EXPERIENCE MADRID—Sensory Cartography as a Tool for Exploring the Intangible Urban Landscape: A Pedagogical Experiment

Abstract

Urban heritage documentation has traditionally privileged visual and material attributes, while transient and sensory dimensions of everyday urban experience remain more difficult to record through conventional architectural methods. This study examines sensory cartography as an exploratory method for identifying and graphically representing perceptual dimensions of the urban cultural landscape. A six-week pedagogical experiment was conducted with thirty first-year architecture students in central Madrid. Organised into five groups, the students successively explored six perceptual registers—sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and balance/orientation—across different urban areas. The variables represented in each exercise were generated by the students through field observation and subsequently translated into drawings and cartographic representations. The article analyses the complete six-week graphic corpus produced by one student group. The results show how sensory cartography can direct attention towards acoustic conditions, olfactory phenomena, haptic qualities, food-related activities, and spatial conditions associated with movement and orientation that conventional visual surveys may overlook. They also reveal methodological limitations: perceptual registers cannot be fully isolated from multisensory experience, non-visual phenomena are inevitably transformed when translated into graphic form, and the present design does not permit controlled cross-register comparison because perceptual register and study area varied simultaneously. The study therefore proposes sensory cartography not as a means of establishing intangible heritage values in itself, but as an exploratory form of architectural enquiry capable of identifying perceptual phenomena and everyday practices that may warrant further heritage investigation. Its pedagogical implications are considered exploratory, since learning outcomes were not formally assessed.