Too rapid development can lead to loss of local culture and silencing of the vibrant life that defines a city, both metaphorically and literally through its soundscape. An influx of wealthier residents and businesses can displace long-standing or new communities, resulting in the loss of diverse voices and experiences. Once-thriving street markets, local music scenes, and community gatherings can be supplanted by sanitized, commercial experiences.
As place is sensed, senses are placed.
In reimagining the way we perceive cities and develop urban landscapes, it's crucial to shift our focus from designing for merely visual aesthetics to taking a multi-sensory approach, including consideration of the auditory aspects of cities. While we often marvel at the architectural structures of new urban landscapes, we rarely pause to consider the symphony of sounds that truly defines a city's character. How do we capture and convey the essence of these soundscapes, so that urban planners and decision-makers can accommodate the forces of change, while also respecting local communities and cultures?
Rather than solely tackling the quantitative aspects of sound, such as volume levels, we must prioritize a qualitative, ear-level perspective. By tuning planners’ ears to the intricacies of urban soundscapes, we can cultivate more inclusive environments that cater to people of all ages, genders, and cultural backgrounds throughout the day. This qualitative approach prompts us to ask fundamental questions: What kind of soundscapes contribute to a vibrant and healthy city? Who decides what spaces “should” sound like? How can we ensure that our urban environments are co-creative spaces that resonate with everyone?
Embracing a more inclusive understanding of citizenship
In the handbook "Senses and Citizenships - Embodying Political Life" (Trnka, Dureau & Park 2015), the authors dive into a realm often overlooked: the sensory dimensions of citizenship. They argue that our senses, including listening, play a pivotal role in shaping our understanding of what it means to belong to a community or a nation. They introduce a groundbreaking concept called "sensory citizenship," which expands the traditional notion of citizenship beyond mere legal rights and obligations. Instead, it encompasses how we engage with our surroundings through our senses, influencing our sense of belonging and participation in collective life.
This new perspective on citizenship unveils a fascinating interplay between our sensory experiences and the political and normative ideologies that shape our societies. By examining the ways in which certain sensory experiences are privileged and normalized, the authors shed light on the mechanisms that uphold particular forms of citizenship while marginalizing others. They challenge the conventional, one-size-fits-all notion of citizenship, recognizing that factors like gender, nationality, and sexuality often determine who is included and who is excluded from full participation in society.
By embracing a more inclusive understanding of citizenship—one that acknowledges the diverse sensory realities of individuals—the authors suggest that we can begin to challenge and redefine dominant forms of belonging and representation. They emphasize the embodied nature of engagement and exclusion, highlighting how our sensory experiences shape our interactions with the world around us. In doing so, they invite us to reconsider the very foundations of citizenship and imagine new possibilities for political life.
Based on this idea, "Sonic citizenship"1 has become a fruitful framework for understanding the multitude of ways in which we— in the rhythms of our daily lives—form the aural background of each other, and how—through our everyday sonic activities—our citizenship is practiced, negotiated, and maintained. It prompts us to reflect on how we audibly participate in and connect with our communities.
Sonic citizenship invites discussions about who holds the privilege to speak and make noise, who has the right to be listened to, and how we—through our attunement to each other's sounds and the regulation of our own—assume the roles of active sonic citizens.
Exploring how to understand sound environments at ear level
In essence, sonic citizenship challenges us to consider the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within our auditory landscapes, urging us to explore how our everyday sonic activities contribute to the construction of shared spaces and identities. It's a dynamic framework that encourages us to listen closely, speak up, and engage meaningfully with the sonic fabric of our lives. Exploring a complex sound environment like a city park at ear level, as sonic citizens, needs to include understanding sonic parameters as well as non-acoustic factors and the complex interplay between all our senses in different contexts as well as our individual sensitivities to sound. An ear-level approach to sound environment studies therefore calls for an awareness of affective, bodily and contextual presuppositions, and how they influence the way humans experience a given sound environment. A sound environment approach at ear-level should focus on the relational and performative relationship between the sonic citizen, the place and the sonic environment.
Today’s data collection standard methods are based on interviews, soundwalks, questionnaires and measurement2. They are concerned with the assessment of existing soundscapes to provide data on how future soundscapes can be designed. To include a future-oriented sonic citizenship perspective, we need urban interventions and experiments that can help glean finer insights into people's lived experiences, and capture these nuanced, often-subconscious aspects of urban living when developing urban soundscapes. Based on extensive knowledge across the understanding of public space, public life, the experience of a place and soundscape studies, Aarhus University and Gehl are in the process of developing a new method to understand sonic citizenship, and our sense of a place, at ear level. Interventions based on the concept of sonic citizenship can yield soft data that elucidates cultural and social practices, enriching urban planners’ understanding of the experiential dimensions of soundscapes, and informing future urban development. By fostering participatory initiatives that motivate and empower a diverse spectrum of citizens to engage in the urban development process, we aim to enhance the awareness and underscores the urgency of developing high-quality future soundscapes, in co-creative collaboration between relevant authorities and urban stakeholders.
