To download the Listening to the City Handbook, click here!

 

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On April 2, 2018, the MIT CoLab published the incredible Listening to the City Handbook: Community Research and Action through Sound and Story, a 181-page toolkit dedicated to furthering civic engagement as expressed in sound studies research, art, and pedagogy. Free and downloadable via the CoLab website, Listening to the City works toward “cultivating empathy and developing a multi-layered understanding of place. . .[while urging] academics and practitioners alike to explore emergent methods for making meaningful change within communities,” as the book’s overview states (10).  Assembled by Allegra Williams (Project Curator and Principal Author) and Maggie Coblentz (Researcher and Graphic Designer), the book offers engaging, accessibly written lesson plans, practical strategies, best practices, worksheets, and real-life community models from organizations such as LA Listens, the Binghamton Historical Soundwalk Project, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, the Urbano Project, the Frontier of Change Soundwalk, and OJBKFM Third Coast Pop-Up Community Radio.

Listening to the City the book began as the experimental conference Listening to the City: Engagement, Exploration + Intervention through Sound  held in Cambridge, Massachusetts (and the Greater Boston Area) on May 25-26 2017. A National Endowment for the Arts-funded collaboration between the MIT Community Innovators Lab, (CoLab), LA Listens, and the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI), the free conference offered an innovative, interactive weekend that brought artists, activists, and academics together to discuss sonic orientations to social change.

For a review of the conference, click here.

The opening plenary of Listening to the City conference, May 24th 2017

When conference attendees began excitedly sharing assignments, drafts of grants, syllabi, and other resources via Google Drive, the organizers realized the necessity to commemorate the conference and widen the conversation.  If folks at the center of the conversation were this starved for like-minds and start-up materials, then the greater need for a handbook was definitely out there. In the months following the conference, Williams and Coblentz conducted interviews with attendees, followed up on sources, led testing and feedback sessions, and organized the ensuing material into sections based on eight emerging methods: meditative listening, audio mapping, soundwalking, personal storytelling, pop up listening, drama, story mapping, and photovoice.

Sample pages from the Listening to the City Handbook (124-125) detailing the Urbano Project, photo credit by Allegra Williams

In the introduction, Williams and Coblentz identify four key guiding principles for Listening to the City, as both a volume and a culmination of a collaborative research process. They selected projects, methods, and practices for the book based on 1) accessibility–having a low barrier of entry for participants, 2) transferability–how readily the material could be used across disciplines and in varying communities, 3) high levels of participation and collaboration, and 4) possibility for transformation–strong interest in enacting community change.  By compiling and sharing these methods more widely,” Willams and Coblentz write, “the creators of this handbook hope others will come to see the unique power they hold to uplift and amplify critical community voices and their struggles through community research and action” (16-17).

Collaborators and contributors to the volume include Allegra Williams, Maggie Coblentz, Kenneth Bailey, Jessica Blickley, Douglas Burnham, Emily Cohen, Erik DeLuca, Katie Diamond, Rachel Falcone, Michelle Fine, Jocelyn Frank, Terra Graziani, Matt Green, Elisa Hamilton, Krista Harper, Dey Hernandez, Josie Holtzman, Aurie Hsu, W.F. Umi Hsu, Salvador Jiménez-Flores, Nathan John, Steve Kemper, Beau Kenyon, Isaac Kestenbaum, Jonas Kirkegaard, Lori Lobenstine, Stella Aguirre McGregor, Liz Ogbu, Anthony Peña, James Rojas, Katy Rubin, Catherine Sands, Katherine Shozawa, Jennifer Stoever, Brett Stoudt, María Elena Torre,  and Marc Weinblatt.

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