Over the years, in different cities, sometimes in the middle of a walk, sometimes on the way back home, and sometimes simply because I could not bear to let that moment slip away, the small visual notes I kept led me again and again to the same thought: A city is assumed to be seen first, but in fact it is heard first. Sometimes beneath the lights slowly spreading over the night along a shoreline, sometimes in the hum resting on the shoulder of a crowded street, and sometimes on a morning when snow softens everything into silence, the city takes the task of reading its character away from the eye and hands it to the ear. The eye selects many things according to its taste. The ear, however, is less fond of ornament and less easily deceived.
To get to know a city, it is not always enough to lift your head and look at building facades; sometimes you need to fall silent and listen for a while. Because what we call a city is not made only of stone, asphalt, trees, buildings, and voids. It is also the way these things speak to one another. Roads have a sound, the wind touching a pavement has a sound, crowds have a rhythm they organize within themselves. Even silence has a sound; at times it brings peace, at times unease, and at times it suggests that public life there has thinned out, withdrawn, begun to recede. From the sound of a city, one can read far more than expected about what it values, whom it places at the center, and whom it leaves at the margins.
The eye selects many things according to its taste. The ear, however, is less fond of ornament and less easily deceived.
Images can often be beautified. A square, when photographed from a good angle, may appear more orderly, more spacious, more inviting than it truly is. But sound is not so easily polished. Where the sound of engines dominates, the pedestrian is secondary. Where horns, brakes, exhaust, and a constant sense of haste are always audible, that city has been built around speed; not for people, but for flow. By contrast, where footsteps, brief encounters, distant children’s laughter, water, birds, and a light breeze can all exist without drowning one another out, another idea of the city begins to emerge. There, life is not merely continuing; it is, to some degree, being lived.
Coastal cities are especially interesting in this regard. Cities founded by the sea are often described only through their scenery. Yet the real story is often hidden in layers of sound. The relationship between waves and hard pavement, the faint metallic trace left by a bicycle wheel on the promenade, fragments of conversation from people sitting on benches, the slowed rhythm of walking a few steps away… These reveal the public life of that city. There is a clear difference between the sound of a person walking along the shore and the sound of a vehicle passing at speed: one settles into the city, the other cuts through it. No matter how crowded a waterfront may be, if that crowd can establish an acoustic balance without suffocating itself, then public life there may have been formed not in a crude way, but in a mature one.
Crowded streets, meanwhile, reveal another face of the city. When you enter a major pedestrian axis, the first thing you usually notice is not the architecture but the density. That density has its own sound. Footsteps overlap, the call of a street vendor rises briefly above the rest, storefront conversations blend into the flow, the sound of rails or tire friction draws a thin line through it all. In such places, the city becomes more anonymous. A person becomes invisible within the crowd while at the same time belonging to it. Perhaps this is one of the oldest contradictions of the big city: Crowds give a person both loneliness and belonging. Through sound, the city both pulls you in and leaves you with a certain weariness toward people.
The character of a city lies not only in how it looks, but also in what it compels its people to hear.
Marketplaces, bazaars, and semi-covered commercial spaces make the social backbone of a city clearly audible. There, sound is rougher but more alive. The sound of bargaining, calls, rustling bags, the noise of wet ground underfoot, all rub the class layers of everyday life against one another beneath the same roof. These are not sterile spaces; perhaps they are a little tiring, but they are real. Because what is heard there is not life in its arranged version, but life in something close to its raw form. Sometimes the character of a city is understood most clearly precisely here: where it is not perfect, where it loosens control a little, where it allows everyday life to compose its own music.
The sound of youth in a city also matters. Because young people are not only users of public space; they are a social force that gives it tempo. Skateparks, rollerblading areas, walls, steps, railings, open concrete surfaces… Places that the adult mind often sees as leftover spaces can become the liveliest stages of the city for young people. The sound of wheels, laughter, that brief silence between trying and falling, the rhythm a group of friends creates among themselves… These may appear disorderly, yet they are in fact an acoustic declaration of the right to exist in the city. If the sound of youth is overly suppressed in a city, that city may be orderly, but it is also a little old. Slightly noisy, somewhat scattered, and at times filled with metallic echoes, these sounds show that public life is still open.
The sound of children is similarly decisive, though it is a more fragile sign. If children’s voices cannot be heard in a city, that does not simply mean children are indoors. Perhaps the street is no longer safe for them. Perhaps speed has increased too much. Perhaps adults have occupied public space so completely that children have been compressed into small, designated areas. Yet children’s voices are among the signs of how open a city remains to the future. Because the sound of children is unplanned, a little startled, a little unruly; and precisely for that reason, it is a powerful proof that public space is alive. As the city is built more and more for the frictionless passage of adults, it loses its voice; or rather, it collapses into a single sound: the sound of a system that functions, but does not live.
In historic cities, this issue becomes even more layered. There are places where the sound of water and the horn of a ferry, seagulls and human crowds, the call to prayer and engine noise, slopes and the shoreline all exist within the same acoustic texture. Such cities are not merely large; they are polyphonic. And this polyphony does not always mean harmony. Sometimes it means collision, sometimes overlap, and sometimes one sound suppressing another. Yet even so, that layered structure keeps the city’s memory alive. Because history does not survive only in stone buildings; it also survives in regimes of sound. The sound of a port city is not the same as that of a steppe city. The sound of a commercial center does not carry the same weight as that of a border city.
When night falls, the sound of cities changes, but it does not disappear. In fact, some cities reveal their true identity most clearly at night. Seen from above, lights create the first impression of silence; yet that silence is deceptive. Every light carries an interior life. The hum of a road not visible in the distance, conversations rising from a side street, mechanical sounds from the port, the movements of a hilly city folding into itself… Night does not reduce sound; it makes it invisible. Perhaps that is why, when we look at cities at night, our ears work a little more through imagination. We look at the lights, but in truth we think about what we might be hearing.
In winter cities, sound takes on an entirely different character with the season. When snow falls, the city suddenly ceases to be the same city. The echoes of hard surfaces soften, the sound of wheels grows heavier, the sense of distance changes, and footprints and footfall nearly converge. Snow covers acoustics too. That is why winter cities do not always sound calmer; they often sound more withdrawn. They pull people from the outside toward the inside, from the public toward the more private. Yet precisely for that reason, the sound of a city under snow is instructive. Because in that moment, it becomes clearer which sounds remain alive: the scrape of a shovel, a distant engine, short conversations leaking from inside thick coats, the rhythm of someone walking through snow. Winter filters out the city’s unnecessary sounds and reveals its backbone.
But the city is not shaped only by natural sounds and everyday sounds; there are symbolic sounds as well. The relationship between a flag and the wind, the ceremonial moments of a square, the silence surrounding a monument, the acoustic counterparts of historical memory… These are heard less often, yet they sink deeper. A city can sometimes become the sound of a nation, sometimes of a shared memory, sometimes of a feeling carried for a long time. For that reason, to understand a city means not only understanding which sounds are present there, but also which sounds respectfully step back. Silence, no less than sound, is culturally constructed.
When speaking about the sound of cities, it is difficult to ignore the question of class. Because not every neighborhood produces the same sound, or rather, not every neighborhood is exposed to the same sound. Affluent areas may contain a filtered silence, an acoustic softened by trees, and a controlled traffic order. More fragile neighborhoods, by contrast, may live with high speed, hard surfaces, dense traffic, irregular infrastructure, and mechanical noise all at once. The issue here is not merely decibels. The issue is who is forced to live with which sounds all the time. Spatial justice is, in part, acoustic justice. What a child hears when opening the window, which sounds surround an elderly person sitting on a bench, whether a student can hear their own thoughts while walking, all of these are invisible components of the right to the city.
Cities built for the eye attract attention. Cities also imagined for the ear remain in memory.
Some cities wake to the sound of a market, some to ferries, some to trams, some to the heavy hum of traffic. In some, the waterfront in the late afternoon mixes human voices with water; in others, life withdraws as snow begins to settle. Yet in every case the same question remains important: do these sounds crush one another, or do they together form a rhythm of life? A good city is perhaps not a completely silent city. A city that is entirely silent is often either abandoned or over-controlled. The more livable city is one in which the right sounds can exist without smothering one another. A city where children’s voices are not drowned out by horns, where the rhythm of walking is not shattered by engines, where water can truly be heard, where wind can be felt not only in its harshness but in its presence.
In the end, the issue seems to come down to this: The character of a city lies not only in how it looks, but also in what it compels its people to hear. Because sound carries the traces of power, of everyday life, of memory, and of exhaustion. Some cities remain in the ear like a tiring command sentence; others linger in the mind like a melody long after one has left. Perhaps good design is, in part, this: reducing what should not be heard and making room for what should. Cities built for the eye attract attention. Cities also imagined for the ear remain in memory.
