The application of the soundscape approach in the evaluation of the urban public spaces

An important issues in the development of European cities is the design and renovation of the urban public areas. Typically, broad variety of approaches (sociological, ecological, environmental, physical, etc.) is needed. Earlier studies show the necessity of the transversal multidisciplinary approach in this issue. In order to study the acoustical dimension, the concept of soundscape needs to be proposed and elaborated. Soundscape approach differs from the classical statistical noise analysis in the evaluation of a context-related noise and in the extrapolation of environmental sounds in its complexity. Nowadays, even by using recently developed sophisticated acoustical and psycho-acoustical measurable and quantifiable parameters, it still remains difficult to grasp the complete meaning of a soundscape in words only or by numbers only. Our hypothesis is that the description of the city soundscape might be successfully done by combination of acoustical numbers and words. This article will propose a method for acoustical characterization of urban areas in the framework of the Belgian federal project: SD/TA/05A Design and renovation of urban public spaces towards sustainable cities (DRUPSSuC).