Urban choreographies: a reflection on the design with differently augmented bodies

Starting from the peculiar character of the body and of its role in urban design in the light of the pandemic and the digital transitions, this contribution addresses the issue of urban design made with and for human and more-than-human bodies. Ongoing global changes lead urban design to adopt a relational approach that returns to the body, in relation to space and to other bodies. In fact, the renewed focus on the corporeal dimension in the post-covid era and, in parallel, the ever-increasing opportunities offered by virtual realities, open up new possibilities to explore and experience urban spaces through differently augmented bodies. The body can be enhanced through somatic and perceptual attention, facilitated by the contribution of artistic-performative practices, or it can be expanded by cyborg effects with various degrees of technological hybridization. Both possibilities can shape a new understanding in the field of urban studies since they enable a complex and amplified experience of spaces. Therefore, the paper investigates some possible ways for urban design to relate to augmented bodies to build new epistemologies and methods: pushing forward a phenomenological approach, sensory and bodily experience is here considered indispensable for reading and transforming the city. On the one hand, the city is perceived by the body as a set of interactive conditions, and the body itself expresses a transitory synthesis of these interactions recording its experience through an urban ‘bodygraphy’ (Britto & Jacques 2008). Creative and mobile methods for urban investigation – referring to the senses, movement and perception – are thus explored: walking methods and artistic-performative practices such as urban dérive and urban dance. They are understood as ways to acquire an embedded knowledge of spaces from which to proceed to design their transformations, but they are also intended as ways for resignifying places, creating new relationships with the community, a stronger sense of affection and belonging, caring for places, etc. On the other hand, the digital transition allows the expansion of urban phenomenology, constructing a new body-scheme that questions the spatio-temporal categories of the experience of space and using the possibilities of virtual simulation to innovate, create and build alternative futures in the material world (Seibert 2022). Understanding the body as a living interface between the virtual and the real environment, a post- human creature hybridised with technology, can open horizons for experimentation on different fronts. On the side of designers, who become capable of tracing nodes of an informational network moving in space and mapping a collective spatial intelligence, but also on the side of citizens who are provided with a tool to actively engage with their everyday landscapes allowing new forms of empathy and significance of places. Using the lenses of the human and post-human body to interpret urban phenomena, this paper also aims to tackle the dichotomy between real and virtual, physical and digital, biological and machinic, proposing a dialogue between these different corporal sensibilities in an attempt to question their claimed antinomies. From this perspective, the work of the designer becomes similar to that of a choreographer, who interacts with the “life between buildings” (Gehl 2011) and works through dynamic projects that co- evolve with their actors and contexts. The concept of choreography becomes seminal, both for the renewed attention on the performative features of space in terms of body movements and for the fertile analogy with the design act capable of holding together heterogeneous and moving components.