Walking as Kinaesthetic Experience of the City

In the last few years, the design of public spaces has been increasingly considering the multisensory experience of the environment by the users, in particular by trying to create attractive or comfortable “ambiances.” This chapter aims at clarifying some notions used by researchers and practitioners to analyze the city experience with regards to the practice of walking. The aforementioned analysis is aimed to serve the study of the lived space and also for future urban and architectural designs.

Graphical Research Tools for Acoustic Design Training

This chapter presents an overview of 3 graphical tools supporting soundscape assessment in different settings, indoors and outdoors. These research prototypes support the spatial organization of the perceptual information available to the participants and are designed based on surveying techniques used in architectural training to create a foundation for acoustic design education in architecture schools. This chapter reports the contexts of the focus groups investigations, presenting advantages and drawbacks related to their use. It has been found that participants often added explanatory verbal data and arrows to the provided diagrams. The diagrams and their use have been interpreted with the support of the qualitative data captured along the studies through thematic analysis. Finally, paper prototypes are useful for educational approaches, but future more comprehensive studies will require integrating these tools in existing or yet-to-be-designed systematic frameworks for soundscape analysis and design.

Sensitive Bodies in the Cityscape

Cities evolve to just possible, always uncertain urban futures, achieving complexity so this complexity becomes itself the best tool to face uncertainty. The main operation in urban systems evolution is difference, the establishment of traces indicating differences, differences themselves consisting of increasingly more complex systems of rules, like a game board. Differences operate both in space and time, conforming to a cultural landscape, a cityscape. It is in this context where the authors present the concept of sensitive bodies. Urban spaces highly internalise processes due to a collective memory of past events, whose complexity can be read through both a hermeneutical approach to form and a sensitive approach to topology, the underlying system of rules that can be read just by playing the game, using techniques borrowed out of performing arts, making bodies interact with living bodies whose behaviour is just the main component of the cityscape.

On the Intersection Between Speaker Installations and Urban Environments

This chapter deals with speaker installations and the potential to use such installations for designing soundscapes in cities. Through employment of a designer's perspective, eight intersections between speaker sounds and the environment in which they are installed are brought forward and discussed. The intersections were originally deduced by the author theoretically but have subsequently also been examined in relation to existing speaker installations. This chapter describes and exemplifies each of the eight intersections, which have been denoted as sound sculpture, sound space, atmospheric design, sound and light, sound binocular, sound postcard, interactive event, and retuning of soundscape. Discussions in the chapter cover the role of speaker-induced sound in relation to the notion of acousmatics as well as urban design.

Visualisation and Auralisation for Perception-Driven Decision Supports in Planning

Visualisation and auralisation are among the essential technologies for perception-driven decision support in landscape planning and soundscape planning, respectively. By making proposed developments and environmental changes visible and audible, they allow decision-makings based on perceptual experience, providing a “common language” that all the stakeholders are capable of using to communicate and to exchange ideas. While they share common function and criteria when used for decision support in planning, they are not in parallel developments and have been approached differently regarding their applications. This chapter comparatively reviews the developments and applications of visualisation and auralisation for perception-driven decision support in planning, aiming to provide technological and methodological insights into the two interconnected yet somewhat independent subjects. This led to indications for new developments and optimized applications in the near future. The chapter addresses three issues: validity, contents to present, and ways to present.

Changing Perception Through Performance Art

Interest in the study of the senses and performance has been increasing in the last decades in the disciplines of Anthropology and Social Sciences. Architecture has slowly been integrating the senses as part of the analysis, and only more recently, the performance. This chapter analyzes the artistic experience denominated Thermopolis, which took place in Athens in 2012, and used performance and perception as key work tools. The aforementioned analysis is aimed to find references that serve the study of the space and also for future architectural designs.

Thermal-Perception-Driven Adaptive Design for Wellbeing in Outdoor Public Spaces

The spread of digital technologies, aiming at improving the effectiveness of the technological and environmental project proposals, has transformed the modus operandi for architects and designers who approach environmental impact assessment, especially about public space designs. Research activities aim at collecting guidelines for the sustainable regeneration of public spaces, focusing on the effectiveness of the performance of individual actions proposed by gradually checking and fixing the convenient benchmark design required by norms and sometimes by technology and building best-practices widely consolidated, even on a scientific basis. Early design optimization process relies on the combined use of appropriate IT tools for environmental control and on the interoperability of these systems with the traditional modeling tools for outdoor and indoor spaces. According to data-design-oriented logic, the core of the research methodology is applied to three case studies concerning public “complex” open spaces within the Neapolitan urban context (Italy).

Identification, Prioritization, and Assessment of Urban Quiet Areas

Urban growth retains a bipolar dissension regarding quality of life as it is both deleterious and beneficial for urban dwellers. Environmental noise could be considered a byproduct of growth, and according to numerus studies, it should not be ignored. The small urban setting of Mytilene located in the island of Lesvos (North Aegean, Greece) was the case study of this research. By implementing a novel protocol, the potential Quiet Areas of Mytilene were highlighted. The methodology consisted of noise measurements, soundscape recordings, and strategic noise mapping using the CadnaA noise prediction software. Furthermore, several soundwalks were conducted with the scope to obtain the citizen perspective regarding Quiet Area management. The way that city inhabitants perceive their acoustic surroundings could determine the character of the landscape along with the quality of the soundscape and define the meaning of quietness, which still remains vague.

Non-Participant Observation Methods for Soundscape Design and Urban Planning

More accurate non-participatory parameters and psychoacoustics to assess human perceptual responses to the acoustic environment are critical to inform effective urban sound planning and applied soundscape practice. Non-participatory observation methods are widely used by experts to capture animal behavior. In 2012, Lavia and Witchel applied these principles and methodologies for the first time to capturing and assessing human behavior “in the wild” to changes to the acoustic environment using added sound and music interventions in a clubbing district. Subsequent work was conducted with Aletta and Kang and Healey, Howes, Steffens, and Fiebig to begin characterizing the acoustic environment and human responses to align the perceptual and physical findings. Here, the authors report on new work and analysis and propose a preliminary predictive agile applied soundscape framework using non-participatory observation methods and psychoacoustics to be used with environmental assessment practice and evolving urban soundscape planning methods by researchers, practitioners, and policy makers.

Urban Sound Planning

In this chapter, examples of the application of urbanism approaches are described not only to reduce unwanted noise but also to improve the quality of the sonic environment. By considering different architectonic elements existent in the urban environment, it is possible to highly reduce traffic noise levels. The shape of the buildings, the street configurations, or the urban furniture are effective for urban sound-friendly architecture. Additionally, it has been proven that human perception is multisensorial; thus, the visual elements are also influential to the perception of urban sound environments. The way visual elements can support the sonic coherence of a space and its relation to the urban functionality is discussed. Finally, Virtual Reality Technology is proposed as a tool for the design and appraisal of future urban development where both visual and audio can be simultaneously assessed. The implementation within a smart city is also considered.