Sensing the City: an Embodied Documentation and Mapping of the Changing Uses and Tempers of Urban Place (a practice-based case-study of Coventry)

Scheduled to take place over a period of 3 years this practice-based research project will undertake a series of site-specific studies of urban rhythms, atmospheres, textures, practices and patterns of behaviour using the sensate, performing human body as a data-gathering sensor in the first instance and applying techniques of writing or notation and technologies of sound/oral recording, photography and film in the second instance to respond to, document and process such fieldwork activity. The third and final phase of the research programme will be to visualise and present documented text, sound and image material both as an online, interactive mapping of the urban sites in question (presented as a prototypical mixed media website) and via a 'smart' device. The project will also culminate in an exhibition, incorporating a 1-day symposium, and a co-curated publication. Together these outputs will present the findings of the project in a form that is accessible to a broader public as well as to specialists in fields related to the design and planning of urban futures. They will be worked towards in 4 distinctive, practice-based 'micro-projects', aiming to present conclusions about the constitution, character and morphology of urban space as public space, habitable space and sustainable space by monitoring the instinctive reactions of the body. In other words, as a symptom of the degree to which cities are changing in the 21st century, it will examine the effects on the practices and behaviours of urban dwellers of key features of the atmospheric, aesthetic force-field that is modern-day urban space.

The specific focus of the project, which will lay down a marker for future projects to follow suit in other cities, will be the city of Coventry (UK). This has a particularly resonant recent history of mid-20th century destruction and erasure after the devastating bombing of the city in 1940, which effaced its medieval origins (including its cathedral), followed by rapidly implemented post-war modernist reconstruction based principally on serving the city's burgeoning car industry and creating a civic-minded, functional city for working citizens. Now, in the early 21st century, the city finds itself again in a transitional moment, poised as it is for a further phase of significant regeneration, this time of its declining post-war infrastructure. This has witnessed a second radical effacement in the form of a car industry that has been rendered almost non-existence owing to a range of socio-economic factors and developments.

As such Coventry offers a plethora of intriguing and revealing public sites, often circumscribed or governed by atrophying instances of functionalist modernist architecture, street furniture and the built environment in general that were designed and constructed at a time of high local authority investment in an ideal of civic responsibility, democratic participation, welfare provision and social commitment, to say nothing of industrial optimism. Initiatives are under way in the city to prepare it for a bid (in 2017) to become UK City of Culture in 2021, which would serve as the central strategy in a programme of urban regeneration. The implementation of arts practices as the means to track and galvanise urban change is therefore an idea that is very much 'in play' at this point in time. Irrespective of the bid's outcome, an aim of the proposed research is that its findings will be able to contribute directly to the project of revitalisation, not least since regeneration programmes frequently become ensnared in abstract planning, ignoring such factors as embodied interactions with public space and the 'felt', experiential and everyday sides of urban living. Moreover, while Coventry will serve as a prototype for the particular project in question, the ultimate aim is to devise a portfolio of rationalised research practices in the form of a functional paradigm that may be applied in any given urban contexts.

The project has been conceived in such a way as to make its research processes and outcomes integral to both the present and future of the city of Coventry. At the same time the project has the aspiration to develop a template for documenting and mapping the changing uses and tempers of urban place per se, so it is expected that the research will be applicable to other cities across the world and, with the project's incorporation of an international consultative dimension, it has implicitly planned for a way to extend the scope of its initial focus on just one city in the UK. The research will be dependent in its development and in its findings not only on a collaborating group of academics - in themselves representative of different institutions and areas of scholarly and creative expertise, and at varying points in their careers - but also on artists, local arts organisations and the responses of the city's citizens in a variety of contexts, and to differing degrees, within the parameters of the 4 micro-projects (as outlined separately). These responses will include at an early stage the immediate ones of urban inhabitants witnessing - in some cases being invited to participate in - site-based practical exercises taking place in public locations. At a later stage they will extend, first, to the participatory interventions of visitors to both the performative website-as-urban-map and to making use of digital content that can be triggered to appear on a 'smart' device. These will emerge as principal outputs and will continue to be active beyond the three-year scope of the project itself. Second, responses will also be elicited from attendees of both the planned exhibition at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre in the final period of the project and the associated one-day symposium which will cast itself as a public forum of high relevance to all present and future professional designers, civic planners, artists, cultural policy makers, local councillors and inhabitants of the city of Coventry (as well as academics).

While the project in question by no means stakes its occurrence on Coventry's involvement in the UK City of Culture bid, predating, in fact, in its initial conception the decision by the city council to submit an application in 2017 (to be host in 2021), the fact of the city's recent commitment to this project inevitably introduces a relevant opportunity for the Sensing the City initiative to acquire a particular resonance in terms of both its activities and research objectives, which, like the underlying motivations for becoming city of culture, have a revitalised, enhanced urban living environment at their heart. The PI and C-DaRE colleagues have been centrally involved in preliminary brainstorming workshops run in 2015 by organisations such as Warwick Creative Exchange and Warwick Arts Centre, involving a broad church of local parties interested in being involved in the bid (and, ultimately, the staging of the event itself should the bid be successful), so the Sensing the City project group maintains a close involvement with developments. To give two examples of the way the project can play a significant role:

1) with the final City of Culture bid due to be submitted in April 2017, the universities of Warwick and Coventry will contribute directly to it in the form of a joint programme of research based around the theme of urban futures. Warwick Creative Exchange, of which the PI is a member, is leading this initiative.

2) the one-day symposium projected to occur in the summer of 2019 in any case foresees a constituency of participants with a stake in the future organisation of Coventry, so it would be ideally positioned to adapt itself to be responsive to the UK City of Culture initiative should the bid turn out to be successful. Importantly, however, an unsuccessful bid would not diminish the city's ongoing project of regeneration to which this research project remains relevant.