The first Research Strand / action has produced significant new knowledge concerning the transformative impact of digital technologies on everyday European life (Research Objective 1). Thanks to SENSOTRA’s research, we can now offer much deeper understanding than seven years ago about the the ways in which digital media technologies affect young, city-dwelling people’s sensory relations with their more-than-human environments, the urban green. A recurrent topic in the research material is the constant and generalised use of smartphones for listening to chosen audio content in mobile situations. The young research participants’ common choice for their sensobiographic walk was in a natural site of some kind. The capacities of the media to craft sensory experiences come about through constant and co-emergent interplay between media technological devices, individual but culturally-bound bodies–minds, and environments that are simultaneously physical and sociocultural.
Research Objective 2 (Strand 2) has scrutinized the ways in which the senses constructed understandings of the environment and place for people who were youngsters in three European cities in the 1950s and early 1960s. This has been compared with the situation half a century later, in the 2000s and 2010s. Important achievements were reached in studying the new sensory atmospheres in early socialist Yugoslavia. SENSOTRA’s ethnography demonstrates how the establishment of socialist spaces solidified socialist senses. The analyses also show the ways in which consequences of urban touristification not only reconfigured the historical quarter but also profoundly influenced the perception of public space in Ljubljana. The term sensoryfication of place attempts to denote this contemporary deployment of commodity-oriented hyper-aestheticization and spectacularization.
The same phenomenon was noticed in the city of Turku as well. The heavy designing of sensory atmosphere causes a growing sense of becoming excluded from central locations in their home cities, with increasingly fewer materialities to remember with.
When it comes to the third city studied, Brighton in the United Kingdom, for some people the city creates shared feelings of attachment. Sexual and gender minorities represent a relatively big part of the city’s population. Especially those identifying as part of the LGBTQ community, Brighton’s atmosphere creates a safe, welcoming environment, which fosters many elements of meaningful place bonds. But for others, the same materialities and social elements in the city space create experiences of exclusion or unsafety. Many older participants mentioned how the cityscape used to be dull and colourless in their youth; in contrast, the city space of today was described as full of colourful, artistic and artisan centre with a strong sense of freedom of expression. Touristification comes up in all three cities, Brighton included.
SENSOTRA has produced a fair amount of new understanding through the ways in which the sensory atmospheres and their remembering become relations. A feature of sensobiographic walks is the possibility to live unexpected contacts: in our society, people from different generations, classes, ethnic origins, tend to live apart.
Research Objective 3 (Strand 3) addressed the question of the sensory agencies involved in attempts to challenge and deconstruct the commonplace understanding of sensing as a discretely individual activity, elaborating and comparing sensory tonalities and the common sensescapes of the aging and young populations. Throughout SENSOTRA’s research, we have been able to scrutinize, how moving in the city relates to the notion of understanding the urban space as a commons. Analysis shows the co-sensed “shapes” of the cities that give their particular character. In all three cities studied there were value-laden conflicts on the “proper” uses of public space.
