Sensing the City

What does the city do to your body and who decided that? A game about sensing urban space together.

Visit the Bubble Box website for extra information and reading: https://bubblebox.studio/page.html?page=sensing

About

In her last game, Cemre invited a group of strangers to navigate the city by smell. Exploring how this individual experience becomes shared, she asked participants to imagine a new city based on each other’s descriptions of the space. Where Cemre turns individual sensory experience into something shared, Ikram extends that question, asking how a shared experience can become something learned about our environment. She believes that the people who live in a space already hold knowledge about it, rarely listened to by those who design this space. Together, Cemre and Ikram are developing a game to explore our cities, its spaces and its textures, using our bodies.

While the urban environment is heavily documented on a physical level, there are more gaps in the documentation of how a space makes us feel. Urban spaces keep our bodies agitated, motivating us to move through, rather than to stand still and reflect on what we feel and how the space moves us. We are directed through a set of small choices and manipulations presented by the environment, making urban space more of a process than an object.

In this session, Cemre and Ikram guide us through this process looking at the different layers present in the urban environment. From the physical materials that it is made of, the network and the relations it creates with- and between bodies, to the invisible flows and rules that it is organised by. As we become aware of how all of these small directions accumulate into something larger. We can also imagine how a collection of small changes can become a larger shift.

The Process

We start at Bubble Box, where Cemre and Ikram will introduce their spatial observation model before taking us to a nearby location in public space. Moving through the space together, we will use a structured set of questions to reflect on how it affects us — how we navigate it, what it makes us feel, and why. The space is divided into zones, each inviting attention to different physical and sensory aspects.
Back at Bubble Box, we collect our experiences on a large shared map. From there, each participant imagines changes to the space — however small — and together these individual proposals become a collective reimagining of what the space could feel like.
The spatial observation template used throughout the session will be yours to take home, and a digital version will be available on the website afterwards.