Presenting the Atlas “Sensing Zones - Uncovering invisible power structures in the city“ produced by last semester's Urban Design Project 1 students:

"Sensing Zones brings together two notions that are both everyday and contested. Sensing is an ambiguous concept that refers at once to bodily perception, to technological sensing devices, and to the cultural practice of making sense of the world. It is about perceiving, feeling, and measuring, but also about interpreting and valuing across different scales and situations. What we sense, and what we do not, is shaped by prior knowledge, social position, given narratives and shared imaginaries. Different histories, bodies and sensors thus produce different interpretations of the same place. Zones, in turn, can be understood as spatial, digital and social order that structure how the city is organised and experienced. In urban planning, zoning appears as a technical practice: an instrument and strategy that provides spatial structure by distinguishing, for example, between residential, commercial and industrial zones. These functional zones serve as governance tools that manage growth, density and use through regulation. At the same time, they operate within wider regimes of capitalism through property and privatisations, determining where value is concentrated, where investment flows, and who can access which parts of the city.

Sensing zones, then, is both an analytical and a political project. It asks how we can read, feel and map the city in ways that do not reduce it to only abstract land-use categories or functional diagrams. Instead, it calls for an attention to the textures and atmospheres of urban life, to the ways in which neoliberal governance or resistance movements, media narratives and residential communities are manifested and materialised in the streets and buildings. "

Thank you to Helmut Voelter for the great support on bookmaking!