Chapter 8 Environmental quality, housing and city residents: a sensory urbanism approach

Abstract

This chapter considers the role and potential of sensory urbanism as an approach to exploring people's sensorial experiences and understandings of their local environments. Such an approach is warranted given the influential role of the senses in developing and affecting experience of the urban environment. Debate about the role of the senses in shaping urban experience has progressed in recent years and increasingly is taking place across disciplines (Adams & Guy, 2007). Pallasmaa (2005, p. 40) describes this sensory urban engagement when he says:I confront the city with my body … I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.

Citation

Adams, M., Moore, G., Cox, T., Croxford, B., Refaee, M. and Sharples, S. (2008), "Chapter 8 Environmental quality, housing and city residents: a sensory urbanism approach", Maginn, P.J., Thompson, S. and Tonts, M. (Ed.) Qualitative Housing Analysis: An International Perspective (Studies in Qualitative Methodology, Vol. 10), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 185-208. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1042-3192(08)10008-8