Nightsniffing

Nightsniffing is a practice-based inquiry that works generatively between two key problems – the difficulty of figuring the city’s multifarious multispecies inhabitants in urban decision making, and the challenge of repoliticising digitised systems of governance reshaping urban space. It focuses on London’s urban bats, elusive but exuberant echolocators often unnoticed by the human they share space with, but who can tell us much about the environmental health of our cityscape and help us sound out the challenges of multispecies spatial governance. This is in part thanks to the complex relations bats have with cities and society: vulnerable to changes in the built environment, they are enveloped in a thin tissue of legal protections that give them a role in community alliances against development. Engaging with technologies that make bats enchanting to encounter, and planning resistant to community participation, I developed novel devices and staged walking events in London that brought obtuse data systems stutteringly to life. This engendered different conversations regarding how spatial decisions are made, and how our cities could function otherwise.

This research is structured around the following three questions:

1. How can the articulation of planning datasets within bat walks figure bats as agents and stakeholders in urban development and contestation?

2. How can we develop locative contraptions as ambulatory interfaces to resituate difficult spatial datasets, so people can engage with such data through local, sensory and specialist knowledges?

3. How can we surface the exclusions created by such a practice, and how do we take responsibility for those it enacts?

This documentation website should ideally be consulted with reference to the thesis commentary. Between them, they offer a full account of Nightsniffing as a research project.

Organisation of the documentation website

This documentation website mirrors the structure of the thesis commentary. Below is a short summary of what is included in each part of the website:

• Situations offers an illustrated account of the project, as well as detailing the graphical tools I used to understand my work, and the different practices I encountered throughout the project. This allow the research inquiry to be better characterised, and provide tools to evaluate the creative processes and outcomes at different stages of the project.

• Investigations provides interactive maps and technical documentation for two inquiries. The first was an experiment to understand the affecting practice of bat walking by creating special maps that encouraged bat walkers to discuss their experiences in depth. The second was a co-inquiry with housing activists Concrete Action into digital systems of urban governance. These provide a foundation of knowledge from which to answer the research questions.

• Iterations documents the creation of the London Development Datasniffer, a contraption that articulates the planning database within the practice of bat walking. I provide detailed technical documentation of this device to encourage future iterations of its approach. This part also documents the Nightsniffing Walks, carefully composed walking events that represent the culmination of the research.

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