The Noise Landscape: A Spatial Exploration of Airports and Cities

The world’s cities are connected to the rest of the globe by air travel.

But the airports built to serve cities can take on a life of their own. The areas around large urban airports have particular noise complaints, forms of infrastructure and transient, impermanent architecture unique to them. These “noise landscapes” are emerging worldwide, often rivaling―or even surpassing―the cities they purport to serve in size and economic importance. The Noise Landscape: A Spatial Exploration of Airports and Cities, the product of several years of research led by Kees Christiannse at ETH Zurich, is the first attempt to study this phenomenon. On the basis of eight European case studies (Amsterdam, Zurich, London–Heathrow, Frankfurt, Munich, Madrid and the two Paris airports) this volume provides the first account of how these landscapes emerged and how they can be interpreted.