Sensing Kalasatama: Design Culture and Neoliberal Bodyhood

Over the last 40 years, neoliberalism has come to dominate urban form and experience in many cities. This is where ‘rational landscapes’ are designed to provide measurable and controllable environments that privilege the interests of their investors within a logic of rentier capitalism. Bodily gestures and somatic memory are conditioned for and within these settings. The ‘neoliberal sensorium’ therefore becomes hardwired into participating in the work of financialization. By combining performative and representational research, this article presents a sensing field study undertaken in Kalasatama, a new district of Helsinki, Finland. This becomes the starting point for a more general exploration of connections between the somaesthetics of neoliberalism and design culture. Rhetorics and practices of efficiency and functionality course through multiple objects and social understandings. These go beyond individualised notions of the ‘quantified self’ to form another, instrumental layer of neoliberal subjectivity. In this, particular focus is given to how practices of calculation, coordination and anticipation are active in these socio-material and socio-economic relationships.