Chord Notes: Body Rhythms in the City

Once upon a time, Dolores Hayden, urban historian, architect, and poet, published an essay speculating on housing, urban design, and human work in a non-sexist city. Grounded in an analysis of the American capitalist system, and women's increased involvement in industrial expansion, she proposed a new paradigm for shared space, one that supports the activities of employed women and their families. 

She highlighted events, demonstrations, and strikes that pushed employers of her milieu to reconsider plant locations. The Industrial Housing Associates of The United States of America and Consultants were hired to enforce a new paradigm where good homes make contented workers and happy workers meant bigger profits. This, she explained, was the basis for urban planning where the structures were optimized for women's contribution to good homes. With the expansion of America’s capitalist liberal ideas from 1990, this framework spread across the world rapidly.

This essay provides a historical grounding from which to appreciate the works of this year’s Dreaming New Worlds collectives. They  propose the body as an urban planning tool of the future. Acknowledging that bodies are differently policed, exhausted, disabled, and gendered by rigid urban planning also in Nigeria, they push past unhuman urban visions and adopt solution-oriented thinking that puts the body in the centre.

For the collectives, space is a social construct defined by how we perceive and experience it. And how we perceive it is lived through the body. In designing and thinking through their city, they invite us to experience intimacy with our senses, our shared physiological processes and negotiations in the urban space.

For Sarauniya Ene, the city prioritizes belonging. Divisions of class, gender, and tribe, reinforced through inaccessible institutions and spaces, form the inefficient root of the city. They propose a monument to unification and belonging, one that rests in the collective memory rather than in 
external imperial ambitions to expand influence, control territories, or dominate foreign lands through political, economic, and military means.

They have chosen Queen Amina of Zaria as their inspiration. Her existence is contested, even among the people of Zaria. In popular culture, she has risen into the hearts of Nigerians as a warrior queen through Erabor Emokpae’s epic painting, Queen Amina of Zaria (1976), yet her own people question whether she was real. Saruniya Ene undertook research into her imperial rule and its legacy, finding the sole material monuments to her prosperous empire are gates that dot the city of Zaria, and the rebuttals to her existence. They propose through their installation that legacies show evidence not just in physical monuments whose meanings erode with time, but in internal, generational values and behavioral norms. Lastly, they evidence that cities are also built through narrative, memory, and shared belief.

MatriAér Lab pushes the material exploration of the ideal city further. They propose that the city should be organized to the tempo of the breath - that architecture, traffic, work, and domestic life should flow with the rhythm of breathing, aesthetically and structurally, to benefit all who participate in the inherent negotiation of movement in the public space.

Their innovation is a redesign of the city in the image of breath rather than capital gain, excess, and wasteful energy consumption. This results in kitchens that pay attention to the particularities of Nigerian local cuisine, biophilic architectural design, and public infrastructure that avoids clutter, leading to better prioritization by residents and institutions, as well as new approaches to zoning laws, third spaces, and investment decisions.

The artists propose tools and systems that can enhance human relationships. They aim to increase communal quality of life, acknowledging diversity and local culture rather than division, speed, and extraction. Together they acknowledge that the city is made up not only of owned land and federation laws, but also of shared values and that sensory intelligence is something we already carry inside us.

Obieze Chinyere