Performative Urbanism: Mapping Embodied Vision

In this chapter, we start from learning-experiments conducted in the course Performative Urbanism to ask: How can we use a critical spatial practice to address the conditions of neoliberal performance that determines how we think of possibilities to inhabit, use and construct spaces? The explorations of this question weave through the affective and material turn in arts and humanities and performative urban theory, as we explore how the city co-constructs learning situations. We are particularly interested in how learning takes place through performativ and situated knowledges, exploring performative mapping as such an embodied form of research and learning. In the article, we propose that performative mappings and situated knowledges can be grafted into institutions – both the institution of academic disciplines and the disciplines of urban planning – in order to “teach ourselves to think, to practice, to relate, and to know in new ways. Hence, the article will explore performative engagements with the city investigating practices actions that relate to other ways of performing - and potentially designing - the city, and to other ways of performing academic knowledge.