Walking With Dragons: Performance, the Sensorial, and Urban Change in Vancouver, Canada

ABSTRACT This article discusses the “Dragon Walk” project, a series of guided walks and participatory art‐based community gatherings purposefully located in one of Vancouver's major redevelopment landscapes, the Cambie Corridor. Adopting a “cats' cradle” approach to thinking and writing, I follow Dragon Walk's suggestion that we look at urban change from a circuitous route—one informed by performative, imaginative, and sensuous practices. I argue that by activating sensorial sites of encounters between human and more‐than‐human city inhabitants, Dragon Walk reveals some of the paradoxes of urban growth and points out a chasm between what is being envisioned in city projects and what redevelopment looks and feels like on the ground. Dragon Walk shows that so far, redevelopment on this major corridor has not been able to create more affordable, inclusive, or vibrant urban forms and urges us to pay attention to the stalled times of ruination and housing precarity. In this process, it questions an understanding of urban change modeled on growth, forward temporality, and the city as a human‐centered built environment.