Abstract
Living in cities offers many benefits and thus more and more people are living in urban areas. However, the concentration of human activities also creates environmental stressors with severe influence on people’s health and well-being. Noise is an environmental stressor with known health impact. Despite this, studies investigating small-scale difference in noise exposure and annoyance are lacking. Against this background, this case study investigates environmental justice empirically, focusing on the distribution of road traffic noise and its perception in Hamburg, Germany. The study outlines a methodological approach that takes into account subjective and objective measures of exposure in small-scale residential blocks. The results show that annoyance by noise is clearly related to noise emission. Moreover, different groups are affected by noise pollution in our study area unequally. In particular, younger people and people with lower socio-economic status have higher probabilities to be affected by noise. Additionally, it emerged that participants reporting higher levels of annoyance from noise are on average younger than those feeling less annoyed. Overall, these results show that the current legal noise limits applicable to residential planning processes in German cities are not sufficient to prevent substantial annoyance effects in residential populations.
Highlights
Vibrant and densely populated cities are often considered to be one of the most preferred urban environments because they offer opportunities for a creative economy, social life, outdoor activities and entertainment amongst others
Focusing on exposure to noise, this paper aims to understand the relations between the stressor noise, its perceived and qualitative characteristics, and the socioeconomic status of urban dwellers
In the European context, Environmental Justice (EJ) as a conceptual framework focuses on the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and harms in general and on spatial disparities in human exposures to environmental stressors such as various pollutants and noise, in particular
Summary
Vibrant and densely populated cities are often considered to be one of the most preferred urban environments because they offer opportunities for a creative economy, social life, outdoor activities and entertainment amongst others Life in such cities is influenced by different types of stressors, such as noise, air pollution, light pollution and density. Focusing on exposure to noise, this paper aims to understand the relations between the stressor noise, its perceived and qualitative characteristics, and the socioeconomic status of urban dwellers. We present results of the case study and link these to the conceptual debate in order to define future research tasks
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