AHRC Sensory Cities Network

Participants Cologne

Manuela Barz (Digital Consultant) is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Culture at the London Metropolitan University; she holds a BA in architecture and an MA in Digital Art. She worked as digital designer and lecturer before undertaking studies for a Phd. The research concentrates on the different spatial qualities within a prison for female offenders, the processes leading to engagement with education and educational and regime artefacts (digital and non-digital) designed and employed in social interactions. Additionally Manuela is interested in the intersections and interrelations of physical and virtual space, user research for digital artefacts and learning networks.


Beatrice Behlen is the Senior Curator, Fashion & Decorative Arts at the Museum of London. Beatrice studied Fashion Design in Germany before undertaking an MA in the History of Dress at the Courtauld Institute, University of London. Before joining the Museum, Beatrice was curator (collections) at Kensington Palace where she staged several exhibitions including Princess Diana by Mario Testino in 2005/6. Prior to this she worked in a modern art gallery and was a lecturer of the history and theory of dress and design at several art colleges. Beatrice specialises in dress from the 18th century to now and is particularly interested in ready-to-wear, subcultures and dress in literature, see also her blog entries. She is an associate lecturer at Central Saint Martins, teaching a seminar about fashion between the wars.


Carlos Delclos works at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona and collaborates with the Health Inequalities Research Group at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona. He received his PhD in Sociology from the UPF and his research interests include social stratification, urban studies, migration, demography and social change. His work has appeared in such media outlets as Cadena SER, Radio Nacional de España, ElDiario.es and Open Democracy, among others.


Monica Degen (PI) is a Senior Lecturer in cultural sociology at Brunel University London. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on the sociology of the senses, urban cultures, the politics of the everyday and the experience of design and architecture. In particular she is interested in developing a more sensory-emotional approach to understanding the diverse power relations that underpin urban life and culture. She has been involved in a range of research projects: “Architectural Atmospheres: The impact of digital technologies on architectural design practice” (ESRC), “Urban aesthetics: A comparison of experiences in Milton Keynes and Bedford town centres” (ESRC). She is the author of Sensing Cities: Regenerating public life in Barcelona and Manchester (Routledge, 2008) and The Meta-City Barcelona: Transformation of a Metropolis (Anthropos, 2008). She has been awarded a British Academy Fellowship to research “Timescapes of Urban Change” (2016-2017).


Stefano Faiella was born and raised in Rome to an Italian father and Scottish mother, Stefano moved to Glasgow where he studied Building Design Engineering and Integrated Building Design at Strathclyde University between 1998 and 2004. A qualified architect since 2005, he is a Director and founding member of Threesixty Architecture (http://360architecture.com/). He is currently involved in a number of projects with a particular focus on city centre retail & leisure as well as Residential and Masterplanning projects.


Isabel Finkenberger (Studio if+ . Büro für Stadtentwicklung und räumliche Transformation, Cologne) is an urban planner (Freie Stadtplanerin AKBW). She studied architecture with a specialisation in urbanism and urban planning at the Technische Universität Berlin, London Metropolitan University and the Universität Stuttgart. After work in Hamburg, Berlin, London, Stuttgart and Sydney, she has been developing projects at the crossroads of planning and research with her Cologne firm „Studio if+. Büro für Stadtentwicklung und räumliche Transformation“. She is particularly interested in developing integrative quarters in the city that link sustainability and process development. As a scholar of the Montag Stiftung Urbane Räume she developed the „KALKschmiede*“ in Köln-Kalk with two colleagues from the social sciences and architecture (2009-2010). Between 2011-2016 she was a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Landscape Architecture at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and, since 2009, has been lecturing at the Institute for Architecture and Urbanism of the Hochschule Biberach. Since the start of the 2015/16 theatre season she directs with Eva-Maria Baumeister the project ‘Die Stadt von der anderen Seite sehen am Schauspiel Köln’ (‘Seeing the city from a different side at the Cologne Theatre’).


Stefanie Gänger is an Assistant Professor in History at the University of Cologne. She studied European and Latin American history at the universities of Augsburg, Seville and Cambridge and received her PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. Stefanie Gänger is a historian of science and knowledge in the Andes and Mesoamerica in the late-colonial and early-Republican period. She has published widely on the history of collecting and on approaches to global history. Her books include: Relics of the Past. The Collecting and Study of pre Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837 –1911 (University of Oxford Press, 2014) and (with Niels Petersson & Boris Barth, eds): Globalgeschichten: Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven (Campus Verlag, 2014).


Angelina Göb, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy for Spatial Research and Planning (ARL, Hannover). She has worked as an urban planner following her degree in geography at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Her thesis dealt with perception and use auf mobile phones in public spaces by using a research design made up of different qualitative methods for example photography and time scheduling.


Hanna Katharina Göbel is a sociologist concerned with architecture, urban design, art, expertise and the role of the expert and DIY-creativity. She studied cultural studies, media studies at Zeppelin Universität Friedrichshafen and sociology at Goldsmith College, University of London and obtained her Ph.d in sociology from the University of Konstanz. She is currently a research fellow at the Institut für Bewegungswissenschaft (Institute for Movement Studies) at the University of Hamburg. Her publications include The Re-Use of Urban Ruins. Atmospheric Inquiries of the City (Routledge 2015) and as editor (with Sophia Prinz) Die Sinnlichkeit des Sozialen: Wahrnehmung und materielle Kultur (Transcript 2015) and (with Monika Grubbauer and Anna Richter) Designed to improve? The makings, politics and aesthetics of ‘social’ architecture and design, CITY, Special Feature 2-3/20 (forthcoming 2016).


Klaus Hardering is Director of the Cathedral Archives, Cologne and editor of the learned journal »Kölner Domblatt«. He has published widely on the history of Cologne Cathedral. The Cologne Cathedral Archives contain ca. 20.000 plans and drawing on the construction and interior fitting of the cathedral from the Middle Ages to the present, as well as the files on the completion project in the nineteenth century, including ca. 30.000 photographs, a specialist library and an art collection. The archives enable the historically informed conservation and restoration of the cathedral.


Eva Herr (Stadt Köln – Dezernat Stadtentwicklung, Planen, Bauen und Verkehr) is an urban planner. Having worked in Berlin, London and Bremen, she has been, since 2013, the personal assistant and head of office for Franz-Josef Höing, Dezernent für Stadtentwicklung, Planen, Bauen und Verkehr (Head of the Department of Urban Development, Planning, Works and Traffic) of the City of Cologne.


Werner Jung is Director of the NS- Dokumantationszentrum, Cologne. Following his degree in History, German and Phsychology and his Ph.D at the University of Cologne, Werner Jung has been a research fellow at the NS-Dokumentationszentrum since 198, before becoming director in 2002. Cologne’s National Socialism Documentation Center is now the largest regional memorial site in all of Germany for the victims of the Nazis. It was founded by a resolution passed by the Cologne city council in 1979. For many years, the centre’s activities were restricted to research and academics. In 1987, the council passed a resolution calling for “the foundation of the NS Documentation Centre of the city of Cologne,” and the centre gradually developed into the comprehensive institution it is today.


Rainer Kazig is a human geographer interested in public spaces, everyday aesthetics and sensory geographies and has published widely on these subjects. He obtained his Ph.D from the Technical University Munich and is currently a CNRS researcher at the research group “Ambiances – Architectures – Urbanités, CRESSON” located at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble. His current research projects are on the experience of densification of individual housing areas and on the use of urban atmospheres as a „resource“ to stimulate creative work. Rainer Kazig is co-director of the International Ambiances Network (http://www.ambiances.net/home.html) and co-editor of the Ashgate/Routledge series “Ambiances, Atmospheres and Sensory Experiences of Space”.


Tayfun Keltek is president of the council for integration of the city of Cologne (Vorsitzender des Integrationsrates der Stadt Köln) and president of the regional council for integration of the Northrhinewestphalia region (Vorsitzender des Landesintegrationsrates NRW). He studied sport sciences and taught sport in a secondary school in Köln/Deutz for 40 years.


Mario Kramp is Director of the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum. A historian and art historian by training (RWTH Aachen), he wrote his Ph.D on early gothic architecture and was a visiting scholar in Paris. Since the early 1990s he has been working as a curator, and for the department of culture of the city of Aachen. Between 2002 and 2008 he was director of the Mittelrhein-Museums Koblenz, before taking up the directorship of the Cologne City Museum in 2010. His publications include books and catalogues on medieval, as well as modern Rhenisch art history and history, on orientalism, and on cultural transfers between the Rhineland and Paris.


Sandra Kurfürst is an Assistant Professor of “Cross-cultural and Urban Communication” at the Institute of South Asian and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Cologne as well as a member of the Global South Studies Center Cologne. She attained her PhD in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Passau. From 2007-2008 she was a visiting scholar at the Vietnam National University Hanoi. Her research interests are urbanism, communication, and state-society relations in Southeast Asia. She has worked on the development of public spaces and public spheres in Hanoi, Vietnam (Sandra Kurfürst, 2012. Redefining Public Space in Hanoi. Places, Practices and Meaning. Zürich: LIT). Her current research focuses on urban gardening in Vietnam, Hong Kong and Indonesia as well as on Hip Hop in Vietnam.


Stefan Lewejohann is curator at the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum. He co-curated exhibitions on the city quarter of Eigelstein, on Cologne during the Thirty Years War and on Cologne’s relationship with Prussia. His books include: Stefan Lewejohann (ed.), Köln in unheiligen Zeiten. Die Stadt im Dreißigjährigen Krieg, Begleitband zur Ausstellung des Kölnischen Stadtmuseums vom 14. Juni bis 5. Oktober 2014. Köln, Böhlau Verlag, 2014 and Stefan Lewejohann und Sascha Pries (ed.), Achtung Preußen! Beziehungsstatur: Kompliziert – Köln 1815-2015. Köln 2015.


Rebecca Madgin is Senior Lecturer in Urban Development and Management in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Her current research focuses on the emotional and economic values of heritage which are revealed during the process of urban development. Rebecca works in an international context and is particularly interested in the experiential value of the historic built environment during the twentieth and twenty-first century. Contained within this is an examination of the extent to which urban development initiatives consider the sensory dimensions of heritage-led urban regeneration. Rebecca works closely with a number of organisations outside academia and is both an Associate Member of the Royal Town Planning Institute and a member of the Editorial Board for ‘Context’, the journal of the Institute of Historic Building Conservation.


Alex Rhys-Taylor is a sociologist and deputy director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths. His research looks at the relationship between sensory experiences in urban and social formations in the city. His recent publications include reflections of jellied eels and class disgust, mangoes and multiculture and the role of smell-scapes in the production of local senses of place. He has a book due out next year with Bloomsbury looking at the relationship between urban food cultures and processes of social formation. He lectures in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.


Gillian Rose is Professor of Cultural Geography at The Open University, UK. Her current research interests focus on contemporary digital visual culture and visual research methodologies. She is the author of Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, The Public and The Politics of Sentiment (Ashgate, 2010) and Visual Methodologies (Sage, third edition 2011), as well as a number of papers on images and ways of seeing in urban and domestic spaces. Gillian blogs at visual/method/culture, and a full list of her publications can be found at oro.open.ac.uk.


Jochen Schmauck-Langer is an author, lecturer and social worker specialising in working with the elderly and with people with dementia. He is a member of the working group on cultural participation of the NRW-Demenz-Servicezentren and of the German Association for Museum Pedagogy (Bundesverband Museumspädagogik e.V.). Since 2014 he lectures on dementia and art at the Institute for Art and Art Theory of the University of Cologne. He is the founder of dementia+art: Eine Schöne Zeit erleben – für Menschen mit und ohne Demenz.’ and runs dementia museum tours at the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, the Museum für Angewandte Kunst and the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, http://www.dementia-und-art.de.


Arno Steffen is a German musician. Born in Cologne in 1953, he was a member in the 1970 of the bands Stellair Overdrive, Zeltinger Band (1979) and Triumvirat (1980 ). His solo singles from the period with Conny Plank include »Schlager« (1983), »Supergut, ne« and »Liebeslieder« (1984). Since 1992 he recorded several albums with the Cologne band L.S.E. In 1992 he was a founding member of the artistic initiative against racism „Arsch Huh“. He composed film music, inter alia for »Tatort«, and »Das Wunder von Lengende«, »Untergang der Pamir«, »Berlin 36.« and »Schimanski – Loverboy«. In 2014 his CB „ Hop Hop“ appeared. He has been a lecturer at the KISD Köln in Sound. He continues his work with the AG Arsch Huh. http://www.facebook.com/Arno.Steffen‎ and http://www.Arno-Steffen.com.


Astrid Swenson (CI) is Senior Lecturer in European History at Brunel University London. Her background is in history, art history and modern languages. Her research focuses on understanding cultural heritage historically, transnationally and experientally. Her book The Rise of Heritage. Preserving the Past in France, Germany and England, 1789-1914 (Cambridge University Press 2013) looked at the emergence of the concept of heritage in Europe and traced the birth of an international preservation movement during the long nineteenth century. Her current work focuses on the intersection of senses, emotions and politics through different, loosely interlinked projects, including a comparison of the appropriation of crusader architecture across the Mediterranean and a study on the international making of Cologne cathedral.


Carolina Vasilikou is an Architect and Associate Lecturer at the University of Kent teaching urban design and sustainable architecture. She holds an M.Sc. in Façade Design & Engineering from the University of Bath and a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Kent. Carolina currently conducts sensory research based on primary fieldwork funded by an AHRC Cultural Engagement Fellowship and EPSRC CCN+ (Sensory Navigation in Heritage Cities). Her research work focuses on thermal and sensory perception and urban comfort of pedestrians in complex urban environments. Carolina is active in people-centred and evidence-based design and research and is currently a member of the Centre for Architecture and Sustainable Environment at the University of Kent, Architecture et Climat at Université Catholique de Louvain, Working Group 5 of the EU COST Action People-Friendly Cities in a Data-Rich World Project and the Academy of Urbanism.


Rita Wagner (M.A.) is the curator of the Graphics Departments of Cologne City Museum. She studied Modern History, Sociology and Journalism at Mὒnster University. She has been working at the Cologne City Museum since 1984. Her areas of expertise are photography, painting, fashion and textile, and Cologne’s history since the 16th century (especially social history and gender history). Furthermore, she is responsible for the permanent exhibition of the museum and participating in the planning of the museum’s new building near Cologne cathedral. Her most recent exhibition is „Cologne unvarnished. Wilhelm Scheiner as a photographer“ (1880–1914), 2015. She is currently preparing an exhibition for the centenary of Konrad Adenauer’s mayorship in Cologne in 2017.


Eusebius Wirdeier was born in 1950 in Dormagen. He is an artist working with photography. He studied art at the Kölner Werkschulen/FH Köln, is a member of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie, and was a Lecturer for Photography in Architecture at the BUGH Wuppertal 2001–2004. The subject of his work is everyday life in Cologne and the Rhineland. His work featured in a range of exhibitions and books since 1968, inter alia „kölsch? – Heimatphotographie“, 1990; Wirdeier/Reiter “Trotzdem Alaaf! Kölner Rosenmontag 1991“, 1991; Hermann Claasen, “Kirmes UKB 1950” (designer and author), 1992; Wirdeier/Nitschmann, “Garzweiler – oder wie die Braunkohlen-Connection eine ganze Region verheizt“, 1993; Wolfgang Niedecken/Eusebius Wirdeier, „noh un noh– Texte und Bilder aus Köln“, 1996; Reprint Chargesheimer/Heinrich Böll, Unter Kranhenbäumen, 1998 (issuer); „Die Wunderkammer der Agnes Bosen – Eine Inventur“, 2000; Wenders/Niedecken/Wirdeier, „Viel Passiert“, 2004; Goldmann/Knauer/Wirdeier, „Moderne. Weltkrieg. Irrenhaus. 1900–1930 – Brüche in der Psychiatrie, Kunst und Psychiatrie”, 2014; „Ursula + Jean – Ein Fotobuch”, 2014.), http://www.eusebius-wirdeier.de.

Recent Comments

    Sensory Cities

    MoniDegenMonica Degen
    @MoniDegen:
    RT @ProfGillian: Posthuman Agency in the Digitally Mediated City - my latest paper is online now and you can get a free copy here: https://…
    84 months ago
    _NinaJMNina Morris
    @_NinaJM:
    Great to see geographer @ProfGillian on Smile! The Nation's Family Album on @BBCFOUR #photographs
    84 months ago
    ProfGilliangillian rose
    @ProfGillian:
    honoured by this endorsement from someone using Stiegler in such interesting ways - thanks James! https://t.co/mtGfMgT1Bn
    84 months ago
    ProfGilliangillian rose
    @ProfGillian:
    RT @allartmarkets: Representing the claim that smart data can make everything great @OliverZanetti @AMValdez_OU #digimethods https://t.co/8…
    84 months ago
    OU_FASSFASS@OU
    @OU_FASS:
    RT @allartmarkets: Making a city smart takes much more than data infrastructure @OliverZanetti @AMValdez_OU @ProfGillian #digimethods http…
    84 months ago
    allartmarketsLiz McFall
    @allartmarkets:
    Making a city smart takes much more than data infrastructure @OliverZanetti @AMValdez_OU @ProfGillian #digimethods https://t.co/KHtQQaCIEG
    84 months ago