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Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Publisher’s statement: Please refer to the repository item page, publisher’s statement section, for further information. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications thesensing city: AN URBAN ROOM Sensing the City A B C D 1 1 thesensing city: AN URBAN 2 ROOM 2 3 3 4 4 Dave Allen Grid Map: THE COVENTRY PHOTOGRAPHIC GRID 2019 (detail). The underlying map is © OpenStreetMap.org The map shows the locations for the photographs as magenta dots. thegridproject.org.uk/Coventry-Grid-Map.html 5 5 A B C D 250m THE COVENTRY PHOTOGRAPHIC GRID 2019 The underlying map is © OpenStreetMap.org contributors Sensing the City: an Introduction to Our Urban Room “After almost 50 years of neglect of the human dimension, here at the beginning of the 21st century we have an urgent need and growing willingness to once again create cities for people.” Jan Gehl, architect and urban planner, Cities for People, 2010 • How can the human body be in measure of the city? • How can a focus on human sensing enhance the habitability of urban life? • What do the sensed contours, textures and atmospheres of the city tell us about it? • Who and what is Coventry city centre for? • What kind of city do we wish to live in? These are just some of the key questions posed by this exhibition. As a collaborative research group of artists and academics, specialising in the application of experimental methodologies in dance and choreography, creative writing, performance, film, photography and sound technologies, we have spent three years exploring them in and around Coventry city centre. Our aim was to produce an integrated embodied mapping of the city centre which, using multiple spatio-temporal forms of expression, would consider its viability as a place supposedly designed for people. We did so against a backdrop of Coventry’s medieval, post-second world war and recent 21st century history, all of which is reflected in an eclectic, changing built environment that generates very particular atmospheres. An implicit point of departure was the realisation that the city centre is increasingly struggling to know what it is for, after over half a century of giving predominance in its practical organisation to forms of consumerism on the one hand and vehicular traffic on the other. As shopping struggles to retain its appeal as a physical activity and public awareness grows of a climate emergency rendering private car use deeply problematic, the time is ripe for a reconsideration of city centres from the point of view of you the pedestrian and citizen as ‘sensitised user’. We hope you will find our creative responses to the city and the questions posed by the exhibition as relevant to the present moment as we have. With Coventry set to be UK City of Culture in 2021 and the City Council launching a 10-year strategic programme of cultural initiatives and repair in 2017, the city is uniquely placed to engage in issues around the cultural infrastructure of the built urban environment in both a sustained manner and for the common good of citizens. One way of facilitating that debate would be to set up an Urban Room in Coventry during 2021. This would act as a resource centre for the city, hosting exhibitions, talks, workshops and informal drop-ins for citizens and professionals alike to explore collaboratively the opportunities for urban change in Coventry. We hope that our exhibition here will play its part in highlighting the potential value of such a facility which many UK cities have already and Mapping © Christian Kipp (detail) Moving introduced. CONJUNCTIONS: Some Road Maps (in Multiple Moods) NICOLAS WHYBROW Welcome to our pop-up Urban Room! Presented here is a portfolio of four collaged mappings of Coventry city Sensing the City Project Team: centre’s ring-road, authored mysteriously by “unknown-but-knowing Professor Nicolas Whybrow, University of Warwick hand”. The four discrete text and image items are entitled in turn Still Life, Dr Natalie Garrett Brown, University of East London Dysjunction, Bare City and White Noise. The collagist may be a professional Dr Emma Meehan, Coventry University artist for whom this is no more than a provisional mock-up. But, given the Dr Michael Pigott, University of Warwick obvious absence of hi-tech production values involved, the creator is quite Carolyn Deby, sirenscrossing possibly an amateur urbanist. In asserting anonymity, the person concerned Dr Nese Ceren Tosun, University of Warwick is perhaps giving themselves licence to be provocative without recrimination. Rob Batterbee, University of Warwick The Conjunctions portfolio seems to concern itself with the aesthetic infrastructure of central Coventry, surfacing as it did in 2017 at the time of the city’s successful bid to be UK City of Culture and the City Council’s development of a comprehensive ten-year cultural strategy. In particular, the mappings are preoccupied with the effects on the habitability of the present-day city produced by the inner ring-road. This was constructed, in the wake of the destruction wreaked by the second world war and as an immediate consequence of the ‘best laid plans’ for the city, presented in the City Corporation’s The Future Coventry brochure in 1945. Each of the four road maps relates to a segment of Coventry’s inner ring- road, intentionally presenting it in a particular mood. Conceptually these moods conjure diverse spatio-temporalities which equate to the temper of the location – not unlike the tempo allocated by composers to their musical scores to evoke a certain feel. For example, the subjunctive mood of Bare City turns out to have a hypothetical premise underpinning it – a futuristic vision of urban space which implicitly proposes that the ring- road should be closed to cars and repurposed as a new form of city centre. But some of these moods are coinages. Most obvious in this regard is the “hyperjunctive” mood of White Noise which is intended to project a sense of the clamour and claustrophobia of the built environment around the Whitefriars section of the ring-road, producing a form of “hyper-present”. While Conjunctions may share the sentiments of a Paul Chatterton with his persuasive manifesto demands for “real change”, involving among other things a car-free, post-carbon, commons-based sustainable city1, the methodology of these road maps is far less prescriptive than suggestive. In other words, via its focus on indicative spatio-temporal moods, as opposed to evidence-based data gathering for example, it appears to work from a projected form of intuitive sensing about the infrastructure of the city – a sixth sense perhaps. 1 Chatterton, P. (2019) Unlocking Sustainable Cities: a Manifesto for Real Change, Still Life © Anonymous London: Pluto Press. CONJUNCTIONS: Some Road Maps (in Multiple Moods) Still Life: Som[n]a in the City (adjunctive mood) Dysjunction: these Towns Will Live and Die (disjunctive mood) The year 1961 serves as a running point of reference in this road map. Gordon This road map steers us towards the west of the city centre, focusing exclusively Cullen’s Townscape, whose spirit effectively sets in motion the sequence of set- on Junction 7 of the ring-road, which is significantly elevated at this point. Where piece “still lifes” presented here, was published that year. So were Jane Jacobs’ its counterpart Bare City amounts to a speculative projection in the subjunctive The Death and Life of Great American Cities and key texts of the Situationist mood – a utopia indeed – this mapping effectively forms its antithesis in the International movement, including Kotányi’s and Vaneigem’s on the pivotal “disjunctive mood”, presenting as it does a dystopian portrait of the ring-road’s notion of unitary urbanism. Meanwhile, Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City underbelly or that which lurks in its shadows. This is reflected inDysjunction ’s had been published just the year before. All of these publications are concerned inversion of Bare City’s subtitle – foregrounding towns rather than people – which in their own unique ways with urban living, with spatial scale and movement riffs at the same time off the title of Jane Jacobs’ seminal book on urban living and, above all, with the social and physical human body being, like the technical The Death and Life of Great American Cities (see Still Life road map). instruments of a land surveyor, in measure of the city. The body as protagonist, Dysjunction appears to present a perspectival montage in which a juxtaposition including the way its urban surroundings affect and position it, is then the test of vertical portrait formats, customarily reserved for the depiction of people, of whether the city works.