A methodology to awake citizens' awareness on the effects of leisure noise

Abstract

In recent years, several cities’ administrations have proposed projects of urban renewal of historical districts to face state of neglect and degradation problems. Frequently these projects include new outdoor social activities such as pubs, bistros, and shops along and/or on the streets with a huge amount of investments, and the success of these projects is then measured through the increase in local population and tourists that frequent, during day and night time, these sites. On the other hand, more people frequent these sites more crowd noise and more consequent complaints of the resident population can be expected. Finally, the due imposition of administrative restrictions can nullify the original aim of the project. Starting from these considerations, a methodology based on sound recordings of different outdoor gathering spaces, on subjective questionnaires administered during listening tests, on features extraction's algorithms, and finally on the artificial neural networks is proposed. The methodology aims to improve the awareness of citizens about the impacts that leisure noise may have on a specific urban project and in general on the quality of the urban environments.