Affective Methodologies and more-than-human encounters: livability and life quality beyond the smart city

What are the qualities of a skylark singing, a mushroom growing on a branch, a dandelion breaking through the pavement and how does it foster urban livability in and beyond the smart city?

The recent more-than human and vitalist turn in urban studies and urban design (Jasper & Gandy, Singh 2016) allows for new ways of understanding urban livability as relational, affective and transversal. While several urban scholars identify how datafied, cybernetic urbanism is related to control (Krivy 2018) we argue that affective and datadriven methodologies also holds the promise for a qualitative revaluation of urban livability (Fritsch and Samson 2020)
While urban design and planning use data in the development of cities, the affective qualities of interspecies relationality and social, environmental and mental affectivity is often neglected or overlooked.
Working with affective methodologies registering and revaluing the affective, sensory and somatic qualities of urban space can help us understand the encounters between bodies in the city and add useful knowledge to what is life quality and urban livability. By bringing in examples from the urban Labs, Air Lab and Performative Urbanism, we will provide examples of how affective methodologies can explore and make comprehensive the vitalist qualities of urban space.