Responsive listening

negotiating cities of sirens, smartphones and sensors

Sarah Barns

pp. 217-231

in: Milena Droumeva, Randolph Jordan (eds), Sound, media, ecology, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

Urban life today is shaped, more and more, by our interactions with digital devices, infrastructures and platforms. Cities are now being designed in a way that is 'smart", utilising distributed sensors, algorithmic governance and machine learning techniques to support closer monitoring and management of urban infrastructures, atmospheres and services—from traffic monitoring and charging, to energy and water utilities, to air quality and crowd management. In light of these developments, this chapter explores how practices of listening negotiate different kinds of urban informational and infrastructural technologies. This work situates today's digitally-responsive cities within a longer historical trajectory of urban technological disruption and remediation, in order to explore the different ways in which technologies of listening are today seeking to modulate and to "make sense" of urban environments.