Under the heading of "Gang i København" a number of initiatives was presented
by the Lord Mayer and the Technical and Environmental Mayer of Copenhagen in
May 2006. The aim of the initiative, which roughly translates to Lively
Copenhagen, was both to make Copenhagen a livelier city in terms of city life,
outdoor concerts and serving; and to make Copenhagen a better city for
entrepreneurs.1 The coupling of the two goals: city life and entrepreneurship,
testify to the political preference for creative industries or, to use Richard
Florida’s famous concept, the creative class, assumed to thrive in a lively urban
environments.2 “Gang I København” clearly aimed to raise the assets of
Copenhagen in the global urban experience economy.

This article takes the case of “Gang I Købanhavn” as an entrance to discuss the
politics of urban sound and draws attention to an undeveloped, but emerging
theme in discussions about urban sound environments: namely that sound as a
senso-motoric register may be poorly reflected through concepts of noise and
harmonics, respectively disturbance and well-being. A cultural theory of sonic
environments may focus on the sociality of sound and investigate the ways in
which people interact and make meaning through sound. Arguing for the
relevance of a method to register and describe auditory practices as a kind of
social interaction – a method that may supplement the engineer’s quantitative
sound measurements and the landscape architect’s qualitative descriptors this
article outline a few approaches to a theory of acoustic territoriality.