From noise control to quietizenship: Privatizing public space in Plaça del Sol, Barcelona

Source abstract

This article examines how noise governance reconfigures public space and citizenship in Plaça del Sol, a square in Barcelona’s Gràcia neighborhood. Drawing on an ethnographic approach (19 interviews and 1 year of participant observation), it traces a sequence from measurement (sensors, sound-level measurements) through regulation (police sweeps, terrace expansion, redesign of benches, planters, and playground) to counter-assemblages (users’ subversions). As the analysis shows, measurement operates as a citizenship device, translating disturbance into thresholds that sort admissible from inadmissible presences, while regulatory routines operationalize these thresholds to privilege paying, seated users on privatized terraces. Street drinkers/non-consuming publics become conditionally present—tolerated, surveilled, or removable—leaving the square in a liminal state at the threshold of privatization. In response, everyday re-appropriations (re-signifying the playground at night, repurposing planters) expose the contingency of control. Conceptually, the article links sonic governance to hybrid public/private topologies and specifies quietizenship as an emergent mode of urban citizenship premised on silence, compliance (with sociospatial restrictions), and purchase; empirically, it shows how human—nonhuman assemblages (devices, furniture, cleaning routines, noise control operations) enact these shifts in situ.