Acoustic Planning of Urban Space

Urban planning requires multiple instruments to make a city, to achieve a human habitability necessary in the environmental. The growth of cities as a dynamic process requires political, economic, technological changes, incorporating urban factors architectural design concepts, but also acoustic, this vision of cities will allow us to create a public and private space more on a human scale, and friendly environmental. Noise as a pollutant of public and private space, generated mainly by vehicular traffic, increases its intensity due to the presence of buildings on both sides of streets, depending on its shape, materiality, height, distance between facades. The direct sound when reflected in facades, returns as a secondary source. These multiple reflections and the acoustic diffusion that add to the direct sound, produce a "residual noise". If this phenomenon incorporates it into the time variable, when the passage of vehicles is continuous, an observer can define a linear source in constant generation. The persistence of the noise can reach 3 seconds, reflected successively in objects, and facades. The decomposition of these three aspects, original source, residual noise and the persistence of noise over time, is the phenomenon called environmental noise, associated with the design and shape of cities.