Tamara Kocan: Sound, tactile, social sustainability maps....

Since deciding to go back to study sustainable urbanism, I have been concentrating on understanding what sustainable urbanism actually meant and what the different elements composing it related to.

The process I have started to analyse these components have been multiple: wandering across cities; taking pictures of public spaces, of people using the spaces; looking at what I thought were fun and well designed landscape elements; staying and observing people in those spaces; writing down in tables what was there, what seem to be missing; gathering information from all my friends architects, landscape designers, urbanists, sound geeks and others.

I have always had a love for maps and tools for visualising and simplifying very complex structures. After struggling many months trying to put to paper these bits and pieces of information I had gathered over the years, I decided to illustrate some of the findings using different mapping systems. And below are a few examples of them. Some gathering theoretical information like what it actually takes to create a socially sustainable city or what elements are needed for an environmentally sustainable place.

My latest experimentation came about after some walks through London with an urbanist/sound specialist friend and some other experimentation with sound and spaces with the MUSARC choir I am part of. These 'sound maps' are my first attempt to understand what impact sound has in cities, what we actually hear when walking through a space and what we could listen to if we would stop. And maybe slowly understand what it needs to create quality public spaces.