Urban Soundscapes: A Guide to Listening for Landscape Architecture and Urban Design

Sound and listening are intrinsically linked to how we experience and engage with places and communities. This guide puts forward a new conceptual framework of embodied affectivity that emphasises listening in urban research and design and advances new ways of knowing and making. The guide invites landscape architects and urban designers to become soundscape architects and offers practical advice on sound and listening applicable to each stage of a design project: from reading the environment to intervening on it.

Urban Soundscapes foregrounds listening as an affective mediator between subjects and multispecies environments, and a vehicle to think and conceptualise environmental research and design beyond prevailing visual and human-centred modes. The guide expands landscape architects’ and urban designers’ tools and skills to assess existing soundscapes, predict how those soundscapes will be altered through their designs, consider sound as a creative and active part of the design process and envisage how users might perceive and be affected by those soundscapes as they evolve in time. The volume sits in the interface of research and practice and interweaves theoretical, methodological and creative contributions from acoustic ecology, ecoacoustics, bioacoustics and sound art. Each of the design stages is illustrated through project examples that demonstrate the many advantages of incorporating attentive listening and sound into Landscape Architecture and Urban Design Practice. This book shows how incorporating listening and sounding as part of the design process promotes slow and subtle ways of practice, adds social and ecological value through the reduction of noise pollution and by monitoring the health of habitats, and enables the design of soundscapes that complement the character and design intent of a scheme and elicit joy and wonder.

The book will be of interest to practitioners and academics in landscape architecture, and other design and spatial fields such as urban design, architecture, geography and engineering, who play a primary role in the composition of the soundscape.