The SMUS Kolkata kick-off, organised through a collaborative-interactive workshop and outreach with a group of diverse stakeholders, marked the inception of this longer-term understanding and processes of sensing and documenting the city. The group experimented with undisciplined practices and methods such as sensory walks, sensory ethnography, self-reflexivity exercises, transect walks (deliberate movement to understand spatial relationships), storytelling, artifact collection, the creation of a curatorial box (challenging the colonial conservationist-archiving logic), co-curation through collage, and more.

Everything is an ec(h)otone! Boundaries are political demarcations that attempt to territorialise space with intent. Yet things exist as porous palimpsests—elements disappearing and reappearing in cyclical rhythms—imbricating far-reaching repercussions across space, time, and culture, simultaneously shaping and being shaped by change. Rigidity undermines resilience; it emerges from boxed thinking and bounded categories. We unsee what waits to be recognised, rushing to classify rather than dwell within entangled interactions and mutable interfaces. Such detached planning produces irreparable socio-ecological rifts. Moving beyond ecotones as mere transition zones, undisciplined modes of sensing reveal the power of embodied encounters to re-cognise processes and affects through which urban ecologies continually emerge as checkered assemblages of material and immaterial life.

Urban ecology has seen a meteoric rise in scholarship from different perspectives: system-based approaches, political ecology, and, more recently, multisensorial, multispecies attuned environmental humanities. While there have been attempts to integrate them or “emphasise difference and diversity” (Gandy 2024a: 366), “…an alternative conceptual synthesis might allow for a more embodied, multi-subjectival, and historically situated reading of urban metabolism” (Gandy 2025) to do away with AI-enabled, fancy, investment-laden technocratic designs. But to arrive at multi-sensorial embodiments, empathising for cities as dense hybrids of intra-acting technologies, social configurations, and more-than-human agencies, towards an “engaged praxis,” deployment tactics are indispensable. There are no attempts to control and change existing urban environments through virtuous urban solutions, but unruly endeavours and experiments muddling subject, object, and agency in tracing the roots of wicked urban problems. EC(h)OTONING serves as a crucial intervention in methodological practice, assembling and contagioning empirics from nine different cities of the global South by demystifying detached observations and insisting on embodied subjectivities, forging deeper engagements, towards a desirable urban Anthropocene.

Bhattacharyya, D. (2018). Empire and ecology in the Bengal Delta: The making of Calcutta. Cambridge University Press.
Gandy, M. (2024). Four urban ecologies: A working typology and alternative conceptual synthesis. Progress in Environmental Geography 3(4): 352–374.
Gandy, M. (2025). Urban metabolism redux. Urban Studies.