City of sounds: An heuristic of sensible aspects of public life in contemporary urban landscape

Abstract

The analysis of the sensible aspects of public life, or, in other words, Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, has an enormous heuristic potential for the study of cities and their images. This text argues that city images are also made of sounds and that urban sounds can reveal not only urban evolution, but also the current mode of organization of the social environments of cities. However, the Social Sciences have not dealt consistently with these sounds. Making inroads into Sociology and Geography, this text defends the need to pay more attention to the urban soundscapes, in order to detect with more rigor their social-political trajectories and configurations.