Project description
Impact of physical waves in urban environments
Physical waves – be it heat radiation, sound waves or radio frequencies – represent significant environmental disturbances. Invisibly crossing the urban environment, they harm bodies, both human and nonhuman in uncertain ways. The EU-funded WAVEMATTERS project investigates how waves affect specific bodies and environments and become issues of public concern and design intervention. The project involves extended ethnographic fieldwork in areas where urban projects have been set up to mitigate the urban heat island effect, reduce environmental noise and build fifth generation wireless communication networks. WAVEMATTERS will study the impact of bodily exposure to physical waves, and how these waves cause design interventions. The project will also explore how people physically adapt to such waves.
Objective
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 ur-ban 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 pro-duction, 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 environmen-tal disturbances.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
10117 Berlin
Germany