Chapter in City, Public Space, and Body: The Embodied Experience of Urban Life
Edited By Mahsa Alami Fariman, Chien Lee, Ahmadreza Hakiminejad, Asma Mehan. Published Routledge Nov 2025 following a paper presentation at the Goldsmiths conference of the same name in December 2021.

In the summer of 2020, I went on a series of soundwalks in my local area of East London which involved listening to how music and musical behaviours formed part of the local soundscape. Due to COVID lockdown restrictions, not only were there increasing numbers of people out in the parks and squares with mobile phones, bike speakers and portable sound systems, but this was also juxtaposed with the complete absence of music from commercial venues. Using digital DJ technology, I combined the noisy, field-recorded music I had gathered with the original versions of the tracks discovered using the music identification app Shazam. This echoes a technique called worldizing developed by film sound designer Walter Murch while working on the film American Graffiti. The technique involved the re-recording the musical soundtrack on set, complete with the environmental acoustics and noise of the location, which was then blended with the original music in post-production to create a sonic depth-of-field. Playing recorded music in public not only brings the music into a complex sonic relation with the urban environment, but also with the social dynamics of the local area. Recorded music itself can also be seen as forming part of a larger, global discursive ecology. This piece suggests that the practices of soundwalking, music identification, and DJ performance are generative live methods for examining music’s place in the urban soundscape. It also frames DJing in its broadest sense – playing recorded music through speakers into an environment – as an act of worldizing. Viewed in this way, DJing can then be productively analysed across three layers—sonic, social and discursive.

City, Public Space, and Body offers a timely and interdisciplinary examination of how bodies experience, shape, and are shaped by urban life, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bringing together contributions from scholars, artists, and practitioners across diverse geographies, the book explores the entangled relationships between urban space, embodiment, and publicness through a variety of methodological lenses including ethnography, visual and performative arts, and critical urban theory. The book highlights underexplored themes such as gendered vulnerability, spatial justice, post-pandemic public space, and marginalized urban bodies in both Global North and Global South contexts. By focusing on lived experience and embodied methodologies, the book challenges dominant urban narratives and contributes fresh perspectives on space, care, power, and resistance. It will benefit readers seeking to rethink cities not merely as physical or functional entities, but as affective and contested terrains of social life.

Designed for researchers, students, and professionals in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, gender studies, and cultural geography, this collection foregrounds the bodily and sensory dimensions of urban encounters, spatial politics, and everyday life.