Editions Parenthèses, Paris Augoyard JF (2008) Introduction aux actes du colloque “Faire une ambiance” - “Creating an atmosphere”. 1st International Congress on Ambiances, Grenoble 2008, Sep 2008, Grenoble, France. A La Croisée, Ambiances, ambiance Bachelard G (1994) The poetics of space: the classic look at how we experience Intimate Places. Beacon Press, Boston, MA Cole RJ, Brown Z, McKay S (2010) Building human agency: a timely manifesto. Building Res Inf 38(3):339–350. https://doi.org/10.1080/09613211003747071 Demers C, Potvin A (2009) Architecture. Energy and the Occupant’s Perspective. Presses de l’Université Laval, Québec, Canada Demers C, Potvin A (2016) From history to architectural imagination: a physical ambiances laboratory to interpret past sensory experiences and speculate on future spaces. Ambiances [En ligne], 2016 | Ambiance et histoire de l’architecture : l’expérience et l’imaginaire sensibles de l’environnement construit, mis en ligne le 07 november 2016 Demers C, Potvin A (2017) Erosion in architecture: a tactile design process fostering biophilia. Architectural Sci Rev 60(4):325–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/00038628.2017.1336982 Dufrenne M (1973) The phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Casey E, Anderson A, Domingo W, Jacobson L (eds), Trans. Northwestern University Press, Evanston Frédéric M (Eds) 2014 Bernard tschumi - architecture, concept & notation. Centre Pompidou, Paris Holl S, Palallasma J, Perez-Gomez A (1998) Questions of perception: phenomenology of architecture. A + U Publishing, Tokyo, 39–46 Kahn LI (1959) In essential texts, 2003. Edited by Robert Twombly WW, Norton & Company, New York Merleau-Ponty M (1945) Phenomenology of perception. Routledge, New York Norberg-Schulz C (1979) Genius loci: towards a phenomenology of architecture. Rizzoli, New York Pallasmaa J (1996) The eyes of the skin- architecture and the senses. London Academy Editions, Lanham, UK Pallasmaa J (2001) The architecture of image - existential space in cinema. Hâmeenlinna, Building incorporation Ltd, Kirjapaino Karisto Oy Potvin A (1996) The flâneur, dans StadtPlaene, Vienne, juillet Potvin A (1997) Movement in the architecture of the city. A study in environmental diversity, thèse de doctorat, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Potvin A (2004) Intermediate environments, Book chapter. In: Steeemers K.and Steane MA (eds) Environmental diversity in architecture. Spon Press, Abingdon & New York, pp 121–142 Potvin A, Bontemps A, Demers C (2007) The dynamics of physical ambiences: development of a representation technique through a filmic and sensory approach, ACADIA conference “Expanding Bodies”, Halifax, 1–7 Oct Potvin A, Demers C (2016) Ambiances in the city: longitudinal surveys in the dynamic representation of built environments to observe, measure and speculate. In: Nicolas Rémy (dir.); Nicolas Tixier (dir.). Ambiances, tomorrow. Proceedings of 3rd international congress on Ambiances. Volos, Greece, Sep 2016 Thibaud J-P ( 2015) The backstage of urban ambiances: when atmospheres pervade everyday experience, Emot Space Soci 15:39–46 Thibaud J-P, Siret D (Eds.) (2012) Ambiances en acte(s)/Ambiances in action. 3rd International Congress on Ambiances, International Ambiances Network, Montréal Tschumi B (2002) Event-cities 2. London, MIT Press, Cambridge

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Tschumi B (2014) Notations: diagrams and sequences. Artifice Books on Architecture, London Zumthor P (2006) Atmospheres: architectural environments - surrounding objects. Birkhäuser Base

Claude M. H. Demers Professor of Architecture at Université Laval, actively involved in teaching and transdiciplinary fundamental and applied research. She received her Ph.D. from the Martin Center for Architectural and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge in 1997, innovating on the integration of qualitative and quantitative aspects of daylighting ambiances in architecture. She is a director and co-founder of the Groupe de Recherche en Ambiances Physiques (GRAP) since 1999. Her main research topics relate to occupants’ satisfaction, associating the importance of design to users’ behavior to multisensory ambiances. Her teaching and practice interests therefore aim to create architectural environments that favour the integration of natural light combining bioclimatic solutions and biophilic principles adapted to sustainable architecture in cold and extreme climates. As an expert in the digital and analogical modeling and analysis of light and well-being, she develops building designs through integrated design processes (IDP). She has produced fundamental and applied adaptive building solutions favouring the integration of bioclimatic design strategies for at the scales of urban, architectural and detail. Several projects were recognised for their contribution to architectural innovation from OAQ, RAIC medal, Energia prize, CECObois, Bomex, AIA and ACSA Faculty awards. She is a member of the Centre de recherche en aménagement et développement (CRAD), the Institut Hydro-Québec en environnement, développement et société (EDS), the Society for Building Science and Educators (SBSE), and the International Ambiances Network. André Potvin M.Arch., Ph.D., graduated from the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies at the University of Cambridge, he teaches and conducts research in environmental design at graduate and postgraduate levels at Laval University School of Architecture. Dr Potvin is past director of the Institut Hydro-Québec en environnement, développement et société and current President and Scientific Director of the Table de concertation en développement durable de l’Université Laval. He cofounded the Groupe de recherche en ambiances physiques (GRAP) dedicated to bioclimatic and carbon neutral architecture, urban microclimatology and post-occupancy evaluations (POE). As sustainable design consultant and integrated design specialist, Dr Potvin collaborated on numerous award-winning projects featuring passive environmental control strategies at the urban, architectural and detail levels. He coauthored the manifesto Acting on Climate Change within the Sustainable Canada Dialogues interdisciplinary group mobilizing more than 80 Canadians scholars. Dr Potvin leeds the integrated design section of the Chaire industrielle de recherche sur la construction écoresponsable en bois de l’Université Laval (CIRCERB) and is member of the Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC), the steering committee of the Centre de formation en développement durable (CFDD) as well as associate member of the international network Passive Low Energy Architecture (PLEA).

Part III

Experiential Walk for Informing Urban Design and Favoring Citizens’ Engagement

Chapter 14

Interior-Exterior Ambiances: Environmental Transitions in the Recollection of an Urban Stroll Claude M. H. Demers and André Potvin

Abstract A multisensory representation of physical ambiances is proposed to translate experimented sequences of an urban walk through interior and exterior public spaces over time. Beyond the exploration of the series of environmental transitions that inevitably occur through such a walk, the paper addresses the importance of data representation to expand the discussion of physical ambiances in the built environment. Existing spaces offer invaluable sources of embodied knowledge for architects and urban designers and can potentially provide a thorough understanding of ambiances both physically and perceptually [10, 23]. Keywords Environmental survey

14.1


Lighting ambiance
Thermal experience

Introduction

When acting upon the existent, architects are faced with complex dynamic multisensory spaces that should inform the design process with more evidence-based data on physical ambiances gathered through in situ environmental transitions. However, architectural culture and design are far more familiar with the qualitative expression of ambiances than with quantitative numerical data. An urban experiential walk provides an opportunity to develop thinking processes integrating measurable built environmental parameters into graphical synthesis of a more subjective and sensory nature. The research therefore aims to investigate the potential of representation to discuss measured survey data of an urban walk. The original version of this chapter was revised: The images 14.1; 14.2; 14.3; 14.4; 14.5; 14.6 have been corrected. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3030-76694-8_20 C. M. H. Demers (&)
A. Potvin École d’architecture, Vieux-Séminaire, 1 Côte de la Fabrique, Université Laval, Québec G1R 3V6, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021, corrected publication 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_14

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It hypothesizes that the interpretation of those captured data and calibrated images could take an active part in the recollection of spaces. The resulting representation should moreover support with more evidence a discussion on ambiances experienced through interior-exterior transitions within the urban realm. Rethinking ambiances in terms of dynamic exchanges between interior and exterior spaces becomes the necessary challenge to optimize people’s environmental satisfaction and building energy performance. In the current quest for more sustainable built environments, the question of the experiencer, the inhabitant, is central to develop low-energy design strategies, clearly indicating the necessity to bridge human perception and building science [7]. The urban experience of space through walks is determined by our response to the environment in relation to senses, which act as personal receptors of the built and natural environments. Many types of measuring tools that assess the environment are available, but ultimately, the user is always central to questions related to spatial experiences [4, 19], as buildings are not built to save energy but should respond to people’s needs. The research explores combined interactions of lighting, thermal and acoustical ambiances with people’s sensibility since they greatly affect the perception of space [17]. Theoretical knowledge accumulated through the environmental survey of an urban walk is thus translated into a representation of physical ambiances at the pedestrian scale. Experiences are thereafter interconnected with physical environmental parameters through time or by a sequence of spaces, whereas transitions define the in-between experiences that may arise from such sequences [20]. Environmental diversity may be discussed in relation to those physical parameters in a single space experienced through time or it could relate to experiences occurring over the course of several spaces and transitions. The environmental diversity theory states that perception of a space is defined by the experience of the previously visited space and the expectation of the next one. The notion of comfort or discomfort therefore arises depending on the order in which a transition is performed. Experiencing a variety of interior and exterior spaces is central to the environmental diversity theory [11, 19] and was therefore instrumental to the definition of a survey area in the present research. The walk moreover had to offer the widest range of interior-exterior transitions in response to the diversity of tools and methodologies involved. The discussed experiential walk is an outcome of the Groupe de recherche international des ambiances GDRI-CNRS Second Seminar on Translating Ambiances, organized within the International Ambiances Network. The methodological approach is based on previous research conducted over the past twenty years at the Groupe de recherche en ambiances physiques (GRAP), Université Laval.

14.2

Physical Context

An urban walk was devised to provide a multisensory and spatiotemporal recollection of a public space on April 27th in Canada’s cold climate city of Montreal (Latitude 45°30′ N). In terms of environmental diversity, the walk included a

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selection of exterior locations of Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles as well as interior, underground public spaces found at the subway level. The urban walk responds to the longitudinal in situ survey approach that gathers evidence of the experienced multisensory environmental diversity perceived by static and moving pedestrians. The plan (Fig. 14.1) illustrates the pedestrian itinerary and selected survey stops, consisting of red and blue circles. An initial hypothesis of stops was initially planned according to microclimatic expectations, aiming to discuss environmental diversity in urban spaces experienced from the exterior of Université du Québec à Montreal building (UQUAM, stop 1) to the interior of the Complexe Desjardins mall (stop 7; Fig. 14.1 in red). Such an interior commercial space partially embodies urban elements of the city at a smaller scale [13], which should contribute to a discussion of ambiance differences with nearby exterior environments. The exact location of stops was confirmed during the survey, as opportunities and sensitive observations of micro-climatic and sensorial variations more forcefully responded to the actual experience. The dotted red line corresponds to the promenade that occurred in ground level spaces, which mostly consisted of exterior spaces, except for stop 7 which was captured right inside Complexe Desjardins. The return walk to the initial location through Montreal’s underground city was suggested by the thermal discomfort experienced on that cold spring day, and by following pedestrians flows swiftly aiming to the metro station (stop 14). Interior spaces became more appealing to experiencers, which were moving leisurely and slowly instead of those trying to adapt their activities to outdoor conditions. The return itinerary was thus performed indoors through the underground public mall and tunnel spaces, shown as a blue line in Fig. 14.1. The selected itinerary allowed experiencers to embody the notion of an urban flâneur, meaning to wander with no purpose, rediscovering environmental diversity in the city [18].

Fig. 14.1 Walking itinerary and stops: ground level (red) and underground level (blue). Source Demers and Potvin

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Tools and Methods

The research uses the urban walk as a dynamic longitudinal survey methodology to assess the complexity of a pedestrian experience in existing spaces [18]. Such dynamic survey method refers to the repeated environmental data capture process for different stops located along a walk. Several tools are simultaneously used to record ambiances at each stop of the walk, ideally requiring four researchers acting together as a unique “sensing machine” that gathers environmental data (Fig. 14.2). The approach suggests that humans act both as sensors and regulators of the tools. The sensing machine thus allows experimenting with Bateson’s [3] cybernetic research in two ways: the tools as extensions of the human body in environmental assessments, and the influence of external factors on internal survey team decisions. The systemic analysis of ambiances using in situ dynamic surveys aims to decompose the complexity of daylighting, thermal and acoustical dimensions which act together systemically to ultimately provide their quantitative and qualitative rendering. Environmental data are measured with a portable multimeter at each stop for visual and tactile senses, and a sonometer is used for sound measurement. The research explores the potential for visualizing ambiances through imaging techniques developed by Demers [8] to discuss the recollection of events that occurred during the walk. In that regard, imaging technologies developed in engineering science become privileged visualization tools to capture ambiances: a thermographic camera, and a photo-luminancemeter equipped with an entire 180° view field for lighting analysis [12]. Both tools generate false colour images, consisting of rendering filters for highlighting non-visual aspects of ambiances, which translate data into patterns in relation to their contextual built environment. Light reflected from surfaces to a person’s eye provides of luminance data that can be represented into false color patterns varying from bright (orange) to dim (violet). For instance, those luminance maps provide an accurate measure of the diversity of brightness and contrast values captured in the entire visual field of an observer. An

Fig. 14.2 Researchers and environmental tools of data acquisition acting as a “sensing machine”. Source International ambiances network

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acoustical recording additionally enabled to visualize the colour of the sound through a spectrogram showing frequencies of audio signals. Dynamic experiences were moreover recorded through panoramic (180° pan view) and longitudinal (continuous recording) views captured by a video camera. A synthetic questionnaire-based graphical representation, namely a ROSE of physical ambiances records users’ environmental satisfaction in relation to senses [9]. This simplified version of the questionnaire consists of a polar graph combining four environmental stimuli (thermal, visual, olfactory and acoustical), qualified by the user on a scale ranging from “intolerable”, to “neutral” and “very pleasant”. A ROSE therefore illustrates in a single graph the satisfaction level of occupants in relation to their environmental conditions (Fig. 14.4).

14.4

Results

The research develops a synthetic ambiance representation to establish recollection of an urban walk through 14 stops. The proposed graphical ambiance representation is therefore an outcome of the research to support with more evidence the notion of environmental transitions and diversity in architecture. Physical ambiance survey results obtained from images and numerical data were processed and organized into a single representation that combines environmental captures for each stop. The fact sheet representation, such as illustrated in Fig. 14.3 for stop 1, was created to include a plan indicating the location of the observer, a graph of measured values highlighted for the discussed area, as well as previously described outputs from survey instruments and data imaging technologies. With most information being factual, the ambiance title is essentially subjective, expressing the unique impression experienced at a specific place and time of the walk. It refers to the notion of the collective affects [1] that resulted from the evaluation of the ambiance by the “sensing machine”. A larger image, located at the top of the fact sheet, suggests horizontal eye movements of the entire wide pan view of selected superimposed images. This image consists of a “compressed” video sequence captured at a stop into a single frame by artist Damien Beyrouthy, resulting in an original artistic interpretation of the dynamic visual experience of a space. The representation of ambiances for each individual stop favours interconnections of ideas to report on in situ experiences. The sequential viewing of the entire walk, from a fact sheet to another, favours the comparison between imaging ambient results of all 14 stops. These graphical results can potentially be “animated”, such as a storyboard that translates into its cinematic version. This aspect could be further explored, such as in architectural storyboard representations discussed in Tschumi [21] and Bontemps et al. [5] to integrate the dynamic representation of survey results. In terms of environmental diversity through interior-exterior ambiance transitions, comparison between two consecutive spaces of the walk is however more relevant to associate all data results into the analysis.

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Fig. 14.3 Fact sheet of data representation of captured ambiances at stop P1. Source Demers

The longitudinal survey provides an environmental history of the walk through a series of outdoor and indoor spaces, here presented as a neutral canvas. A graph, illustrated in Fig. 14.4, connects physical data captured from the multimeter at each stop through a single timeline. It gathers measured environmental parameters on the vertical axis. It also superimposes data scales relating to the climatic context characterizing ambiances, such as air temperature (red curve), wind speed (blue), relative humidity (green), light (yellow) and sound (grey). The horizontal scale indicates stops through time, from the beginning of the walk at 1500 h (stop 1) until it resumes at 1645 h (stop 14). The graph moreover connects a subjective assessment of perceived physical ambiances, shown as a text reference.

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Fig. 14.4 Environmental transitions and survey parameters through time and location. Source Potvin

Microclimatic variations generally occur when the configuration of the built fabric creates a physical interaction with natural elements [6]. As an example, slower air movement and greater exposition to the sun would result in a positive experience for this cold April day on which the survey took place. Conversely, a negative perception could emerge when protection from the elements, such as rain, is limited or unavailable. The diversity of experiences may respond to pedestrian needs in terms of comfort, which greatly vary throughout the year according to seasonal changes [16]. The graph (Fig. 14.4) acts as a representation of environmental diversity generated from microclimates and configuration of interior spaces expressed throughout the itinerary, witnessing the potentially rich plurality of physical ambiances characterizing the itinerary. When walking in the city, environmental fluxes usually generate much greater diversity of ambiances from an exterior space to another (stop 1 to 6) than within a series of interior spaces (stop 7 to 14). Environmental diversity was thus mainly linked with visual and thermal experiences of walking through a series of exterior spaces, thus essentially varying according to local microclimatic conditions. As an example, lighting values obtained from horizontal illuminance data consist in the measure of experienced ambiances throughout the walk (Fig. 14.4, yellow curve). Higher lighting levels were consistently measured in open exterior public places (left of the graph), whereas the narrower street canal with limited sky light progressively produced inferior levels when approaching the Complexe Desjardins Mall. The lowest lighting levels were recorded in interior spaces, with little variations from a space to another since they mostly relied on standard illuminance values generated from artificial light sources. The windy and noisy exterior stop 1, located near a main street intersection is clearly contrasting with the microclimate of the semi-protected area of stop 2, situated away from automotive traffic. It was measured as being less windy and more humid as the team approached the grassy area, with a brighter ambiance because of its surrounding openness to the sky. User’s perception offers even greater contrast, starting from the “cold noisy” (stop 1) to the “humid calm” (stop 2). Whereas wind speeds (blue) was much higher and contrasting in exterior spaces in relation to buildings, air movement variations were almost non-existent in

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interior spaces, except when approaching the atypical metro entrance doors, mostly open during our passage. The graph could moreover illustrate climatic changes that have occurred during the walk, but at the time of the survey, the Montreal weather parameters remained mostly constant. The sky was overcast, therefore providing uniform conditions of light emitted from the clouds. In terms of thermal comfort, temperatures reached about 12 °C with a momentary light drizzle of rain and constant wind speeds all of which remained below 20 km/hr. In fact, the graph could result in even more environmental diversity in the expression of exterior ambiances if sunlighting patterns had been present. Architectural variables linked with the urban walk address two main spatial transitions expressed in the graph: exterior-interior and vertical transitions. A variation of the interior-exterior consists of an in-between space, acting as an intermediary transition between indoor and outdoor experiences. These transitions are below described in relation to the walk.

14.4.1

Interior-Exterior Transition

Arnheim [2] suggests that there is no greater challenge for the architect than the one to solve the dialectic problem between the interior and the exterior. The interior-exterior is recognised as a main expression of architectural transitions, encompassing environmental adaptation and diversity of ambiances between the comfort of an indoor space in relation to outdoor natural elements. In the Montreal stroll, it consisted in an abrupt threshold occurring when passing through the main entrance door from exterior (stop 6) to the interior (stop 7), leading to commercial and office spaces of the Complexe Desjardins mall. The graph (Fig. 14.4) indicates a dramatic transition for all measured environmental parameters. It corresponds to the crossing of the cold and busy and noisy Ste-Catherine street (stop 6) to the comfort and protection of the interior building (stop 7), offering the greatest ambient contrast experienced during the walk. Lighting levels dramatically dropped (yellow curve), as well as air movement (blue) while temperature levels increased (red) to reach normal comfort standard values, which remained uniform thereafter throughout indoors spaces. The spectrogram output of sound recordings (middle of Fig. 14.3) clearly confirms this exterior-interior transition associated with higher and denser sound frequencies recorded in interior spaces, resulting in a brighter graph on its right half. False colour images confirm these observations (Fig. 14.5), as the dominant luminance values (left images) are distributed within the mid-range (green zone, 50–75 cd/m2) to the highest orange and white zones of the exterior (Fig. 14.5a). In interior spaces, luminance values are considerably inferior, mostly located within the low blue range of 10–20 cd/m2. The thermography at street level (Fig. 14.5a right) indicates that maximal values were recorded on cars and people in the exterior. In fact, a person lying on the sidewalk was later noticed because of the thermography, captured inadvertently since we do not expect such peculiar encounter during a walk. The normal heat of the body indicates that the person is probably sleeping. In indoor spaces, recorded thermal values reached their highest

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Fig. 14.5 Interior-exterior transition: a Ste-Catherine Street stop 6; b Complexe Desjardins stop 7. Source Demers and Potvin

level from light fixtures, which were much warmer (57 °C) than measured body temperatures. Although the ambient indoor temperature was rather uniform, surface temperatures showed great variations (Fig. 14.5b, right).

14.4.2

Vertical Transition

A vertical transition connects spaces located on different floor levels of a building or urban space. During the stroll, the vertical transition located between the ground floor of Complexe Desjardins (stop 8) to the underground commercial level (stop 9) was not clearly defined by an architectural barrier but was instead progressively experienced through an open set of stairs and escalators (Fig. 14.6). A fountain, almost invisible from the entrance area, was eclipsed by the busy view field consisting of a diversity of interior design features (Fig. 14.6a), contrasting with the relative sobriety of the exterior of the building. The view of the interior space includes dominating triangular structures of the ceiling and several sources of direct light generating glare. However, the fountain is clearly expressed in the thermography as a vertical surface consisting of the coolest surface of the space (Fig. 14.6 a, right). The thermography therefore reveals the invisible thermal contribution of the cool water in the experience of space near the experiencer.

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Fig. 14.6 Ground to underground transition a ground floor stop 8; b underground stop 9. Source Demers and Potvin

An underground space should benefit to its users by being somewhat desirable, guiding people by the senses to meet visitors’ needs [14]. The approach to the fountain affirms the vertical transition by the distinct ambiance it creates during the experience. Environmental parameters of light, air speed and temperature remained uniform throughout the vertical transition experience, except for humidity and noise levels, which were higher than any other indoor recorded values of the walk (Fig. 14.4). The transition corresponds to comparable humidity values to the ones experienced in the outdoor green space of stop 2, suggesting in its own way a physical connection to the exterior environment. Acoustically, the accompanying sound of the fountain’s splashing water combined with people speaking more loudly when approaching the stairs confirmed the particular physical ambiance of the transition. In the case of a commercial area located underground (stop 9), attracting customers by a marked entrance has advantages to the viability of those rented spaces which have no view to the exterior. Although the horizontal illuminance remained relatively uniform underground, the concentration of light on the ceiling generates a bright perception of the space, illustrated in Fig. 14.6b, left and centre.

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Fig. 14.7 An interior-exterior space: metro entrance at stop 14. Source Demers and Potvin

14.4.3

An Interior-Exterior Space

An entire space may expand the notion of interior-exterior transitions, potentially mitigating the discomfort that would result in the experience of walking, for instance from a warm to a cold space. Continuing the walk indoors resulted in limited experiential variations in terms of environmental diversity. Most environmental parameters remained relatively uniform indoors except for the last stop, number 14, which was located indoor near the metro entrance (Fig. 14.7). The space was immediately perceived as cooler, signified by a clear temperature drop and higher airspeed movement. It corresponded to cold air infiltrating the space through the set of large access doors that barely closed during busy transit hours going upwards to the stairs leading to street level (red curve in Fig. 14.4). The space was therefore almost felt as an exterior area in terms of recorded temperatures and wind speeds, also represented in the graph of Fig. 14.4. The large glazed area illustrated in Fig. 14.7 (left part of center image) produces a higher brightness impression. However, the space remained much darker than any other exterior space in terms of horizontal illuminance. In fact, most interior spaces rarely reached illuminance values higher than 1000 lx, whereas an overcast sky may produce much higher values of about 8000–10000 lx horizontally [22]. On a clear day, sunlight would produce even greater illuminance values, about ten times higher than overcast sky conditions. Light is therefore a reliable environmental parameter to express the duality existing between the interior and the exterior, since the much higher illuminance levels of an outdoor space can never be reproduced in interior spaces.

14.5

Conclusion

Critical questions that address subjective aspects of space combined with objective measurements are relevant to understand and discuss variables creating ambiances. A field survey methodology to capture environmental variables of an urban walk is

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proposed, but more specifically, a visual representation connecting images to numerical values associated with commonly measured microclimatic parameters is introduced. The survey discusses the potential for visualizing ambiances through a series of tools such as video, high dynamic range imaging techniques, thermography, as well as environmental meter numerical data. The paper illustrates an urban walk which occurred at a specific time to discuss space transitions on a typical day of the equinox in Montreal. The method could further be applied to other climatic conditions or seasons according to information needed from city planners and designers to improve the space. The method is particularly applicable to post-occupancy evaluation of spaces, and useful to city stakeholders, design professionals and engineers. The interpretation of visual and numerical data into subjective and objective criteria certainly requires theoretical backgrounds in environmental science, but key concepts can be transferred to target audiences. A specially devised bi-dimensional representation of ambiances experienced at each stop translates into fact sheets that enable a discussion of environmental diversity experiences. The environmental data survey graph acts as a history of the walk, gathering all captured data on a single timeline. It connects several aspects of the sensorial experience, acknowledging qualitative descriptors and addressing the importance of actual measured data in an experiential narrative. Environmental diversity was present even on this spring overcast day, which resulted in uniform light and a lack of intensity contrast between sun and shadow environments. Three transitions were discussed: exterior to interior, vertical transition (from ground floor to the underground), and an interior-exterior space. A clear day and another season (winter or summer) with other thermal conditions would produce more contrasting results, especially in human transitions that occurred in outdoor spaces and between the interior and the exterior. The graph of the walk illustrates that environmental diversity characterizes the experience of exterior spaces with greater contrast than interior spaces. Although several parameters may vary in the graph, the most relevant data to identify transitions was light, since the consistent and considerably higher values of exterior illuminances can never be reproduced indoors. Imaging technologies resulting in false colour analysis enrich the discussion of the perceived ambiances when spatially locating sources of the sensory discourse. The human body and its relation to space remains an essential landmark to discuss ambiances. In fact, imaging technologies reinforce the discussion between measured data in relation the spaces explored by pedestrians. In particular, thermography renders the invisible nature of the thermal environment, identifying particular concentration of thermal distributions and values in particular location such as for the fountain or a human body in space. The methodology proposes that experiencers could work together to measure environmental data, acting as a single piece of equipment. Such “sensing machine” was unconsciously created on-site, while operating the instruments. Responding to Bateson’s research [3], it not only measured and qualified an ambiance, but team members jointly confirmed the relevant selection of stops of the urban “flâneur” which best contributed to experiencing environmental diversity into a pleasurable walk. The “sensing machine” adapted its pace and use of the tools according to

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environmental factors and comfort of its experiencers, and therefore became a unique tool of its own. The team’s first captures took more time to gather data and select stops because of the discussions that obviously resulted in the coordination and operation of the many pieces of equipment involved. However, the efficiency of operators was very soon attained early in the process and the “sensing machine” was consequently created. Although non-intrusive for the surrounding urbanites, the “machine” became both a spectator and an actor of the physical ambiance. The added value of the process lies in the methodology itself, providing a clear means to communicate complex visual and non-visual dimensions of the urban landscape. Although the walk was performed by researchers interested in physical ambiances, it is expected that the methodology could be adapted for pedagogical purposes in discussing the complexity of existing environments in urban spaces. Acknowledgements This research was possible through the CNRS-GDRI Groupe de recherche international, International Ambiances Network. Special thanks to our collaborators: Damien Beyrouthy, videast responsible for dynamic video captures and analysis, Samuel Tronçon social and computer science researcher for audio recordings, Nicolas Remy for acoustics.

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13. Kusumowidagdo A, Sachari A, Widodo P (2016) Visitors’ perceptions on the important factors of atrium design in shopping centers: a study of Gandaria City Mall and Ciputra World in Indonesia. Frontiers Architectural Res 5:52–62 14. Labbé M (2016) Architecture of underground spaces: from isolated innovations to connected urbanism. Tunn Undergr Space Technol Elsevier 55(2016):153–175 15. Lépine P, Demers C Potvin A (2012) Environmental diversity in architecture using photographic and thermal imagery for the dynamic assessment of light and heat. Towards an environmentally responsible architecture-opportunities, limits and needs. In: 28th PLEA international conference. Lima, Peru, 7–9 November 2012 16. Nikolopoulou M, Baker N, Steemers K (2001) Thermal comfort in outdoor urban spaces: understanding the human parameter. Sol Energy 70(3):227–235 17. Ouameur F, Potvin A (2007) Urban microclimates and thermal comfort in outdoor pedestrian spaces. In: ASES national solar 2007 conference, American solar energy society, Cleveland, 7–13 July 18. Potvin A (1997) The arcade environment. Architectural Res Q 2(4):64–79. https://doi.org/10. 1017/S1359135500001603 19. Potvin A (2004) Intermediate environments. In: Steemers K, Steane MA (eds) Environmental diversity in architecture. Routledge, London, UK, pp 121–142 20. Potvin A, DuMontier C (2012) Assessing the microclimatic performance in Nordic cities. In: 8th International conference on urban climate. ICUC 8, Dublin, 6–10 August 21. Tschumi B (2014) Notations: diagrams and sequences. Artifice Books on Architecture, London 22. Tregenza P, Loe D (2011) Daylighting: architecture and lighting design. Routledge, London 23. Vasilikou C, Nikolopoulou M (2019) Outdoor thermal comfort for pedestrians in movement: thermalwalks in complex urban morphology. Int J Biometeorol. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s00484-019-01782-2

Claude M. H. Demers Professor of Architecture at Université Laval, actively involved in teaching and transdiciplinary fundamental and applied research. She received her Ph.D. from the Martin Center for Architectural and Urban Studies, University of Cambridge in 1997, innovating on the integration of qualitative and quantitative aspects of daylighting ambiances in architecture. She is a director and co-founder of the Groupe de Recherche en Ambiances Physiques (GRAP) since 1999. Her main research topics relate to occupants’ satisfaction, associating the importance of design to users’ behavior to multisensory ambiances. Her teaching and practice interests therefore aim to create architectural environments that favour the integration of natural light combining bioclimatic solutions and biophilic principles adapted to sustainable architecture in cold and extreme climates. As an expert in the digital and analogical modeling and analysis of light and well-being, she develops building designs through integrated design processes (IDP). She has produced fundamental and applied adaptive building solutions favouring the integration of bioclimatic design strategies for at the scales of urban, architectural and detail. Several projects were recognised for their contribution to architectural innovation from OAQ, RAIC medal, Energia prize, CECObois, Bomex, AIA and ACSA Faculty awards. She is a member of the Centre de recherche en aménagement et développement (CRAD), the Institut Hydro-Québec en environnement, développement et société (EDS), the Society for Building Science and Educators (SBSE), and the International Ambiances Network. André Potvin M.Arch., Ph.D., graduated from the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies at the University of Cambridge. He teaches and conducts research in environmental design at graduate and postgraduate levels at Laval University School of Architecture. Dr Potvin is past director of the Institut Hydro-Québec en environnement, développement et société and current President and Scientific Director of the Table de concertation en développement durable de l’Université Laval. He cofounded the Groupe de recherche en ambiances physiques (GRAP)

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dedicated to bioclimatic and carbon neutral architecture, urban microclimatology and post-occupancy evaluations (POE). As sustainable design consultant and integrated design specialist, Dr Potvin collaborated on numerous award-winning projects featuring passive environmental control strategies at the urban, architectural and detail levels. He coauthored the manifesto Acting on Climate Change within the Sustainable Canada Dialogues interdisciplinary group mobilizing more than 80 Canadians scholars. Dr Potvin leeds the integrated design section of the Chaire industrielle de recherche sur la construction écoresponsable en bois de l’Université Laval (CIRCERB) and is member of the Canada Green Building Council (CaGBC), the steering committee of the Centre de formation en développement durable (CFDD) as well as associate member of the international network Passive Low Energy Architecture (PLEA).

Chapter 15

Towards Using Space Syntax for Soundwalk Set Up Tin Oberman, Tamara Zaninović, and Bojana Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci

Abstract Soundscape is influenced by both acoustic and contextual factors. The aim is to investigate if space syntax tools can inform the soundscape assessment framework for urban planning and design as planning-related configurational factors are often overlooked in soundscape studies. Soundwalk is an essential part of Methods A and B for soundscape assessment per ISO/TS 12913-2: 2018. The space syntax analysis was performed on the area covering the locations where consecutive in situ audio and video recordings were performed from 2013 until 2017, in a walkspace system of public places in the historical centre of Zagreb, Croatia. The recordings were then used for a virtual soundwalk. The overlapped results indicate that syntactical values for control, choice and integration can be used to describe spatio-social context and inform the soundwalk set up. Keywords Soundwalk Soundscape

15.1


Space syntax
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Walkspace system


Introduction

Soundscape is a perceptual, inherently subjective construct. It is highly dependent on the context, similarly to landscape [12]. Various urban descriptors, such as openness, harmony or complexity, were used to explain how it is influenced by visual context [1, 15]. However, spatio-social configuration, as investigated within the space syntax discourse, was not previously used to describe context of an acoustic environment. T. Oberman (&)
T. Zaninović
B. Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] B. Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci e-mail: [email protected] T. Oberman UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, the Bartlett, London, UK © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_15

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This research combines two approaches for observing quality of open public spaces. The first is a soundwalk-based soundscape evaluation as user centred approaches to acoustic environment and its context. The second is the space syntax or social-oriented spatial analytical approach, which looks at how the way people and vehicles move through urban fabric influences descriptors such as integration, segregation or dynamics of public spaces. Soundwalk is a tool for assessing places from the viewpoint of the sounds which can be heard in that place and the way people perceive them. It is a key part of in situ soundscapes assessments following the ISO/TS 12913-2:2018 [2, 12] and assessments of public space systems to be implemented into urban planning and management [20]. It usually consists of conducting a walk from one evaluation point to another [34]. Similar to soundscape, soundwalking itself is influenced by external factors such as participants’ activities [4], immediate context and evaluation point selection [4, 16, 31], amongst others. Public spaces are used in passive and active ways which is rarely considered in assessment [7]. Soundwalk can be conducted in situ or in laboratory, using a virtually simulated environment [17, 24]. Laboratory environment can help to reduce some biases but also introduce new ones, such as influence of an unusual environment or technology [8, 31]. Evaluation points selection can be designed top-down, in researcher’s discretion on- or off-site [31], or bottom-up, by participant’s choice on site [16, 17]. This study argues that having a starting point that is informed by space syntax methodology would enhance objectivity of the evaluation point selection when: • conducting large-scale studies which involve a high number of measurement points, so it is not time-effective to decide on each point individually. Although this case isn’t common in soundwalks it is applicable to other large-scale soundscape assessments and prediction models. • monitoring a place over a longer period of time, in which case it is important that the evaluation point is indeed representative of the activity taking place. Hence, the location could be first determined in a syntactical spatial model, for example in a highly integrated place, which is later checked on-site.

15.2

Research Background

Soundwalk introduces the soundscape construct to environmental assessment as it includes gathering data on peoples’ perception, which is important since the current noise mitigation approach of using the decibel (dB) scale doesn’t adequately address quality of the acoustic environment [19]. Sounds carry meanings which are crucial to people [35], yet hard to describe and assess using only acoustic data. Therefore, a quiet environment can still be acoustically uncomfortable if it features unwanted sound sources [18], while a loud one can be considered pleasantly exciting if the sound sources fir the context and one’s expectations [6, 14, 30].

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Soundwalk, as a tool for collecting data on acoustic environments of cities, is rooted in the very beginning of soundscape research. Southworth [36] performed walks with sensory deprived participants to collect sensory focused information on exposure to different parts of central Boston, USA. Since then, soundscape research has significantly grown in numbers [3]. Soundwalk can be used to create soundscape maps [20]. Recent soundscape mapping studies covered a span of approaches to collect and organise complex data sets. Those studies covered the range of spatial sampling strategies from a predefined spatial matrix [25] or an organic bi-directional soundwalk [20], to interpreting data gathered from public geo-referable social networks activity [1]. The former studies relied on in situ data collection and were applied to medium scale city centres (Sheffield and Brighton), while the latter was tested on a large city level (London and Barcelona). The way people use specific space depends on its’ position and relations within the spatial system [11]. These premises have been tested and used in numerous spatial studies for observing both architecture and cities from different perspectives and combined with different other assessments and research fields. Axial maps and modelling are the basic research tools for spatial analysis of the configurations in urban environments [10, 11, 21]. They follow the criteria of the longest straight line of sight. This type of open space modelling can be used to evaluate and analyse the potential of pedestrian and traffic movement patterns. Depthmap software, which was used in this research, enables axial and segment analyses of these models. Segment analysis takes into account each part of the axial line which is a result of configuration or interrelation between lines of sight in a system. Analyses can be undertaken for systems of different levels or scales, referred to as low- or high-‘resolution’ map [10]. Depending on the resolution and specific criteria for drawing a configurational representation of the real space as axial map, the analysed movement patterns are either pedestrian, traffic or both. The resulting mathematical values are then expressed through developed configurational measurements such as integration, choice, control, entropy. Integration (Int) is a measurement of how close the origin space is to all other spaces or how integrated or segregated a place is. It can be gained through both axial and segment analysis. Integration core is a pattern formed by the most integrated elements in a analysed system usually referred to in percentage, e.g. 10% integration core [11]. Choice measures how likely an axial line or a street segment it is to be passed through on all shortest routes from all spaces to all other spaces in the entire system or within a predetermined distance (radius) from each segment. Therefore, integration measures to-movement while choice measures through-movement potential. Control value is a dynamic local measure. It measures the degree to which a space controls access to its immediate neighbourings taking into account the number of alternative connections that each of these neighbours has. Spaces which

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have a control value greater than 1.00 will have strong control, those below 1.00 will be weak control spaces [11]. Entropy is a measure of the distribution of locations of spaces in terms of their depth from a space rather than the depth itself. If many locations are close to a space, the depth from that space is asymmetric, and the entropy is low. If the depth is more evenly distributed, the entropy is higher [9, 38]. The case study site is a walkspace system of sequential public places in Zagreb that consists of seven squares and a botanical garden [28], as shown in Fig. 15.1. It is colloquially known as the ‘Zagreb Horseshoe’, ‘Green Horseshoe’ or ‘Lenuci’s Horseshoe’ [5, 22]—due to its layout shape. Each square within this walkspace system is of a similar size, shape (cca. 120  140 m) and traffic regulation, but they feature different types of foliage, pavilions and activities. The system was built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and it forms a vital part of Zagreb’s city centre, where the historical setting has been well preserved [22]. However, several authors reported that not all the urban open spaces in the sequence are equally important or adequately used in terms of their potential, from the viewpoints of soundscape research [32] and cultural heritage conservation [23]. Four squares were reported as less audio-visually congruent areas [29], while Knežević [23] reported concerns about their inadequate use. This served as motivation to investigate if ‘soundscape positiveness’ can be related to spatio-social descriptors calculated using space syntax tools.

Fig. 15.1 ‘Zagreb Horseshoe’ marked within the block structure of Zagreb city centre: seven squares (Z1, Z2, Z3, Z5, Z6, Z7 and Z8) and one botanical garden (Z4) on Zagreb orthophoto map with the city axial lines (map source T. Zaninović based on orthophoto map provided by geoportal. zagreb.hr)

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Methodology

15.3.1 The Syntactical Analysis Two maps were analysed for the described case study area, where city level is low-resolution while city centre area is high-resolution. Low-resolution map of Zagreb as a whole [26, 39], was made to depict traffic-oriented movements including pedestrians. High-resolution map was made specifically for the investigation of Zagreb Horseshoe system within the nineteenth century block area with the focus on pedestrian movement thus representing selected pedestrian walkspace system. Evaluation points used in soundscape analyses were approximated to coincide with the high-resolution map as shown in Fig. 15.5. Both high- and low-resolution maps were drawn as axial maps. High-resolution map depicts pedestrian movement of Zagreb central area which represents the system of Zagreb Horseshoe. Axial and segment analyses were done on both maps using Depthmap Software version depthmapX[net] 0.30 (under the copyright: 2011–2014, Tasos Varoudis). The high-resolution map includes all pedestrian pathways in parks and squares, together with stairs and pedestrian connections across the roads. Entrances to public buildings on squares were also mapped as one axial line at the place of doors. For pathways one axial line represents the whole width of the path and its length depends on the curves in the configuration. In the resulting map the paths are either one or two axial lines in length in most of the cases, while exceptions were pathways in the Z4 area (botanical garden) and parts of semi-circular square forms (Z1 and Z2 areas). Syntactical analyses were conducted in two scales, for the entire system (Rn) and by using the 800 m radius (R800), as considered appropriate for pedestrian movement analyses which coincided with the dimensions of the analysed walkspace system being roughly 800  800 m. The syntactical analyses in this study included normalised measures of integration and choice (NaIn, NaCh), while axial analyses were used for measured axial integration, entropy and controllability.

15.3.2 Field Data Collection Consecutive in situ audio and video recordings were performed from 2013 until 2017 in the same eight public spaces with slight differences in evaluation point selection and equipment used. The evaluation points were chosen following the previously mentioned top-down approach with the aim to represent the overall ambience and architectural concept in an optimal way—both visually and aurally. The point selection criteria, following this aim, was to position the microphones near a bench in the central area of the analysed public space, as shown in Fig. 15.2.

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Fig. 15.2 The recording setup used for 1st order Ambisonics and monaural recordings at Z8, Z1 and Z5 (left to right). Author of the photographs: T. Oberman (Z8 December 2013, Z1 June 2014, Z5 February 2014)

10 min long audio recordings were made, as described in the Soundscape Indices Protocol—recording stage [27]. All the recordings were conducted on working days between 1 p.m. and 2.30 p.m. Sound sources observed in the walkspace system during the analysed recording session belong to all three main sound source types (noise, human and natural sounds) with road traffic noise being present at all evaluation points [32].

15.3.3 Soundscape Assessment Using the Virtual Soundwalk The recordings were used for listening experiments conducted in auralisation laboratory equipped with the 2nd order Ambisonics system using the virtual soundwalk approach and the Swedish Soundscape Quality Protocol, translated to Croatian [33]. Participants were presented with panoramic pictures, as shown in Fig. 15.3, on a large screen and a satellite picture of the walkspace so they could intuitively understand spatial relations between the evaluation points. For more detailed description of the method used, please see [31]. The assessment conducted in 2014 involved 35 participants, aged between 19 and 34 (mean age 27), 49% male and 51% female. The assessment conducted in 2017 involved 20 participants, aged between 23 and 36 (mean age 29), 35% male and 65% female. No participant reported any hearing problems. All participants were familiar with the analysed spaces and were recruited amongst University of Zagreb students or staff. For the purpose of this study it can be presumed that all participants had the basic understanding of the position of each evaluation point area within the Zagreb’s historical centre and pedestrian network.

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Fig. 15.3 Panoramic pictures taken in February 2014 at the eight evaluation points used in the virtual soundwalk. Author of the photographs: T. Oberman

15.4

Results

As observed in the available noise map document [37] and confirmed by the opportunistic in situ measurements[32], all the evaluation points were in the approximately same range around LAeq of 65–70 dBA (measured range of 64– 71 dBA), likely to cause annoyance by traffic noise [18]. The dominant soundscape characteristic was calculated as per ISO/TS 12913-3 [13] and for the purpose of clarity represented depending on its position in the vibrant (VB), calm (CL), monotonous (MN) or chaotic (CH) domain so the difference between them is understood better. The sound sources noted by the participants included: cars and motor traffic (all evaluation points), people (Z1, Z3, Z5, Z6, children at play (Z2), bird song (Z2, Z4, Z7), trains (Z4, Z5), sirens (Z4) and water fountains (Z5, Z8) [29]. Low-resolution map, (city of Zagreb as a system, Fig. 15.4) in the axial integration measurement, shows that the analysed walkspace system of Horseshoe squares is inside the 10% of most integrated lines in the system (10% integration core). The segment analysis confirms this with an exception of Z2 and Z3 whose values are between 10% and 25% integration core. Z5 has the largest values out of observed squares for the axial integration (axial Int value for is 0.71) and normalised choice in both radii (NaCh value for Rn is 0.95 and for R800 1.02) on the low-resolution map (where the mean value for axial Int is

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Fig. 15.4 Graphical comparison between 10% integration cores of low-resolution map that represents Zagreb system and high-resolution map which represents Horseshoe central area: red lines in the 10% of most integrated values from the axial analyses (integration core) and evaluation points used in soundscape assessments are marked as dots. Botanical gardens (Z4) were excluded on this map due to the fact that axial line in that area at this level does not represent the garden since it was not drawn through it becuse the garden has a fence with controlled entrances. (map source: ©T. Zaninović and T. Oberman, 2018)

0.47 and maximum is 0.78; mean NaCh Rn is 0.79, while NaCh R800 is 0.90 and maximum NaCh value is 1.54 for Rn, while for R800 it is 1.68). It is also the only place which is in all of the values above the mean result in the overall system and it was assessed as a chaotic area during both experiments conducted. Observing the high-resolution Horseshoe map, no evaluation point is in the 10% of integration core (minimum value for axial integration core of the Horseshoe system is 1.67 and minimum value for the Rn segment integration core NaIn is 1.68). More specifically, Z3 with the axial integration of 1.65 and Z6 with the integration of 1.66 are included in the 25% integration core in the axial analysis while Z1, Z2, Z4, Z5, Z7 and Z8 are not. Disposition of the evaluation points in the axial analysis from the most integrated to the most segregated is as follows: Z6, Z3, Z7, Z1, Z8, Z5, Z2 and Z4, while in the segment analysis it is: Z8, Z7, Z1, Z6, Z3, Z5, Z2 and Z4. Therefore, high-resolution map in both axial and segment analysis detects Z5, Z4 and Z2 being in more segregated areas of the city centre and Zagreb Horseshoe. For the Z4 this was expected because it is a botanical garden with labyrinth like layout and three controlled entrances. Normalised segment integration values on high-resolution map for Rn depict that only Z7(NaIn = 1.29) and Z8 (NaIn = 1.34) are above the mean value of 1.28, but with Z1 (NaIn = 1.27), Z3 (NaIn = 1.25) and Z6 (NaIn = 1.27) being very close to it while again Z5 (NaIn = 1.09), Z4 (NaIn = 0.54) and Z2 (NaIn = 0.90) are significantly below it, as shown in Fig. 15.5.

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Fig. 15.5 Evaluation points sorted in the Calm (CL), Vibrant (VB), Chaotic (CH) and Monotonous (MN) domains are shown on high-resolution maps showing: normalised integration values for Rn (above, left) and R800 (above, right); control (below, left) and entropy (below, right)

Z5, Z4 and Z2 are segregated areas with Z4’s and Z5’s soundscape being assessed as ‘negative’, while Z2 is segregated but ‘positive’. Evaluation points in the calm domain (Z7 and Z8) measured the highest normalised integration values on the high-resolution map (NaIn for both Rn and R800 are all above the value 1.29) and these are the only two places for which the value is rising at the local radius R800 from the value at Rn. Yet both the highest (1.08 at Z6) and the lower (0.57 at Z4) choice (NaCh R800) values were associated to evaluation points in the monotonous domain (Z3, Z4, and Z6), as shown in Fig. 15.5. Therefore, it was considered that the segment integration (NaIn R800) better relates to the assessed soundscape dimensions as it appears to be influencing distinction between the Calm and other domains. Evaluation points in the monotonous domain (Z3, Z4, and Z6) measured highest control values (above 1). Yet the lowest (below 0.35) control values were associated to evaluation points in the chaotic domain (Z1 and Z5), as shown in Fig. 15.6.

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Fig. 15.6 Evaluation points are sorted in the calm (CL), vibrant (VB), chaotic (CH) and monotonous (MN) domains and shown in the relation to normalised integration values from the high-resolution map for R800 and Rn (left); control and entropy (right)

15.5

Discussion

15.5.1 Limitations of This Study As soundscape data collection and low-resolution space syntax analyses described in this study originated from separate research frameworks, soundscape assessments were conducted prior to spatio-social and no correction was applied, nor investigated to check possible modifications to evaluation points choice. The low number of test points (eight) resulted in having to approximate the positions of the evaluation points to the same axial line therefore represented by the same configuration data for different recorded environments (in the same square). When the multiple evaluation points in the same square were not on the same axial line, the resulting syntactical values taken into consideration for that square were averaged between those axial lines. The same translating calculation from the evaluation point to axial line representation was conducted when the point was at the intersection of two axial lines. Perhaps an in situ study with closely controlled evaluation points and environmental conditions would be more revealing. Also, for more conclusive syntactical results, the social study as the in situ check of public life is needed in combination with used analytical tools. However, the results still reveal some benefits of combining space syntax tools and soundwalk approach for assessment of public parks, described in the following paragraphs.

15.5.2 Possible Indications of the Study Despite relatively high sound pressure levels observed, annoyance wasn’t the prevalent dimension, which expectedly supports the soundscape discourse. Moreover, this allowed to give more weight in attributing the difference in soundscape assessment to contextual features. It is therefore interesting to note that evaluation points assessed as Calm were positioned in areas with common

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spatio-social configuration—high entropy and integration values (entropy above 3, NaIn R800 above 1.48, NaIn Rn above 1.25). Z2 and Z3 aren’t within the 10% integration core, yet Z2 (low segment integration placed at 88% out of all values) was assessed as the only vibrant place. This can be explained due to the sounds of children playing. Such case, where a more intimate environment allows for a more vibrant soundscape following a specific use, such as a children playground, speaks for the complexity of this topic as it appears counter intuitive to the ‘higher integration means more people means a more vibrant place’ logic. The concerns regarding the inadequate use of certain squares, mentioned in the introduction, namely Z3, Z4, Z5 and Z6, were indeed reflected by the ‘negative’ soundscape and lower integration values.

15.6

Concluding Remarks

The conducted study was based on comparing results of the two user-oriented approaches to the analysis of a walkspace system in the historical centre of Zagreb, Croatia: geospatial space syntax model and virtual soundwalk. It was presumed that the space syntax approach could inform the soundscape assessment to a certain extent, as contextual data, and soundscape could confirm the perceptual effect of issues detected by spatio-social analyses, vice versa. Future research could confirm usefulness of both tools as a basis for: • controlling for spatio-social bias in evaluation point selection for soundscape assessments, including both in situ and simulated soundwalks; and • developing geospatial soundscape prediction tools. Expectedly, the high-resolution pedestrian map provided more conclusive results than the low-resolution one. Including space syntax analysis in the early stage of soundwalk set up could enable control of spatio-social context on both global and local radii (Rn and smaller) and put soundwalk results in context with both urban planning and design discourses. Acknowledgements This research was carried out at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb and partially funded by the Croatian Science Foundation, research project “Heritage Urbanism” grant number HRZZ-2032, and the University of Zagreb, research project “Urbanscape Emanation”.

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22. Knežević S (1996) Zagrebačka zelena potkova. Školska knjiga, Zagreb 23. Knežević S (2018) Najvažnija povjesničarka zagrebačkog urbanizma: Što je sve pogrešno s izgledom, stilom i sadržajem Adventa. https://www.telegram.hr/price/najvaznijapovjesnicarka-zagrebackog-urbanizma-sto-je-sve-krivo-s-izgledom-stilom-i-sadrzajemadventa/ 24. Maffei L, Massimiliano M, Aniello P, Gennaro R, Virginia PR (2015) On the validity of immersive virtual reality as tool for multisensory evaluation of urban spaces. Energ Proc 78:471–476. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2015.11.703 25. Margaritis E, Aletta F, Axelsson Ö, Kang J, Botteldooren D, Singh R (2015) Soundscape mapping in the urban context: a case study in Sheffield. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1. 5026.1607 26. Marić T, Palaiologou F, Griffiths S, Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci B (2017) Gateway—pathway heritage and urban growth—Zagreb case study. In: Heitor T (ed) Proceedings, 11th international space syntax symposium XI SSS, Lisbon. Presented at the international space syntax symposium, Lisbon: Instituto Superior Tecnico, Departamento de Engenharia Civil, Arquitetura e Georrecursos, Portugal, pp 90.1–90.16. http://www.11ssslisbon.pt/contact/. Accessed 12 July 2020 27. Mitchell A, Oberman T, Aletta F, Erfanian M, Kachlicka M, Lionello M, Kang J (2020) The soundscape indices (SSID) protocol: a method for urban soundscape surveys—questionnaires with acoustical and contextual information. Appl Sci 10(7):2397. https://doi.org/10.3390/ app10072397 28. Obad Šćitaroci M, Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci B (2015) The Zagreb Horseshoe Park. Centropa 15 (1):34–49 29. Oberman T (2015) Soundscape of urban open spaces—factors and models in urban sound planning and design. University of Zagreb, Zagreb 30. Oberman T, Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci B, Jambrošić K (2015) Integral approach to enhancement of soundscape in urban open space. Prostor 23(1):118–129 31. Oberman T, Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci B, Jambrošić K (2018) Towards a virtual soundwalk. In: Handbook of research on perception-driven approaches to urban assessment and design. IGI Global. https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/towards-a-virtual-soundwalk/198170 32. Oberman T, Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci B, Jambrošić K, Kang J (2017) Winter Buzz and summer Siesta in Zagreb—perceptual differences in soundscape of the sequence of urban open spaces. Presented at the AESOP annual congress 2017, Lisbon 33. Oberman T, Jambrošić K, Horvat M, Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci B (2020) Using virtual soundwalk approach for assessing sound art soundscape interventions in public spaces. Appl Sci 10(6):2102. https://doi.org/10.3390/app10062102 34. Radicchi A (2017) A pocket guide to soundwalking: some introductory notes on its origin, established methods and four experimental variations. In: Besecke A, Meier J, Pätzold R, Thomaier S (eds) Stadtökonomie—Blickwinkel und Perspektiven Ein Gemischtwarenladen Perspectives on Urban Economics A General Merchandise Store Eine kleine Buchführung für den Ladeninhaber Dietrich Henckel A brief overview of the accounts for the shopkeeper Dietrich Henckel. Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, Berlin, pp 70–73 35. Schafer RM (1993) The soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Rochester, Vt. : [United States]: Destiny Books ; Distributed to the book trade in the United States by American International Distribution Corp 36. Southworth M (1969) The sonic environment of cities. Environ Behav 1(1):49–70. https://doi. org/10.1177/001391656900100104 37. Strateška karta buke Grada Zagreba (2016) https://eko.zagreb.hr/strateska-karta-buke-gradazagreba/2452 38. Turner A (2000) Angular analysis: a method for the quantification of space. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international symposium of space syntax. CASA, UCL, London. https://discovery.ucl. ac.uk/id/eprint/1368/1/paper23.pdf

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39. Zaninović T, Palaiologou G, Griffiths S, Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci B (2018) Urban landscape and spatial heritage: the case of gateway-pathways in Zagreb, Croatia. Hist Environ Policy Pract 9(3–4):274–305. https://doi.org/10.1080/17567505.2018.1514568

Tin Oberman Researcher, urban planner, architect and a musician. He got his M.Arch. and Ph.D. (Architecture and Urbanism) degrees at the University of Zagreb, in Croatia. He was awarded the Assistant Professor title at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb in 2019. He is currently working as a Research Fellow at the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering, the Bartlett, on the ERC—funded research project Soundscape Indices, led by Prof. Jian Kang. During his studies in architecture and urbanism and following his education in music theory, he started working on several music projects. During his years working at the University of Zagreb, he acquired significant teaching experience in assisting undergraduate students through courses covering urban design, spatial planning, landscape architecture and history of landscape architecture at the Faculty of Architecture and the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Zagreb. At the Faculty of Architecture, he was involved in organisation of research projects and contributed to several urban planning teams. His research work included collaboration with the Institute of Electroacoustics at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, where he gained experience in auralisation and soundscape field research, focused on the enhancement of soundscape of urban open spaces. He is author of research and conference papers. Tamara Zaninović M.Arch. in architecture and urbanism (2011) at the Faculty of Architecture, the University of Zagreb, where she is currently employed as a research and teaching assistant at the Department of Urban Planning, Spatial Planning and Landscape Architecture. She participated in the research project ‘Heritage Urbanism’ (HERU, HRZZ 2032) from 2014 until 2018 led by prof. Mladen Obad Šćitaroci, Ph.D. She is a Ph.D. Student at Vienna Technical University (TU Wien, supervisor: Prof.em. Richard Stiles, Ph.D.). She was a guest Ph.D. student in London during 2016 at the Space Syntax Laboratory, the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), where she studied space syntax theory and methodology, supervisors: Sam Griffiths, PhD and Garyfalia Palaiologou, Ph.D. She has worked as a co-author and collaborator on 10 urban and architectural competitions among which are international Water Works, Brooklyn, 2012, 1st prize and Adaptive City, Europan 12, Hammarö, 2013, honorable mention. She has participated in projects for Zagreb Society of Architects Youth Section: Zagreb Pocket Architectural Guide and two City Acupuncture Workshops. She has organized two international architecture summer schools: ‘Zagreb Rooms’ (2014, publication and exibition Re:Public) and ‘City as a Monument’ (2015 in Motovun). Area of research: urban landscape, streets, heritage, walkspaces and space syntax. She has participated as a co-author on more than 10 scientific conferences and has published as a co-author several papers in ‘Prostor’ journal and one in ‘Historic Environment-Policy & Practice’. Bojana Bojanić Obad Šćitaroci (http://scitaroci.hr/) Prof.dr.sc. Graduate architect and D.Sc. in the field of architecture and town planning. She is professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Zagreb, and Head of the Department of Urban Planning, Spatial Planning and Landscape Architecture. She is the author/co-author of five books, about forty scientific articles, ten scientific studies from the field of landscape architecture, forty town-plans and studies and thirty designs from the field of garden and landscape architecture. She is a scientific-research counselor (scientist no. 125251) at scientific-research projects registered at Ministry of science of Croatia, and she is a scientific researcher in the international project Smart U Green (2017–2020) and FAR project PRE-PLAN (2020). She is a reviewer of scientific-research projects in the field of architecture and town planning. She has taken part at national and international scientific-expert conferences with topics related to the protection of the cultural heritage of architecture, tourism, landscape and space syntax. She lectures Landscape Architecture and conducts course of Landscape Design on the B.Sc., and lectures Contemporary Landscape Architecture, conducts

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Workshop of Landscape Architecture and supervises graduate theses on the faculty’s M.Sc. studies. She also teaches Theory and Design of Landscape Architecture and Space Syntax at the faculty’s doctoral scientific studies (until 2018). She is teaching Module Scape at the Postgraduate doctoral scientific study Architecture and Urbanism (from academic year 2018/2019). She speaks English, French, German and Italian, and can use Spanish, Latin and old Greek.

Chapter 16

Urban Flâneur: A Site-Responsive Walking Methodology for Fashion Design Tarryn Handcock and Tassia Joannides

Abstract Walking is fundamental to how we occupy and navigate our world. Our streets are populated by walking, dressed bodies yet the role of walking has been largely overlooked by the field of fashion design. This chapter examines how fashion can play a role in producing experiences and understandings between (dressed) social bodies and urban environments. Firstly, it proposes that walking the city is a critical activity for fashion practice that can be utilised by creative practitioners to build embodied and situated knowledges of place through a methodology of ‘urban flâneurie’. Secondly, it demonstrates how a critically reflective approach to walking can enhance how fashion presentations—such as runways and public events—contribute to place-making through engagement with urban environments. These concepts are explored through a case study of a site-responsive fashion project in Victoria Harbour, Australia, entitled Urban Flâneur, which resulted in two creative public events. Here, walking becomes a method for fashion designers to study complex relationships arising between fashion, culture and place, and to produce outcomes that activate the urban site. Keywords Fashion Situated design

16.1


Design practice research
Embodied experience
Flâneur


Contextual Review

Urban Flâneur is a creative practice research project that demonstrates how walking can form a site-responsive design approach for fashion in an urban context. While fashion design is concerned with practices of conceptualising, making, T. Handcock (&)
T. Joannides School of Fashion and Textiles, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] T. Joannides e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_16

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wearing and communicating dress, fashion is a system built on beliefs [20]. Fashion imbues bodies, artefacts, spaces, and even representations of dress, with personal and cultural meaning that render them recognisable and acceptable within society [1, 10, 26]. Yet as much as it is culturally constituted, fashion is also temporal—it is specific to a time, place and social group [19, 20, 32]. Kwon [21] suggests that fashion design can be conceived as a sited practice: responsive to specific but impermanent attributes of bodies and their environments, as well as shifting ideological and discursive sites of cultural ‘fashion’ production.1 Understanding that our sense of identity and cultural values are tied to place (Lippard cited in [21]) was a prompt for us to consider the potential of fashion design in exploring relationships between places and dressed bodies. Writing about fashion and walking dates from Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life (1972 [1863]) [2] and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (2002 [1927–1940]) [4] and continues to theorists Potvin [28] and Quinn [29] today. However, walking is an under-researched area in fashion. In particular, there is limited practice-based or practitioner generated knowledge about how walking can be a critical approach and medium for fashion design practice and presentation. In written texts outside of the fashion discipline, a key link between fashion and walking is the figure of the flâneur. Descriptions of the flâneur suggest they are a critical walker: curious, reflective, attentive to detail; usually alone and idly roaming city streets; studying crowds around them [2, 4, 18, 35]. As a model for an urban pedestrian examining fleeting fashions, the flâneur forms a starting point for this project. Initially we looked to creative practices where the flâneur was present—writing, public art and fine art—to ground our work in an interdisciplinary field of practitioners who explored flâneurie as a way to develop creative practice thinking, and as a medium for communicating experiences and understandings of place to others. Writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a creative practitioner known to have composed and arranged ideas while walking [33, 35]. Rousseau famously remarked, “I cannot meditate except while I am walking; as soon as I stop I do not think any more, and my head does not go except with my feet” [33]. This is what Jo Lee Vergunst and Tim Ingold describe as a “double awareness in walking” [22], whereby walkers connect emplaced perceptions, feelings and experiences generated by walking with simultaneous inner reflection and thought. Artists working in this way include Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and Janet Cardiff, who use walking as the mode and subject of their work.2 Fulton’s walks are recorded on camera and are often translated into other media such as text, which overlays images or is displayed on gallery walls. Long uses these devices as well as diagrams, maps and drawings to communicate his walking process and observations. Like many land artists, his 1

In the context of this research, sites are specific spatial locations with defined boundaries [31, 30] as well as discursively determined and generated sites that delineate a field of knowledge, cultural exchange or debate [21]. In each instance sites are understood to contain the potential for transformation through design practice, presentation or performance. 2 For examples of their creative work see Fulton [11], Fulton et al. [12], Long [25], and Cardiff [5].

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work also involves interacting with the landscape by marking it with his passage, collecting and moving materials, and relocating these into a gallery setting. Artist Janet Cardiff, by comparison, creates an experience of place by inviting audiences to partake in ‘audio walks’. Audience members don headphones and listen to binaural recordings that layer Cardiff’s spoken walking instructions over sound-effects, music, voices and recordings from the route. In these artists’ respective practices, qualities of a particular time and place experienced and generated through walking are distilled and enhanced, encouraging audiences to reflect on their own embodied experiences in relation to the artists’ walk/work. This participation is of particular interest to our project Urban Flâneur.

16.2

Method

Looking to this community of practice, we propose that fashion practitioners can assume the persona of the flâneur to build an embodied and situated understanding of the city and people within it, as well as produce fashion in relationship with place. This is explored through creative practice research, which recognises that practitioners’ skills and expertise in a field are necessary to undertake situated research within it [37]. Urban Flâneur is therefore a creative research project conducted through the practice of fashion design, that asks: how might fashion designers use walking as a mode for engaging with the particularities of where and when fashion is situated to better understand and cultivate relationships between dressed bodies and place? The following case study of Victoria Harbour describes the development of a design methodology for ‘urban flâneurie’, demonstrating design thinking and knowledge as situated processes arising out of actions and sites of practice (Frayling cited in [37]). Actions that constitute the authors’ fashion practice include embodied processes of walking, mapping, designing, writing, collaborating and producing public events, which are modes of reflection-through-action, reflectionin-action and reflection-on-action (Schön cited in [14]). Reflection-through-action occurs as practitioners gain awareness through the actions of practice, which is demonstrated in the case study through walking, writing and mapping activities that grow an understanding of the site. Reflection-in-action, whereby doing extends thinking through experimentation and reflection feeds on doing and its results, is evidenced through ways walking informs and evolves the authors’ approaches to design collaboration and event production. The research findings are primarily generated by reflection in and through action as creative research practice becomes a means of working and a way to generate knowledge. The case study itself is written in the style of reflection-on-action, retrospectively reflecting on thinking, actions and feelings in relation to the practice. Using this approach demonstrates theory in practice for a field (fashion) with little existing literature on the topic of walking and shows how fashion designers can critically respond to and activate urban sites. The Victoria Harbour site was selected due to

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its reputation as an area lacking in local specificity and cultural authenticity. As designers are often problem-focused this was a key provocation for the Urban Flâneur project: to identify unique qualities of the area in order to develop a stronger sense of place.

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Case Study: Victoria Harbour

Victoria Harbour is in Docklands, an area close to Melbourne’s central business district (CBD) and major public transport routes, yet there is an enduring perception by Melbournians that it is geographically and culturally disconnected from the rest of the city. To some extent the reputation is warranted; access routes are limited by the surrounding water and congested key arterial roads. However, redevelopment in Docklands over the past 10 years has transformed what was once described as a “derelict industrial wasteland” [9] into one of the fastest growing communities in the state [8]. Growth has been driven by State Government initiatives to secure private sector investment in order to connect the CBD to the water, and property and infrastructure group Lendlease have led this construction and development. As a part of their corporate interest in social responsibility and community engagement [23, 24], the company has supported a range of creative initiatives that align with City of Melbourne’s [8] goals for cultural activation and place-making in order to counter the area’s sense of disconnection and the perception of it as a ‘non-place’. One of these initiatives is The Exchange, a year-long interdisciplinary research lab formed in collaboration between RMIT University and Lendlease, operating out of two formerly unoccupied shopfronts—Knowledge Market and Aperture—located in Victoria Harbour. The Exchange’s goals are to explore concepts of community and new ways of understanding the shared urban environment. These interests align with the trajectory of the authors’ ongoing collaborative projects, which explore unconventional sites for fashion presentations and practices of dress. During a residency hosted by The Exchange at Knowledge Market, we developed and refined a methodological framework for examining the culture and conditions of urban sites (here, Victoria Harbour) through a fashion lens. Simultaneously we ran a design studio for the third year of RMIT University’s Bachelor of Fashion (Design) (Honours), which invited a group of fashion students to develop design responses to Victoria Harbour through walking. Our methodology, that of urban flâneurie, evolved as way to study complex relationships arising between fashion, culture and place, demonstrating how a site-responsive fashion practice can respond to embodied and situated experiences of sites. Initially, urban flâneurie was an activity rather than a creative practice methodology; at the start of our residency we roamed Victoria Harbour on foot to familiarise ourselves with the area. Yet over time it became clear that walking formed an organised approach to identifying specific cultural qualities and conditions of the site, and reflecting on our embodied experiences within it. As described by Lee and Ingold [22] “walking affords an experience of embodiment to the extent

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that it is grounded in an inherently sociable engagement between self and environment”. We became urban flâneurs by actively adopting particular behaviours for observing the city and our own mode of inhabitation. We came to understand walking as an expanded range of bodily practices including looking, navigating, pausing, watching, listening, feeling, and talking. Our walks began by looking ahead to assess the direction we would take. This decision was often guided by weather, as Victoria Harbour is subject to strong wind and rain coming off the water. Our walks were punctuated by pauses to interact with public art, rest on benches, and wait for traffic while crossing streets. The question was raised: what does it mean to have a moving dressed body? Ingold and Vergunst [18] propose that a walking body is a body in the act of forming knowledge and constituting place. Through walking we discovered the urban space again and again, each day of being in the space adding, altering and changing our understanding and our being. The site too was transformed by our walking, as our clothed, moving bodies contributed to the cultural landscape. This reflects Jane Rendell’s observation that urban spaces and places are dynamic, as sites for design are entwined with “the cultural and spatial practices that produce them, including the actions of those who investigate them” [31]. As the walking body is social and inscribed with cultural signifiers of dress and adornment, we must also note the specificity of the urban environment and knowledge being observed and produced. The moving body is always situated in a particular location and Entwistle [10] notes that the particular context of a dressed body often prescribes the constraints of appropriate dress. This is relevant to Victoria Harbour, which is a generally conservative space primarily inhabited during business hours by a combination of office workers and labourers. The work culture conservatism affects modes of dress in the area, demonstrating that “the degree to which the dressed body can express itself can therefore be symbolic of [its] location” [10]. Through our walks we identified four distinct archetypes of dress common to Victoria Harbour: corporate attire, high visibility clothing, athleisure gear, and street wear. These archetypes of dress reflect the micro-social order of Victoria Harbour, enforced by business and construction work environments, and the social expectations of what one wears when jogging at lunchtime or walking the dog. This highlighted a phenomenon of fashion, that dress is a ‘situated bodily practice’ [10]. During our residency, our presence (and the collective presence of our students and collaborators) contributed to a shift in the social and physical environment of Victoria Harbour, temporarily expanding and shifting the existing micro-social order by introducing modes of dress not usually seen in the area. While the flâneur is often conceived as a lone figure, we found that urban flâneurie is not always—as Benjamin suggested—about observing introspectively. Over the course of the project we worked in an interdisciplinary way with specialists in human geography and ethnography, sound design, public art, fashion, interaction and technology design, project management and development, fine art, architecture, and urban planning, as well as one another. Walks were often undertaken together, which resulted in ongoing discourse about our embodied experiences in Victoria Harbour. Talking as we walked revealed our ‘situated

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knowledges’, which Donna Haraway describes as partial knowledge produced under specific local, historical, political, and situational circumstances [34]. This process of reflection-through-action revealed how we were becoming responsive to rhythms of the city’s social and physical ecology. Collaboration through walking also enabled us to search for commonalities and connections between our situated knowledges, and to develop questions around how fashion—as an embodied and social phenomenon—might respond to observed qualities of Victoria Harbour. These findings became the basis for group activities we later employed with our students, who were instructed to select a location in Victoria Harbour for analysis using critically reflective walking practices. Their collective discoveries would inform the development of their own site-responsive fashion designs. A series of group walks, including a dérive workshop with Professor Laurene Vaughan, enabled analysis of discrete sites across Victoria Harbour. Dérive is a walking technique developed by the Situationists, and was used to break habitual ways of inhabiting the city by directing attention to how we walk and perceive our environment. Each designer in the workshop was issued with instructional cards that directed them to use their perceptive senses and walk at a particular speed or direction. Following these instructions enabled us to mindfully focus on embodied experiences of place and was effective to identify patterns and features in the environment through close sensory observation. To capture the embodied experiences of urban flâneurie, we employed a range of mapping methods including video, photography and note taking. While photography framed moments in time, video allowed us to document the nuances of a walk and capture seemingly trivial details; writing notes was a way of detailing and interpreting our individual experiences: I walk slowly. I feel the irregular gusts of wind off the water and warmth of the sun, and my dress whipping about. I listen to the industrial noises of the dock - metal chipping, the beep of trucks, the whir of a crane, men’s voices calling, hammering, and what I imagine are metal girders hitting one another. I am fascinated as these fade away and there is the laugh of tourists, talk of businessmen, the closer I get to the library and away from the dock. —Notes from the authors’ dérive journal April 2018

Clayimpressionsofsurfacesaddedtexturetoourdocumentation,anddrawingenabled translation into gestural lines and marks. Combinations of these methods focused on documenting experiences and observations of social and environmental aspects within specificareas.FollowingStrandvad’sdefinition,thesearesituateddesignmethodsasthey start“fromthelocationofproduction,seeingtheconditionsasconstitutiveforthedesign” (citedin[34]).Yetforurbanflâneurie,designissituatedandembodied,sotheconditionsfor design are expanded beyond the characteristics of a place and must also include the phenomenological experience of place, as our bodies combine thoughts, memories and perceptions of sites generated through walking (Merleau-Ponty cited in [6]). Furthermore, interweavingofrealitywithimaginationisaqualityattributedtotheflâneurbyBaudelaire [2],sofordesigners adopting the personaofthe urban flâneur, respondingto this‘double awareness’ [22] is critical to an embodied and site-responsive practice. These ideas

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developedthroughthecasestudywerefurtherexploredthroughtwopubliceventstesting howwalkingcouldbeacriticallyreflectiveapproachforfashiondesignpractice.

16.4

Fashion and the City

Our hypothesis—that fashion designers can use walking to engage with sites of fashion and better understand and cultivate relationships between dressed bodies and place—was tested through two public fashion events, which were outcomes of the critically reflective design methodology described above. The first outcome, URBAN FLÂNEUR: Fashion and the City, was a one night only runway showcasing the entire collection of works produced by the fashion design students during the Victoria Harbour residency. Forty site-responsive looks were modelled in the urban landscape outside Knowledge Market, situating the designs back into the environment which inspired and informed their creation. The runway was accompanied by a specially designed sound score created collaboratively between a selection of four of the fashion design students, together with students from RMIT Bachelor of Design (Digital Media), in response to their observations of Victoria Harbour. A catalogue also accompanied the event, along with a map showing the sites designers had responded to. For this event, we focussed on how presentation mechanisms could communicate the narrative of the designer walking the city. This was choreographed as a performance of bodily practices associated with flâneurie, comprising of models loitering on benches and observing the crowd. The path of the models formed an outdoor runway; models left Knowledge Market and entered into the public space of Victoria Harbour, interacting with features of the built environment before a final promenade back to the venue. The entire performance was staged in response to existing infrastructure of the site, including environmental lighting. We made use of fluorescents along the entrance to adjacent shops, street lamps in the public park, and the ambient light of Victoria Harbour at dusk to light the models’ passage. The models’ purposeful catwalk along the final stretch, combined with their earlier performance of flâneurie, raised questions about what it might mean (for a predominantly female cast and audience) to occupy dimly lit public space at night. Beaumont [3] suggests that walking has political economy, including where one walks as well as the way they do it. In the context of this performance, the walking behaviours of the models suggested confidence and demonstrated how public events can encourage women to inhabit the urban environment after dark. The models’ journey in Fashion and the City is an example of what Solnit [35] describes as “a mode of making the world as well as being in it”, that is, we found that walking a particular path contributed to the place-making of Victoria Harbour as both city and body reciprocally transformed one another [7, 13]. This place-making was amplified by the wearing of site-responsive designs and the embodied experience of the audience. For this presentation format, the audience were not only observers of performance, sight and sound; they interacted with the

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presentation site by sitting, standing, or walking around the outdoor space as the models traversed their paths. By inhabiting the area and interacting with one another and the urban environment through the medium of fashion, designers, models and audience contributed to the production of a culture of place. Their convergence and occupation created an inclusive and safe social environment to celebrate walking in the city after dark. Fashion and the City suggested that walking can play a role in fashion presentation by cultivating and communicating embodied and social experiences of urban environments. It indicated that fashion might be produced through bodily walking practices, including pausing, lounging, watching, listening—and crucially —gathering at a particular place and time. To explore these ideas further, we proposed a site-responsive fashion event for Melbourne Fashion Week (MFW), an annual festival celebrating the city’s fashion industry and culture.

16.5

Fashion Reimagines the City

The second public event, URBAN FLÂNEUR: Fashion Reimagines the City was conceived as an exhibition of works displayed across The Exchange’s two venues, located a short walk from one another. Where the previous fashion presentation had focussed on models expressing flâneurial bodily practices and design outcomes, the MFW event concentrated on the role of urban flâneurie for designers and audiences in a fashion context. In the gallery space at Knowledge Market we divided the fashion design work under two key themes, ‘Fashion Designing Victoria Harbour’ and ‘Urban Futures’. Under the first theme we featured selected observational drawings, textile samples, photos, and reflective writing as well as video documentation of the prior runway. The ‘Urban Futures’ theme offered perspectives on how designers might shape a city through their activities and ideas (as much as being shaped by their own experiences in it), and showcased how designers drew from their observations and experiences of Victoria Harbour to imagine how broader social and environmental phenomena might impact the area and its inhabitants in the future. For example, revealing design process in the MFW exhibition offered audiences insight into the significance of Victoria Harbour as a site for designing, testing and presenting urban flâneurie. One speculative scenario asked, would future workers be able to commute on foot if the area was subject to rising water levels from the surrounding river and harbour? What might displaced pedestrians wear if the area was only accessible by water? The design outcomes reflected a double awareness of spatial and discursive fashion sites and were an exploration of what might happen if walking is no longer an assumed way of inhabiting and experiencing the city. At the second venue, Aperture, we curated a series of thematic streetfront windows. The installation activated the newly developed but as yet unoccupied retail space. The installation activated this site by prominently featuring glossy banner images, fashion publications, and garments suspended from steel frames

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reminiscent of clothing racks. In addition, one window was illuminated by fashion films, which could be viewed by commuting workers and residents returning home at night. Quinn [29] describes how fashion is premised on visuality and visual media, which plays an important role in the transmission and consumption of fashion, particularly through advertising and merchandising. Taking this into consideration, we drew on the visual language of fashion retail environments and imagery to compose the fashion installation in response to qualities of the site. Our installation (Fig. 16.1) differed from visual displays in traditional fashion retail spaces, which predominantly focus on constructing possible and aspirational identities for individuals, driving the desire to consume fashion through purchasing product. Instead, it explored how fashion window displays function as a representational strategy to narrativize and impose identity, as well as influencing the currency of certain places and spaces [28]. In Aperture the identity being displayed, produced and narrativized in the windows—the object of desire—was a reimagined place rather than a reimagined audience. By constructing alternative narratives of place through a site-responsive fashion display, we found that we were able to speculate on possible past, present and future urban identities for Victoria Harbour. During planning, we considered how the embodied experience of the flâneur involves consuming their surroundings through observation. Thus, the display mechanisms were about how fashion could be consumed through sensory perception; passing pedestrians found that the window frontage whispered and sang to them. These were soundscapes developed by the RMIT Bachelor of Design (Digital Media) students, projected by exciter

Fig. 16.1 Fashion installation at Aperture, responding to the shop frontage. Photo [36]

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speakers which use vibration to transform glass into a sounding body. Like the Paris of Benjamin’s flâneur (2002), the culture and conditions of Victoria Harbour represented in Fashion Reimagines the City were partially real and partially illusory, inviting the audience to engage their imagination as well as their senses. The static and audiovisual installations across these two venues were strategies to encourage walking in Victoria Harbour and activate Aperture, a previously unoccupied site. Ultimately, we wanted the audience to explore and understand their urban environment by adopting some of the walking practices used by designers featured in the exhibition. To this end, the display at Aperture included a large printed banner with dérive instructions for the audience to engage with. This was accompanied by an event catalogue and a self-guided walking tour map with the dérive instructions printed on the map’s reverse (Fig. 16.2). The design of the map intentionally withheld most street names, encouraging a drifting audience to create their own path, while dérive instructions provided loose guidelines for navigating the city. Audience members could use the map to create a route for walking between sites, yet the non-determinative instructions enabled a walker to trace their own path, offering alternatives for engaging with their environment through wayfaring [17]. This differs to other recent fashion walks in the Southern Hemisphere, such as ‘Walk the Walk’, a guided walking tour operated by the New Zealand Fashion Museum [27], which aimed to uncover Auckland’s inner city fashion history. Instead, Fashion Reimagines the City encouraged self-guided

Fig. 16.2 MFW self-guided walking tour map and dérive instructions. Design [15]

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exploratory and experiential walking to perceive the urban environment through the lens of fashion, and demonstrated how discursive fashion sites can be generated through narratives built across fragmentary events and nomadic actions [21].

16.6

Discussion

Both Fashion and the City and Fashion Reimagines the City are contemporary instances of what David Gilbert describes occurring at the end of the nineteenth century, when “the fashion object that was being consumed was the city itself, and the spectacle of high fashion in situ” (cited in [28]). In these examples, the spectacle of fashion can be seen to transform the city, for example, the models’ walk in Fashion and the City defined a site for the performance of fashion by transforming a playground space into a runway. Additionally, while the performance aimed to communicate the designers’ methods of urban flâneurie it also invoked the tradition of promenade, that is, walking as society spectacle [3], by presenting the designers’ collections publicly and in their urban context. By inviting audiences to converge, inhabit and interact with the space and one another, the spectacle contributed to social and community experiences of the urban environment and place-making; the site was transformed into a place for gathering after dark. In Fashion Reimagines the City the transformative potential of site-responsive fashion and spectacle were further explored. By aligning the presentation with MFW, a significant event on the fashion calendar, Victoria Harbour was connected with the broader culture of Melbourne and became a locus of attention; the site became a place for encountering and producing fashion. Furthermore, the exhibition, opening night event, and use of static and audiovisual display mechanisms had a dual effect. They encouraged audiences to inhabit the city and engage in perceptive and imaginative experiences through walking, and they also played a role in producing narratives of fashion and the city, demonstrating the ability to conceive of sites as collaboratively generated. Through creative practice research in this case study we came to understand site-responsivity as processes and outcomes that emerge in response to conditions of a site. However, it is important to acknowledge that the site-responsive outcomes produced through this application of urban flâneurie do also intersect with existing site-specific approaches in other fields. Activating social space is characteristic of community-based site specificity in art, where artists seek integration with communities in order to speak with and for them through the artwork [21]. Likewise, Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics is commonly used as a lens for site-specific creative practice, reflecting an interest in how artworks can produce collaborations by engaging participants through social encounters [16]. The case study illustrates how, when applied to fashion, urban flâneurie can cultivate connections between the city and its people, however the focus is less on speaking for a community or collaborating with the audience, and more on how the urban flâneur might act as an ‘urban citizen’. In this capacity the urban flâneur not only inhabits,

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observes, and engages with urban environments through walking, but also contributes back to the city by activating sites and communities, which can develop culture and place. Solnit [35] states that “the ideal city is organized around citizenship—around participation in public life”; our creative practice research in Victoria Harbour demonstrated that urban flâneurie can encourage creative practitioners to engage and activate urban environments as citizens, creating new relationships between dressed bodies and place. The designer as urban flâneur also demonstrates how a site (Victoria Harbour) can be imbued with cultural currency through increased visibility of the location and affiliation with a city-wide fashion festival. This is an example of the productive power of a site-responsive design approach, as it illustrates how designers can both find and design discursive sites through their actions [38]. In this sense, the site-responsive practice of the urban flâneur can be seen as an interpretation of site that might shift ontologies and experiences of place by overlaying current realities with collectively and collaboratively imagined alternatives. What the case study and two public events demonstrate is that walking is a critical—and overlooked—method for fashion practice and presentation. Fashion can be produced by drawing upon embodied and situated experiences and knowledges. Through the course of our case study we considered the provocation of the flâneur as a figure comprised of qualities from Baudelaire and Benjamin’s writing. We developed a methodology for utilising walking as a particular way of observing and inhabiting the city, and to inform and activate fashion design practice and presentation. Enquiry into this knowledge production through creative practice research has deepened an understanding of the role of fashion designers and— through critical reflection—evolved the practice itself. Consequently, the figure of the urban flâneur has become a lens for addressing relationships between urban environments and their dressed, situated and social occupants. By extension, urban flâneurie has emerged as a means to activate and contribute to understandings and experiences of fashion, culture and place, through fashion practice and presentation. Moreover, we found that the methodology of urban flâneurie can encourage interdisciplinary collaboration by bringing together embodied and situated knowledges, as well as socially embedded narratives of place from interdisciplinary perspectives. For instance, the collaborations between fashion and sound designers resulted in collective understandings of place constructed by shared knowledges of sites in Victoria Harbour, and led to unique combinations of creative expression. Through this study we have highlighted that fashion, and in particular practice based investigations, have a place in expanding interdisciplinary spatio-cultural discourse of sites, and that there is great potential to further interrogate relationships between fashion and walking the city into the future. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the following parties for their support of this project: RMIT University, Lendlease, The Exchange team (Charles Anderson, Komal Lakhanpal, Ross McLeod, Shanti Sumartojo, Natasha Sutila, Bianca Vallentine), consulting disciplinary specialists (Andrea Eckersley, Andy Fergus, Ceri Hann, John MacKinnon, Glen Rollason, Laurene Vaughan), collaborating RMIT Bachelor of Design (Digital Media) students (Tom Harman, Adam Hogan, Rory Tyzack, and sound design project leader Mitchell Waters),

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alumni of the 2018 RMIT Bachelor of Fashion (Design) (Honours) Urban Flâneur studio, and those who contributed to the Urban Flâneur project public events.

References 1. Barthes R (2013) The language of fashion. Bloomsbury Publishing, London 2. Baudelaire C (1972) The painter of modern life. Penguin Books, London 3. Beaumont M (2016) Nightwalking: a nocturnal history of London. Chaucer to Dickens, London, Verso 4. Benjamin W (2002) The arcades project (trans: Eiland H, McLaughlin K, Tiedemann R (eds)). Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 5. Cardiff J (2020) ‘Walks’, Janet Cardiff George Bures Miller. https://www.cardiffmiller.com/ artworks/walks/index.html. Accessed 10 Feb 2020 6. Casey ES (1997) The fate of place: a philosophical history. University of California Press, Berkeley 7. de Certeau M (1984) The practice of everyday life. University of California Press, Berkeley 8. City of Melbourne (2012) Docklands community and place plan. https://www.melbourne.vic. gov.au/SiteCollectionDocuments/docklands-community-place-plan.pdf. Accessed 29 April 2018 9. Development Victoria (2018) Docklands, http://www.development.vic.gov.au/projects/ docklands. Accessed 29 April 2018 10. Entwistle J (2000) Fashion and the fleshy body: dress as embodied practice. Fashion Theory J Dress Body Culture 4(3):323–348 11. Fulton H (1978) Roads and paths: Twenty Walks, 1971–1977 and eight photographs of roads. Schirmer-Mosel, Munich 12. Fulton H, Messner R, Hapkemeier A, Vettese A (2005) Hamish Fulton: keep moving. Charta, Milan 13. Grosz E (1992) Bodies/Cities. In: Colomina B (ed) Sexuality and space. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, pp 241–254 14. Handcock T (2014) Skin That Wears: Body-site as a context for designing wearable artefacts. PhD thesis. School of Fashion and Textiles, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University 15. Handcock T (2018) Self-guided walking tour map and dérive instructions for Urban Flâneur: Fashion Reimagines the City, Melbourne Fashion Week. Presented 4–17 September 2018, Victoria Harbour, Docklands, Australia 16. Hayes L (2017) From site-specific to site-responsive: sound art performances as participatory milieu. Organised Sound 22(1):83–92 17. Ingold T (2016) Lines: a brief history. Routledge, London 18. Ingold T, Vergunst JL (eds) (2008) Ways of walking: ethnography and practice on foot. Ashgate, London 19. Kaiser SB (2012) Fashion and cultural studies. Berg, London 20. Kawamura Y (2005) Fashionology. Berg, Oxford 21. Kwon M (2004) One place after another: site-specific art and locational identity. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 22. Lee J, Ingold T (2006) Fieldwork on foot: perceiving, routing, socializing. In: Coleman S, Collins P (eds) Locating the field: space, place and context in anthropology. Bloomsbury Publishing, London, pp 67–86 23. Lendlease (2017) Sustainability committee charter. https://www.lendlease.com/au/-/media/ llcom/investor-relations/governance/sustainability-committee-charter-may2017.pdf. Accessed 5 July 2018

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24. Lendlease (2018) Our approach: sustainability framework. https://www.lendlease.com/au/ company/sustainability/our-approach/#/section/anchor-strategicchallenges?animate=true. Accessed 5 July 2018 25. Long R (2020) Richard Long. http://www.richardlong.org/index.html. Accessed 10 Feb 2020 26. McCracken G (1986) Culture and consumption: a theoretical account of the structure and movement of the cultural meaning of consumer goods. Journal of Consumer Research, 13(1): 71–84 27. New Zealand Fashion Museum (2017) A history of walk the walk: fashion in the city. New Zealand Fashion Museum, Auckland 28. Potvin J (ed) (2009) The places and spaces of fashion, 1800–2007. Taylor & Francis, New York 29. Quinn B (2003) The fashion of architecture. Berg, Oxford 30. Rendell J (2010) Site-writing: the architecture of art criticism. I.B. Tauris & Co., London 31. Rendell J (2006) Art and architecture: a place between 32. Roach-Higgins EM, Eicher JB (1995) Dress and identity. In: Roach-Higgins ME, Eicher JB, Johnson KKP (eds) Dress and identity. Fairchild Publications, New York, pp 7–18 33. Rousseau J, Kelly C, Malesherbes CGDLD, Masters RD, Stillman PG (1995) The confessions and, correspondence, including the letters to malesherbes. University Press of New England [for] Dartmouth College, Hanover and London 34. Simonsen J (2014) Situated design methods. Design thinking, design theory. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England 35. Solnit R (2001) Wanderlust: a history of walking. Verso, London 36. Titz T (2018) Photo of fashion reimagines the city installation at aperture. Photography. In: McLeod R, Sumartojo S, Anderson C, Sutila N and Hogan S (eds) The Exchange at Knowledge Market. Melbourne Books, Melbourne 37. Vaughan L (2017) Practice based design research. Bloomsbury Academic, New York 38. Ware SA (2013) On site, place and specificity. In: Bruhn C (ed) Multitudes. Uro Media, Melbourne, pp 93–144

Tarryn Handcock Handcock is an interdisciplinary artist and academic who works across the disciplines of art and design. Through collaborative projects she explores sites of fashion presentation as well as embodied and material practices of dress. Based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, Handcock’s research connects embodied approaches, which incorporate experiences and insights of users with situated approaches that are sensitive to personal, social, cultural and environmental contexts of dress. She holds a creative practice-based Ph.D. and teaches in RMIT University’s School of Fashion and Textiles where she specialises in sites for design innovation, relationships with place, and material knowledges. She has exhibited, published and presented work both nationally and overseas, most recently at the National Trust of Victoria, and MONA FOMA. Tassia Joannides Joannides is an artist and academic who’s interdisciplinary performative works situate and intersect the fileds of art, craft and design. Based in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, Joannides is a founding member of Triple F collective, where she works collaboratively with culturally diverse female artists on intersectional art and design projects. She is currently the Program Manager of RMIT University’s Bachelor of Fashion (Design) and is a former Coordinator of Art: History + Theory + Cultures in the School of Art at RMIT University, where she also completed her practice-led Ph.D. Her research focuses on contemporary investigations of identity, culture and sexuality, the body, materials and modes of exhibition practice. Joannides has exhibited, published and presented their work broadly both nationally and overseas, including Germany, Japan and the USA.

Chapter 17

A Walking Methodology as the Participatory Tool for a University Master Plan Design Karen Andersen and Sofía Balbontín

Abstract This paper presents the results of a study carried out on a university campus, which deployed the “commented walks” method to analyze the use and value of the campus open spaces. This method is applied as part of a citizen participation process, incorporating the walking method as a way of having a natural view of the space. The surroundings are toured, and from the collective in situ perception, it is given significance and value. Our objective is to enrich theoretic and practical elaborations of urban planning around citizen participation in developing an urban diagnosis. This article concludes the benefits and limits of research in movement methodology carried out within the design framework of a University Campus Master Plan in Punta Arenas, Chile. Keywords Citizen participation

17.1


Walking methodology
University campus

Introduction

Within urban studies, ethnographic tools from anthropological research have resurged, reinventing themselves according to investigative interest in everyday practices [7, 15]. De Certeau recognizes in the walking practices a tool for disK. Andersen (&) Université Paris Est, Champs-sur-Marne, France e-mail: [email protected] Institut d’Urbanisme de Paris, Université Paris XII, Créteil, France Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile Institute of Architecture and Urbanism, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile S. Balbontín Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile e-mail: [email protected] School of Architecture, Design and Construction, Universidad de las Américas, Providencia, Chile © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_17

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covering unseen places in everyday life and subvert the planned city. If perception is a direct function of stimulation, and not a mind construction [10], perception about space is organized in the experience. This affirmation has put the experience of walking as a way of understanding urban life. This particular cognitive focus of storytelling while touring a place comes from other studies carried out by anthropologists, writers, poets, and filmmakers. The Situationists were the first to use the so-called “drifts” as a way to compile aspects of a city to construct psycho-geographic maps, or environmental units [8]. However, studies based on walking practices are diverse, such as the poetic praise of the walker by Sansot [20]; or the famous flanêur character, of Baudelaire, who Walter Benjamin theorized in the context of Paris [4]. Such studies demonstrate the importance of walking as a method to observe the urban space. We focus on studies of urban public spaces that incorporate walking interviews as a methodological experimentation that have for aim to collect the sensory and affective experiences about spaces [2, 3, 5, 6, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22]. Our participatory experience on a university campus in Punta Arenas, Chile, was grounded in theoretic elaborations and practices based on perception and experience, incorporating the participation of the university campus users [12]. We rely on the idea that a mobile method generates data located and informed by landscapes [9]. Our study applies the “commented walk” method for the generation of a participatory diagnosis about the exterior university campus spaces. These results will feed the design of a master plan for the university campus. To develop a Master Plan for Punta Arenas Campus, the Universidad de Magallanes command a study and diagnosis about the current situation of the space that included sensory information for the urban design proposal. From a methodological point of view, the diagnostic study that precedes the design phase of the Master Plan is understood as a technical and participative process [1]. The participative process has the goal of incorporating aspects related to identity, experience, and perception, of detecting main problems and necessities of the university community, as well as involving this community in functional decision making, and giving updates about project advances. With this in mind, a participative methodology was chosen: (1) Ten meetings or focus groups with diverse actors (key informants) from the university community, with the intent of representing different interests. (2) One full day of fieldwork on the university campus, where freely and anonymously different actors were invited to respond to four questions and place their answers on a campus map with post-it notes. (3) Commented walks with a group of users from the campus. It is important to underline that the “commented walk” method requires revision and adaptation to each problem and territory to which it is applied. It was necessary to think about the configuration of the participant groups as well as the times, places, and moments in which the commented walks took place. This article aims at giving a deeper account of the results obtained from the third tool employed.

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We used a walking method to conduct our fieldwork on the university campus. How space is used, lived and perceived is what we aim to understand through this tool. We collected information during a guided tour around the study area, applying individual or group interviews to understand more about the community’s experience in the space. This method is founded on the premise that the individual understands the world through their perception, which is an interaction between the environment and the individual who perceives it [10]. Jean-Paul Thibaud, a french sociologist that studied the urban environment theory, refers to the “commented walk” method or parcours commenté as that which obtains information from perception in movement, and consists of three parts: walking, perceiving and describing [21]. The method consists in living the experience of the space together with a group of different types of users of the campus, with the objective of “telling the space” while it is toured. The users were professors, students, functionaries, and administrative staff. This experience is tied to the moment, to the place and persons that participate in the walk. Therefore, results from this experience are relevant concerning the depth and detail about the relationship between the users and places that they occupy. The social representativeness of the participants is not so relevant. The application of this particular tool observes in situ the symbiosis between users and a place. Diversity of smells, sensations, colors, and sounds encourage the telling of those who inhabit the space. Our objective was to open the reflection about tools of citizen participation that incorporate inhabitants’ perceptions into urban diagnosis. This professional experience is a crucial part of the premise that in order to achieve good design it is necessary to understand the sensitive relationship that exists between the user and the place. The concept of a sensitive relationship with space is used to understand the sensory relationship between individuals and their surroundings [21].

17.2

Forms and Uses of Walking Methods

We are interested in walking as an exploration tool with cognitive and critical objectives about the space, as well as a device for citizen participation. In the USA, intending to find out how citizens of the contemporary city perceive urban forms and their transformation, the urban planner and architect Kevin Lynch used citizen walks to activate their perceptions and feelings [17, 16]. German sociologist, Margareth Kusenbach developed and theorized the “go-along” method as a hybrid ethnographic tool between participant observation and qualitative interviews [13]. This method looks to explore the role of places on everyday experiences by accompanying an informant in their everyday itinerary while conducting an interview and observations. Kusenbach studies how citizens of urban neighborhoods in Hollywood perceive local problems and how this perception is related with their activities and social interactions.

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In the political and intellectual context of the mid-twentieth century in France and Germany, sociology strays from global theories and delves into daily life and praxis [14, 15]. This sociology will evidence of physical aspects of reality, but at the same time its phenomenological, imaginary, and sensory aspects [11]. One of the first sociologists that incorporated walking into research about urban spaces was Jean-Francois Augoyard, who constructed a walking rhetoric through studying a neighborhood in Grenoble, France. This walking rhetoric is capable of translating “the organization of each citizen’s own style and the correlations between these styles inside a common space” [3, p. 28]. Inspired by this work, in 1979 a research laboratory was created in Grenoble, France (Centre de recherche sur l’espace sonore & l’environnement urbain). Studies by CRESSON about “l’itineraire” [19] or “le parcours commenté” [21] give credence to the projection of this research line. The itinerary is an in situ research method developed for the first time by Jean-Yves Petiteau. This method consists of an interview in the field, which the interviewee proposes the route and guides the researcher through the study area. Petiteau and Pasquier describe the itinerary method as a transaction, a shared experience between the researcher and the interviewee. This itinerary is a displacement around the territory and the reference universe. Walking as a critical knowledge tool is born from a method of observing the landscape through movement. Transformations of the contemporary city and the actual emphasis on sustainable planning, demand to the practitioners paying more attention to how individuals and communities value the spaces [9]. “The fact of traversing, an instrument of phenomenological knowledge and symbolic interpretation of a territory is a psychogeographic form of reading the territory…” ([5, p. 11], traduction libre) Francesco Careri proposes the act of walking as an aesthetic practice that paints the outline of human settlements. It is translated as the first human action that implies an organization of one’s surroundings. The constant mutation of cities is a product of the movement of persons and its variations and this brings a possible understanding about the city from a counterposition of the static view [5]. “Through walking, man began to construct the natural landscape that surrounded him. And, through walking, categories have been conformed in our century with which we interpret urban landscapes that surround us.” [5, pp. 19–20]. Walking reveals the space from the individual and social dynamism of a city. From this point, the essential need for movement is born to understand relationships that man has forged with the territory.

17.3

“Commented Walks” Through a University Campus

The UMAG campus is located in the northern part of the city of Punta Arenas, a sector that is characterized as a transition zone between the northern pre-urban area and the city center. This zone borders large productive estates and field equipment

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that coexist with residential areas in the process of consolidation. A large part of UMAG’s facilities are distributed between the North Campus and the Instituto de la Patagonia (Patagonian Institute). However, the degree of consolidation at the campus is low. The campus, where we conducted this study is comprised of two properties located across from each other, separated by Avenue Presidente Manuel Bulnes, one of the main arteries of north-south connection within the city. A lack of a common urban image, added to the wide profile of the Avenue, hinders the connection and symbolic relationship between both campuses (Fig. 17.1). The route selected consisted of a first stage through the heart of university life, a place where participants were convened, and later a route in a straight line across the campus end to end. This route began at the back of the Campus Norte and finished in the greenhouse area of the Patagonia Institute. Crossing longitudinally through the campus, the route cut through different spaces and situations. The decision about the route of the “commented walk” was made by the researchers, based on reflections about results taken from a previous process of citizen participation in relation to the reduced and inefficient connection between both campuses, currently perceived as separate entities. The entire activity was recorded with video and photos with the aim of register the opinions of each participant in each place visited (Fig. 17.2).

Fig. 17.1 Map of Punta Arenas city. Universidad de Magallanes Campus. Source Courtesy of author

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Fig. 17.2 Map of followed route. Source Courtesy of author

The experience was carried out with one group consisting of a diverse mix of users from the campus. Researchers acted as route monitors, also forming part of the team, interfering in specific moments asking questions and revealing our own experiences as users foreign to the campus. Even the camera operators, who were also alumni and currently employed by the same university, actively participated in the tour. This investigation shows us that the walkers develop in the experience a team feeling. Following a straight line made our route an imaginary axis which unified both campuses. Walking along this axis allowed reflection about this segregation and the benefits of improving the space design. The notion of an integrated campus was awakened, one that grants mobility to students and academics across the entire university. In this way, the experience consists of living the future campus in situ. While tracing this imaginary axis, the route incorporated less frequented sites and even abandoned areas. It was surprising how passing through less frequented places invoked stories and sharpened memories about these places. With the “commented walks” method, we could direct the information collected about forgotten places that bring back memories and opinions based on the sensory contact with these

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Fig. 17.3 Diagnosis Map. Source Courtesy of author

places. Additionally, direct contact with reality, show us places or aspects of the space that goes unrecognized and are not retained in the users’ memory (Fig. 17.3). New landscapes are discovered, and users become spectators of their own space, which, even if used daily, during this exercise they are capable of viewing it from other angles. In this manner, familiar places are rediscovered. Some landscapes are presented as unknown scenes, and their beauty attracts attention. The route from the museum to the botanical garden follows informal pathways, where participants recognize the place’s beauty, but also lack of access to the sector. This trajectory generates a collective sense that the university is not occupying its most scenic places which should be adapted and integrated into the university environment, respecting the surroundings. Nature is discovered and valued through direct contact on campus. This is the case for grasslands in the sporting area where the “queltehue” bird nests, defending its nests as we passed on our walkthrough (Fig. 17.4). Along the route, a series of historical and natural information layers in situ can be appreciated, contained in less-frequented areas on the campus, but with important symbolism for the University. Such is the case for the “Museo del Recuerdo” (Museum of Memories), a historical icon of Punta Arenas. This museum has the particularity of being a large, open-air museum that considers objects, buildings, trains, carriages, and machinery that show the process of regional development and way of life from pioneer colonization from 1880 until 1950. Furthermore, the botanical garden tells the environmental history of the place, providing space for a rich biodiversity of native flora and fauna (Fig. 17.5). Touring an area dedicated to scientific experimentation located at the back of one of the parcels, allowed participants to a better understanding of the research carried out at the university. Some older and more knowledgeable participants about the history of the university told about the historical value of various buildings such as

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Fig. 17.4 Observations during the “commented walks” experience and objective image of the Sport Zone. Source Courtesy of author

Fig. 17.5 Observations about the place during the “commented walk” and objective image of the Cultural Zone. Source Courtesy of author

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Fig. 17.6 Observations about different places during the “commented walks” and objective image of the Scientific Zone. Source Courtesy of author

greenhouses located in this area. A notable installation was the observatory, an element which at the time was abandoned, and only memories remained about its operation. Another important facility is a meteorological station which still works today (Fig. 17.6). Our tour not only evidenced unknown aspects to appreciate, but also uncovered a series of design problems such as pavement in bad condition, badly dimensioned profiles, flooded areas, etc. Diverse informal paths were discussed that have been formed by those who transit the area, creating shortcuts. The behavior of university life was observed. We were able to observe the spontaneous appropriation of areas favored by the users of the campus, such as some gardens, building entrances and furniture. The group of walkers discusses the reasons that one place is more used than another (Fig. 17.7). Discussion is also opened about spaces suitable for use as meeting places. A recently equipped space was observed, with benches installed, yet they have not received regular use. An exercise was carried out that included observations and discussion about this obsolescence. This type of dialogue during the “commented walk” creates a situation in which participants can describe and analyze how the university community uses and appropriates these spaces. Such a position reaffirms and validates previous observations, but also stimulates on-site sharing of ideas for projects for the place, playing the role of designers (Table 17.1).

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Fig. 17.7 Observations about different places during the “commented walks” and objective image of the Academic Zone. Source Courtesy of author

Table 17.1 Analysis of results. Table shows the transition from observations to strategies Themes

Appreciations

Strategies

Design problems

Paths and sidewalks are too narrow to walk in groups Walking is not agreeable. There is no continuity or sufficient protected space Towards the fields, all references to pathways are lost Public spaces without urban furniture Lack of garbage can and benches Main entrance has little identity with the university Lack of reference symbols within the campus

Formalize pathways. Strengthen connectivity and orientation towards the campus interior, between buildings and university areas with pedestrian walkways that have coherent dimensions for the flow of people

Lack of urban furniture Lack of identity

New urban furniture. Equip the entire campus with urban furniture Fortify the identity of different elements. Recover the landscaping units. Strengthen the Museum’s image and consolidate the area used for scientific experimentation (continued)

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Table 17.1 (continued) Themes

Appreciations

Unconsolidated public space

Important spaces are identified with potential to be public spaces, but without infrastructure The courtyard at the entrance to the Engineering building gives a sense of dryness Spaces do not invite the user to stay and enjoy the exterior. There are no outside patios nor covered areas for rainy days Cars play a much too protagonist role in different spaces. It would be necessary to relocate parking areas Each faculty and building on the campus should have its own patio Natural heritage Nests of queltehues (Chilean bird) are found in the sports field area A large arboretum is pictured in the sports field area When walking through the Bulnes Arboretum, it was mentioned how these green areas act as places to visit and stay In the Botanical Garden and scientific experimentation area, landscapes were discovered that were unknown to some, yet drew attention for their natural beauty Historical The tour from the museum to the heritage botanical garden is a route made by informal pathways The greenhouses are iconic elements of Magallanic history The observatory and meteorological station stand out Source Author elaboration

17.4

Strategies Consolidate public spaces. Recognize important spaces with potential for public use and consolidate them into places that contribute to university life

Activation of the landscape. Make a park in each sector of the University that integrates the landscape of each place, acting as a platform for access to natural spaces within the campus which are hard to access and therefore unused. This park should be representative of the local flora and wildlife, strengthening existing ecosystems and creating new areas of biodiversity

Activation of historical heritage. Integrate the museum and scientific experimentation area by direct involvement with these spaces

Conclusions

A “commented walk” method uses observation in movement as the premise that encourages reflection about a daily scenario and its different interpretations. Such a method requires participants to assume different roles regarding the actions of diverse actors that occupy the area. This exercise is translated into information that can only be obtained by combining inhabitants with the study area, therefore providing untold results for the participants. The act of walking allows the

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interviewee to reflect not only about the space itself, but also about the very act of walking and how it configures the surrounding space. We highlight the route’s importance, which opens a discussion about its qualities as an essential space for connecting permanent spaces, times, distances, dimensions, and characteristics of the trajectory. This method denotes a critical view of mobility and the order system that is implied by its displacement. Some limits of the methods were the weather and the time of the day. We were not able to do walks in all the situations, because of safety reasons and because of campus users’ availability. There are limits of the method that show us data of the place that has to be considered by the design. Some of these limits were some walking in narrow sidewalks, the background noise of the wind, and the cold temperature that did not allow us to spend much time outside. For us, the “commented walk” method was useful for obtaining contextually based information about the everyday life experience on the campus. It is important to note that the results of the application of the “commented walk” method had been complemented with the results of other participatory methods. Another of the benefits of this method was that it increased the opportunities of the participant for talking. Furthermore, this method stimulates the imagination. Not only is it a walk around a study site, but it serves as a creative instance of co-design. While designing the Master Plan UMAG, the core proposal invited participants to imagine a new corridor that would unite both campuses. Walking along this corridor triggered a purposeful action by the interviewees, imagining a boulevard that unites different zones within the university. A change of roles was apparent between the interviewees and designers, allowing the collection of experiences and proposals for the new university. A dialogue emerges from the in situ experience, resulting in a reflection about what already exists, translating into antecedents to formulate proposals. This method is efficient in generating quality results, given that observation in movement creates a coherent dialogue between places and projects that gives life to planning that is conscious of the context and its quality of life.

References 1. Andersen K, Balbontín S (2019) Participación ciudadana en movimiento: Metodología de recorridos comentados por la Universidad de Magallanes, Punta Arenas. Revista AUS 25:32– 40. https://doi.org/10.4206/aus.2019.n25-06 2. Anderson J (2004) Talking whilst walking: a geographical archaeology of knowledge. Area 36(3):254–261. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0004-0894.2004.00222.x 3. Augoyard J-F (1979) Pas à pas. Essai sur le cheminement quotidien en milieu urbain. Ediciones du Seuil, Paris 4. Benjamin W (2005) Libro de los Pasajes. Ediciones Akal, Madrid 5. Careri F (2002) Walkscapes. Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona 6. Carpiano RM (2009) Come take a walk with me: the “go-along” interview as a novel method for studying the implications of place for health and well-being. Health Place 15:263–272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2008.05.003

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7. Certeau De (1990) L’Invention du quotidien I Arts de faire. Editions Gallimard, Paris 8. Debord G (1975) Theorie de la derive. In: Internationale situationniste 1958–69. Éditions Champ-Libre, Paris 9. Evans J, Jones P (2011) The walking interview: methodology, mobility and place. Appl Geogr Nº 31:849–858. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2010.09.005 10. Gibson JJ (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey 11. Grafmeyer Y, Joseph I (1979) L’École de Chicago. Naissance de l’écologie urbaine. Champ Vallon, Seyssel 12. Grosjean M, Thibaud J-P (2001) L’espace urbain en méthodes. Ediciones Parenthèses, Marsella 13. Kusenbach M (2003) Street phenomenology. The go-along as ethnographic research tool. Ethnography 4(3):455–485. https://doi.org/10.1177/146613810343007 14. Lefebvre H (1999) El materialismo dialéctico. El Aleph, Buenos Aires 15. Lefebvre H (2000) The production of space. Blackwell, Oxford 16. Lynch K (1960) The image of the city. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 17. Lynch K (1959) A walk around the block. Landscape Mag Hum Geogr 8(Spring):24–34 18. Moles K (2008) A walk in thirdspace: place, methods and walking. Soc Res Online 13(4). https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.1745 19. Petiteau JY, Pasquier E (2001) La méthode des itinéraires: récits et parcours. In: Grosjean M, Thibaud JP (eds) L’espace urbain en méthodes. Marsella, Ediciones Parenthèses 20. Sansot P (2004) La poétique de la ville. Ediciones Payot, Paris 21. Thibaud JP (2001) La méthode des parcours commentés. In: Grosjean M, Thibaud JP (eds) L’espace urbain en méthodes. Ediciones Parenthèses, Marsella 22. Whyte WH (2001) The social life of small urban spaces. Project for Public Spaces, New York

Karen Andersen Ph.D. and Master degree in Spatial Planning from the Université Paris-Est, France, and a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Universidad de Chile, Chile. She is currently an academic and researcher at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism and Director of the Master in Design of Sustainable Environments of the Faculty of Architecture and Arts of the Universidad Austral de Chile. She is a member of Observatorio de Sostenibilidad y Estudios Urbanos del Sur Austral (OBSUR). Her work focusses on urban studies seeking to innovate and explore new participatory and ethnographic methodologies. Her research topics are perception and significance of public space, neighborhoods, walking methodologies and participatory design. Her main sites of study are river edge spaces, streets, parks, squares, university campuses, fluvial landscapes, and waterfront public spaces. She is currently working in a research project financed by National Agency for Research and Development ANID by the Government of Chile (2019– 2022). The purpose of this research is to evaluate different waterfront public spaces and their immediate surroundings in the city of Valdivia, Chile, considering their morphological, social, and environmental characteristics, in order to formulate criteria to address urban intervention in river border areas and guide the design and planning of river public spaces. Sofía Balbontín Architect from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, is currently lecturer at the architecture school at UDLA—Universidad de las Américas. Her work focuses mainly in research on sound and space experimentation. She has created workshops, lectures, performances and installations in the cross field of architecture and music, as well as projects related to the soundscape. The methodologies she has develop in this kind of research are usually sensible technics with application through experience. From this place she has participated in urban interventions and collective and individual exhibitions, in Valparaíso, Valdivia, Santiago and Bilbao. She has given workshops and conferences in San-tiago, Valdivia, Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Cosenza. She is currently develop-ing a research about historical and industrial spaces with long reverberations in different countries.

Chapter 18

Experiential Walks for Challenging Planning Education: The Case of Laboratorio del Cammino Luca Lazzarini and Marco Mareggi

Abstract The chapter presents the Italian network of Laboratorio del Cammino (LdC) as a case-study for the application of experiential walking to university education. The goal is to describe objectives and distinctive features of the experimental approach of LdC and to underline its contribution in enriching contents and strengthening alternative pedagogical methodologies of urban and territorial planning. Firstly, the chapter critically underlines some theoretical features and the distinctive approach of walking, through a literature review in different disciplines. Then, it presents the core activity of LdC, an annual Summer School during which a group of students with different backgrounds walk together for 10–15 days for investigating territorial vulnerabilities. By explaining what are the aims, the actors involved and the distinctive project features, it highlights the ways in which the LdC frames and uses experiential walking. The chapter concludes by outlining what is the contribution of the project for challenging planning education. Keywords Walking


Planning education
Experiential learning

This work is the product of a joint reflection among the authors. Introduction and Sect. 18.2 are attributed to M. Mareggi. Sections 18.3 and 18.4 are attributed to L. Lazzarini. Conclusion was written by both authors. L. Lazzarini
M. Mareggi (&) Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DASTU), Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] L. Lazzarini e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_18

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Introduction

In a world of accelerated and dematerialized “mobile lives”, where “people are ‘in motion’ probably as never before” [10: 7] and where they increasingly tend to “live” lives on screens” (Ibid.: 229), the Laboratorio del Cammino (LdC) project aims at collectively discovering the territory by foot, slowly, and at meeting communities and institutions for reflecting upon the ongoing transformations and projects within the landscapes crossed. LdC is an Italian inter-university research and teaching unit which gathers students and researchers from a number of Italian schools of architecture and planning. The project brings to light an apparent counter-tendency—shared by some analogous academic and non-academic experiences1—at incorporating and emphasizing the approach to proximity and direct experience of places, which is a tradition of urban studies in Europe. The chapter presents the Italian network of Laboratorio del Cammino as a case-study for the application of experiential walking to university education. By describing objectives and distinctive features of its experimental approach, the aim is to underline the contribution of LdC to enrich contents and strengthen methodologies of education in the field of urban and territorial planning. The chapter is organised in four sections. Section 18.2 critically underlines the theoretical features and the territorial approach of walking, through a review of literature in different disciplines. Section 18.3 presents the case of Laboratorio del Cammino. It describes the ways in which LdC frames and uses the experiential walking, by explaining what are the aims, the actors involved and the distinctive features of the project. In Section 18.4, we clarify what is the contribution that the LdC project makes of experiential walking for challenging planning education. The chapter ends with some concluding remarks about the approach of LdC in education.

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Here the reference goes to some academic and non-academic experiences such as: the teaching activity by Francesco Careri at the Roma Tre University who has been using the walk as an educational tool for several years with the purpose of discovering unknown urban places and meeting unexpected communities; the itinerant workshop promoted by IUAV University which, since from 2000, follows by foot historical-cultural itineraries in Europe and in the Mediterranean region; the “Labirinti di libertà”, also promoted by IUAV University, which explore minor streets of the Veneto region to observe the territory and its transformations by walking; the group “Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade” that since 1995 has made experiences of urban drifts through the so called “territori attuali” (contemporary territories); the night walks in Paris and other European cities promoted by Luc Gwiazdzinski at the end of the 1990s to explore through the movement the night as a new frontier, and to make a phenomenological contribution to night studies; the network of routes in the Milanese metropolis, also with the help of dedicated apps, promoted by the Association “Sentieri metropolitani” for over a decade.

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The Walk as a Tool for Exploring and Investigating Territories

Urban studies and other disciplines have used the direct contact with the territory through the walk as an explicitly or implicitly formulated instrument of investigation. Travelers have used it as a tool for exploring unknown lands or for rediscovering nearby places. Diaries, guides, travel stories and maps of itineraries are their restitutions. Among the most recent works, there are “The art of travel” by De Seta [8] which includes portraits of cities, and the travel stories by Rumiz [30]. In contrast, reflexive disciplines such as philosophy, religion and aesthetics have practiced walking for reviving values such as the slowness or the inner and spiritual, search, being it laic or religious. Here, the relationship between walking and thinking is tight. The intimate novel, the philosophical essay and the written memories are some of the possible products. Among them, the essay by Thoreau [37] titled Walking, as a personal contact with reality, cannot be forgotten. In a different way, some areas of art, which are at the border between reflection and transformation, have understood walking as a practice standing in-between the deepening of the surrounding world and the production of a knowledge on the self. Works of landart, performances and photographs are some forms of communication that recall their experience. “A Line Made by Walking” (1967) by R. Long [27] is a line traced on the grass of a meadow which marks the early career of an artist who, more than others, has intensively explored the walk as an artistic medium. This simple variety of the ways to deal with this topic immediately highlights two essential aspects of walking. First of all, the walk is a tool for knowing the self or a territory. These are two domains often disjointed in the walker’s reflection, but which are always co-present, whether one chooses to work on both of them, or prefer one other the other. Moreover, the walk is an experience of the individual ‘here and now’ and a restitution ‘to those who were not present’, through different means of communication: an experience for which we want to leave a memory. Thus, as these two essential aspects cannot be easily distinguished, it is likewise difficult to differentiate, on the one hand, the works and authors who treat the walking as an instrument for investigating the territory and its transformations, from those, on the other, who deal with the walking in other forms and for other purposes. An attempt to draw a picture of the many narratives of walking can be found in Wanderlust. History of Walking by R. Solnit [36]. This can be interpreted as a large ‘library’ on this topic. Here walking is many things: motion, self-manifestation, moving alone or with others, promenade, parade, procession, pilgrimage, excursion, climbing but also moving during the everyday routine. Solnit traces this story by starting from the philosophical walking of the Greek Peripatetics and from the search of the self, carried on during the walk, in opposition with what Rousseau [28] identified as the advancing speed and modernity. The French philosopher is the first to consecrate the act of walking within landscape

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as a distinctive practice. Solnit describes the transition which leads walking from being a pure movement of body and mind to an experience of the world and a discovery of the environment. This is a fundamental step towards urban studies. Hence, the nineteenth century walks like the pleasure trips, discoveries, climbs and planned excursions, as those promoted by the environmental associations and groups, become relevant chances for improving the knowledge of places. Moving the interest on the urban phenomenon, a focus is dedicated to the dreamy and solitary walking of the flâneur in the metropolis [2] and to the street vibrancy, which can be both legal and informal [29]. Compared to the present, the interest is addressed to the difficulty of moving by foot in the immense suburbs of the middle class, without any sidewalks as “infrastructures for walking”. Suburbs are dominated by the automobile and by the “infrastructures for driving” (Solnit [36], It. tr. 2018: 351), thus by barriers and fragmentation of places. Here, the “walking city” [19] has disappeared, the city of the proximity, of the densely populated mixité narrated by Solnit through the cases of Los Angeles and Las Vegas [18, 38]. We would like to emphasise two further aspects in this epic tale. First of all, Solnit claims the need to walk because it allows to maintain a corporeity not impeded in the everyday life, which is otherwise sensorially deprived, even more by the pervasive use of the car. The interest in the bodies also reiterates a feminist instance, of which Solnit is the bearer. Moreover, the author reveals how walking generates places, such as paths, roads, trade routes, parks. Thus, it constructs landscapes, in the sense understood by the European Landscape Convention (2000), as places in which inhabitants recognize identity and transform the territory. If the book by Solnit has facilitated the task of giving back the many interpretations of walking, we must instead refer to a number of authors for presenting the walk as a tool for investigating the territory and its transformations. Even this side trespasses, perhaps unavoidably, in the storytelling. To treat it, rather than a review of authors, it is useful to underline four main aspects of territorial exploration through the walk, which becomes an instrument for experiencing a territory, deciphering it, grasping its changes and probing it critically. Firstly, walking is interpreted as an instrument to experience a territory, which is also useful for planning surveys. For P. Geddes, walking corresponds to a “personal immersion within places” [11: 222], useful for carrying out “local and practical surveys which allow to draw the plan’s detail” (Ibid.: 222). The “itinerant method on the field, with the notebook and the camera” [13: 63], quoted in [11: 77] is the planner’s tool for exploring directly the city. This way of looking the city by “walking through” it, which is alternated to the synoptic view from above, gives consistency to the Geddesian survey. Similarly, among the Surveys that precede the urban plan, Abercrombie [1] interprets as necessary some “theoretical investigations”, which consist “in the elaborate collection of data and statistics” (Abercrombie [1], It. tr. 1979: 256) and in “practical investigations … observing the changes by a naked eye”, traveling “the city far and wide … taking notes of everything … obtaining a collection of memories … that, for the liveliness of direct observation, they will have an inestimable value for the future plan” (Ibid.: 259).

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Beside the planning practices, in recent years the act of walking for observing and taking notes has been growingly recognized by architects and planners as a tool which allows to “learn to know from reality and closeness” and to meet “facts and things that can be seen and touched” [5: 31 & 20–21]. Thanks to the rediscovery of psycho-geography [9, 34], the vagrancy finds within the “practice of urban wanderings” [6: 65] forms of collective visits of peripheral areas. This results in obtaining a “sensory and inner knowledge” [3: 74]. Moreover, artists like Richard Long highlighted that during the walk “the body is an instrument for measuring space and time” [6: 109], the extent to which it jointly limits and allows movement, effort, duration and distance. Accordingly, the walk is interpreted as an experience of territorial exploration which is able to dive people in places, through a direct and close contact to things, and to let people subjectively seeing and touching objects with the purpose of collecting observations and first-hand interpretations of places. Secondly, walking is an instrument for deciphering a territory. Taking up Geddes again, it is necessary to underline two relevant aspects that the attentive walking allows. One concerns the long time of history and the other the present and future time. Geddes, in fact, on one hand speaks about the need to “decipher” the city because it is a “memory that accumulates and conserves”. Furthermore, “history cannot be read in books … but within and from the real city” [14: 55], quoted in [11: 76–77]. Thus the “work by foot” is done almost as a work of an archaeologist in the field. On the other hand, the author underlines that “walking is not just looking: it is also listening, in every single place, those who live and know the city” [11: 83]. For Geddes, listening means to bring attention to the concrete conditions of people’s life, it is a “look from the inside that interacts with the subjects” (Ibid.: 76) and through the dialogue these subjects are discovered and become interlocutors within the plan making. The ‘opacity’ of the territory constructed in the second half of the 1900s has instead invited to decipher by walking the contemporary city and not just its historical parts layered in the long time of history. It is a situation that “cannot be imagined without the experience” [5: 20–21], where to decipher on foot the “signs” in the city that “we continue to write, day by day, century after century, without loosing really anything … In cities the memory does not become time, it becomes space” [3: 26]. When exploring the urban voids of peripheral and suburban areas, it is possible to move “barefoot in the chaos” [6: 129]. Thus, “using the aesthetic form of the erratic path” (Ibid.: 133) a geography within the supposed chaos can be recognised, one enters into relationship with it and it turns out that “the empty spaces … are inhabited … [and are] spaces of freedom and socialization” (Ibid.: 131). In this way, while walking a man carries on a circumstantial investigation capable of “grasping a deeper reality […] starting from the hypothesis that minimum signs can be taken as revealing elements of general phenomena” [25: 15] and that “if reality is opaque, there are privileged areas—spies, clues—which allow to decipher it” [15: 91].

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Accordingly, the different authors show that discovering the processes of production of space by memory and of listening to the inhabitants are together clues and translators of territorial phenomena that are difficult to interpret. Walking allows to ‘approach’ them through senses and turn them into descriptions useful for constructing urban projects. Thirdly, walking is a tool to grasp the transformations in a territory. On one hand, in the last decades of the 20th century, research on the so called “città diffusa” [4, 17, 33] and more recently, the researches on the “territories in contraction” [20] reiterate the need of walking to see, listen and enter the places for understanding their changes [22]. These works constantly remind that “Planning is a practice built by feet”.2 Moreover, this means to reaffirm a constitutive tradition of a part of Italian and European urban planning and design research that has interpreted the ‘field survey’ and the on-site investigation as one of the connoting features of the urban project in a specific settlement context. On the other hand, in the same years, urban sociology rediscovers the flânerie as a tool for social investigation and urban exploration, which allows to recover an a-systematic and subjective sensitivity towards places, redefine the relationship between people and places in a reflective and empathetic way, and activate an observation in those places subjected to change. This attitude aims at “chasing the myth of the space-time centrality: in the right place at the right time” [26: 15], thus taking an approach that sensibly captures the changes. At the same time, also anthropology uses shadowing techniques3 and collective ‘neighbourhood walks’ with the inhabitants [31, 32], for investigating places’ daily life and for meeting and discovering possible stratagems able to trigger virtuous changes in participatory urban projects. Fourthly, walking is a critical tool. If sensitivity and subjectivity are the forms of an alternative knowledge that walking activates, this can be understood as a useful tool to criticize or rediscover hyper-rational cognitive paths. It is still the flâneur, together with the Dadaist, Surrealist and Situationist artists of early 20th century and slightly later, to propose this role for walking; the latter, perhaps, with a more provocative spirit. “The flâneur is subversive. He/she subverts the crowd, the goods and the city, as well as their values” [16: 177], not much with an attitude towards contraposition, but rather with a form of bypass. The flâneur proposes a “tortuous path, impregnated with subjectivism, partial interpretations, ambiguous observations, but no less useful to test the stability of analytical models often unwilling to dig in depth” [26: 130].

“‘Planning is a practice built by the feet’—one of the most popular phrases by the well-known Italian urban planner Bernardo Secchi—refers precisely to this mix: between things and people, between urban forms, fabrics, their inertia and the practices of a changing society, the need to ‘enter’ the creases of a city, that before being planned must be heard and understood” [12: 54]. 3 Shadowing techniques are a tool of enquiry in which the researcher follows another person in his/ her daily life (following his/her shadow) to investigate his/her environment, behaviours and reactions. It can be a participatory tool of urban planning analysis. 2

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With a different approach, and with urban ambulation tactics, the artists reconquer the urban and territorial space of the banal, playful, nomadic city [6]. This process is able to investigate aspects that escaped from the bourgeois transformations, thus revealing unexpected elements. While these aspects underline the significant meanings of the walk as a tool for investigating the territory and its transformations, it is however necessary to clarify that walking is not the only tool that can be used by architects and planners to investigate a territory. The act of performing a field survey often goes together with an articulated series of other research operations, which from time to time are used to construct the planning project through different combinations and due to many contextual factors.

18.3

ViaSalaria and Sicilia Coast to Coast: Two Territorial Walks for Investigating Man-Place Interdependencies

“Isn't the road a work of art? And if so, in which way? As a big ready-made object? As an abstract sign which crosses the landscape? As an object or as an experience? As a space in itself or as an act of crossing? What role does the landscape have around it?” [6: 87] These were some of the questions that thronged the mind of Tony Smith [35] when in early 1960s he decided to cross with some students at night the New Jersey Turnpike, a large highway under construction in the suburbs of New York. As a founding act of minimal and land arts, Smith celebrated the experience of traveling along a road as an attempt to draw an abstract sign and gain awareness on the lived space and the landscape perception. As if they were implicitly resuming this idea, 20 students and young researchers coming from the Polytechnic University of Turin and University of Camerino in Italy during the summer of 2017, walked along the Salaria road, from the Adriatic to Tyrrhenian sea. They began an exercise of crossing Italy by foot. The ViaSalaria itinerant Workshop,4 an evocative and maybe naive experience,5 attempted to explore the possibilities of walking for understanding the territorial impacts of the

4

The ViaSalaria workshop was born from the idea of three university students, L. Lazzarini (Polytechnic of Turin), G. Benigni (University of Camerino) and A. Pesaresi (IUAV University). The training project got the patronage of the Department of Urban and Regional Studies and Planning (DIST) of the Polytechnic University of Turin and of a number of local associations and administrations. 5 “I walk through every damn inch of the wall” said Marina Abramovich during her Great Wall Walk that she made in 1989 with the German artist Ulay. The goal of the travel was to walk towards each other from the two opposite points of the 4,000 km of Chinese Great Wall, meet and get married [23]. We could use the same words to define the strong willingness of the ViaSalaria group to walk along the entire Salaria road with no disarray and distractions.

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Fig. 18.1 The group of ViaSalaria walking under the historical centre of Arquata del Tronto (AP) deeply damaged by the earthquake in August 2016. Source Flavio Stimilli

2016 earthquakes, in an area already marked by deep vulnerabilities [24]. Starting from the direct observation of the landscapes hit by the catastrophe, the group built a debate with researchers and local administrators on the trajectories of the reconstruction and on the processes of identity redefinition experienced by communities which had been hovering between uprooting and resettlement [7, 21] (see Fig. 18.1). Born as an evolution of ViaSalaria, the Laboratorio del Cammino6 has taken up the practice of crossing the Country by walking, even though it has reinforced the project training and research objectives. More than a new research trajectory, the Laboratory has the ambition to build in the Italian schools of architecture and planning an open platform to foster the exchanges among students and researchers, with the purpose of exploring the methodological potentials of walking in planning education. The LdC is a catalyst of interests and perspectives on contemporary territories, which start from the common denominator of walking as an act able to 6

The network of Laboratorio del Cammino currently counts eight Italian universities (Politecnico di Milano, Politecnico di Torino, Universities of Camerino, Cagliari, Palermo, Teramo, Basilicata and Orientale of Naples) and a number of local institutional and civil society partners (www. laboratoriodelcammino.com/project-partners). The LdC is coordinated by two team leaders (L. Lazzarini, S. Marchionni) and it leans on a scientific committee formed by the representatives of the universities involved in the project.

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intercept significant real-world situations and to explore the ways in which planning can contribute to better understand them and to plan their change. Laboratory’s disciplinary boundaries are soft because open and stratified is the palimpsest of research contributions it hosts. The project is able to put in tension students’ collective explorations and enrich them with interpretations and approaches belonging to different fields, such as photography, ecology, literature and sociology. Exactly one year after the walk along the Salaria road, the Laboratorio del Cammino has drawn its second transept across the country, moving the reflection from Central to Southern Italy. In August 2018, during the inter-university Summer School Sicilia Coast to Coast walking in vulnerable territories, the walk took place from Mazara del Vallo (Trapani) to Palermo, following a path which crosses transversally the island (see Fig. 18.2). The itinerary has largely followed the “Francigena Mazarense”, an ancient path of transhumance whose remains are just in some documentary sources that a local association is trying to restore as a path for sustainable tourism.7 The Mazarense road crosses different vulnerable situations. Cities with a high density of mafia crime, where the State daily clashes with criminal behaviours and practices, such as Castelvetrano and Partinico. Portions of settlement where the effects of the 1968 Belice earthquake and the planning policies implemented during the phase of reconstruction have elicited scenarios of demographic decline and emptying difficult to stop, such as Salemi, Vita and Gibellina. Urban and rural contexts that show the dramatic consequences of a waste emergency which in Sicily is a structural problem, an endemic issue and the expression of a delicate tension between production, management and disposal/recycling of waste. Settlements built in conditions of informality, where some recent attempts to bring back legality collide with the resistance of the inhabitants to defend a right to the house acquired illegitimately and now strenuously claimed, as Triscina and Alcamo Marina. And also, places where past fires have affected the territory through dramatic changes in the vegetation, and which have mobilized local communities towards defending their environments and have unveiled some murky dynamics of illicit interests and perverse practices of exploitation of natural resources. The Summer School training program took shape from the issues raised by the territory crossed by the group. Earthquake and seismic risk, forest and interface fires, waste management, and informal settlements are the themes investigated by the students. The fact that these were “frontier themes” for urban planning has developed the skills of students towards inter-disciplinary and multidimensional challenges. Starting from these, students were organised in groups of 4–5 members and, with the support of young researchers and Ph.D. students as tutors, have built the research questions and identified the local contexts where to focus on. Three training days in classroom took place before the walk, and gave students a common

Here reference is made to the “Amici dei Cammini Francigeni di Sicilia” association that has cooperated with the Laboratorio del Cammino for creating the itineraries of the 2018 Summer School.

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Fig. 18.2 Itineraries of the two experiential walks made by LdC in 2017 and 2018, and of the one which took place in 2019 in Sardinia. Source Elaboration made by authors

background of tools and knowledge, which was useful to approach the walk with adequate cognitive resources. Students were asked to produce a book which included a narration of the experience with the exploration of some significant places, a critical reflection on the chosen theme, and a diary-map able to spatialize both the narration and reflections. They were also asked to orient their survey towards four dimensions: the material dimension of places, the listening to local actors, the biographies of places and of their changes, and the policies and tools of intervention. Once identified the theme, the students chose the point of view from which observing the phenomenon, the voices of the local actors to listen to for discerning

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and reconstructing the dynamics of that phenomenon, and the places where it found the more significant spatial manifestation with respect to the research question. Groups were asked to build the work plan before the beginning of the Summer School. This did not exclude that the plan went through progressive and incremental modifications, because biographies, daily practices and alternative narratives were intercepted along the way. These continually restricted and widened the research field, challenging students’ capacity to formulate the problem. Moreover, the deep awareness that the analysis of the effects of the phenomena required a precise orientation of the walker’s eyes towards the territory has guided the identification of photography as a relevant medium of the researches made by students. Two professional photographers have been involved in the group of teachers with the purpose of leading students towards a conscious use of photography as a tool able to better understand the relationships that bind together ideas, actions and material world and that frame them with respect to the territorial changes. Thus, photography has been interpreted as a way to exercising the sight in building walker’s bodily experience when crossing the landscapes. While photographing, students had to choose the object to frame, the point of view, the light conditions. More importantly, they had to build a corporal and emotional relationship with the subject portrayed, which can be an object, a person met during the walk or a landscape. And, at the end of the walk, they had to construct a discourse of the images taken which needed to be clear, logical and coherent, a sort of visual narration which had to inform and contaminate the problem formulation and the planning survey. An example of the application of the methodology to the topic of fires comes from the process of listening to the voices of some farmers encountered along the path between Selinunte and Castelvetrano. They revealed the common practice of setting fire to the semi-natural bands bordering agricultural fields. This is a practice that, not only is vain because of the plants’ deep roots, but is also dangerous because flames often spread to closer fields (see Fig. 18.3). Likewise, some members of a local committee encountered along the walk reconstructed the hypothetical causes at the basis of the fires that happened in the woods of Monreale (PA), which were almost impermeable to local media. This allowed students to study the effectiveness of fire-fighting devices as the fender strips, to map some critical issues in the reforestation policies (see Fig. 18.4) and in the monitoring activities of the interventions carried out, and to document some perverse mechanisms of territorial management. For the theme of informal settlements, students have investigated the incremental and minute practices of territorial appropriation which characterise this phenomenon. The informal house has been studied from the inside, observing its morpho-typological characters, touching the domestic spaces, the finishes and the furnishings. Students have also analysed the devices which mark the relationship between internal and outdoor spaces, and have investigated the margins of the lot, the design of the access, the treatment of vegetation, the shape of the fence. These elements reveal the articulation and the meaning of informal spaces in relation to public-private ownership and property arrangement. Also, informal spaces are

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Fig. 18.3 The burnt reed beds bordering the agricultural fields along the Mazarense road in Sicily. Source Fabrizio Russo

constantly changing. The change is not only material, but it also reveals social dynamics, which were interpreted by the student-walker by getting in contact with the biographies of inhabitants, with their instances and visions of reality. The interviews unfolded the history of the housing, but also the social issues and the economic factors that contributed to produce the current configuration of informal settlements. Students’ works have become narratives of change and they have demonstrated that the absence of local institutions played a key role in the self-construction practices. Thus, going back to the evocative, experiential, symbolic value that Tony Smith attributes to the road, those crossed by the Laboratorio del Cammino have been an implicit mean to activate a process of itinerant pedagogies, in contact with the places and their inhabitants. The Salaria and Mazarense roads have been the traces to follow in order to experiment a way of reading and describing the territory by walking. The two experiences have been an opportunity of thinking about methods, tools and actors of an unorthodox way of teaching that, as it will be explained later, shifts the focus on the interactions between student and places and rediscovers a corporal and experiential dimension of learning that the current acceleration of displacements and the dematerialization of human relations are deeply transforming.

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Fig. 18.4 The location (in red) of the firebreak strips in Angimbé wood in Calatafimi Segesta (TP) in Sicily. Source Cecilia Fraccaroli, Laura Munoz, Fabrizio Russo, Giuseppe Santoro

18.4

The Contribution of Laboratorio del Cammino to Planning Education

There are three aspects that we would like to highlight as relevant in the contribution of Laboratorio del Cammino to planning education. These aspects consider and discuss the main characteristics of territorial exploration by walking we have exposed in Sect. 18.2.

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The first one concerns the potentials of walking for experiencing a territory. Here corporeity plays a crucial role. This is understood not as a limiting factor of the analysis (e.g. the fatigue that opacifies sight and senses), but as an aspect which anchors to the materiality of land, to the concreteness of facts, to the measurability of the anthropic space, as a condition able to add value, quality and meaning to planning education. While walking along the rural roads throughout the inland Sicily, students have discovered and mapped the illicit dumps of household trash (some of whom smelly and in combustion), signs of a waste chain full of disconnections and inefficiencies (see Fig. 18.5). The physical presence of students and teachers—with their feet on a changing ground, with their alerted and vigilant eyes, smell and hear—has allowed to identify situations of environmental risk created by the proximity of waste to agricultural cultivations. These were dynamics experienced and re-signified by the group during the walk, aspects that a “view from above” (from the tower, according to Geddes) is not always able to elicit. It is crucial to highlight that the corporal dimension has guided the territorial investigation, even though without tackling the totality of aspects that need to be investigated when studying a problem. Walking does not reveal all layers of complexity, it can rather grasp some indications and draw a possible key for interpreting it. Therefore it should be accompanied by other complementary methods of territorial observation and analysis. The “view from below” is combined with the “view from above and over time”, the field survey is accompanied by urban analysis, historical, socio-economic, geological-environmental researches, morphological and stratigraphic analyses, as well as constructions of scenarios,

Fig. 18.5 The group of the summer school “Sicilia coast to coast” walking through the peripheral areas of Castelvetrano (TP). Source Luca Lazzarini

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design explorations, on the basis of different factors and peculiar instances. After all, walking is just one—a relevant one—among the methodologies to use when approaching a problem. The second aspect relates to walking as a tool for deciphering a territory. During the Sicilia Coast to Coast Summer School, the students have caught the traces, signs and clues encountered along the way that have been useful for understanding the material, physical nature and the consistency of some phenomena. The signs capable of describing the consequences of complex events such as the fire are, for example, the vegetation changes occurred as a result of the reforestation practices planned after the fire, or the rapid regrowth of the barks in the burned oak trees. But also the neglected state of the undergrowth or the diffusion of unauthorized practices of setting fire to the residues of agricultural cultivations are clues able to express the conditions of vulnerability of territories. The signs were captured both in the evocative and/or indicative value of the phenomena, and as a contribution for constructing a systematic knowledge on territory. In this second case, the walk was an opportunity to carry out an analytical mapping of the current mismatches in the waste management system in Western Sicily. The students have photographed, mapped and classified all dumps of domestic or special waste encountered along the way (see Fig. 18.6). The process

Fig. 18.6 The illegal dumps mapped along the path followed by the group of the summer school “Sicilia coast to coast”. Source Federica Bavetta, Francesca Bruno, Luisa Coppolino, Rosalia Evola

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of giving meaning to the signs has allowed to decipher a phenomenon. Thus, the map showed that most dumps were located in portions of land placed at the borders of municipalities. These are areas difficult to control and often subjected to management conflicts by municipal waste collection companies. The third aspect relates to walking as a tool to capture the changes in a territory, to express their materiality and physicality and to make them treatable by urban and territorial planning. These changes are revealed by the encounters with the physical space, but also by the relationships that link inhabitants to places, from how communities inhabit the territory. The spaces of change are not only the large-scale projects and transformations which result from public policies that are deposited on the territory and deeply modify the orders. Especially after the crisis, past or potential changes can be revealed by the practices of use and re-signification of marginal areas, spaces waiting for new uses, vacant lots. In addition to showing that the season of economic growth has ended, they also reveal the presence of deep lacerations in the relationship between ecosystem and humans. While walking the students have crossed the fringe territories among municipal administrations, and have stepped into the land at the margins of large driveways and the vacant lots which are unlikely to be filled in the near future by houses or sheds. They have approached the unfinished buildings and have registered their phenomena of deterioration. They brought to light informal practices, such as phenomena of illegal deposit of waste, micro-dumps, often burned, domestic waste, leftovers which can be hardly perceived by the zenith view or by traditional surveys. These are the signs which mark a tension of the interdependencies among man and environment and among city and countryside, or rather their profound and necessary reformulation.

18.5

Conclusion

The previous section has explained the educational and training contribution of Laboratorio del Cammino with the purpose of offering a possible application of three of the key components of walking as a tool for investigating the territory and its transformations, which were presented in the first part of the chapter. Finally, it is useful to resume and comment on the teaching methods and the composition of the group of teachers and students set up by the LdC. Leaving the classrooms and walking to study a territory for 10–15 days, after few days of interdisciplinary training, means to abandon the rhythms and the habits of traditional education. It also means to test the abilities of students to study and learn on the ground, by reading and listening to places and by taking a direct contact with the territorial dynamics. This is a way to apply to teaching the indication that “planning is a practice built by feet”. Furthermore, the composition of the class of students was made through an open call launched and disseminated in the promoting universities but that was open also to other universities. Also, the group of

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teachers brought together university professors and researchers, experts, practitioners and technicians with different backgrounds and formations. Keeping these elements together is a way of treating the complexity of reality. Thus, an attempt to teach a sort of pragmatic planning has been experimented, made of a number of skills that are ‘played together’. These are different, albeit complementary, to the more traditional forms of learning mainly referring to disciplinary fields, which are typical of university teaching. These two simple attitudes in the way of teaching have generated an articulated logistic organization and have determined some significant outcomes. On one side, these positively have led students to learn within the places, to listen to the local actors and to understand the relational aspects that are meaningful and useful for understanding the phenomena investigated. On the other side, as a weakness, the proposed teaching program did not allow them to benefit from an extended time for reflecting, elaborating and making sense of the observations made during the walk, a time which instead the orthodox training can guarantee. Furthermore, during the first two years of LdC the teaching has been structured more on producing careful, relevant and articulated descriptions of territories crossed. Despite the interesting design reasoning that some groups have been able to propose, still the dimension of the project needs to be further developed and detailed.

References 1. Abercrombie P (1915) The study before town planning. The town planning review VI, pp 171–190 (Italian edition: Studi che precedono il piano urbanistico. In: Calabi D (1979) Il “male” città: diagnosi e terapia. Officina, Rome, pp 237–263) 2. Benjamin W (1982) Das Passagen-werk. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main (Italian edition: (2007) I ‘passages’ di Parigi. Turin: Einaudi. In particolare il capitolo “Il flâneur”, pp 465–509) 3. Biondillo G, Moina M (2010) Tangenziali. Due viandanti ai bordi della città. Guanda, Milan 4. Boeri S, Lanzani A, Marini E (1993) Il territorio che cambia. Abitare-Segesta, Milan 5. Brandolini S (2013) Milano. A piedi nella metropoli. Compositori, Bologna 6. Careri F (2006) Walkscapes. Camminare come pratica estetica. Einaudi, Turin 7. Cinciripini D, Marchionni S (eds) (2017) Bab02 Andare, andare ancora. Ikonemi, San Benedetto del Tronto (AP) 8. De Seta C (2016) L’arte del viaggio. Città, paesaggi e divagazioni tra passato e futuro. Rizzoli, Milan 9. Debord GE (1957) Guide psychogeographique de Paris. Paris 10. Elliott A, Urry J (2010) Mobile lives. Routledge, New York (Italian edition: Vite mobile. Il Mulino, Bologna) 11. Ferraro G (1998) Rieducare alla speranza. Patrick Geddes planner in India. 1914–1924. Jaca Book, Milan 12. Fini G (2014) Bernardo Secchi. Activities, contexts and multiples views of an urban planner. A biographical profile. Urbanistica 153:48–55 13. Geddes P (1905) Civics: as concrete and applied sociology, part II. Sociological paper 14. Geddes P (1918) Indore II: town planning towards city development. A report to the Durbar of Indore, vol. II. Indore

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15. Ginzburg C (1979) Spie. Radici di un paradigma indiziario. In: Gargani A (ed) Crisi della ragione. Einaudi, Turin, pp 57–106 16. Gros F (2013) Andare a piedi. Filosofia del camminare. Garzanti, Milano (Original edition: (2009) Marcher, une philosophie. Carnets Nord, Paris) 17. Indovina F (ed) (1990) La città diffusa. Daest, Venice 18. Jackson JB (1970) Other-directed houses. In: Zube EH (ed) Landscape: selected writings of J. B. Jackson. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 19. Jackson KT (1985) Crabglass frontier: the suburbanization of the United States. Oxford University Press, New York 20. Lanzani A (2015) Città territorio urbanistica tra crisi e contrazione. Angeli, Milan 21. Lazzarini L, Benigni G (2017) Ricostruire camminando: il progetto ViaSalaria. Urbanistica Informazioni 272:172–176 22. Mareggi M, Merlini C (2014) ‘Background noise’ is a serious thing. Urbanistica 152:97–104 23. McEvilley T (1989) The Lovers, libro catalogo della Great Wall Walk. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 24. Mela A, Mugnano S, Olori D (2017) Verso una nuova sociologia dei disastri italiani. In: Territori vulnerabili. Verso una nuova sociologia dei disastri italiana. Franco Angeli, Milan, pp 7–21 25. Munarin S, Tosi C (2001) Tracce di città. Esplorazioni di un territorio abitato: l’area veneta. Franco Angeli, Milan 26. Nuvolati G (2006) Lo sguardo vagabondo. Il flâneur e la città da Baudelaire ai postmoderni. Il Mulino, Bologna 27. Roelstraete D (2010) Richard long: a line made by walking. Mit Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 28. Rousseau J-J (1782) Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. Genève (Italian edition: (1979) Fantasticherie di un passeggiatore solitario. Rizzoli, Milan) 29. Rudofsky B (1981) Strade per la gente. Architettura e ambiente umano. Laterza, Rome-Bari 30. Rumiz P (2012) A piedi. Feltrinelli, Milan 31. Sclavi M (1989) A una spanna da terra: indagine comparativa su una giornata di scuola negli Stati Uniti e in Italia e i fondamenti di una metodologia umoristica. Feltrinelli, Milan 32. Sclavi M (ed) (2002) Camminata di quartiere. In: Avventure urbane. Progettare la città con gli abitanti. Elèuthera, Milan, pp 205–208 33. Secchi B (1994) Resoconto di una ricerca. Urbanistica 103:25–30 34. Sinclair I (2002) London orbital. Penguin, London (Italian edition: (2008) London Orbital. A piedi attorno alla metropoli. Il Saggiatore, Milan) 35. Smith T (1996) Talking with Tony Smith. Interview with Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr., Artforum, Dec 1996 36. Solnit R (2000) Wanderlust. A history of walking. Viking, New York (Italian edition: (2018) Storia del camminare. Adriano Salani editore, Milan) 37. Thoreau HD (1862) Walking. The atlantic monthly, a magazine of literature, art, and politics, vol IX(LVI). Ticknor and Fields, Boston, pp 657–674 (Italian edition: (2009) Camminare. Oscar Mondadori, Milan) 38. Venturi R, Scott Brown D, Izenour S (1977) Learning from Las Vegas: The forgotten symbolism of architectural form. MIT Press, Cambridge

Luca Lazzarini Post-doc Research Fellow in Urban Planning at DAStU, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano. In 2019 he obtained the Ph.D. in Urban & Regional Development at DiST/Polytechnic University of Turin with a thesis titled “Urban/rural co-productions. Planning and governance approaches for improving the relationships among city and countryside in Italy and England”. In 2017 he was visiting scholar at the Countryside and

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Community Research Institute (CCRI) of University of Gloucestershire (UK). His main research interests concern urban/rural relationships planning, the analysis of governance processes in metropolitan and city-region contexts and the integration between urban planning and food policies. Marco Mareggi Architect and urban planner, senior lecturer at DAStU, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, School of Architecture, Urban Planning and Construction Engineering of the Politecnico di Milano. His research focus is on spatio-temporal city design, open spaces and ordinary landscapes. He carries out research, consultancy and training in Italy and abroad on urban analysis and design and urban temporal policies. He is the author of essays in national and international journals. He has published: Urban Rhythms (2011), Designing Open Spaces in a Valley (2013) and Spazi Aperti. Ragioni, Progetti e Piani Urbanistici (2020).

Chapter 19

Way-Tales: An Archaeological Topophonics for Emerging Tourist Spaces Charlie Mansfield

Abstract Describes an innovative methodology for data collection in urban space using walking and audio recording with local citizens. Develops an analytical process from the data which can be reused in travel writing for place branding and for building resources for ethnographic museums and archives, ethnopôles. Draws on theories of writing and identity from Foucault and from Deleuze & Guattari. Keywords Topophonics

19.1


Place branding
Travel writing

Research Aims Set Within a Contextualising Literature Review

The research presented here develops a working practice for writing about urban space in the context of cultural tourism knowledge. The work is situated in the field of place branding [1] and place making which identifies the positive value that citizens derive from their locality [2] and the changes in identity that citizens embody and display through their emotions [3, 4]. The paper sets out an experimental two-stage methodology, which will be called archaeological topophonics. The methodology develops its data collection from the innovative audio-recording work on Cardiff by Saunders and Moles [5] in which local citizens captured their spoken testimonies whilst exploring non-tourist spaces in the city. The recent approach to place-making, by Saunders and Moles [5] has many similarities with the analysis phase employed in current place branding exercises in which knowledge of urban space is elicited from local citizens [6]; although the new approach proposed here in this chapter can be placed in the same framework it seeks to elicit emotional responses by citizens rather than information. The second stage in the research practice may be termed, place-writing. It requires the development of a C. Mansfield (&) Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Plymouth, 334 Cookworthy Building, Hampton Street, Plymouth PL4 8AA, UK e-mail: c.mansfi[email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_19

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relationship with archive material of the place under inquiry in order to discover catalyst material for the walking fieldwork, and after the fieldwork as an archaeological substrate for deep reading of place. This writing practice will be in the form of a synthesis by the researcher preparing place-writing from three of the participants’ testimonies, and presented in the latter half of this chapter. It is anticipated that this type of place or travel writing will have impact on the destination image for the destination management organisation and for potential visitors as textual material for the enrichment of cultural itineraries. In this aspect, the study considers the identity of the local citizens and the researcher and how identity is created though the narrating of the experience of movement through urban space [7]. Theoretical approaches drawn from Foucault [8] will be used for this. Foucault [8] explains the practices of keeping a notebook, the hypomnema, drawing on Seneca’s advice (Seneca c.65) so that anxiety of the future can be replaced with ‘the possession of a past that one can enjoy to the full and without disturbance’ [8], c.418). The hypomnema becomes a space in which the writer forms their own identity as a collection of the mediated voices of all the best that has been read and heard on their travels (Seneca 65, Epistle LXXXIV) but not so that the writer becomes the same as those read or heard in the sense that Ricœur calls idem, ‘identity as sameness’ [9, 73]. In Foucault’s lectures on avowal (Foucault 2014), his conception of the work of historians is that they seek the moment in the past when a freedom was closed down to serve the ends of one particular group in power, or simply through a misjudgement. The constraint on behaviour continues even though the historical conditions no longer apply. Historians can attempt to discover the discursive change that created this inequality by an archaeological study of the documents from the past and, through this process, emancipate that part of current identity still constrained, Foucault proposes this as a ‘locus of emergence’ [10], 62), and as an event with ‘a residual existence in the field’ [10, 28]. Space, too, endures these conditions of accumulated ideology. Pressures act to create a constrained space in the city and this restriction is maintained and enacted through the behaviours of its residents. The methodology outlined here in this chapter seeks a way of eliciting residents’ emotions by taking them into the field of the urban space where Foucault’s loci of emergence might exist. Work on dominated memories in the city of Nantes [11] reveals these closures at work and the negotiations to re-narrate the history of contested spaces. The closure and re-development of a tobacco factory in Nantes for example, created a dramatic interruption in the lives and life-stories of its managers and workers: Le cas de Nantes montre comment l’histoire des stratégies patrimoniales et de la mobilisation mémorielle a rôdé les pouvoirs urbains sur des techniques de désamorçage de la conflictualité. [11, 32].

Nicolas and Zanetti [11] show here that the city planning authorities act to defuse (techniques de désamorçage) the conflicts of ex-workers protesting the erasure of the site of their everyday lives. However, the rehabilitation of urban sites is not as clear cut as a two-sided conflict. Activities have often ceased because

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society no longer wants these to continue, for example, the consumption of tobacco, of sugar, of oil, of asbestos, the trading in exploitative labour, or society has moved the production of these elsewhere. The locals involved in these economic activities at these erased sites take on a sense of loss as part of their identity. The urban site is a site of grief. To recover from this the site must be re-narrated or at least the moment of closure must be re-discovered. Full and effective erasure of a site-specific activity means, of course, that the land use is no longer visible to visitors, the tobacco factory of Nicolas and Zanetti [11] is still visible in many discourse practices. Therefore, this research on Nantes has selected an urban space that has no immediately apparent conflicts, instead the chosen guiding ‘locus of emergence’ [10, 62], is a reference by Breton to the positive emotional value he expresses for the Parc de Procé [12]. Since this research is concerned with cultural tourism knowledge, the expression of pleasure and value for a place that may be visited is sufficient catalyst to investigate this area. Nantes, the sixth largest city in France, was chosen as the site for this case study because it has a relatively new tourism management structure called, Le Voyage à Nantes, established in 2011, and thus still has large urban areas undeveloped as tourist spaces which are of interest to this research methodology. The geomorphology of the town, especially on the north bank of the river Loire, provides sloping terrain through streets over 100 years old, with accessible histories and layers of urban planning easily read from the visible domestic architecture.

19.2

Design of the Methodology

The design of the data collection process to examine the interface between the local inhabitant and the place deployed a group of 5 locals equipped with audio recorders to pursue a new, not-yet-established tourist route through an urban space. The voice recording and walking process was introduced by the researcher to the 5 respondents as a group in the field using the term way-tales, or in French récits de voie. They were encouraged to narrate their emotions as they explored the urban space, and to forge their own route up the slope of town towards the park, which they already knew well. They were prompted to notice the marvellous in the buildings they encountered and let that elicit memories, and emotional responses to the sensations they experienced as they walked alone on their own, contingent route northwards to the park called Procé Park. They all embarked at the same moment but quickly dispersed onto their own paths on different streets. In the briefing, the participants were reminded of the poetry of the surrealist writer, André Breton (1896–1966), who worked in Nantes during World War I. This literary connection served as a purpose for finding a route, all 5 participants knew of Breton, his work and his time in the city. This choice of privileged witnesses as the selected sample was intentional since the purpose was to elicit tacit knowledge that was relevant to this area of the city. All the participants recruited were older professionals or retired professionals who lived and worked in Nantes, so that the potential existed for

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unlocking memories of a very familiar urban space. The sample met these criteria but only one of the respondents, designated Maître for anonymity, had very detailed knowledge of these few streets that led from the point of departure to the park. This may prove to be a shortcoming of this type fieldwork and should be considered for future work. The recordings are listened to repeatedly by the researcher to build ‘[a]n accumulation of familiarity’ [13, 62]; Wight, treats interpretive practices concerned with heritage as enunciations using Foucault’s [14] sense of the term. Foucault’s notion of the archaeology of the enunciation suggests that levels exist within each enunciation that give it a density [14, 189] which is further enriched by accent, expressive performance and emotion [15]. This analysis attempts to uncover these levels to reveal how a practice has been introduced to this area of the city and which, if any, practices have been forbidden. Guiding analytical questions were applied to the recorded spoken data, for example, what do locals talk about when they walk in their own city? What do they notice and tell listeners? A critical hermeneutics is applied to the spoken recordings and their transcriptions [16]. As an integral part of the methodology, archive work was undertaken prior to the fieldwork to discover a catalyst that would provide a starting point for a new walking route that would have a link to the life or work of a literary or historical figure who had spent time in the town. The figure who emerged from this was the surrealist poet, André Breton. The following links were found in the archives: Olier [17] provides transcriptions of military hospital letters which reveal that Jacques Vaché, who was to become Breton’s close friend, was transferred to a temporary hospital on 22 November 1915 at ‘2 rue du Bocage, dans les locaux du lycée de jeunes filles Gabriel Guist’hau’ [17]. This address still exists as 2 rue Marie Anne du Boccage and so was used as the starting point for the exploration of a new walking route in Nantes. Breton, himself identifies the Parc de Procé, a place which he says he loved. It is hoped that readers will seek these 2 locations, on Google Maps for example, to provide context for the rest of this chapter.

19.3

Findings and Data

In total, 6 sets of spoken recordings were collected, 5 from the local case participants and one from the researcher’s own autoethnographic recording. One additional case participant delivered written data. The names are anonymised for ethical reasons: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Elle 20 min in 9 files Maître 18 min in 8 files Les 22 min in 23 files Poète 18 min in 9 files Trustin 15 min in 2 files Researcher’s own auto-ethnographic recording 21 min in 1 file

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Technically, the recordings show that the speaking times of the walks all averaged around 20 min. Total walking time was longer, closer to an hour to reach the café in the park. Each of the 5 case participants took their own routes through a choice of streets connecting the two points. Google Maps shows a 1.5 km route, via the rue Camus which would take 17 min with no stops. The case participants met again in the shelter of the café in the park and this provided an opportunity for reflection and closure. The occasional light rain at the start of the walk led to a future design decision that the walk should start from a sheltered point also. Walking back south-west into the city centre and to the parked cars of some of the participants, it was felt that guided urban walks should have a circular nature, returning the visitors to their starting point via different streets. The Radisson Blu Hotel at 6 Place Aristide Briand would provide such a point since a return route could follow the rue de la Bastille. This would provide a 3 km round trip. Besides the repeated listening to the French spoken recordings, transcriptions were made and gerund coding applied [18], in order to understand what actions the participant presented through their testimony. Memo-writing [18] was made from these gerund-coded transcriptions and these provide the themes in the analysis below. As the themes emerge from the grounded approach to the spoken data, further time is spent in the archives to seek a historical deep mapping of the places that are highlighted by the respondents’ emotions.

19.4

Analysis of Themes

In this section just three of the witness testimonies are analysed, and read against and alongside the archive material. These are the three which yielded the clearest emerging themes during coding. Also for reasons of space, these are presented here as productive, re-usable examples from the all the data recorded. The in-line references use the word, Stanza, a long-standing practice in narrative analysis to indicate a meaningful section of spoken testimony [19].

19.4.1 Happy Here Twice the participant, Elle declares that she loves one particular place on her urban walk thus assigning it high emotional value; in her Stanza 4 it is the verse from Breton’s (1932) prose poem ‘The Verb To Be’ that she has recalled and recited and in St. 3 it is her movement downwards on the street Marie-Anne du Boccage deeper into the valley of La Chézine: ‘J’aime bien cette rue qui descend, qui descend’ (Elle 2017, St. 3). The word cette, ‘this’ is deixis, a pointing out to her listeners, which places them there in the descending street with her. Her use of the present tense and the adverb là, reaffirms this interpellation: ‘I find these footsteps here along the sloping street’ (Elle 2017, St. 2). If considered as playing the role of a guide, Elle is

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enacting leadership to her listeners and expressing the emotion of happiness that they can follow by taking the same route through the town that she imagines Breton taking and by engaging with the same literary text, Breton’s prose poem. Her memorisation of a large part of the poem is a substantial act which replays Seneca’s (c.65) practice of collecting the writings of others to constitute an identity. The literary text of Breton deals with the emotion of despair through knowledge and as such strengthens the identity of Elle against future anxieties (Seneca c.65). Her reciting also places the poem at a site where Breton, over a decade before, may have been experiencing despair as he watched his friends in the military hospital near the end of the first world war. In this way, the quiet urban street becomes a ‘locus of emergence’ [10, 62], alerting future visitors to a hidden discursive practice here. Literary texts offer a discourse practice which store and communicate emotional memory, whereas history texts communicate events and changing spatial arrangements.

19.4.2 Sous Les Pavés Le Bocage The case participant, Maître, who has the deepest knowledge of this part of Nantes stops beside a fenced-in property in the urban landscape and refers to it as a barnyard or poultry yard. He spends time explaining the marvel of seeing poultry and their coop, caserne in French, surrounded by domestic housing. It is a remnant of agricultural living in an urban space. Maître explains that the avenue named Camus is from Le sieur Camus, who owned property here in the quartier Hauts-Pavés—Saint-Félix that was used as a maraîcher, a market garden for Nantes. However, Bauquin [20] who lived in this area held by Camus in 1919, recounts how Camus established a gated community of exclusively bourgeois family mansions here. No aristocrats, nor others of bad ways and bad manners were allowed to reside on the avenue; they were relegated to neighbouring properties in Monselet [20]. Although today, during this research in 2017, the individual grand houses are replaced by blocks of apartments a green ribbon of trees still runs down the 70 or so metres south-west to the little river Chézine. This south-west aspect of the slope would have made it perfect for the fruit trees and vegetables used to supply the city centre markets and restaurants. The brasserie, La Cigale opened in 1895 is only 1.2 km’ walk from this slope. Two erasures have thus taken place and warrant further research in the archives. The erasure of the mansions and the loss of local food production. On the BnF’s online Gallica archive town plans are available and the 1838 map of Nantes shows that Avenue Camus does not exist at that time [21], in fact only an incomplete fork south in the road from le Chemin des Dervalières appears slightly north of where Avenue Camus would be built. Interestingly, too, the starting point of the research walks, the rue Marie Anne du Boccage is named simply Rue du Bocage in 1838, the poet’s name must have been added later. Within 15 years though Avenue Camus has been constructed, shown on the Jouanne’s map of 1853 as simply

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Grande Avenue and lined with trees on both sides. By 1877 the name has changed to Grande Avenue Camus. France had lived through huge struggles for power: the French February Revolution of 1848 creating the Second Republic and with it, the right to work, the coup by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and his defeat by Prussia in 1870 and finally the emergence of the Third Republic with its civil war against the urban ambitions of the Paris Commune in Spring 1871. This final conflict escalated on 18th March 1871 on the butte of Montmartre in Paris when the army from Versailles failed to organise enough horses to haul away the 170 cannons. Back in Nantes, the maps drawn by Jouanne around Avenue Camus hold two loci of emergence concerning horses in the mid-nineteenth century: a road called Chemin des Herses, pathway of the horse harrows, and at the southern end of the walk, a huge building which in 1838 was labelled Ecole d’Equitation, riding school but by 1853 had become a Caserne de Cavalerie, a cavalry barracks, by 1871 this had been erased from the maps. One of the most exciting finds in the BnF is the map drawn by architect Amouroux, [22] made during the formation of the Second Republic and Second Empire which labels the riding school as a manège, the term used in English today for a dressage arena and on the slope down into the Chézine river twenty-five to thirty fields about 40 m wide with different types of plants drawn in rows in an area labelled Tenue Camus. Using data from Lawton and Lee [23] the urban population of Nantes was growing at a rate of 1,500 new inhabitants per year from 1841 to 1861. The fields of local food production drawn on Amouroux’s map of 1849, would be under pressure to deliver more crops whilst simultaneously being considered as building sites for denser housing. However, again through archive work, a guide-book published in 1870 shows that this research is not the first time La Tenue Camus has been considered as a place for a pleasant walk, since Veloppé lists it as one of ten principal promenades [24, 36] in his Guide to Nantes.

19.4.3 Plateau La ville exceptionnelle devient également un objet de l’appareil sensoriel – l’alerte, la catastrophe elle-même, mais aussi la fête, la liesse collective – et elle constitue une mise à l’épreuve des liens ordinaires de l’individu avec sa ville – aussi bien par la peur qu’il éprouve pour elle que par la joie, qui peut constituer aussi une forme de fierté par rapport à sa ville. [25, 44]

Beck [25] writes of how the town becomes an object of all the senses of the walker and diarist and this tests the bonds the citizen feels for the town. Social catastrophes and collective joy are felt in equal measure, the ups and the downs. The sense of gravity felt when walking on a rising street turns imperceptibly to relief, even joy, when the ground levels. On the 1849 map of Amouroux appears the Bureau d’Octroi, a Roman innovation to erect a building to collect taxes on goods entering the city for consumption. The tax collection point would need a flat space for the horse-drawn carts to stand without the risk of rolling away during the paperwork, payment and

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writing. During the second walk for data collection a building occupying the exact spot where the rue de la Bastille becomes the rue des Dervallières was noted in the auto-ethnographic way-tale. It occupies a slight high-point in the geography of the space, a plateau, and would have faced the junction with the pathway of the horse harrows. If the projected road of 1838 had gone ahead as planned, the local customs office located here would have been destroyed but the cutting for the new avenue was moved down the valley. Today the space is occupied by a library, the architecture is grand municipal brick and stone. Could it be that the tax collection office has survived? We call a “plateau” any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems […]. We are writing this book [A Thousand Plateaus] as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. […] Each morning we would wake up, and each of us would ask himself what plateau he was going to tackle, writing five lines here, ten there. [26, 22]

For Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is a writing practice to deliver a short, meaningful text which may be connected to other texts by the narrative effort of their readers; it is a small flat place to pause with pleasure after a climb to catch breath before the route slopes away again, to look around and say a few words about the buildings that share the relief of this flatness with the guide. In March 1848, the prefect in Nantes, Guépin ordered 130 of the town’s unemployed to make the ground level where the old Bouffay palace had stood so that the land would be more saleable [27]. Levelling the ground was one of the key activities of the National Workshops. They were established on 25 February 1848 to provide work after the February Revolution; it was the failure of the workshops that contributed to the June Days Uprising that same year.

19.5

Conclusion and Implications

The three example themes drawn out from the testimony of the participants and then synthesised using archive material provide the basis for a guided walk along the same streets as the original fieldwork. The stories developed using history and theory could be delivered as a written document, or an audio or a tour guide as ‘plateaus’, drawing the term from Deleuze and Guattari [26]. The next step in this research is to develop written resources using these three themes for use by potential visitors and to evaluate their impact. This would be considered the productive practice of place-writing. One of the key linguistic features in which place-writing would differ from the syntheses above is to move to the use of the past tense to indicate that the travel writer, had stood in these emotionally charged places in the streetscape and that the reader-visitor can now walk the same route and encounter these exact spots. The testimony of two of participants lent itself to productive synthesis. One mainly historical, who knew these particular streets very well from living nearby and from previous walks; the other from the emotional and literary responses to the

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experiences drawn from detailed knowledge of the writer, Breton. It is suggested that it is the selection of older participants near or at retirement that provides the greater stock of memories about the city. When using this methodology again it is suggested that to overcome limitations that locals who work and regularly commute by foot through the area under investigation are recruited as respondents. This will provide more immediate emotions and memories of the landmarks, buildings and streetscapes encountered during the walk from a richer tacit knowledge. As researchers become familiar with the use of this methodology, other forms of experiential research by walking in towns can be added to enrich the data, for example, by drawing from Stevens’ [28] work in urban planning where a phenomenological and behavioural perspective is constructed from situationists’ urban drifts. Acknowledgements Grateful thanks to the EU’s ERASMUS+ scheme for academic mobility which funded a period of study on récits de vie with Professeure Martine Lani-Bayle at the University of Nantes in April 2017.

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17. Olier F (2016) Brancardiers : des soldats de la grande guerre [online]. Accessed 10 Jan 2017. http://hopitauxmilitairesguerre1418.overblog.com/surrealisme-et-hopitaux-militaires-19141918-jacques-vache-a-nantes-22-nov-1915-25-fev-1916. Accessed 22 July 2017 18. Charmaz K (2006) Constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. Sage, London 19. Riessman C (1993) Narrative analysis. Sage, Los Angeles & London 20. Bauquin S (1994) La tenue Camus. Les Annales de Nantes et du Pays Nantais. 254, Archives municipales de Nantes, Société académique de Nantes et de la Loire-Atlantique, 7–8 21. Jouanne M (1838) Plan de Nantes dressé par Jouanne. Forest, Nantes. Permalink http:// gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b530299027. Accessed 22 July 2017 22. Amouroux L (1849) Plan de Nantes. Sebire Permalink, Nantes. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/ 12148/btv1b53061950w. Accessed 22 July 2017 23. Lawton R, Lee W (2002) Population and society in Western European port cities 1650–1939. LUP, Liverpool 24. Veloppé T (1870) Guide à Nantes. Libraire Universelle de Mme, Nantes. Veloppé 25. Beck R (2013) Sentir et ressentir la ville à travers des ego-documents. L’exemple du Journal du passementier bavarois F.C. Krieger, 1821–1872. Norois, 227. http://norois.revues.org/ 4660; https://doi.org/10.4000/norois.4660. Accessed 22 July 2017 26. Deleuze G, Guattari F (1987) A thousand plateaus [Trans: Massumi, B.]. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 27. Haudebourg G (1980) Chapitre 5. L’assistance aux valides et les ateliers de charité : Mendiants et vagabonds en Bretagne au XIXe siècle. Presses universitaires de Rennes, Rennes 28. Stevens Q (2006) The shape of urban experience: a re-evaluation of Lynch’s five elements. Environ Plan 33:803–823

Charlie Mansfield Since 2009 Dr. Charlie Mansfield has been a lecturer in tourism management and French with the University of Plymouth. He is programme leader of the Masters for Travel Writers. His post-doctoral research explores how place writing can be developed as a practice of inquiry in urban space. Mansfield has also completed major funded research projects with the University of Edinburgh and for the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Correction to: Interior-Exterior Ambiances: Environmental Transitions in the Recollection of an Urban Stroll Claude M. H. Demers and André Potvin

Correction to: Chapter 14 in: B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_14 The book was inadvertently published with badly cut images 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4, 14.5, 14.6 in chapter 14. These images has now been updated with the correction chapter.

The updated version of this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_14 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. E. A. Piga et al. (eds.), Experiential Walks for Urban Design, Springer Tracts in Civil Engineering, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76694-8_20

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Fig. 14.1 Walking itinerary and stops: ground level (red) and underground level (blue). Source Demers and Potvin

Fig. 14.2 Researchers and environmental tools of data acquisition acting as a “sensing machine”. Source International ambiances network

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Fig. 14.3 Fact sheet of data representation of captured ambiances at stop P1. Source Demers

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Fig. 14.4 Environmental transitions and survey parameters through time and location. Source Potvin

Fig. 14.5 Interior-exterior transition: a Ste-Catherine Street stop 6; b Complexe Desjardins stop 7. Source Demers and Potvin

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Fig. 14.6 Ground to underground transition a ground floor stop 8; b underground stop 9. Source Demers and Potvin