Sonic Urbanism as Critical Spatial Practice

Research by Caroline Claus (advisors: Burak Pak and Peter Cusack)

|| Within a context of militarized urban transformation seeking sonic strategies to deal with alienation, repression and immobility, the importance of sound’s affective and disruptive capacities, cannot be understated. Sonic Materialism offers us a non-anthropocentric perspective and becomes simultaneously a means of artistic as well as critical inquiry.

Through interdisciplinary network practice we explore how a decentering of the human sense and perspective necessitates the production of new sonic (infra-)structures in ways that breaks those confines whilst facilitating the collaborative construction, engineering of alternative sonic futures emancipated from certain impasses. By connecting the avant-garde output of urban sound artists and curators to the perspectives and practices of young people involved in urban transformation, we set out a path to a sonic vocabulary, diagrams and tools for a positively defining and performative urbanism of sonic possible futures.

Keywords: sonic materialism; vibrational nexus; urban transition; green infrastructure space; sonic urbanism; critical spatial practice