What I attempt to present here may be understood as an attempt to comply with the appeal made by Roland Barthes in "Semiology and Urbanism": to multiply not only the functional studies of the city, but also, and not the least, the readings of the city. I will pursue the hypothesis that studies of urban sound may not only be operational in leading to better sonic environments, but rather such studies could be a useful resource for planners, architects, designers, politicians etc. whishing to analyze the social dynamics of urban life.
This article takes the case of Gang i København, a strategic project from the Copenhagen Munincipelity initiated in 2006, as a starting point to discuss the politics of urban sound. It points out an important challenge for the methodology of urban sonic environments: namely that sound as a senso-motoric register may be poorly evaluated through concepts of noise and harmonics, taken to express disturbance and well-being respectively. A cultural theory of urban sonic environments would focus on the sociality of sound and investigate the ways in which people interact and make meaning through sound. Arguing for the relevance of a method to register and describe auditory practices as a kind of social interaction – a method that may supplement the engineer’s quantitative sound measurements and the landscape architect’s qualitative descriptors this article outlines a few approaches to a theory of acoustic territoriality and suggests alternative ways of mapping, analyzing and planning urban sonic environments.