Choreographing the city: Can dance practice inform the engineering of sustainable urban environments?

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to demonstrate that choreographic practice has the potential to offer new insights into the engineering of sustainable urban infrastructure and environments. Identifying urban mobility as an ideal starting point to discuss the potential overlaps between engineering and choreographic thinking, we briefly outline the notion of sustainability as it pertains to a key area of city engineering–urban transport. Arguing that transport is one of the most critical issues in creating socially and environmentally sustainable urbanism, we draw on studies of engineering to show how its working cultures and epistemologies prevent it from undergoing the transformation that would allow it to effectively address the issues posed by sustainable transport. The focus of the paper is what we believe to be a comprehensive survey of the few conceptual and practical experiments that have been undertaken in using choreographic techniques to explain or design the way people move in cities, in scholarship and design practice. We conclude by arguing that there is great potential to expand on these experiments as ways to address the cultural and epistemological limits within engineering, and calling for practice-based research that shows what impact this would have on its processes and outcomes.