Can Participatory Experience Performances Co-Create Qualification and Design of Audible Public Realm?

This paper discusses if listening performances, as part of a multi-sensory approach, can support qualification of public spaces. Based on participatory performances, such as sound and experience walks during Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017 and Inter-Noise 2016 in Hamburg done and captured on film, photo and audio recordings by the authors, this paper discusses the interrelationship between moving, listening and seeing, all equally important for experiencing and shaping the city. Qualified here is thus how such experiences could act as co-creative and participatory steps within the city making process. Possible benefits for city planning of such an approach on human perspective involves sensory-aesthetic experiential aspects of city life, and thus, human/site interrelated emergence. This may open new ways in developing sustainable and welcoming public spaces which become an important issue in densely populated and tightly built urban environments and in light of accompanying noise concerns. The objective of this qualitative approach is to evolve knowledge and language about human sensation and human-site interrelation, which can complement the metric and quantitative approaches used today for the design of public spaces. Thus, audibly and visually differentiated spaces stirring human becoming can be qualified. That's truly radical democratic and performative action.