The Sense of City


This project aims to re-examine what local space means to the city person in order to make better designs to promote an individual’s sense of community.

As a collaborative work, Jerlyn Jareunpon and I chose to focus on the experience of sound in my investigation of urban spaces: London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Seoul, as well as other cities. First, before beginning this project, we made seven colorful stickers for indicating overall sound experience by relative volume and intensity. Each sticker has sub categories to examine specific sounds like transportation, people, construction, nature, machinery, music, and miscellaneous. Second, using these stickers for envisioning information, we mapped the locations of the sounds we heard and communicated our impressions of the city to each other through postcards sent through mail. When we went to specific places, famous streets, squares, etc., we recorded sounds, took a photo, indicated the place on the map, and finally descriptive objective facts and subjective feelings. Finally, we documented about 200 postcards with a book containing photos and maps.

What is the sense of living in a city today? The Internet, cell phones, and other devices keep our lives moving faster and faster in a world that is becoming increasingly connected through this technology. A sense of community identity is still important to help us locate ourselves within this mobile world. Sound is often a forgotten sense, but a necessary faculty that we use to communicate and experience our surroundings. Through a collection of recorded sound and writing, Jerlyn and I wanted to set out to define the identity of place in the cities. The post-card aspect of our project emphasizes the human and subjective nature of experiences in a place. The mapping of the data becomes the document of our locations, and allows us to make comparisons between the sounds that identify various cities. Finally, the project conducts people to travel the cities through imagination.

Initiate research in collaboration with Jerlyn Jareunpoon