The Vacant Land Sound Map is an output of the encounter between two research projects: NoVOID and Som Urbano.

The research project NoVOID – Ruins and vacant lands in the Portuguese cities: exploring hidden life in urban derelicts and alternative planning proposals for the perforated city (PTDC/ATP-EUR/1180/2014) is coordinated by Professor Eduardo Brito-Henriques from the University of Lisbon. This project is funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia and its team is composed by researchers from the University of Lisbon and the University of Minho. For more information on the project, visit the website.

Som Urbano: territórios, atmosferas afetivas, e políticas públicas (SFRH/BD/108907/2015) is Daniel Paiva’s PhD research project, and it is also funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. You can check Daniel Paiva’s work at ResearchGate.

Since the beginning of 2017, we have been exploring the sounds of urban vacant lands in Lisbon as a means to approach what we call ‘the hidden life’ of urban derelicts, meaning the human and non-human appropriations of these lands that often are not taken into account when we think about these sorts of places.

Our ongoing study aims at recording and mapping the soundscapes of vacant lands in Lisbon, with a focus on Lisbon’s Eastern Zone (Zona Ocidental) and Western Zone (Zona Oriental).

The Vacant Land Sound Map is one of the outputs of our study. It contains a series of recordings we have made in several vacant lands during our fieldwork. We believe it is important to make these recordings public because they serve as a testimony of the life of vacant lands, and the significance of these spaces for the urban ecosystems.

The NoVOID project's definition of urban vacant land is the following:

Unutilized, non-cultivated, non-landscaped, and non-built up land, with shrub and herbaceous

covering showing signs of neglect and lack of maintenance, or presenting bare soil, rubble, and

vestiges of razed buildings. Only the vacant land located inside official urban areas was

contemplated in our approach. Land zoned for agricultural use and for green infrastructure was

not considered vacant land.

Urban vacant lands are very important for life in the city. They are important for vegetation growth, and it has been pointed out that “lawn grass, shrubs, trees and woods on vacant land provides a variety of critical ecosystem services”, such as preventing soil erosion, improving water quality, preventing floods, or storing carbon (Deng and Ma 2015, 89). Furthermore, these spaces are important for arthropods, birds, small reptiles and mammals that are searching for food, or for spaces to mate and to nest in (Gardiner, Burkman and Prajzner 2013).

The Vacant Land Sound Map was made using a combination of Google My Maps and Soundcloud. In the map, you will find a series of black markers that signal the places in which there is a recording available. By clicking on each marker, you will see on the right part of the screen the coordinates and the description of the recording. Follow the link to Soundcloud to hear the soundscape and observe a photograph of the vacant land. The description also contains the following information: zone of the city, parish, and street closest to where the recording was made; the date and hour of the recording; a small and not exhaustive list of the sounds you will hear; the name of the recorder and the equipment used; and the indication if it is a static recording or if the recorder travels through the soundscape.