The Smells, Sounds, and Tastes of Future Cities - How might climate change and new technology cause upheavals in our sensorial landscape?
On August 30th, 2017, SWA’s innovation lab, XL: Experiments in Landscape and Urbanism, opened an exhibition entitled Urban Sensorium: 5 Cities, 5 Senses, 5 Maps at SPUR Urban Center in San Francisco.
Through the lens of sensory experience, using touch, smell, sight, taste and sound, the project anticipates potential scenarios for five cities where our firm’s designers work in urban design, planning, and landscape architecture.
Hotter weather could change the crops that flourish in Shanghai.
The abnormal warmth Shanghai is facing threatens mustard greens and bok choy, and opens the door to more heat-tolerant crops like peppers that could drive cooks to experiment with spicier, Sichuan-leaning food.
Why did we take this approach to thinking about urban futures?
“As designers, it helped us to think toward possible constructions of the built environment and changed economies, not only the ones we know today, but those that are forming, and those we do not yet know. Infrastructure, transit, food systems, ecology, energy, economy, and climate—the things that affect the built environment—are enormous in scale, and require abstract thinking and planning for the long term in order not to be purely reactive to systemic shocks. Grounding these issues in the bodily senses, in human experience, and in particular objects, made the abstract tangible for us. In this way, we followed familiar things into multiple, unfamiliar futures and scenarios—scenarios that we have agency in shaping the direction of. Urban Sensorium is a testing ground that enables us to become more intimately “in touch” with the near future.”
References:
https://www.spur.org/exhibitions/2017-08-30/urban-sensorium
https://www.citylab.com/environment/2017/08/the-sights-smells-and-tastes-of-future-cities/537021/