This special issue of Ethnologia Fennica, “Sensing the Urban”, began to take shape in the discussions of the research group at the University of Turku. The group, consisting of ethnologists, a museologist, and a cultural historian, together studied the designed, experienced, and perceived socio-material well-being in a newly built residential area near the medieval castle of Turku in southwestern Finland. The aim of the research was, on the one hand, to understand the everyday mobility of people living and working in this area and how they engage sensorily with its different kinds of places, materialities and temporalities, and, on the other hand, what sensory experiences could contribute to urban design and planning. So, we decided to invite other scholars to reflect on the importance of sensory urban studies in ethnology and our related disciplines. You can read the results in this special issue.
This issue presents articles that discuss different ways of doing sensory research in urban settings, especially sensory perceptions, knowledge and practices related to the urban environment in the present and through time. This is an important collection of articles, each contributing in its own way to the ongoing discussion about the method and its application in the field of urban research.
In addition to the four thematic articles, this issue also includes an article contributing to the anthropology of dance (still very fitting to the methodological framework of the theme), and lastly; four dissertation reviews and two conference reports.