JUNE 26, 2026
Living along the Chaussée d’Anvers, at the edge of historic and more recent urban fabric in Brussels’ North District, the sensory conflicts of urban life cannot be ignored. Last night, windows were left open to cope with the heat; aircraft noise from RNP 07 flight routes followed. A neighbor, a mother of five, resides in a rear house beneath a black-membrane flat roof, her family’s only outdoor space a half-square-meter terrace. This situation exceeds a simple condition of discomfort. It is an atmospheric condition where thermal and acoustic stresses intersect and accumulate.
As part of an art-driven research experiment (Claus et al., 2024), last summer I explored with local residents, including our neighbor’s children, the lived experience of acoustic comfort along the Chaussée d’Anvers, with the sidewalk beneath the tree canopies of President Garden as one of the sites.
One of the planning scenarios tested during the project proposes enclosing this green space with taller buildings, a spatial intervention that assumes acoustic comfort can be achieved through enclosure. Yet this approach risks installing a spatial logic of uneven distribution, where acoustic comfort is not uniformly accessible in time and space, privileging some spaces over others.
The implementation of RNP 07 adds another dimension by concentrating aircraft noise in areas already confronted by thermal stress and socio-spatial precarity. Audible and inaudible vibrations propagate through material and air, modulating across structural interfaces, triggering resonance, and redistributing affect across urban sites, building complexes, and landscapes. The limitations of the planning scenario and the additional impact of RNP 07 demonstrate how socio-technical regimes of governance neglect the relational nature of urban atmospheres.
Sonic urbanism, understood as atmospheric urbanism, reframes these challenges as interconnected atmospheric conditions. It is a form of climate adaptation that addresses sensory conflicts already present in the city, while tracing their socio-technical origins and the need for mitigation. By treating acoustic comfort as a relational field, entangled with thermal, aesthetic, social, cultural, and political dimensions, this approach moves beyond discrete technical fixes, shifting between disciplinary positions to examine how forms of dis/comfort emerge through the spatial organisation and interaction of atmospheric conditions.
Benedito’s Atmosphere Anatomies (2021) approaches atmosphere as a spatial and design medium, foregrounding weather, climate, materiality, and sensory experience, while Peterson’s Atmospheric Noise (2021) examines noise as an atmospheric and urban condition. Building on these perspectives, I argue for a sonic urbanism as atmospheric urbanism, considering how atmospheric conditions accumulate and interact across spatial, environmental, and social contexts.