From Crowdsourced Data to Open Source Planning: the Implementation of the Hush City App in Berlin.

This paper introduces Hush City, a novel mobile app to find, map and evaluate everyday quiet areas in cities. The Hush City app has been developed as a soundscape tool in the framework of a participatory methodology for the identification, evaluation and planning of everyday quiet areas, successfully tested in Berlin by means of a pilot study. Firstly, this paper outlines the original aspects of the pilot study against the state of the art of methods so far developed in Europe for the identification of urban quiet areas. Then, it describes the Hush City app's concept, its goals and impact on the official Berlin Quiet Areas Plan. Thirdly, it discusses the results of data collection, made so far in Berlin with the Hush City app, showing the commonalities emerged in relation to the spatial context, the sonic environment and the use of the everyday quiet areas crowdsourced with the app. To conclude, the Hush City app's potential application to noise action plans is discussed along with the presentation of new features of the app.