Suchergebnisse

In this paper the authors reappraise the ways in which travellers in urban areas have interacted with new transport technologies and argue that mobility change over the past century or so may be less than is sometimes assumed. Attention is focused on changes in the journey to work over the 20th century, on the experience of new travel technologies by an adolescent female in the late 19th century, on perceptions of competing forms of urban transport in Manchester and Glasgow in the interwar period, and on changes in the everyday mobility of children aged 10–11 years since the 1940s. It is argued that, although the material experience of everyday transport has changed significantly over the past century with the advent of new transport technologies, these did not necessarily change the aspirations and decisions of people with regard to everyday mobility. Moreover, such changes did not always bring benefits to all travellers.

This paper introduces regulatory components influencing city soundscapes in Europe and the UK, illustrating the abatement approach taken within noise policy, demonstrating the importance of individual experience in assessing the soundscapes of urban environments and identifying a terminology to facilitate an introduction of soundscapes into the planning process. Drawing on work from soundscape ecology, a way is demonstrated to coalesce these divergent positions. Reviewing interviews undertaken in Clerkenwell, the paper demonstrates that it is not simply noise levels that are important to people in an urban area. Context, source, distance, temporariness and control over noise, are all relevant to whether people would want to see a particular sound eliminated from their soundscape. Using Schafer's terminology 'keynote sounds', 'soundmarks' and 'sound signals', a rationale is proposed through which experienced soundscapes may be articulated, challenging the strategy of noise abatement which could produce a conformity of soundscape that homogenises place and dissolves local uniqueness.