Urban vibrations: How physical waves come to matter in contemporary urbanism

Cities are critical zones where the intermingling of environmental processes, infrastructural arrangements and human lives is increasingly apparent and disputed. By asking how physical waves, particularly heat radiation, sound waves and radio frequencies, come to matter, this project explores how waves become associated to specific bodies and environments, as well as how they become matters of public concern and design intervention. To answer these questions, this project entails extended ethnographic fieldwork at key locations where urban projects aimed at mitigating the urban heat island effect, abating environmental noise and building 5th generation wireless communication networks are currently unfolding. This is crucial to reassessing the material politics of the Anthropocene as entailing contested practices of materializing abstract or imperceptible environmental disturbances.