Sonic urbanism(s): listening to the city

This reflection on cultural geographies in practice draws upon experimental pedagogical practices from a Critical Urbanisms seminar entitled Sonic urbanisms: Sound, mobilities, culture and identity convened by the University of Basel and University of Cape Town. In the seminar we sought to explore the sonic aspects of Cape Town and its acoustic territories shaped through movements, circulations, and encounters. By experimenting with methods of listening to an African urban environment we offer insights to citiness developed through ‘sonic dérives’ – building on the concept from the Situationist International – that allowed our pedagogical process to drift with sounds: following, sampling, tracing. In this paper we seek to demonstrate firstly how our sonic dérives highlight emotional and affective relationships with urban space; and secondly, how our experiments shift us from hearing the city as a cognitive process of comprehension to listening as an active pedagogical and analytical process of speculation and imagination, straining towards possible meaning that is not immediately accessible. The outcomes of our sonic dérives illustrate how sound casts long spatial and temporal shadows, spreading across an acoustic territory without neat boundaries while also disrupting linear notions of past, present and future in the life of the African city through sonic connections to memories, desires and the formation of alliances. Through our experiments in sonic urbanism(s) the city is rendered in mobile acoustic territories that are fluid, ephemeral and intersecting as evidenced by a sonic map of Cape Town providing a multi-layered soundscape that is made visible and audible.