Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WAVEMATTERS (Urban vibrations: How physical waves come to matter in contemporary urbanism)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-01-01 al 2023-06-30
Cities are critical zones where the intermingling of environmental processes, infrastructural arrangements and human lives is increasingly apparent and disputed. Physical waves, particularly heat radiation, sound waves and radio frequencies, constitute major environmental disturbances that invisibly cross the urban built environment affecting bodies, human and nonhuman, in harmful and uncertain ways. By asking how they come to matter, this project explores how waves become associated to specific bodies and environments, as well as how they become matters of public concern and design intervention. To answer these questions, this project entails extended ethnographic fieldwork at key locations where urban projects aimed at mitigating the urban heat island effect, abating environmental noise and building 5th generation wireless communication networks are currently unfolding. Following techno-scientific researchers, city officials, professional consultants, affected groups and concerned residents, the project will address two major research problems: 1. How bodily exposure is done in practice, paying attention to both knowledge production and controversies concerning wave-related exposure, as well as to how individuals learn to be affected by and bodily attune to physical waves. 2. How waves problematize forms of urban coexistence leading to design interventions that reassemble (and disassemble) urban environments, as well as to practices of imagining other possible urban environments. A unique feature of this project is its emphasis on expanding conventional ethnographic research by means of multimodal collaborations with actors from the field, thus actively engaging in multimedia forms of knowledge production, prototyping or community building. This is indeed crucial to reassessing the material politics of the Anthropocene as entailing contested practices of materializing abstract or imperceptible environmental disturbances.
During the first 18 months, the project work was broadly divided into four partially overlapping phases:
• January-February 2022: The Principal Investigator (PI) established the foundation for team collaboration and developed a training program for the team.
• March-July 2022: Team members engaged in preliminary online research in the three key project fields (solar radiation, environmental noise, and wireless signals). Their aim was to develop research plans, taking into account the anticipated case studies and new relevant scientific publications. During this period, the project was publicly launched at the biannual conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) in Madrid. The team organized two highly successful events during the conference: a panel with approximately 8 contributions and a multimodal special format (https://vimeo.com/851601257).
• September 2022-February 2023: The team organized three international workshops with experts in each of the project's key fields: noise, heat, and wireless signals. Team members also began pre-fieldwork, both on-site and remotely. Based on these workshops, three special issues are currently in development: one has already been approved by the journal Science, Technology, and Human Values, a second one has been recently submitted to a leading journal of science and technology studies, and a third one is pending submission to a leading journal in social anthropology. These three special issues will collectively feature 7 contributions from the WAVEMATTERS team.
• March – June 2023: The team commenced the main phase of ethnographic fieldwork. This involved extended periods of interaction and engagement, mainly through participant observation and interviews, with scientific experts, public officials, concerned groups and affected communities. Team members conducted ethnographic research in Las Vegas, Madrid, and Podgorica for the field of heat adaptation, in Brussels, London, and various German cities for the field of EMF/wireless signals, and in Paris and Barcelona for the field of environmental noise.
• January-February 2022: The Principal Investigator (PI) established the foundation for team collaboration and developed a training program for the team.
• March-July 2022: Team members engaged in preliminary online research in the three key project fields (solar radiation, environmental noise, and wireless signals). Their aim was to develop research plans, taking into account the anticipated case studies and new relevant scientific publications. During this period, the project was publicly launched at the biannual conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) in Madrid. The team organized two highly successful events during the conference: a panel with approximately 8 contributions and a multimodal special format (https://vimeo.com/851601257).
• September 2022-February 2023: The team organized three international workshops with experts in each of the project's key fields: noise, heat, and wireless signals. Team members also began pre-fieldwork, both on-site and remotely. Based on these workshops, three special issues are currently in development: one has already been approved by the journal Science, Technology, and Human Values, a second one has been recently submitted to a leading journal of science and technology studies, and a third one is pending submission to a leading journal in social anthropology. These three special issues will collectively feature 7 contributions from the WAVEMATTERS team.
• March – June 2023: The team commenced the main phase of ethnographic fieldwork. This involved extended periods of interaction and engagement, mainly through participant observation and interviews, with scientific experts, public officials, concerned groups and affected communities. Team members conducted ethnographic research in Las Vegas, Madrid, and Podgorica for the field of heat adaptation, in Brussels, London, and various German cities for the field of EMF/wireless signals, and in Paris and Barcelona for the field of environmental noise.
The project has been designed to go beyond the state of the art in at least two ways: firstly, the project studies exposure to atmospheric waves not as a matter of fact, but as a social practice that entails a process of learning to be bodily dis/affected by atmospheric waves. Secondly, the project approaches contemporary urban challenges as related to the government of the atmosphere of cities, exploring how it becomes a matter of concern and design. These two hypotheses have been specified in different ways in the different research fields of the project.
In the field of urban heat mitigation and adaptation, the case studies currently under research are allowing us to address various hitherto neglected issues from a social science and humanities perspective. In relationship to the problem of exposure to urban heat, the most important empirical findings concern how people and animals (especially pets) do exposure in collective and collaborative ways. In relationship to questions of atmospheric design, we are currently developing a conceptual framework to study shade as an architectural artefact.
In the field of environmental noise, the case studies show that the well-known fact that Environmental Noise Directive of the EU is fundamentally differently implemented in different cities is not only a result of the coexistence of different cultures of noise and soundscapes, but also of the ontological indeterminacy of noise and the practical and technical difficulty of measuring noise.
In the field of EMF/wireless signals, the case studies go beyond the state of the art, as they demonstrate that risk communication about health effects of 5G is not framed as a problem of uncertainty and deliberation, but as a problem of too much certainty in opposing camps increasingly rejecting mediation through deliberation. This leads to a fundamentally new political situation, in which new methods of political deliberation and risk communication based on experimentation and diplomacy are needed – and the team is currently working towards developing new methods of staging public deliberation and risk communication in collaboration with scenography and theater studies.
One overall finding that goes beyond the state of the art entails understanding the specificity of what we call ‘wave pollution’ in opposition to the much studied ‘particle pollution’. This promises to make an important contribution to pollution studies.
In the field of urban heat mitigation and adaptation, the case studies currently under research are allowing us to address various hitherto neglected issues from a social science and humanities perspective. In relationship to the problem of exposure to urban heat, the most important empirical findings concern how people and animals (especially pets) do exposure in collective and collaborative ways. In relationship to questions of atmospheric design, we are currently developing a conceptual framework to study shade as an architectural artefact.
In the field of environmental noise, the case studies show that the well-known fact that Environmental Noise Directive of the EU is fundamentally differently implemented in different cities is not only a result of the coexistence of different cultures of noise and soundscapes, but also of the ontological indeterminacy of noise and the practical and technical difficulty of measuring noise.
In the field of EMF/wireless signals, the case studies go beyond the state of the art, as they demonstrate that risk communication about health effects of 5G is not framed as a problem of uncertainty and deliberation, but as a problem of too much certainty in opposing camps increasingly rejecting mediation through deliberation. This leads to a fundamentally new political situation, in which new methods of political deliberation and risk communication based on experimentation and diplomacy are needed – and the team is currently working towards developing new methods of staging public deliberation and risk communication in collaboration with scenography and theater studies.
One overall finding that goes beyond the state of the art entails understanding the specificity of what we call ‘wave pollution’ in opposition to the much studied ‘particle pollution’. This promises to make an important contribution to pollution studies.