ABSTRACT
What can sensory anthropology bring to the study of urban lives, encounters, and transformations? This chapter argues that an attention to the senses, embodiment, and sensory emplacement goes beyond providing a more comprehensive description of urban environments. It can help us attend to different ways of knowing in place, rethink some of the paradoxes and debates that animate city changes, and privilege our interlocutors’ insights, theoretical interventions, and enacted knowledge. Drawing from ethnographic encounters in Milan, Italy, and in Vancouver, Canada, this chapter follows three women’s sensed stories and observations of gentrification and housing precarity. Their multisensorial engagements attend to places “in between” and in transformation and constitute openings for them to participate and intervene in urban debates.
