In this paper, we aim to demonstrate that choreographic practice has the potential to offer new insights into the engineering of sustainable urban infrastructure and environments. Identifying urban mobility as an ideal starting point to discuss the potential overlaps between engineering and choreographic thinking, we briefly outline the notion of sustainability as it pertains to a key area of city engineering – urban transport. Arguing that transport is one of the most critical issues in creating socially and environmentally sustainable urbanism, we draw on studies of engineering to show how its working cultures and epistemologies prevent it from undergoing the transformation that would allow it to effectively address the issues posed by sustainable transport. The focus of thepaper is what we believe to be a comprehensive survey of the few conceptual and practical experiments that have been undertaken in using choreographic techniques to explain or design the way people move in cities, in scholarship and design practice. We conclude by arguing that there is great potential to expand on these experiments as ways to address the cultural and epistemological limits within engineering, and calling for practice-based research that shows what impact this would have on its processes and outcomes.

Since the nineteenth-century engineers have led the way in delivering the infrastructures that have modernised cities and allowed them to support the levels of health, accessibility, and communication that most urbanites in the Global North can expect today. Engineers built railways to spur the IndustrialRevolution, sewerage systems that eliminated many urban diseases, rolled out telecommunications systems and delivered large-scale public events such as Olympic Games across the world. Though engineers’ interventions in cities are often at an infrastructural level, and are subject to little public debate in comparison to architecture and urban design that are much more visible (as argued by) they are key in shaping the values produced by public spaces. For example, the engineering of urban transport systems, from train networks to streetscapes, encodes assumptions about who moves, for what purposes, and what the experience of using these systems should be, which are rarely challenged or debated within engineering practice or in the public sphere.As advances in technology continue to accelerate in the twenty-first century and as social change mirrors this pattern, engineers must adapt their practices just to keep up, and to continue to contribute to society in a meaningful and positive way. This change is driven primarily by the pressing needs of climate change adaptation and mitigation that requires a move away from carbon intensive resources and towards more responsive and adaptive systems; by the rise of big data, deep learning and artificial intelligence, which will replace the need for human designers; and by global urbanisation, which will concentrate and intensify populations’ consumption needs

With this in mind, the engineering, infrastructure and construction industries, with their large institutions and companies, often siloed approaches (Blockley and Godfrey 2017), and somewhat dated education systems, are at risk of falling short. Without substantial and sustained attention and creative approaches to transformation the industry could become as Ramírez and Seco (2012) describe, ‘victims of ingrained inertia, that will require a decisive push if they are not to become hidebound organizations, enslaved to the past, with few signs of future effectiveness and efficiency.’ In terms of its role in the design and construction of the built environment, engineering is at an important moment: perhaps, as Kanter (2015) implores, ‘we are stuck not only with ageing infrastructure but also with obsolete ways of talking about it.’ If the engineering industry continues to rely on solutions based on limited notions of efficiency, the social and environmental costs will continue to be paid by urban citizens. Alternately, it can look to fundamentally change its assumptions by incorporating new realms of knowledge and practice.Though seemingly distantly related, both choreography and engineering design are creative processes that design materials through time and space; they are both taught formally, are developed through practice and experience, and have known outputs, physical and economic constraints and desired social outcomes. Both practices deal with curating form and movement to shape personal experiences of space. These practices have developed independently and have emerged from different schools, which may have different underlying assumptions and processes that we will explore through this work. Dance practice – its ways of thinking about, designing and embodying movement – has the potential to offer new insights into the design of sustainable urban environments.