It explored how urban design has shaped ecologies of sound, but also how the sonic agency of non-human life exceeds and disturbs what can be planned. Should green spaces be considered quiet zones, as they are in urban sound policy, when this imaginary is disturbed by the vibrant sonics of non-human life? Are the sounds of infrastructure and technology part of this ecological vitality, or themselves disturbances to it? How can refuge from sonic disturbance be designed if we think beyond silence as an acoustic ideal?

Planning policy tends to privilege the quiet, and to see nature as a way to absorb the excess noise and pollution with which we make our environments unliveable. But sonic justice is also about the right to be heard, for both humans and non-humans. There is an urgent, overlooked need for new frameworks of urbanism that can work with the more-than-human and its sonic vitality, without silencing or controlling it.

This symposium responded to these quiet urgencies by assembling work addressing the complex ecological formations that constitute our worlds, as part of a broader constellation of critical practices of sonic urbanism. By engaging the term sonic ecologies, the symposium looked consciously beyond soundscapes of nature and towards the multiple dynamics (nature, including human bodies, but also infrastructures, technologies, politics, and cultures) that intersect to shape one another through a web of sonic affect. Dynamics that are sonic but may not always be audible to the human ear. A full critical report on the symposium can be read here.

Following on from the symposium day on 5th June, the workshop days gathered together symposium participants for two days of experiments in sounding and listening informing a set of design responses by students of the CSM Spatial Practices and Product Design programmes.

Students were invited to attend the Quiet Urgency symposium, and a smaller group was selected to develop speculative projects responding to its themes. These projects explored how sonic urbanism might inform critical design responses to the ‘quiet urgency’ of sonic ecologies. Designs were developed through the two workshop days following the symposium and a follow-up series of tutorials and pin-ups.