Crafting a Sonic Urbanism I The Political Voice

Theatrum Mundi & EHESS

Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers, le 13 décembre 2019

Attention is turning more and more to urban sound as a material to design with, as a site of conflict, as a medium through which to understand the urban environment, and so on. Crafting a sonic urbanism seeks to look beyond the soundscape as an object and bring together research and creative practice that reveals how sonic concerns and methods could shed new light on political, cultural, and social formations in the city.

Following the first conference in 2018 exploring sonic urbanism in its broadest interpretation, the second iteration will focus on the ways that the voice / voices and their enmeshments with architecture, infrastructure, and technology are understood in the fields that both analyse and design urban life in their political dimension. To be politically engaged is to have one’s voice ‘heard’ in the public space. How and where, though does this hearing happen? Whose voices are heard, both in the street and on the political stage? What is the role of architecture in amplifying or indeed diminishing the audibility of difference voices? The voice, here, is understood physiologically— as the human capacity to produce sounds and speech orally, - and socially - as the ability and the right to participate in the public sphere of political discourse and debate. Voices are understood as the multiplicity of these capacities, abilities, and rights, and their unevenness across bodies, geographies, platforms, and settings, which are arguably our primary mode of engagement with urban society but little understood in the disciplines that design and plan it. How, then, can urbanism take account for the voice and for voices as primary concerns for the shaping of cities? To what extent can urbanism play a role in giving, shaping, or amplifying voices, creating public squares that can be occupied and where voices come together and rise, and how has it participated in their silencing?