Theatre and Performance Design

Built, Inhabited, Contested: Scenography and Urban Place

This special issue situates scenography in the street as means of exploring and re-imagining the complex, inhabited, and political dimensions of urban experience. The 'place-orientating methods of scenography’(Rachel Hann 2019: 5) mean that scenography can be practice of place-making and a process of un-making place where is can defamiliarize and re-orientate ‘experiences of hegemonic spatial politics on an urban scale’ (Shauna Janssen 2019: 208).  In this special issue, we take the built environment as a site of encounter; a place to meet and exchange but also a site where power is enacted in ‘a magnetic field of tensions and conflicts’ (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 1997: 12). Scenography in urban contexts works with the dynamic relations between people, materials, infrastructures, ecologies, histories, and the wider social, political, and environmental forces that shape everyday life.

Place can be understood as more than a geographical location. Rather, it emerges through the continual interaction of material conditions, lived experience, social relations, memory and power as a ‘meaningful location’ (Tim Cresswell, 2014, p. 19). From this perspective, urban environments are never neutral settings but ongoing processes of encounter through which belonging, identity, memory, visibility and inclusion are continually negotiated. Policy makers recognise the role that creative interventions such as scenography can play in ‘placemaking’ as a means of revitalising urban places, developing community and sustainable wellbeing through a sense of belonging, but these ‘top down’ (Courage and McKeown 2019) approaches can efface diverse perspectives and inequities of power without engaging with them. In response, Erin Toolis, proposes ‘critical placemaking’ (2017) as a way to resist the increasing privatization of public space and Tanja Beer advocates for ‘ecoscenographic placemaking’ (Beer, 2018; Goh and Beer 2024) as a ground-up, place-responsive approach that embraces ecological awareness. In this issue, we want to explore the ways in which scenographic practices and perspectives can engage with the making and unmaking of place in ways that acknowledge the multi-faceted, material, social, political, imaginative, affective and dynamic forces inherent in the formation of urban place. We are interested in how scenographic practices engage with these processes: how design, performance, materiality, atmosphere, participation, and storytelling shape the ways urban places are experienced, authored, contested, and (re)imagined. We are also interested in scenographically-inflected urban research methods ‘that can increase our sensitivity for the material, affective and relational dimensions of urban environments’ (Verfhoeff and Merx 2021).

In responding to this call, contributors might consider the following:

BUILT: How might scenography reveal, intervene in or reimagine the material, spatial, and atmospheric conditions through which urban place is produced?

• Scenography and urban materiality
• The scenographic as infrastructure
• Purposeful, ad-hoc and emergent urban structures
• Building, demolition, decay, and the unmaking of infrastructure
• Scenography of public squares, streets, and civic space
• Atmospherics and the sensory city
• Augmented scenography and hybrid place: digital and physical encounters

INHABITED: How might scenography attend to, register, or enact the everyday acts of encounter or participation through which place is experienced and lived?

• Human and more-than-human co-producers of place
• Durational encounter: time, presence and the living city
• Displacement, loss and the unmaking of everyday place
• Community-led urban scenographics and the ethics of collaboration
• Participation and authorship
• Documentation as scenographic practice

CONTESTED: How can scenographic practice expose, challenge, or reconfigure the political, social, and material struggles through which place is contested?

• Embodied resistance: making, marking, and occupying space
• Material politics: craft, textile and tactile inscription
• Diasporic scenographies: identity, belonging and the constructed environment
• Social memory, trauma, and the afterlives of place
• Counter- publics and contested ground
• Visibility and erasure: whose stories does a space tell?
• Postcolonial spatial imaginaries

Contributors and reach
We are keen to gather voices from across scenography, performance design, urban geography and planning, architecture and socially engaged art and practice who are engaged with the scenographic and  attentive to material, atmospheric and embodied urban encounters. We welcome contributions from practitioners as well as scholars, from early-career as well as established voices, and from cities and urban contexts across the Global South as well as the Global North. The aim is an edition whose authors, examples, and forms of practice reflect a genuinely international and cross-disciplinary understanding of how urban place is built, inhabited, and contested through the lens of the scenographic.