For the 2nd year we are collaborating with the Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur des enjeux sociaux (IRIS, EHESS) to ask how a focus on sound can open up new questions within city-making, and new ways of addressing those questions. Looking beyond soundscape itself as a product of urban life, we aim to map out contemporary practices that think through sonic concerns to reveal other urban phenomena, and work through sonic methodologies to intervene in them.

Listening to non-human life

For this new edition taking place on Gaîté Lyrique’s new online platform Plein Écran, we’ve selected 28 participants that will present work and research projects, showing what can be learned by listening beyond human voices to the ways that animals, plants, and indeed other forms of non-human life make themselves heard. In line with the aims of Crafting a Sonic Urbanism, we are interested less in the soundscapes produced by non-human lifeforms as end points in themselves, than we are in how design and research approaches informed by acoustic methodologies might help understand and stimulate interspecies cohabitation in cities.

In an urbanising world, urbanism becomes the study of reality itself, and requires therefore the greatest possible range of means and collaborators for imagining and enacting situations that can sustain both human and non-human life. Buildings and physical infrastructures are not enough – we also need new imaginative and cultural infrastructures to transform cities and the ways we live in them into sustainable habitats for a multitude of species. Currently, the value of ‘nature’ to human life in cities is mostly framed in terms of psychological impact, disaster mitigation (green infrastructures against flooding or overheating, for example), and the creation of spaces for leisure or aesthetic consumption – parks and gardens.

However, the lifeforms used in these ways are not usually considered constituents: non-human lifeforms are rarely considered to have ‘voices’ within the public sphere. They are however active communicators – through sounds, chemical signals, electromagnetic waves and active agents in the production of urban habitat. How can we be in dialogue with these modes of communication and production, and how being so transform our (humans) own city-making processes?