LA Listens collaborated with MIT Community Innovation Lab on the Listening to the City initiative. This collaboration led to a two-day conference called Listening to the City: Engagement, Exploration + Intervention through Sound, bringing together ctivists, artists, residents, researchers, students, teachers, and community practitioners with an interest in sound as a creative mode of inquiry, a tool for democratic engagement, and a means for social change.
We had the honor of co-hosting this conference with MIT and Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) in Cambridge in May 25-26, 2017. Read this MIT Arts’ great review of this conference.
I moderated the opening plenary panel: Listening for Community Change. And LA Listened organized and ran a workshop sharing our sound engagement methodology.
We also developed a community sound and story toolkit and compiled it into a book. Much of the content was co-created with the group of people who came together through the conference.
The Listening to the City Handbook: Community Research and Action through Sound and Story documents sound-based methodology and practices that we know have played a role in researching and influencing social change at various communities including sound walks, sound mapping, policy theater, audio postcards, etc.
Download and read the handbook.
The Listening to the City Initiative is funded by NEA Design Grant, housed within the MIT School of Architecture + Planning. Thanks to the MIT Colab team led by Allegra Williams for developing and organizing the content of the handbook.
More:
Listening to the City handbook download link
Conference Review in MIT Arts
LA Listens