Effective Methodologies to Study Affects: New Tools for Engaging With Socio-Spatial Relations

Abstract

Present day cities are highly diverse and include ongoing socio-spatial transformations. Attending to recent calls made within urban planning literature to draw on relational, nonrepresentational approaches to better attend to current cities dynamics, this paper suggests three adapted qualitative methods to the study of socio-spatial relations. The paper draws on three empirical case studies of diverse urban settings (the international airport and high-rise residential complexes) in which traditional qualitative methods were adjusted to attune to ‘affects’ in socio-spatial research: sense-oriented observations; experiential walking tours; and in-depth in situ interviews. The paper discusses the benefits and disadvantages of each of these methods and reconsiders the knowledge that can be derived from socio-spatial studies in urban planning for better urban futures. The paper advances the development of a solid nonrepresentational framework in urban planning to derive nuanced understandings of diverse urban experiences in rapidly changing cities, and planning which is more attentive to multiplicities, transformations, and complexities. For nonrepresentational scholars, the paper contributes to the search of affective methodologies empirical examples utilizing qualitative methods which were adjusted to include affective experiences in diverse urban settings.

Introduction

Our bodies’ capacities to relate to other bodies in a particular space and time produce different experiences of and connections to our surroundings. The evasive rhythm of bodies, space, and time that cannot be fully articulated but enables one to feel as if one knows a certain urban setting is the main interest of ‘nonrepresentational’ scholarship. As opposed to common representational accounts addressed by academic studies, nonrepresentational studies emphasize precognitive capacities, practices, and embodied experiences or affect as a significant background to our representational world.

In present-day cities, reconsiderations of socio-spatial relations and urban experience seem to be particularly relevant. Today’s cities are integrating two processes, which at times seem almost in conflict: diversity and abstraction. That is, today’s cities encapsulate generic and standardized global places (e.g., airport cities, convention centers, banks, and train stations) (Lecomte, 2013), growing verticality that includes large-scale urban planning directed towards volumetric cities (e.g., increased developments of high-rise complexes) (Drozdz et al., 2018), and growing dependence on technology for planning and policymaking (Rose, 2017), while with the increased mobility and immigration of people all around the world, present-day cities are also very diverse (Sandercock, 2000; 2004). These dynamic characteristics of present-day cities invite us to reconsider the tools and methods with which we can discern contemporary socio-spatial relations, and recent planning literature questions the methods and tools used to studying socio-spatial relations, cities, and urban planning today (Brenner et al., 2011; Buser, 2014; Kurath et al., 2018; Rydin & Tate, 2016; Sachs Olsen & Juhlin, 2021; Shilon & Kallus, 2018).

In particular, traditional representational approaches focus on the making of meaning through discourse and ideology, often producing a fixed place identity and dogmatic thinking, which is reflected in planning practice and policymaking (Buser, 2014). On the contrary, relational thinking incorporates a flat ontology which is directed towards the associations between nature and culture, different bodies (i.e., humans and more-than-humans), and ongoing dynamics and transformations (see e.g., Gad & Bruun Jensen, 2010; Rose et al., 2021; Simpson, 2021). Within the broad relational framework, nonrepresentational approaches offer new thinking tools and methods for tracing dynamic socio-spatial experiences through “manifold of actions and interactions” (Harrison & Anderson, 2012, p. 2).

Although nonrepresentational theories originate in the field of human geography (see Thrift, 2008), interdisciplinary researchers who study socio-spatial relations have recently shown a growing interest in nonrepresentational engagements of people and places by addressing practices instead of representing what people think, reflect on, and perceive. Within the nonrepresentational scholarship, the capacities of bodies to affect and be affected have become a main interest with which to address dynamic relations and processes (Harrison & Anderson, 2012; Massumi, 2021). However, affect is slippery, elusive and open to different readings; due to the interdependencies between bodies’ affective capacities, affect is something that can potentially happen, but it does not have to (Anderson, 2014).

Although calls to draw on relational thought in urban planning (Shilon & Kallus, 2018) and particularly on nonrepresentational approaches (Buser, 2014; Marotta & Cummings, 2019; Shilon & Eizenberg, 2021) can be found in planning literature, the ‘affective turn’, as it has come to be called (Clough, 2008), has yet to gain full attention in urban planning. Moreover, the burgeoning number of planning scholars who draw on affect-based approaches in their studies often do not focus on one of the most pressing inquiries explored in the field of nonrepresentational theories: the methodologies and methods with which researchers can better understand and scrutinize affects. Accordingly, this paper addresses the question of how can we trace and study affects and affective atmospheres in socio-spatial encounters?

This paper adheres to the relevance of nonrepresentational research for the study of socio-spatial relations. The present work demonstrates methods that when applied in planning research address the affective experience of urban environments, providing more nuanced, nonrepresentational understandings of people-place relations. In particular, the paper draws on three affect-based methods applied in three empirical socio-spatial studies: first, a study of the experiences and assembly of moving passengers and flows to and within Ben Gurion International Airport (NATBAG); second, a study on the associations between humans and more-than-humans shaping NATBAG’S expansion planning project, called the ‘NATBAG 2000 Project’; and third, a study of new residential experiences with high-rise projects in two medium-sized cities in Israel. These studies are based on experiential explorations I have conducted over the last 8 years in which epistemological questions regarding knowledge production in planning research were the focus. With these queries in mind, means to attend to affects in socio-spatial studies were often developed and refined as the research progressed. In what follows, methodologies; methods; vocabularies; and relations between researchers, events, data, and informants for the study of affects and affective atmospheres in the urban arena are considered.

The paper contributes adjusted methods directed to derive a more nuanced understanding of the urban environment and the complex and dynamic ways people understand it and engage and act within it to suggest a new outlook about multiplicities, transformations, and complexities which highly characterize present-day cities. For urban planners the research suggests novel way to reconsider socio-spatial encounters for better urban futures. The work advances affect-based studies not only by making them more accessible to socio-spatial scholars but also by pointing to innovative insights that could be drawn from nonrepresentational approaches. That is, the article shows how drawing upon the nonrepresentational framework in urban planning can advance more just, inclusive, and flexible urban planning that meets multiple needs on the ground. In terms of the nonrepresentational scholarship, the paper contributes empirical case studies utilizing different methods which were adjusted to include affective experiences in studies conducted in different urban settings. With these initial explorations, I hope socio-spatial scholars and practitioners will embrace nonrepresentational approaches and affect-based studies to further develop a solid framework for research and practice.

The paper is structured as follows. The first section discusses the significance of relational and nonrepresentational studies for urban planning. The second section addresses pressing methodological queries that occupy nonrepresentational scholars. The discussion provides three methodological explorations of affect-based methods performed in urban planning. The conclusions made draw on these explorations to offer inputs and insights for future engagements between urban research and nonrepresentational approaches.

Relational Thinking, Nonrepresentational Theories, and Urban Planning

Amidst global urbanization processes, the digitalization of cities, and growing diversity in cities, a substantive quest for tools, vocabularies, theories and explanations for transformations in the urban arena occupy contemporary urban scholars. Particularly in the discipline of urban planning, recent discussions explore concepts, methods, and thinking tools, which can accommodate uncertainties, transformations, and dynamic relations, for use in planning research and practice (see, e.g., Brenner et al., 2011; Buser, 2014; Kurath et al., 2018; McFarlane, 2011; Purcell, 2013; Rydin & Tate, 2016; Sachs Olsen & Juhlin, 2021; Shilon & Kallus, 2018). A disciplinary shift in this regard has been made by notable planning scholars such as Robert Beauregrad, Jean Hillier, Jonathan Metzger, and Yvonne Rydin in calling to draw on relational approaches (e.g., actor network theory and assemblage thinking). That is, approaches that draw on a relational ontology (Rose et al., 2021) to trace the ongoing engagements and associations between humans and more-than-humans in planning processes and to accommodate transformations without pre-determining or assigning roles to the actors producing socio-spatial realities (Gad & Bruun Jensen, 2010; Rose et al., 2021; Simpson, 2021). Although this relational framework of urban planning is relatively new, even more recent scholarship suggests drawing particularly on the relational nonrepresentational theories to study present-day urban planning (Buser, 2014; Marotta & Cummings, 2019; Shilon & Eizenberg, 2021).

In taking representations as an integral part of the world but a not primer to it, nonrepresentational theories attempt to follow the here and now, i.e., the practices, performativities or doing of things (Hillier, 2008). These practices can involve interactions, habits, senses, affects, skills, know-hows, intersubjectivities, intensities, urges, moods, abilities and dispositions that imply that every type of action is, in fact, an interaction (Harrison & Anderson, 2012; Lorimer, 2005; Schatzki, 2001; Thrift, 2008). Although nonrepresentational theories are understood in multiple ways and entail new and often controversial concepts and vocabularies, they are considered to be “the most notable intellectual force behind the turn away from cognition, symbolic meaning, and textuality” (Vannini, 2015, p. xx).

Studies of affects and affective atmospheres have become prevalent within the nonrepresentational framework as they enable to scrutinize our bodies’ relational capacities to dynamically affect and be affected by other bodies, in endless processes of becoming. However, affect is not one thing, it is a concept used to describe a wide array of phenomena ranging from emotions and moods to visceral responses of the body (see, e.g., Anderson, 2014; Duffy et al., 2016; and McCormack, 2008), and scholars from different disciplines understand it differently (Anderson, 2014).

Going back to early writings about affect by Spinoza, in philosophy Massumi (2021) refers to affect as a form of intensity that is embodied by automatic responses resulting from the connection between our bodies and other things (e.g., shivering in response to very cold air), or as a less immediate form of the connectivity of our bodies to their surroundings which also invites automatic responses (e.g., seeing a large needle and responding with an increased heart rate), but this time it mostly relates to content and our interpretations of it. Similarly, Vannini (2015), argues that affect is “a pull and a push, an intensity of feeling, a sensation, a passion, an atmosphere, an urge, a mood, a drive—all of the above and none of the above in particular” (p. 8–9). This paper, as well, adheres to the idea that it is impossible and even redundant to treat sensory registers and more personal interpretations and expressions (or nonrepresentational and representational accounts) as separate in an empirical investigation. Accordingly, it discusses methods’ attunements that can assist us in tracing affects in their multiple forms, rather than as either emotions or sensory registers.

While atmospheres are long known to be shared feelings of humans in regard with a certain place (Ash & Simpson, 2019), to examine the shared background (or affective) conditions for people’s representational actions, scholars address affective atmospheres: collective backgrounds that shape engagements of (human and non-human) bodies with space. These backgrounds include the transmission of affect between people (Adey et al., 2013). Bissell (2010) urges us to think of affective atmospheres “…as a propensity: a pull or a charge that might emerge in a particular space which might (or might not) generate particular events and actions, feelings and emotions” (p. 273). Affective atmospheres are the certain feelings we share with others without being necessarily able to pinpoint what causes us to feel the same way. These atmospheres can illuminate the conditions shaping the cognitive and conscious production of meaning in socio-spatial interactions and formations (see, e.g., Anderson & Ash, 2015; Bissell, 2010; Fregonese, 2017; Sumartojo & Pink, 2018). Therefore, affective atmospheres seem to be useful in tracing multiple forms of different affective engagements such as feelings, emotions, and sensory experiences (see also Anderson, 2009).

In urban planning, studying affect and affective atmospheres enables us to explore the diverse nonrepresentational ways in which people experience the urban environment. Such exploration can be achieved by tracing the affective relations, somatic experiences and connectivity between different bodies, which often produce a shared atmosphere in different settings (e.g., a city center, building complex, neighborhood or park), as well as various perceptions of it (Thibaud, 2011). Buser (2014) argues that while urban planners attempt to describe and understand more-than-representational accounts of space and place (e.g., when referring to the certain ambiance of a place), they often do so with conceptualizations that produce a fixed sense of place. Rather than providing a dynamic sense of place, multiple socio-spatial relations, and processes of places’ becomings, these common fixed conceptualizations are expressed in policies and regulations attempting to transform/enhance a taken-for-granted place identity.

The Search for Methods for Studying Affects

Vannini (2015) argues that nonrepresentational theories are particularly useful for the study of the dynamic development of occasions and affairs and their complex settings; the study of human and more-than-human relations and associations; the study of practices as what is happening instead of what is already present; the study of embodied affects as precognitive bodies’ capacities; and the study of the background for our perceptions, thoughts, and interpretations (see also Harrison & Anderson, 2012; Simpson, 2021). However, these objectives of nonrepresentational theories raise questions surrounding how one can explore occasions, associations, practices, and precognitive capacities in empirical research.

The obstacle of attending to present precognitive affective registers rather than articulated expressions alone is apparent and has recently become widely acknowledged within nonrepresentational studies (see, e.g., Adey et al., 2013; Anderson & Ash, 2015; McCormack, 2017; Simpson, 2011; 2021; Vannini, 2015), posing quite a challenge in the scrutiny of affects in research and practice and in the communication of affect-based studies. While I do not attempt to attend to affects as precognitive capacities only but in their multiple forms (to include sensory registers and more personal interpretations), this challenge remains very much apparent.

Scholars who deal with the epistemological and methodological challenges of affect-based research offer different answers. While Merriman and Pearce (2019) argues that rather than new methods, drawing on common, traditional methods can be useful in studying socio-spatial phenomena, and Asker (2022) critically reflects on the mobilization of mindfulness for nonrepresentational and affect-based studies, other scholars embrace the search for novel or adapted tools to conduct nonrepresentational research. Anderson (2014) suggests rethinking vocabularies used to conduct affect-based studies, Lorimer (2010) offers that the visual methodology of moving images is highly pertinent to nonrepresentational studies, Simpson (2011a) claims that video recording is useful for the study of practices, and Latham and McCormack (2009) denote the potential to work with images in nonrepresentational fieldwork. In a broader sense of research, Dewsbury (2010) argues that (affect-based) research should be performative by questioning our methods and tools, methodologies, and analyses and most importantly getting to know, attending to and experiencing the dynamic becomings of a phenomenon with our multiple bodies’ capacities while acknowledging the challenges this performative research invites and the gaps in knowledge we fail to address.

The crisis of representation and the rise of nonrepresentational approaches also raises the need to give attention to the different ways for researchers to disseminate and communicate nonrepresentational studies. Vannini (2015) suggests that “the non-representational answer to the crisis of representation lies in a variety of research styles and techniques that do not concern themselves so much with representing lifeworlds as with issuing forth novel reverberations” (p. 12) and that instead of focusing on the past and the different ways to represent it in academic studies, nonrepresentational research is occupied with the question of what is happening now and what might happen in the future. Nonrepresentational research is characterized by “a greater focus on events, reflexivity, affective states, the unsaid, and the incompleteness and openness of everyday performances” (Vannini, 2015, pp. 14–15). Simpson (2021) also emphasizes the framing of research – the research question, approach, and dissemination. These become leading tools in the ways we configurate socio-spatial phenomena. I follow Vannini and Simpson and suggest that researchers will pay greater attention to the ways in which they frame their research and its results, to what was not clearly stated, to shared experiences and the affects, feelings, and emotions they elevate on-the-ground, and that the efforts of communicating research will be directed towards addressing differences, processes, relations, and becomings without necessarily providing fixed explanations to socio-spatial realities. Providing this flexibility enables diverse communities, stakeholders, officials, and actors to better relate to research findings and results.

With some accounts arguing for the benefits of drawing on mixed methods (Bannan et al., 2022; Fielding, 2012; Knigge & Cope, 2006), in urban planning common methodology is mostly divided between common quantitative or qualitative methods and tools. Such methods include surveys and descriptive statistics; experiments; different mapping, modeling and visualization approaches (e.g., using GIS); evaluation research (e.g., post occupancy evaluation); content analysis; interviews; participant observation; ethnography; focus groups; and action research (AR) or participatory action research (PAR) (see also Du Toit et al., 2017; Ewing & Park, 2020; Horelli, 2002). These methods often relate to representational accounts of socio-spatial relations, as they seem to disregard important blind spots such as the background of representational acts, more nuanced bodily experiences, and the affective relations and associations between bodies and the urban environment. Referring to the discipline of geography, Lees (2001) argues that “…in their focus on the symbolic meaning of landscape as sign or as text, geographers have had relatively little to say about the practical and affective, or what Nigel Thrift calls the ‘nonrepresentational’ import of architecture” (p. 53). Since Lees first identified this important gap, significant developments in the field of human geography have taken place. In urban planning, the recent work of Sachs Olsen and Juhlin’s (2021) calls for new methods, sensitive to sensory and affective experiences, that can better attend to futuristic aspects of urban planning. However, and although the significance of the senses to the experience of the urban environment was already acknowledged in the literature in the 1990s (See Sennett, 1994), urban planning still lags behind with little to say about nonrepresentational theories in general and about methods for exploring the nonrepresentational in particular (Buser, 2014). It is suggested that rather than abandoning traditional methods, common qualitative methods can be adjusted to better correspond to and engage with multiple, nuanced, affective, representational and nonrepresentational socio-spatial encounters.

The following discussion offers three explorations that illustrate the intertwined progress of methods, concepts and studies of affective relations and associations in planning taking place in different urban settings: a study of an international airport and its surroundings and a study of high-rise residential projects. In each of these studies, different methods were utilized. The methods employed mostly progressed with the study as I sought ways to engage with data, informants and the urban setting and to trace the affective experiences and backgrounds of representational accounts that more easily surfaced. The following section describes this progress and the methods adjusted and practiced with informants and data while considering their advantages and disadvantages for affect-based planning research and practice.

Explorations of Methods to Study Affects in Different Urban Settings

Sense-oriented Observations

In focusing on the experiences of passengers and their on-the-move assembly in emerging ‘global places’ ¹ in cities such as airports, train stations, convention centers, and shopping malls, from 2010–2011, I conducted an empirical study analyzing flows to and within NATBAG. The research traces the dimensions that shape the experiences of people who occupy a global place – the airport. First, different institutions (e.g., security, airlines, and the duty-free stores) apply different and often conflicting logics that monitor and manage the movement of passengers and, accordingly, the ways they experience the airport. Second, passengers have different capacities or ‘mobility capital’ (Shilon & Shamir, 2016) that define their experiences in the airport as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Finally, objects (e.g., tickets, passports, and baggage), practices and particularly the procedures surrounding them may significantly shape the experiences of people in global places such as airports. By tracing the components that shape the flows in airports, the research provides an in-depth understanding of the different ways planning shapes the experiences of people and atmospheres produced in global places.

However, to understand the different spaces of an airport and its surroundings and the flows, uses and experiences of different passengers in different locations, I drew on the qualitative methods of observation and semi-structured interviews. However, since conducting participant observations (Zeisel, 1981) in the numerous areas of an airport and its surroundings is impractical, in the first stage of the research, I sought ways to adapt the common method of participant observation to an airport’s complex settings. Particularly, I was looking for ways to sense and somatically experience the airport and its flow. In opposition to the traditional method of participant observations in which the researcher is expected to be immersed in social processes of specific settings through connections, relationships, and participation in these settings with their bodies and minds (Emerson et al., 2001), I applied ‘narrowed down’ observations with which I only followed a specific facet that produces a sensory experience of the airport. I call these observations ‘sense-oriented observations’. These observations focus on a specific sense while moving to and through an airport. In focusing on sight, for example, I made observations by only following signage to find my way to the airport from the Tel Aviv train station to the airport check-in counters. By focusing on hearing, I strictly listened to recorded announcements to orient in space and flow within it. Other observations involved mapping the endless uniforms found in the airport and shadowing workers, passengers, security officers or visitors.

Sense-oriented observations offer several advantages for studying affective relations between bodies and space: they enable us to focus on particular ways to experience an atmosphere, connect our moving bodies to space, and affectively engage with space’s varying settings as experienced by different people with different bodily capacities. For example, recorded informative announcements made in the airport and train traveling from it are usually given in Hebrew and English in a repetitive and monotonous fashion. Regardless of whether one understands the local spoken language or the content of the announcements, they produce a certain feeling of detachment from space: rather than as a local airport in a foreign country, one can experience the airport as a familiar and well-known ‘global place’. This affective experience might be articulated as such: this is just another airport like the airport I just arrived from back home. That is, the atmosphere produced by the announcements elevates a detachment from space while simultaneously producing a sense of familiarity and security or a gut feeling of knowing a place although it is new to us. For urban planning, these relations can contribute an important facet of the different ways people engage with their environments and of the various feelings and moods these engagements can produce.

These announcements also produce an embodied experience: people who travel must orient and coordinate their bodies with other bodies in space to successfully (or not) begin their journeys and become passengers (Shilon & Shamir, 2016). As I learned from conducting interviews in the second stage of the research, those who succeed in coordinating their bodies are also those who have more positive experiences with the airport, experiencing it as an inviting place. These passengers note experiencing the airport as convenient, as if they were at home. In ‘global places’, which are currently commonly used by city dwellers, the engagements between sounds and bodies are reflected in the flow being more or less effective and efficient but also pleasant and convenient. With the mushrooming of ‘global places’, it is important to study the experiences these places create and can potentially create for their users to better plan them.

Another example relates to the affective experience produced by the associations between people and signs in ‘global places’, which is expressed by people’s different capacities to move through these places. In the airport, people encounter coded signs and textual complexities such as “est” instead of “estimated” and flight codes (e.g., vs454) and different graphics (see, e.g., Figure 1: Signs in the Airport) that are not always deciphered successfully. Moreover, being able to move through the airport requires, first and foremost, a certain capacity to communicate with these signs or a bodily capacity to locate, discern and clearly see them. This affective experience brings about in differential flow of passengers in practice, some of whom move more efficiently and encounter no barriers, while others experience the flow in the airport as full of “bad passages” (Moser & Law, 1999). While as planners we might assign differential flows in ‘global places’ to fixed categories such as those of ethnicity, gender, and age, it seems that more immediate engagements of people and space and their bodily capacities produced by their body’s memories or their ‘mobility capital’ (Shilon & Shamir, 2016) are integral to the differential flows found in different urban settings.

Figure 1.

Signs in the Airport. ²

While sense-oriented observations enable us to trace nuances of space and its atmospheres, affordances, and used settings, there are also limitations to this method. First, in being conducted by a researcher rather than a passenger, the sense-oriented observation method requires the use of complementary methods to share the researcher’s experiences and affective atmospheres in situ. Therefore, in collecting signage observations, I first individually followed signs in the train station and airport, taking notes and pictures, while later on, I stood next to the entrance to the Departures Hall for several hours, watching people orient through space and its different passages and directly discussing this experience with them. That is, alongside the method of sense-oriented observation, complementary methods were used to enable the sharing of my experience with the informants in practice.

Second, conducting observations that focus on bodily experiences with one body only (the researcher’s body) incorporates a particular body’s memory, abilities and disabilities, skills, practices, and competencies that engage with the research settings, and therefore generate a specific somatic experience. In particular, being present in the airport every week for more than 8 months produced a unique affective experience that manifested into my body’s connection and communication with the studied settings over time. Therefore, to refine the shared experience of different people in the airport, additional methods focused on the senses were used. I shadowed people who navigated the airport by following the airport’s signage system, interviewed passengers about their specific experiences with recorded messages and the signage system, and even inquired about the different roles assigned to airport workers according to their visual appearance (i.e., uniform).

The sense-oriented observation method enables us to examine the complexities and dynamic constitutions of space in practice and how bodies engage with and move through space. In my case study of NATBAG, I traced different interactions and associations between humans and more-than-humans, the bodily capacities of different people that enable movement in space, and the atmospheres these associations and capacities produced. While sense-oriented observations are directed towards a defined target (e.g., oriented by sight or hearing), this method reveals broad engagements of people and space and creates an opportunity to examine the multiple constitutions of space and its uses, possible performativities, the experiences of different bodies in different places, and the atmospheres produced in these places.

In-depth In Situ Interviews

Conducted from 2013–2016, the study of the ‘NATBAG 2000 Project’ reconsidered urban planning conceptualizations through a case study of a complex urban setting: an international airport. Following the interrelations and coordination of multiple planning bodies, official authorities and institutions, and drawing on relational theories, particularly on actor-network theory and nonrepresentational theory principles, the study scrutinizes the interrelationships between humans and more-than-humans participating in the NATBAG 2000 planning process, and performativities and practices that have constituted the planning process on the ground. Particularly, the study follows the enactments and performativity of a noise level formula mentioned repeatedly as a major actor shaping the planning process by the interviewees.

While planning studies often criticize urban planning as a prefigured entity building on modern dichotomies (e.g., global/local, planners/opponents, and humans/nonhumans), the study utilizes a nonhierarchical perspective that traces planning in the making generated through the relations between humans and technologies, instruments and devices, and planners and opponents (Shilon & Kallus, 2018). The conclusions of the study are threefold. First, fixed dichotomies commonly used as categories with which to analyze planning processes should be addressed in relational terms and described as shaping and being shaped by processes of planning in the making. Second, planning knowledge production should be examined as a multilevel process that is more than contextual. Finally, affective relations are an important facet to address when examining people’s engagements with the process of planning and their resulting actions (e.g., social struggles).

To collect data on different forms of relations between people and aircraft noise and to particularly trace affective relations and atmospheres, I adjusted the traditional method of in-depth interviews with which I began the study to enable me as a researcher to experience moving aircraft and the affective atmospheres they create with the interviewees. I wanted to attend to, attune, and get to know the aircraft sounds and to share experiences with noise nuisance. I strived to be present with informants in the urban places that were mentioned by activists in protocols, hearings, and plans as Aircraft Noise Areas: areas acknowledged (to different levels) by humans and more-than-humans such as noise monitors, activists, officials, and noise level maps as noise polluted. Therefore, in opposition to a principle of in-depth interviews stating that informants should have a relative advantage in selecting the interview’s location (see Herzog, 2005), and to a principle stating that due to obvious technical reasons interviews should be conducted in a quiet and enabling settings, I specifically decided to conduct the interviews in noise-polluted urban settings. These settings included activists’ homes, workplaces at the airport, and restaurants and cafés located in the Airport City. As a result, while conducting the interviews, aircraft noise often disturbed the conversation, forcing both myself and the informant to attend to it. While the immediate response for both was to keep silent, often later on this pause invited shared contemplation about how it felt to hear these sounds with no notice during the interview and in general.

Several advantages stemmed from the in-depth in situ interviews. First, the experience of aircraft sounds not only generated an affective atmosphere shared by myself and the interviewees and discussions of the different sensations this atmosphere invited and of the feelings and emotions it elevated, but interviewees also expressed a sense of relief as a result of having me present and experiencing these sounds with them. The research data confirms that informants have often made major efforts to describe these sounds, their sensations, and the feelings and emotions they produce to others to argue for noise abatements or compensations in their struggles against the airport’s planning. However, it seems that having an urban planner hearing about the aircraft noise and attending to its effects in real time render the noise, and most importantly, the nuisance, more tangible, focused, and real: the informants mentioned how they could not sleep at night, and I could not interview them because of the noise. Accordingly, these shared experiences can temper power relations between the interviewer and informants (Anderson, 2004), as well as between planners and opponents when utilized in a planning process. This is due to the attempt to fully attend to what people describe by experiencing it with them in situ, which can ultimately bring to better planning with people. However, this is not to suggest that power dynamics in planning processes are dismissed by sharing several experiences with informants. Experiencing aircraft noise while interviewing residents might interrupt the flow of conversation and the recordings for academic research, but this is not akin to share long-term or daily experiences of living with aircraft noise. That could be part of the reason that on my end, I kept on finding myself struggling with the question of whether the aircraft noise was as ‘bad’ as described by the informants. If necessary, would my experience be impossible to bear over the long run? What was causing the nuisance? Although I needed to be very cautious to not be judgmental, these reflections were extremely advantageous, as they forced me, as a researcher, to fully attend to and be with the data on different levels.

Second, this method is extremely useful when what is at stake is very specific and context dependent: I was looking for ways to attend to a dynamic phenomenon that takes place in the different locations informants inhabit (offices, homes, or playgrounds) at different times (every several minutes or hours) and to different extents (quieter or louder). In-depth in situ interviews cater to these needs, as they enable us to trace unbounded and relatively abstract urban phenomena. In the NATBAG case, aircraft noise was heard in the airport’s surroundings as well as in very distant urban settings. This expanded tracing of people-sound affective relations derived important insights regarding noise and the atmospheres it produces in different urban settings.

While in urban planning noise is often perceived as a negative phenomenon that negatively influences quality of life (see, e.g., May & Hill, 2006; Suau-Sanchez et al., 2011), the research conclusions demonstrate that aircraft sounds are dynamic and relational and that they can at times positively impact the experience of urban areas at different scales. An example is found in the case of a relatively small and unknown community in NATBAG’s surroundings called Tzafria. Being located so close to the aircraft runway, Tzafria has become quite popular and a known place to visit for people who wish to closely experience moving aircraft and engage with the exciting atmosphere of being nearly right beneath a landing aircraft. ³

While this method failed to meet some methodological requirements of the more traditional in-depth interviews (e.g., when the interview’s flow was interrupted time and again due to aircraft noise, making it difficult at times to return to the flow of conversation or to the atmosphere of the interview sensed before noise interruption), it was very useful in tracing the affective relations between aircraft noise and people and between planning processes and social struggles. Moreover, interruptions in the flow of conversation that took the discussion in a completely different direction were the result of our bodies’ responses to the noise, which was in fact a desired outcome. Although these transformations seemed to imbalance the course of the interviews and their discussed topics, objectives, and queries, practically taking control over the interview protocol out of my hands, they were most welcome, as they not only elevated in situ dynamic shared experiences and sensations but also tempered power relations due to this ‘out of control’ situation.

In-depth in situ interviews provide insights regarding what makes people differently connect to urban settings and to planning processes. The NATBAG study provides a relational understanding of different urban settings and the features that cause people to feel good or bad within them – such as aircraft noise in the case of Tzafria or in south Tel Aviv in which different residents differently experience and relate to aircraft noise. That is, when drawing on a relational perspective to address socio-spatial relations, urban planning can be more attentive to diversity, complexities, and ongoing transformations on the ground. The Tzafria example also demonstrates that attending to affective relations and urban atmospheres in planning can produce more relational planning that minds urban settings as they transform and change on the ground.

Finally, because conducting an affect-based study also requires reconsidering (nonrepresentational) ways to communicate findings, during research presentations, I commence with visual or audio illustrations that actively involve the audience through somatic experiences with the socio-spatial phenomenon or spatial environment in question. For instance, to explicate the affective experiences of sounds, I frequently incorporate an extended audio recording of a departing aircraft at the start of a lecture. Similarly, for sense-oriented observations, I display images of airport signage (e.g., Figure 1: Signs in the Airport) as a visual aid. In-depth in situ interviews address cases in which methods for studying affects are adapted to engage directly with specific affective registers identified in early stages of research. In the following case, I attend to affects without a preconception or direct attempt to follow a particular sense/somatic experience but a general experience of a place. Only in later stages of the research were these attempts redefined to meet particular affective registers.

Experiential Walking Tours in High-rise Residential Projects

Springgay and Truman (2017) argue that “As we walk we are ‘in’ the world, integrating body and space coextensively” (p. 30). The walking tour is a method commonly used to produce knowledge on people’s understandings and perceptions of the places they inhabit while on the move (Anderson, 2004; Evans & Jones, 2011). However, rather than being a representational act only, the practice of walking offers a broader multisensory experience (Evans & Jones, 2011), pace and rhythm (Middleton, 2009). Walking through space is associated with the embodied experience of the texture of space and the body’s responsiveness to it, relational-social perceptions of space and its dynamics, and the affective experience of space (Springgay & Truman, 2017). Walking through space is sensed through our whole body – our knees, heels, toes, hips, joints, eyes, ears, and mind. When shared between the researcher and interviewee, walking can produce important knowledge regarding the experience of a particular place. Moreover, this shared experience produces places in practice (Pink, 2008).

As part of a study of new residential experiences in cities, we focus on what experiences of verticality and technology in the city, particularly in high-rise projects, entail for residents. Particularly, we trace the ‘background’ that shapes daily living in cities, possible encounters between different bodies, and the social acts they invite. This is done to unpack socio-spatial relations in contemporary urban forms and to suggest a conceptual framework from which to identify the dynamic relations between urban experience, and form and function of the built environment. To gain knowledge about how people experience and understand their living environments in practice, experiential walking tours were conducted in two medium-sized cities located in the center of Israel: Petach Tikva and Natanya. Interviews were conducted with residents of high-rise projects built in these cities between 1998 and 2016. In analyzing these interviews, affective and sensory experiences shared by the interviewers and interviewees quickly surfaced.

Drawing on three moments of affective residential experience, the research delivers innovative knowledge regarding different performances of present-day urban developments and the needs of their users (Shilon & Eizenberg, 2021). The study offers concepts and vocabularies from which planning research and practice can evaluate recent urban developments that generate technological-vertical living in present-day cities and derive a more nuanced understanding of the experiences of diverse city residents.

Experiential walking tours conducted for this study were open-ended: rather than predefining the routes, informants were asked to take the interviewers to places considered significant in their living environments and thus walking through these places constituted the course of the walks. With this emphasis on open-ended routes, alluring atmospheres in high-rise buildings and their surroundings dynamically emerged in practice, engaging the researcher, interviewer and environment in practice. The elevated associations between views, sounds, and space affordances provided a supplementary perspective of residents’ experiences of high rises.

For example, although wind sounds were not referred to by informants as an integral part of what shapes their vertical living, the interviewers commented on how the whistling (or howling) wind would inhibit the proper transcription of the interviews: “Impossible to transcribe due to wind sounds – minutes 20:37-21:20”. While wind sounds were not addressed in representational terms when informants discussed their living environments with the interviewers, the experiences of the interviewers unintentionally reveal an affective register of vertical living. In following this lead and attending to sounds while walking through high rises with the informants, we learned that rather than the sound of children playing, the sound of an incoming WhatsApp message at certain times precipitated certain automatic actions and reactions such as getting organized to go down to play in the playground. Moreover, we found that residents living in high rises who wish to socialize are highly dependent of technology which in turn facilitates vibrant communication and interactions between residents.

Moreover, in attending to sounds while walking through high rises with the informants, we found that various vertical sounds (e.g., waste disposed of in a garbage chute) have more intense affective relations with certain residents’ bodies than others. These affective registers produced negative experiences for some of the residents (mostly those living on the lower floors) and, as a result, the need for new practices to be adopted and regulated in each high-rise building (e.g., agreed upon times for disposing of waste into the chute). These practices are determined by the specific affective register of sound as experienced by certain residents’ bodies in a certain time and place, and they require dynamic organization, coordination, and planning of daily life by residents. The affective capacities of vertical sounds require that common practices such as waste disposal are coordinated between residents to meet the different needs of the myriad people residing in the high-rise building.

Finally, walking through a high-rise building and its apartments provided important insights into the practice of viewing, suggesting that a sense of privacy is derived not only from the number of apartment units in a building, complex, or neighborhood but also by the view seen from different stories of high-rise buildings and the atmospheres they elevate. While we would often anticipate an open view to invite positive feelings and the desires of residents, experiential walking tours demonstrate that seeing other buildings from one’s window produces a positive experience and feelings of security and stability. Touring high rise complexes residents referred to open views as uncomfortable to watch. Residents reflected that they understand empty landscapes in a high-rise complex in a highly dense city to be filled with buildings in the future. Rather than open landscapes which are often perceived by planners as desired landscapes, the view of buildings was found to be highly associated with the needs and desires of residents in present-day vertical-technological city (Shilon & Eizenberg, 2021).

The experiential walking tour method offers several advantages for engaging with affects in socio-spatial studies. In this study, the experiential walking tour enabled a shared embodied experience of high-rise residential projects that informed researchers about space and the dynamic ways people relate to it. Ideally, in walking tours that trace affects and affective atmospheres, there will be less discussion and more of a copresence sensing using all possible senses, gut feelings and other immediate bodily responses. In these tours, the informants could lead the way to places that are important or significant to their daily life. Upon arriving at each of these places, both the interviewer and interviewee could first occupy these places, attend to them with their bodies, and then later on discuss what they have experienced there.

However, experiential walking tours present drawbacks as well: the shared affective experiences studied incorporate contexts that can be easily forgotten in an attempt to fully adhere to the present. While context seems to be extremely relevant to representational approaches (which tend to trace constructivist interpretations and understandings of social reality), it is the exclusive experiences of western urban designs and history that global north cities produce, or on more of a local scale, the Israeli context of high-rise projects, in which these interviews are nested and which must be addressed in the broader analysis. The importance of where and when the experiential walking tours were conducted was part and parcel of the research, and movement between the here and now and the broader experience of high rises is to be relationally considered in affect-based examinations.

Rather than addressing representational accounts of socio-spatial relations, that is, to conceptualize space retrospectively and as a fixed product, experiential walking tours enable us to experience the dynamics of places in practice and to share these experiences with spaces’ daily users. This method traces affective engagements between people and places and emphasizes more immediate relations between bodies, which pinpoint different engagements with space, what it affords, and the becoming of socio-spatial relations in a certain urban setting. In a similar vein as in-depth in situ interviews, this is done with the goal of sharing different capacities, positions, and experiences to advance inclusivity in research and practice (Anderson, 2004). In drawing on experiential walking tours to relate to space with our bodies, planners can attend to the backgrounds of places’ uses and functions as well as to users’ multiple experiences, feelings and emotions regarding the places they inhabit.

Conclusion

This paper embraces recent calls made in the literature suggesting to draw on nonrepresentational approaches in urban planning. Following these calls, the present work specifically contributes adjusted thinking tools and methods for attending to affects in socio-spatial studies to derive pertinent insights for planning research and practice. Three methods that were adjusted to be applied in affect-based planning studies are discussed: sense-oriented observations, in-depth in situ interviews and experiential walking tours. These explorations with methods offer a somewhat different approach to the study of socio-spatial relations and planning processes while considering their advantages and limitations.

Alan Latham (2008) emphasizes the significance of deriving knowledge about culture through the senses rather than by cognition only, advancing nonrepresentational approaches towards the performance of daily urban culture. The methods offered in this article suggest different ways to experience urban settings and contexts by conducting research with informants and data on the ground. The article suggests that to better explore socio-spatial relations in rapidly changing cities, which are characterized by integrated global places, verticality and technology, and diversity, refined methods could assist us in discerning more elements of contemporary urban experience.

In conducting nonrepresentational research in planning, pressing planning issues can be addressed. First, affect-based research suggests that we rethink what kinds of knowledge can be gained in planning research and practice. This paper demonstrates that affective methods enable us to trace multiple forms of urban experience to include, inter alia, more immediate and somatic experiences of everyday urban settings that shape city users’ perceptions, uses, and acts in the urban environment. Such an approach develops and progresses tools for rethinking the constitution of socio-urban spaces and the engagements of people with these spaces. Accordingly, the approach suggests how research deploying nonrepresentational theories can help facilitate planning that better correspond with multiple, differential needs of diverse city users. That is, drawing on the nonrepresentational approach in urban planning has a social impact as it advances inclusivity, diversity, and provides a room for change.

Second, the question of how to conduct inclusive planning in research and practice is also met by affective methods. When researchers share an experience or atmosphere with the informant on the ground, they are making a genuine attempt to share users’ embodied experiences, conceptions, and understandings of the spaces they inhabit. This article demonstrates that affect-based planning studies invite inclusivity and shared experiences between the researcher and informants, planners and individuals, people and the environment. Finally, in acknowledging the relationality of places and their multiple meanings, affordances, and uses by different people, affective methods in planning enables us to trace more dynamic engagements between (different) people and places on multiple scales and to rethink planning processes and their dynamic becomings. By furnishing a more comprehensive and intricate portrayal of contemporary urban encounters that is drawn from a wide range of participants’ experiences and spatial contexts, it becomes feasible to devise planning strategies that are more adaptable and responsive to dynamic socio-spatial realities.

Nevertheless, it is vital to stress the limitations of the suggested methods to socio-spatial and planning studies. While one of the major advantages of nonrepresentational approaches to urban researches is their ability to trace more abstract, dynamic, and fluid socio-spatial relations, as well as conceptualizations of unknown futures and ongoing transformations (see e.g., Hillier, 2008; Marotta & Cummings, 2019; Shilon & Eizenberg, 2021), they are rooted in Deleuzian, processual thinking; one that invites descriptions of relations, flexibility, and processes of becoming instead of final or definite solutions to fixed problems (see also the theoretical discussion in CITY journal: Farías, 2011; McFarlane, 2011; Shilon & Kallus, 2018). This is a major challenge to deal with in urban planning which often draws much more from structural, linear, rational, and instrumental thinking as part of its demands as a profession to provide practical solutions.

As present-day cities include highly diverse populations, constant movements of people and animals, rapid transformations of space to include climate changes and constant environmental catastrophes, the urban experiences and needs of people and the environment become more dynamic, diverse, and temporary. Relational, nonrepresentational approaches can contribute a nuanced understanding of socio-spatial relations due to their ability to address ambiguity and fluidity, rather than providing explanations to defined problems and suggest fixed planning solutions, accordingly.

The methodological explorations suggested in this paper are an attempt to consider the possibilities and potential studying affects open for socio-spatial studies. The methods offered produce an arsenal of conceptual and practical tools that open up possibilities to think of and conduct planning research and practice. With this modest attempt, I hope other planning studies embrace nonrepresentational approaches to planning to produce an encompassing theoretical, epistemological and methodological framework for rethinking socio-spatial relations and formations; planning’s different meanings; and inclusive planning in research and practice.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Effective Methodologies to Study Affects: New Tools for Engaging With Socio-Spatial Relations

Supplemental Material for Effective Methodologies to Study Affects: New Tools for Engaging With Socio-Spatial Relations by Mor Shilon in International Journal of Qualitative Methods