From noise to soundscape in the service of urban health

ABSTRACT

Human health and planetary health are influenced by city lifestyles, city leadership, and city development. For both, worrying trends are leading to increasing concern and it is imperative that human health and environmental impacts become core foci in urban policy. Changing trajectory will require concerted action; the journal Cities & Health is dedicated to supporting the flow of knowledge, in all directions, to help make this happen. We wish to foster communication between researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, communities, and decision-makers in cities. This is the purpose of the City Know-how section of the journal. We invite you to join these conversations. In order to strengthen the community of interest, we would like to include many and varied voices, including those from younger practitioners and people who are supporting health and health equity in everyday urban lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Healthy cities
• urban sound
• planning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

List of reviewers

On behalf of the authors, the editorial team would like to acknowledge and thank the reviewers. Their diligent work and attention to detail contributed immeasurably to the quality of the papers in this special edition.

Francesco Aletta

Sven Anderson

Tjeerd Andringa

Pierre Aumond

Jamie Banks

Chiara Bartalucci

Richard Bentley

Edda Bild

Jeanine Botta

Giovanni Brambilla

Arline Bronzaft

Cristina Calleri

Gunnar Cerwén

Andy Chung

Julie Cidell

Mattia Cobianchi

Marcel Cobussen

Christopher Coutts

Katie Crist

Milena Droumeva

Andre Fiebig

Daniel Fink

Michael Fowler

Robert Freestone

Michiel Huijsman

Pamela Jordan

George Kaplan

Thomas Kusitzky

Jordan Lace

Lisa Lavia

Peter Lercher

Juliana Maantay

Vinaya Manchaiah

Lindsay Mccunn

Daniel Paiva

Antonella Radicchi

Dirk Schreckenberg

Valerio Signorelli

Daniel Steele

Sharon Stewart

Cynthia Tarlao

Aggelos Tsaligopoulos

Jeronimo Vida Manzano

Sabine von Fischer

Hanne Wiemann Nielsen

Katrin Wildner

Ariane Wilson

Hannah Wright

Pinar Yelmi

Special issue partners

The quiet coalition

The Quiet Coalition, a program of Quiet Communities, Inc., consists of science, health, and legal professionals concerned about the impacts of noise on health, environment, learning, productivity, and quality of life. We believe an evidence-based approach to noise as a health and social problem, combined with educational outreach and organized action, can lead to meaningful change. The Quiet Coalition is glad to sponsor this special issue of Cities & Health because noise has such an impact on the health of urban residents. Noise is stressful, and has been strongly correlated with hypertension, obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and increased mortality. We hope that the papers in this special issue will help lead to a quieter and healthier world for all.

Building health lab

Building Health Lab is a research and design collaborative effort to evaluate and propose public spaces for inclusion which help slow groups (children, the elderly, and people with disabilities) integrate in the community and restore their well-being. With great enthusiasm, we welcomed the collaboration and exchange in this project and special issue on sound and health which has widened the scope of our work and added significant value to our approach.

ALD – Noise Control Association of the German Acoustic Society

The Arbeitsring Lärm der DEGA (Noise Control Association of the German Acoustic Society) is a German NGO that aims at the improvement of the German and European noise control policy. The guiding principles of our work are an integrated approach, in order to tackle all kinds of noise sources, and the target of a high level of protection based on the outcomes of the research on noise effects. Noise and its negative effects are still underestimated and therefore awareness needs to be raised. In this sense we very much appreciate this special issue on Sound and the Healthy City which will help to underline the urgency of noise control and the importance of international collaboration.

Editorial board for this special issue

Guest Lead Editor: Antonella Radicchi, Technical University of Berlin, Germany

Guest Co-Editors (in alphabetical order):

- Pınar Cevikayak Yelmi, Işık University, Istanbul, Turkey

- Andy Chung, Macau Instituto de Acústica, Macau

- Pamela Jordan, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

- Sharon Stewart, ArtEZ University of the Arts, Netherlands

- Aggelos Tsaligopoulos, University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece

For Cities and Health:

Commissioning Editor: Lindsay McCunn, Vancouver Island University, Canada

Editor-in-chief: Marcus Grant, Environmental Stewardship, Bristol, England

Advisory Board (in alphabetical order):

- Arline Bronzaft, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of the City University of New York

- Peter Lercher, M.D., M.P.H, Professor of Graz University of Technology, Graz

- Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp, Ph.D., Professor of the Technical University of Berlin, Berlin

- Barry Truax, Professor Emeritus of Simon Fraser University, Vancouver

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Antonella Radicchi

Antonella Radicchi is a registered architect (IT) and holds a Ph.D. in Urban Design and Territorial Planning. She is Research Associate in the Institute of City and Regional Planning at TU Berlin, where she is the Principal Investigator of Hush City. She is Lead Guest Editor of the special issue Sound & the Healthy City for Cities & Health. Dr. Radicchi’s research investigates public spaces’ sensuous qualities through participatory walking methods and mobile technology. Her research was internationally awarded, inter alia, a Marie Curie Fellowship, a HEAD-Genuit Foundation Research Grant and the National Institute of Urbanism Award for the Best Italian Dissertation in Territorial Planning.

Marcus Grant

Marcus Grant is Editor-in-Chief of Cities & Health and former deputy director of the World Health Organisation’s Collaborating Centre for Healthy Cities. With a background in ecological systems and urbanism, he is a practitioner-scholar working in healthy urban planning, healthy place-makingand planetary health. He is an expert advisor to the WHO and UN-Habitat, a contributor to “Health as the Pulse of the New Urban Agenda’ and author of the WHO/UN Sourcebook: Integrating health into urban and territorial planning (2020). Marcus is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, a member of the Landscape Institute and isbased in Bristol, England.