Urban Soundscapes. A Guide to Listening for Landscape Architecture and Urban Design - Usue Ruiz Arana. New York: Routledge, 2024
by Marcel Cobussen
As an academic interested in sound and engaged in advisory work on sound design in public (urban) spaces for both governmental and non-governmental organizations, landscape architect Usue Ruiz Arana’s book Urban Soundscapes: A Guide to Listening for Landscape Architecture and Urban Design naturally caught my attention. After all, few books combine a solid academic contextualization with concrete recommendations for sonic interventions in public spaces. In my opinion, although quite different in many ways, Ruiz Arana’s book falls within a tradition established by publications such as R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape (1994 [1977]), Barry Truax’s Acoustic Communication (2001), Jordan Lacey’s Sonic Rupture (2016), Kang and Schulte-Fortkamp’s edited volume Soundscape and the Built Environment (2016), and the books and articles produced by the CRESSON team. That is, Urban Soundscapes takes inspiration, ideas, concepts, theories, and examples from the social sciences and humanities, enhanced by basic knowledge from the fields of (psycho)acoustics and sound technology.
The book is text-based but does include quite a few figures and audio files, the latter accessible on the Routledge website or embedded in the eBook+ version. Although primarily illustrative, these audio files provide a good impression of (some of) the sonic environments Ruiz Arana describes. Furthermore, the book is divided into three parts: Attunement, Composition, and Performance. These three “tenets,” as she calls them, are subdivided into chapters, each ending with notes and (literature) references. This division appears to give the book a clear structure, although I must admit that, while reading, I often lost track of which part or chapter I was in, partly because many sections, particularly theoretical ones, are repeated more than once throughout the nearly 300 pages.
Nevertheless, Part I – Attunement is undoubtedly the most theoretical section, in which Ruiz Arana outlines her conceptual framework. As could be expected, it begins with the observation that urban designers typically do not take the sonic environment into consideration. They are not taught to listen to it, even though numerous studies have already proven how sounds influence (mostly negatively) human health and well-being, and even though it is (almost) self-evident that every landscape design also affects the aural ambiance.
Ruiz Arana therefore introduces the term “affective listening” early in her book as a tool of sorts that landscape architects should cultivate within themselves. The purpose of affective listening, she writes, is “to engage us with our surroundings and is thus the most simple, everyday form [of listening] and perhaps its most vital” (p. 32). Alongside listening as an aesthetic and creative practice and listening as communication, affective listening is a prerequisite for experiencing, assessing, and (if deemed necessary) transforming a sonic environment. The best way to practice (affective) listening in (urban) soundscapes is by walking – soundwalking, to be more exact – a practice Ruiz Arana explores by interviewing several sound scholars, sometimes supplementing these discussions with listening exercises.
Part II – Composition is somewhat more concrete, offering specific instructions and aids on how to investigate and assess an existing landscape sonically, for example. These include checking pre-existing noise maps, recognizing sound events, paying attention to sound propagation, making audio recordings, considering the history of a place and listing its constraints and opportunities, among others. Ruiz Arana provides several concrete examples of how she, as well as other researchers, have worked to analyze the sonic ambiances of specific sites or city quarters. Several audio files and figures – location maps, photos, noise maps, soundscape assessment tables, and artist’s impressions – help illustrate how these sites look and which sounds characterize them.
In this part she also presents initial design principles, often relying on work conducted by others. For example, she cites Truax who argues against monotonous soundscapes and advocates variety, albeit with enough coherence or regularity to avoid overloading listeners with too much information (p. 161). Another principle is “to accentuate or amplify positive listening experiences through spatial and surface alternations and landscape elements” (p. 168). Additional strategies available for landscape architects for intervening in an existing sonic ambiance include constructing earth berms, enclosing a site (to keep unwanted sounds out and pleasant sounds in), using a cut-out effect (a sudden change in the listening experience), facilitating a greater diversity of natural sounds, restricting traffic, incorporating a variety of materials, and adding shrouded sounds – those that can be heard but not seen, thereby encouraging exploration. Part II concludes with some useful, concrete examples of sites where Ruiz Arana proposed (and realized) sonic interventions.
Part III – Performance is by far the shortest section of the book and focuses primarily on listening to and recording of nonhuman beings and natural spaces “which might get lost in facts and figures” (p. 250). It ends with an Annex that largely repeats content already found in previous sections but, surprisingly, also introduces new examples of “aural effects” – a topic already discussed in Part II and quite similar to “sonic effects” (also in Part II). Additionally, some previously-addressed concrete examples are revisited here. It is not that Part III is uninteresting, but it did make me wonder about the overall structure of the book. The Annex feels somewhat like a collection of miscellaneous issues already mentioned in Part I and II, repeated in slightly different words, sometimes with additional information.
Although I did not discover anything truly new to me in Urban Soundscapes – neither on a theoretical level (as most concepts and ideas Ruiz Arana presents are drawn from other sound scholars) nor on a practical level (most recommendations for sonically improving sites are already well-known) – I still liked the book, precisely because it brings together knowledge that was previously scattered. For example, attention for animals and plants is rarely found in soundscape literature focusing on noise pollution.
Nevertheless, I would like to end with two points of criticism. First, I wonder whether the book will reach its intended audience – namely (landscape) architects, urban planners, policymakers, etc. Are they interested or willing enough to work through a substantial amount of theory and conceptualization? My own experience suggests that they are usually only interested in concrete recommendations, preferably presented with bullet points. Second, the title explicitly refers to urbanity, yet some of the concrete examples that receive the most attention in the book – such as an old pottery in a small town in the north of England and a peninsula close to but clearly separated from Toronto – are far from urban.
I would have preferred Ruiz Arana to focus more on difficult, noisy places in (big) cities, as those are the environments that not only landscape architects but also sound scholars and acousticians employed by government agencies struggle with most. It is in these noisy urban sites that more creativity is needed, simply because reducing decibel levels is often not possible and/or not sufficient to create a pleasant and healthy sonic ambiance.
Perhaps therefore Urban Soundscapes deserves a sequel!!!
