IN-PERSON Barcelona Livable Cities. Section A

Abstract

In city planning, the language of ambience refers both to the computational infrastructures of a city’s design (ambient computing) and a set of aspirational ideals that make a city “livable” (cf. Mattern, 2021 and Halegoua, 2019). Linked to digital or smart city developments, ambient computing and ambient design use data-driven intelligence to organise and systematise infrastructures and services such as garbage collection and traffic flows (Bwalya, 2019). Drawing from theories of ambience in sounds studies, ambience carries specific aesthetic and perceptual connotations of harmony, clarity, immersion and scale (Burdon, 2023). Drawing upon original field recordings, deep listening, and critical mapping of a city’s presumed ambience, from Glasgow and London, UK, the authors stage a theoretical and an experiential intervention into ambience and its political, aesthetic and social consequences within the design of contemporary cities. While ambience’s status may be a seemingly benevolent measure of spatial and social good, this paper discusses the process of listening to the other noises of ambient computing—from the city’s data centres to Wi-Fi towers to fiberoptic cables—that are sutured into urban space. Additionally, we practice deep listening and critical mapping to attend to the silences and exclusions ambience produces through its regulations of environments. Applying a critical technocultural discourse analysis (Brock, 2018) to arts-based methods (Loveless, 2019), this paper advances a timely critical intervention into ambience as a marker of value in contemporary spaces. Therefore, the paper argues ambience is more than a metaphor for design but a translation of values: connoting softness, abundance, unobtrusiveness, self-regulation and quietude.