How One Artist Is Helping Neighbors Decide How Their City Should Sound - Streetsblog USA

"Usually credited to Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, who literally wrote the book on it, tactical urbanism uses reversible, inexpensive infrastructure to temporarily transform streets, like adding planters to protect bike lanes and using paint to visually extend curbs and slow drivers down. Those temporary experiments, in turn, can show residents the benefits of that infrastructure in real time, reducing resistance to innovative approaches and whetting the public's appetite for permanent changes."

"Those experiments, though, usually don't consider the broader sensoryexperience of city environments beyond the happy side effects of shifting travelers from cars to other modes, like reducing road noise from tires and the stench of tailpipe fumes. Di Croce argues that by starting with the impacts of our urban design choices that we can't see, though, we can open up a deeper conversation about how people feel in their places - and get to the root causes of why they move the way they do."

""In our cities, we need to pay greater attention to the sensory environment more generally," he adds. "We don't even think about why we take one street instead of another, if we walk in a neighborhood based on the colors of the lamps, for example. There are a lot of things we do without even thinking about why we take those decisions - and that means that we don't"

A Venice-based academic, musician, and sound artist led a 2022 project to reimagine the sonic environment of Montreal's Place de La Paix in direct collaboration with residents. Tactical urbanism uses reversible, inexpensive interventions to temporarily transform streets and demonstrate benefits in real time. Those experiments often ignore broader sensory experiences beyond reduced road noise and fumes. Adding an auditory dimension can reveal unseen impacts of design, change how people feel and move through places, and address root causes of travel choices. Sound interventions can make spaces more welcoming to people outside cars and strengthen support for permanent change.

Read at Streetsblog