This poster will share preliminary findings from an AHRC research network series Sensory Cities. The network brings together academics, urban professionals and city museum curators from Britain and Europe to provide a platform for dialogue across disciplines, professions and national borders on how to research, curate and represent sensory urban experiences. The sensory-experiential realm has come to the fore in recent years in a range of academic disciplines across the humanities as well as in professions such as museum curation, urban branding and architecture (Classen 1993; Classen et al 1994; Howes 1991; Klingman 2007, Paalasma 2005; Pink 2009). We discuss what different academic disciplines can learn from each other, and from urban professionals such as planners, architects, artists, branding experts or visualisers in relation to researching urban sensory experience. Some questions we’d like to address are: how far can methods developed for understanding the present be applied to historic sources? And, how in turn, a greater understanding of the historicity of sensory experiences might lead to a less static approach in the present. Drawing on our initial findings from our case study cities: London, Barcelona and Cologne we will argue the need to transcend discipline based methodological frameworks to research urban experiences.
Poster co-authored with Dr Monica Degen.