Choreographing the City

We need radical approaches to engineering that challenge our assumptions of what can be achieved. Dance can potentially provide us with some answers

About the project

The world is at an important moment in engineering history. Catastrophic climate change creating increasingly extreme weather events as well as rapid urbanisation and globalisation is straining our city infrastructures. Our cities are beginning to buckle under the pressure of growing demand. On top of this we need our cities to provide fulfilling social and cultural experiences, a sense of community, connection and wellbeing.

While the world is looking to engineers for solutions, traditional engineering is unlikely to deliver the required level of change. We need radical approaches to engineering that challenge our assumptions of what can be achieved.

Photograph: Dr Cosgrave with Scatter, The Place’s adult dance company (photograph by Hayley Madden).

Dance can potentially provide us with some answers. Choreography and engineering design are both creative processes that are taught formally, developed through practice and experience, have known outputs, physical and economic constraints and desired social outcomes. Both practices deal with curating space, form, flow and personal experience. Yet we can see obvious differences in how choreographers and engineers approach design.

Through a series of interviews and workshops this project seeks to explore what choreographers can teach engineers and urban planners about how to curate and design sustainable urban environments and how this learning can influence the way our cities function.