“Town Built From Fleeting Matter”: Audiowalking San’ya’s Hidden Histories as Practice‐Led Spatial Inquiry

Abstract

This article revisits the audiowalk placeless: San’ya, originally produced in 2021 and re-staged in 2025 with geolocated audio technology. Using a practice-led approach and drawing on qualitative interviews and observational field notes, the study examines audio-based walking practices as a form of spatial computing in which digital sound is embedded in physical space and activated through movement. The case is situated in San’ya—a district name that officially no longer exists but remains associated with marginalization—within Tokyo’s continually changing urban fabric, where the past is often only weakly articulated in the built environment. The audiowalk traces layered histories, from the site’s adjacency to the Kozukappara execution grounds in the Edo period, through its history as a settlement for the stigmatized Burakumin caste, and its present-day role as home to an ageing population of day laborers. By keeping the narrative content constant while altering its technical mediation, the re-staging isolates how geolocation and contingency shape participant experience. The study contributes to spatial computing discourse by demonstrating that geolocated audio can function as a spatial interface that reconfigures movement and attention without displacing embodied awareness from the environment. It suggests that such practices can foster engagement with non-monumental urban histories without stabilizing absence into fixed narratives, while also foregrounding ethical questions about mediated presence in socially uneven spaces.