Inaccessible Peace and Serenity

"[Noise is the] new second-hand smoke."
"We're in a noisier and noisier world. 'Finding ways to change that is] urgent."
Quiet Coalition, non-profit Massachusetts

"Efficiency is always linked with speed, which doesn't need to be the case."
"Slow and smart are not opposites -- they can work very well together."
"[Art projections or augmented reality in public spaces to connect people to the past and make them] pause a bit and contemplate [would represent a good project]."
"As everyone becomes glued to their mobiles and online communities, physical contact is being lost.
Slowness could help bring that back."
Lakshmi Rajendran, researcher, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge

The Great Daibutsu, Kamakura, Japan

"Quiet spaces allow you to change gear."
"[They] really help us get a distance from our day-to-day lives and being caught up in the various demands on our time and attention."
"Historically, noise has had to be endured by those on lower incomes and [of] lower status. Those with generally more means can move away."
"It's incredibly important to keep these quiet spaces, and to be aware of their possible disappearance."
Richard Bentley, sound artist, Reading, Britain

Public spaces are increasingly being geared toward quiet, aiding contemplation, as a recognition of their importance in people's lives, as opposed to noisy technology that is efficiency-linked. Health risks of living in noisy cities can include hearing loss, cardiovascular disease and sleep disorders, according to the World Health Organization.

High Park, Toronto

Europe, particularly proactive, adopted a 2002 direction aiming to reduce environmental noise pollution. European Union members have been put on notice that prolonged exposure could lead to "harmful effects" on health outcomes. No federal regulation on noise since the late 1970s has been contemplated in the United States, leaving local jurisdictions to consider action to respond to growing public demand for quiet.

On the other hand, in a community near Houston, Texas, residents voted down a measure recently to limit landscaping noise. Some residents were concerned such a law would increase service prices, ultimately making it more difficult for landscapers to pursue their vocations. Britain, on the other hand created a ministerial position to counteract loneliness. It was discovered through a public campaign that close to half of British adults report no time available out of their busy lives to connect with others.

Lakshmi Rajendran and colleagues study avenues available to slow busy city centres, focusing on Cambridge and Istanbul; the idea being to explore how architecture, culture and a sense of community identity are able to provide unique "localized" experiences. A group of residents in the town of Reading used apps and online communities in the search for silence, huddling with their phones in parks, graveyards and bookstores
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White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire

Richard Bentley associated himself with a global citizen-led initiative to map out quiet public places in Reading. Public sound walks are regularly engaged in cities from Berlin to Chicago; may of the walkers use the Hush City phone app, allowing them to record audio, take photographs and rate quiet spots for others to discover.

The United Nations estimates more than two-thirds of humanity will eventually live in urban areas by 2050 and Mr. Bentley foresees noise from traffic, construction and mobile phones are set to increase, leaving peace and quiet an unimaginable and unreachable luxury in time. An expectation that stimulates him and others who think as he does to use their spare time to discover and log free-to-access pockets of peace in the cities where they live.

"I couldn't find a place to get some fresh air without noise.""I accept that living in a city will have more noise, but this particular type of noise is piercing and very loud [gas-powered leaf blower] -- aarg!"
Haskell Small, music teacher, 71, Washington D.C.

In his neighbourhood, like any such area where people live together, there are constant distractions from clear thinking, disturbances that rent the air with the sound of sirens, lawn equipment, traffic, sounds that are imposing and impossible to blot out. They are the sounds of a city; construction, people travelling, trucking warehoused supplies, tradespeople, reflecting the functionality of a busy agglomeration of people.

Mr. Small's neighbours, however, thought they could do something collectively to bring attention to the onslaught of sound disrupting the peace and quiet they felt entitled to in their neighbourhood. They organized themselves with the intention of speaking with one voice to convince the city it would be advantageous to residents if the municipality joined over one hundred other U.S. jurisdictions to ban leaf blowers to favour quieter, battery-operated machines; a simple enough expedient to combat the most obvious sound-breaker.

The city did just that, representing a determination to restore a level of quiet sanity against raucous auditory disruptions to people's sanity, as an example of people purposefully attempting to slow and silence urban life as a growing trend toward quality of life to improve overall health and well-being around the world. Slowing the pace of city life can be as simple as enacting lower speed limits on roads.