Urban Soundscapes

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 foregrounds 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