Sonic refugia: nature, noise abatement and landscape design in West Berlin

Abstract

This paper extends the history of landscape design and urban green planning by discussing the work of landscape designers in West Berlin, who attempted to create ‘sonic refugia’ using trees, bushes and other plants for noise abatement purposes. It expands the narrow conceptions of landscape as a solely visual experience also to include the acoustic realm. Motivated by increasing concerns over the physiological and psychological effects of noise pollution, and drawing on late nineteenth and early twentieth century ideas of nature as a remedy for the negative effects of modern urban life, this paper places the work of landscape designers in the context of ongoing discourses on the intersections of urban nature and public health. Sonic experiments with plants of the 1960s not only draw our attention to the acoustic qualities of urban nature, but also open reflections on the wider historical, political and cultural contexts in which urban landscapes were experienced. Hereby, West Berlin’s marginal spaces or terrains vagues, which emerged as accidental by-products of the island city’s spatial confinement, were exemplary sites in their attempts to foreground the sensory experience of space.