A Dark Meteorology of Sound: Atmospheric Occupation in Beirut

A Reign of Noise

The classical urban plan is a flattening of the city into a two-dimensional plane upon which lines are drawn, dividing urban space into discrete streets, districts, and zones. This rendering of the city as surface acts as an ordering mechanism, reducing lived space to neat units with clear boundaries and well-defined uses. The two-dimensional plan gives rise to urban imaginaries that conceptualize the ground as grid, divisible into “parcels” of land and “pieces” of property — distinct morsels of space that can be carved up, regulated and governed, bought and sold, mortgaged and foreclosed upon, and, crucially, reorganized and reordered.

Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s “geometric” reordering of Paris, commissioned by Napoleon III and justified as a way of bringing air and light into the city, imposed wide boulevards across its poorest quarters — the city’s crowded, dark, narrow heart, where the urban poor had a habit of setting up barricades and staging insurrections against the emperor’s army.¹ The plan may be written on paper, but it is also written onto the land, since realizing it unleashes violence in the form of uprooting, forced displacement, and expulsion. As the urban sociologist Richard Sennett observes, “The line is drawn on paper by someone, the street is then demolished or altered to fit the line.”²

In Democracy and Urban Form, Sennett argues that the Haussmannian plan was formed in the image of silence. It afforded Parisians, he suggests, the “right to silence in public.”³ An improvised city of informal settlements, of spontaneous coexistence — of spaces of togetherness and “throwntogetherness”⁴ — was replaced by a city of divisions and separations, a city of apartness made through spatial cuts and slashes. These divisions not only reordered and disciplined urban space; by physically isolating social groups, whether different social classes or ethnic groups, they also diminished the possibilities for democratic discourse and even “strangle[d] the possibilities for democracy” itself.⁵ Today, in many cities, the urban commons has been supplanted by the gated community, the luxury condo, the strip mall, and the business park. Here quietness reigns. “The imposition of silence [is] the tool of order in the modern city,”⁶ Sennett remarks. Democratic modes of political discourse — such as the airing of political differences between diverse communities — are curtailed as social differences are planned out of the city.

In some cities, this “reign of silence” has been designed in.⁷ In others, democracy is constrained in the opposite way: through the deliberate overaccumulation of noise. In noise-laden cities, where the air and atmosphere are saturated, even heavy, with noise, disorder — proposed elsewhere by Sennett as a remedy for the segregated, overplanned, “overdetermined” city⁸ — ceases to be a counterbalance to excessive planning.⁹ In some noise-filled cities, among which Beirut is exemplary, what the composer and sound designer Nadim Mishlawi calls “urban discord” is imposed from within (by internal powers) and from without (by external ones).¹⁰ Here, disorder is maintained not through an imposition of silence but through a deliberate reign of noise.

In a reign of noise, excess sound, like urban waste, has been “allowed to accumulate and overwhelm the city,” as Mishlawi writes of Beirut.¹¹ This sanctioned overaccumulation of sound is an unrecognized form of violence that resembles yet troubles and exceeds what has traditionally been called noise pollution. In this context, noise is not merely composed of unwanted or too-loud sounds — the acoustic byproducts of industrialization and modernization. Rather, it is the outcome of an acoustic regime that controls, borderizes, and terrorizes by imposing a noise (dis)order. A reign of noise might curtail democracy by reducing democratic discourse to cacophonous garble. Or it might operate through accumulation and layering, as in Mishlawi’s description, of a superimposition of “endless loops” of nationalist anthems, “echoes” of political speeches, “clashes” of opposing factions, and “tortured screams” of the dead, unresolved histories and energies that linger: residual sound.¹² This aligns with Mhamad Safa’s idea of “acoustic residues” or “auditory residues,” which specifically draws on histories of violence in Beirut and Lebanon to show how sound persists in bodies, psyches, and architectures, engendering “aural atmospheres” of harm — aural atmospheres that harm.¹³

A reign of noise could be imposed through overt sonic violence and traditional forms of sonic warfare, as in the weaponized use of sonic booms or LRADs.¹⁴ Alternatively, it might emerge through more subtle forms of atmospheric violence: the managed overaccumulation of noise or, as I argue here, even subtle modifications of air and atmosphere — a creeping-up of disturbance into the realm of everyday life, an escalation of disturbance into the common ground and common air.¹⁵

This chapter contrasts the Hausmannian plan’s reign of silence — which curtails democracy by reordering urban space through spatial division — with Beirut’s reign of noise, where disorder is engineered through the overaccumulation of sound. Noise here is not incidental but political: the product of an acoustic regime that disciplines by saturating the city with turbulent air. The discussion moves from early practices of aerial warfare and colonial aerial policing to contemporary forms of aerial occupation, particularly Israel’s systematic violations of Lebanese airspace. Through Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Earshot’s Air Pressure project— which documents more than twenty thousand such violations — I approach such incursions as atmospheric occupation: a pervasive manipulation of air and sound pressure that, in Abu Hamdan’s terms, renders air itself violent.¹⁶ Drawing on accounts from Mishlawi, Safa, and Rayya Badran, the article further traces how sonic residues accumulate in the city, generating lingering aural atmospheres that perpetuate violence and anticipation of renewed conflict. It proposes a “dark meteorology” of sound as an analytic attuned to sonic residues, reverberations, and aftersounds that persist beyond violent events, conditioning urban atmospheres and futures.¹⁷ Through this discussion, the city emerges not as a stable grid but as unstable fields of energy, air, and vibration — at once a “city of airs” and a city of waves: a turbulent field in which sound, vibration, and atmosphere can be mobilized to unsettle, discipline, and disorder.¹⁸

Aerial Policing

Seen from the air, the city is all ground: a collection of surfaces that, with technologies of killing, can be struck, percussed, ruptured, “shattered.”¹⁹ From an aerial perspective, the city resembles a drumhead, a membrane — a skin to be pierced, a space that always contains the latent possibility of being subjected to overwhelming force.

Before aerial imaginaries became aligned with the military aims of nation-states — before the sky became a site for delivering what cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk calls “terror from the air”²⁰ — the aerial was the realm of the fantastical and cosmic: the domain of oneiric flight, of souls’ ascent to the heavens, of flying machines and lighter-than-air balloons — an unbounded field for contemplating the infinite.²¹ The sky was a place to which one turned and toward which one aspired.

With the birth of the air raid on November 1, 1911, the sky became a place not to aspire to but from which to cower. On that day, Italian pilot Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti hand-dropped four small, “grenade-style bombs” from a height of around 600 meters.²² His targets were enemy positions in Tagiura and Ain Zara, a desert oasis southeast of Tripoli, in the Ottoman province of Tripolitania (modern-day Libya). Although no one was killed, it is notable that the idea of dropping explosive munitions onto humans from the sky was first applied in the context of a colonial campaign. From its inception, aerial warfare marked a shift in the ethics of combat, eroding traditional rules of engagement and fostering a perspective that rendered targets not just distant but fundamentally less than human. This new threat from the sky was dramatically affirmed during the First World War, a war distinguished by its entry into the sky and the air, whether through large-scale aerial warfare, the expansion of aerial reconnaissance missions, or the dispersion of new chemical weapons into the air — the “deployment of war gases such as chlorine, phosgene, and mustard,” which “drifted” over enemy trenches, “engulfing all those downwind.”²³

By 1920 the militarization of the sky had already given rise to a new mode of colonial governance: aerial policing. Developed by the British and championed by Winston Churchill in the British mandate of Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), aerial policing became a widely adopted strategy in peripheral conflict.²⁴ It entailed, in part, an occupation of the skies: an infiltration of the newly conceptualized domain of “airspace” and the consolidation of a novel military strategy known as “air control.” Air control, or aerial policing, first appeared as a form of colonial policing: suppressing anticolonial uprisings and dismantling Indigenous resistance. It dispensed with the need for large ground forces, easing the burdens of long supply lines. As military researcher Bruce Hoffman notes in his analysis of Churchill’s strategy in Mesopotamia, the advantages of air control were manifold, chief among them the near-total inability of those on the ground to retaliate. The “primitive weapons” of local fighters were useless against aircraft operating at high altitudes.²⁵ The surprise of an air attack further obviated “the advantage enjoyed by tribesmen, whose intimate knowledge of the desert and mountain areas enabled them to lay ambushes [for] British ground forces.”²⁶ Thus, from its inception aerial policing relied on a stark asymmetry between occupying forces and local populations. It was designed to quash the few advantages Indigenous populations had against colonialist occupiers: knowledge of their own lands and the ability to hide.

Air Pressure: Atmospheric Occupation

Today, the legacy of aerial policing persists in colonial projects that not only control, monitor, and deliver terror from the air but also alter the very composition, and even behavior, of the air of the spaces they occupy. The Air Pressure project by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Earshot — an NGO that has advanced the notion of a “right to sonic self-determination” through diligent work with communities affected by state, corporate, and environmental violence²⁷ — exposes a contemporary iteration of aerial policing by documenting the systematic violation of Lebanese airspace by Israeli military aircraft.²⁸ Their website, airpressure.info, meticulously logged 22,355 such airspace violations between 2007 and 2022 — violations documented by the United Nations and videotaped, audio-recorded, and commented on by civilians.

According to curator Virginia Roy Luzaragga, this website, the first searchable, interactive database to document these incursions,²⁹ models “a cloud of lines, strokes, sounds and violations, revealing both the magnitude of this sustained aggression as well as the atmosphere of fear and dread that it provokes.”³⁰ Taken together, these thousands of airspace violations — amounting to an occupation of Lebanese airspace for nearly half the time³¹ — constitute an unrecognized form of what Abu Hamdan calls “atmospheric violence.”³² Rather than relying on direct or overt violence, they exert control and instill fear through subtle manipulations of the atmosphere: modulations in air pressure (atmospheric pressure), including through subtle changes in sound pressure (local pressure fluctuations caused by sound waves). In their accumulation, these airspace violations represent a form of atmospheric occupation — an occupation not only of sovereign territory but of atmosphere itself.

Atmospheric occupation entails the ongoing disruption and manipulation of air and atmosphere to render them charged with violence and threat.³³ In Lebanon, Israel enacts this form of occupation through subtle yet near-constant disturbances in air pressure, whether from the turbulence generated by the moving aircraft (making the sky tremble) or from shifts in sound pressure (making it rumble). The sonic and vibrational dimensions of this “turbulencing” — this deliberate making-turbulent — are integral to its project of atmospheric occupation. Civilians often “spot” the aircraft not by sight but by sound.³⁴ As Abu Hamdan remarks, “in most videos [of aircraft], you don’t see a dot [airplane]. You only [hear] the sky rumbling.”³⁵ The effect of this rumbling sky is the mass production of fear and dread: “Constantly hearing hostile jets and drones overhead, residents of Lebanon live in a state of precarity; the potential of full-scale aerial bombardment is a daily possibility.”³⁶

For Abu Hamdan, the familiarity of the sounds is inextricable from their violence: “Mundanity is part of what makes it so violent. People ignoring it is part of what makes it so violent.”³⁷ The type of violence the sounds represent, he suggests, is “the theft of the future. That noise signals: don’t plan, don’t think. [An attack] can happen anytime.”³⁸ Methods of control and containment are thus enacted at the level of air pressure, while everyday life is altered — effectively pressurized, its possibilities constrained through the “militarization of ambient sound.”³⁹

Atmospheric occupation challenges traditional notions of conflict as well as conventional notions of territory. As Abu Hamdan says, “Air is a very different kind of territory. If we render the air in conventionally cartographic terms of sovereign violation alone, we lose some specificity about what’s actually happening. I am trying not to depict this as a violation of airspace that belongs to someone in particular but rather to create an understanding of the ways in which air is turned violent.”⁴⁰ These airspace violations do not constitute a classical form of territorial invasion, nor do they represent a classical form of sonic warfare, which is typically associated with overwhelming intensities of sound. Rather, in turning the air violent, they represent a form of both atmospheric occupation and vibrational warfare, unfolding at the level of waves, turbulence, and vibrational force. As Benny Gantz, Israel’s former Minister of Defense, said, “Lebanon’s situation is shaky. We can make it even shakier.”⁴¹

A Dark Meteorology of Sound

Marina Peterson has written incisively on the Air Pressure project, drawing attention to the physical, physiological, affective, and political entanglements of “noise” in this context. She remarks, “Low frequencies rumble and are felt bodily as much as, if not more than, they are heard by the ear. Solid matter resonates with low frequencies, which might move through the ground, shaking foundations and causing cracks to appear or tiles to fall off walls.”⁴² Noise comes to matter by coming into contact with matter. The perturbations caused by the aircraft are not confined to the air; their rumblings also disturb the ground. In this sense, an atmospheric occupation may begin in the sky, but it can also represent a destabilization of the earth, binding sky and ground through entwined vibrations. The air moves, yet the land also shakes.

Noise “is never simply frequency or sound pressure level,” writes Peterson. It is “bound up in extrasonic knowledge,” its experience in this case shaped by “knowledge of what lurks behind it, of the intended state terror.”⁴³ This knowledge colors not only the immediate perception of noise but also its afterlife, or “aftersound.”⁴⁴ “Even as the immediacy of noise dissipates, it leaves traces that might be affective or political.”⁴⁵ Taking this seriously demands that we attend not only to sounds themselves but also to their residues — lingerings that persist within affective and political realms, shaping social imaginaries and political futures.⁴⁶

Three texts illuminate the concept of sonic residue in the context of Beirut: Nadim Mishlawi’s essay “Dissonance and Urban Discord,” which examines the persistence and layering of noise in Beirut; the writer and radio producer Rayya Badran’s editorial in The Derivative, “ص.د.ى (Reverberation),” which explores reverberation as a structuring force;⁴⁷ and Mhamad Safa’s dissertation “The Loudest Ever,” a layered inquiry into auditory violence, trauma, military strategy, and law, which focuses on the sonic and auditory aftershocks of Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006. 

In “Dissonance and Urban Discord,” Mishlawi argues that sounds have been “allowed to accumulate and overwhelm the city,” suggesting that there has been a deliberate overaccumulation of noise. Writing against the backdrop of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, and ongoing internal strife, he asserts that “the sounds of the past do not fade out, but sustain indefinitely. And despite their persistence, new sounds are produced and layered on top of the old ones.”⁴⁸ This accumulation and layering of sounds that sustain and persist creates an acoustic climate — a sonic weather that gathers and lingers, conditioning everyday life.⁴⁹

Badran’s editorial offers another perspective on sonic residues as they gather in bodies and architectures. Writing from Beirut in July 2020 — on the heels of a popular uprising that began in October 2019, and amid the Covid-19 lockdowns — Badran observes new sounds layered onto this already-thick mix: whirring helicopters broadcasting stay-at-home orders; sirens “wailing” through empty streets; church services conducted from SUVs; private electrical generators humming “ever so loudly.”⁵⁰ Crucially, Badran hears the sounds of the uprising as historical: an eruption of sounds summoned from the past — “hurled,” as she puts it, “from the depths of decades-old anger, frustration, and hurt.”⁵¹ She writes:

During those first intense months [of the uprising], we occupied the public realm day and night, filling the streets with voices chanting and singing in unison; pots banging in the night; old and new protest music(s) emanating from large mobile sound systems. . . . In those days, the uprising also faced incredible resistance. It deployed a set of weapons such as gunshots, tear gas, water cannons, and other military or police force apparatuses, whose sounds are just as consequential as their aim to squash, maim, and injure. The spaces we occupied were awash with discordant sounds whose reverberations clung inside our ears well after the events.⁵²

In Badran’s reading, protest sounds “hurled” from the past collide with the state’s equally forceful acoustic response: sounds that embed themselves in bodies (clinging in ears) and the built environment (spaces). Sonic traces linger as auditory and acoustic imprints — reverberations that sustain after the violence itself has subsided.

Safa similarly identifies sonic residues in the form of reverberations, a concept his work extends and upends. On media accounts of Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, he observes that “rather than employing the Arabic term for sound, ‘sawt,’ media reporting on witness accounts of explosive sound often use ‘dawi’i’ or ‘sada,’ which translates to reverberations.”⁵³ Safa not only traces the immediate and long-term impacts of these reverberations — showing how they manifest as psychological trauma such as post-traumatic stress disorder — but also theorizes the entanglement of conflict and post-conflict soundscapes. He argues that the former bleeds into the latter, destabilizing the distinction between war and so-called peace. While the “deafening percussions” of war may subside, he suggests, the postwar landscape continues to “pulsate with a loud and resonant atmosphere.”⁵⁴ This milieu is marked not only by the sounds of triumph but also by the noise of reconstruction. “Wartime’s sonorities” do not fade; rather, they are “filtered and transformed,” reverberating in the sounds of mass displacement and rebuilding, forming a “sustained, roaring din.” Thus, beyond the sociopolitical and military aftereffects of war, Safa insists that these acoustic reverberations ensure that the 2006 war “did not end with cessations of the battles; it bled into the subsequent temporality.”⁵⁵

The phenomenon of sonic residues observed by Mishlawi, Badran, and Safa challenges conventional acoustic frameworks. Sonic residues — sounds that “sustain indefinitely” (Mishlawi); spaces “awash with discordant sounds” whose reverberations “cling inside ears” after the violence has passed (Badran); “acoustic residues” that “linger as aural atmospheres” (Safa); and “reverberant extensions of wartime”⁵⁶ into the world of ceasefire (Safa) — demand an analytic approach that accounts for how sounds endure, accumulate, and mutate over time. They call for interpretive tools drawn from disciplines that study lingering phenomena and the atmospheric afterlives of disturbances — disciplines such as meteorology and climatology.⁵⁷ More specifically, since these sonic residues and their accumulation as sonic weather are inextricable from relations of power and the exercise of force, they call for thinking with a “dark meteorology,” an understanding of the weather that sees it as bound up with violence.⁵⁸ I borrow the term from Sloterdijk, who, in revisiting the emergence of gas warfare during the First World War, notes the sudden imperative to control the “concentration, diffusion, sedimentation, coherence, mass, expansion, and movement” of toxic clouds. “Here is announced a dark meteorology,” he writes, “one that is concerned with ‘precipitations’ of a totally unique character.”⁵⁹

What determines the dynamics of sonic weather — of sounds that sustain indefinitely, recomposing atmospheres and environments? How might a meteorological perspective, one “attuned to lingerings, minglings, perturbations and precipitations,”⁶⁰ reframe our understanding of the nature of sound and its effects? What could a dark meteorology of sound reveal about the role of sound and vibration in conditioning urban airs? And what might it tell us about what is happening in the city under pressure — and what is being done to its inhabitants?

A dark meteorology of sound would chart the properties and patterns of sonic weather, sampling air, ground, bodies, and architectures for the sonic traces of violence — traces that gather, disperse, and regather as vibration, sound, affect, politics. It would be attuned to rumblings, lingerings, and reverberations that cross spatial, sensory, and temporal thresholds, disturbing bodies, ecologies, temporalities, and geologies. Mapping sonic weather systems, it would track acoustic pressure patterns and shifting fronts — zones of encounter between sound masses and wavefields. It would listen both as a mode of forecasting — attuning to social and political futures — and as a way of evidencing past crimes. It would attend to reverberations that cling inside ears and accumulate in spaces and architectures, registering sounds that persist in the aftermath of violence.

Slow Violence in the City of Airs

In Aeropolis, architect and researcher Nerea Calvillo uncovers a “city of airs,” which she analyzes through “aerial assemblages”: diverse “practices, people, and disciplines” that interact with air to “compose” it and techniques of power that harness air to “serve particular (often hegemonic) ways of ordering the world.”⁶¹

Aeropolis belongs to a growing field of elemental urbanism: studies that turn to the classical elements — earth, wind, water, and fire — to rethink the modern city. In Elemental Urbanism, Ignacio Farías and Laura Kemmer critique the Western modernist paradigm that positions cities in opposition to the elements, one whereby modernist cities were designed to “mediate or repel the ‘wild power’ of the elements: soils sealed, winds walled out, waters channelled, fire tamed.”⁶² Against this backdrop, they call for a reactivation of an elemental imaginary in urbanism, a task made more urgent by the planetary crises of environmental degradation and climate disaster. Marina Peterson’s work disperses an elemental urbanism into atmospheric and aerial realms, attending to phenomena such as atmospheric noise, seeded clouds, and cultivated weathers as they pertain to the city.⁶³ In “Cloud Seeding Los Angeles” she writes:

An elemental urbanism attunes us toward movement and instability, indeterminate qualities of an unsettled city. A city is not only what is in front of us, on the ground, evident and solid. Rather, it is always more than urban, caught up in dispersed forms, dynamics, and conditions. . . . Cities are compositional nodes in the geological and the atmospheric as much as the social, economic, and political.⁶⁴

Both Calvillo and Peterson, in different ways, confront the air-conditioning of cities — the purposeful engineering and design of urban airs and atmospheres. While in the context of urban planning air-conditioning is typically linked to environmental initiatives such as the creation of green corridors through the planting of trees and shrubs, the design of urban airs is not always benign. It can also manifest as “negative air conditioning,” a harmful modulation of air that turns it into a vector of control or harm.⁶⁵ The Air Pressure project shows how both sound and vibration can function as tools of negative air-conditioning, revealing that even subtle atmospheric disturbances can constitute a violent design of air. Here, air is not a medium for environmental management but one of engineered turbulence, a turbulencing that unsettles as it unfolds. This instability is politically instrumental, part of a broader strategy of control through rendering unstable: a politics of disorder enacted across atmospheric, sonic, vibrational, and affective realms.

In examining the afterlife of mass violence in cities, both urban studies and conflict studies have traditionally focused on conventional forms of environmental pollution, such as air, water, and soil contamination. These studies have productively extended the analysis of war beyond its immediate impacts, tracing its enduring presence in environments and atmospheres.⁶⁶ Within the framework of the city of airs, such research has emphasized aerial pollutants such as toxic gases or particulate matter, with “toxic air” primarily conceptualized as air pollution, its presence detected through the chemical analysis of air, smog, smoke, and dust. In “Ingesting Architecture,” architect Sumayya Vally offers a different reading of toxic air.⁶⁷ In Johannesburg, she identifies an atmosphere saturated with the traces of colonial violence and capitalist extraction — a historical violence that persists, continuing to materialize as dust ingested by the city’s residents. This contamination of air is not principally chemical or material; it is historical. Air carries the residues of past violence into the present, its particulate matter containing the traces of brutalized bodies. Vally reframes air not only as a chemical medium but also as a carrier of history: an archive of violence that continues to cause harm through the slow violence of particulate ingestion. In her reading, air becomes an elemental register of harm, with the necessary, life-sustaining act of breathing binding Johannesburg’s residents to the city’s legacies of dispossession, brutality, and extraction.

In a similar vein, in soundscape studies and acoustic ecology, toxicity has traditionally been associated with noise pollution, while violence has been framed through the lens of sonic warfare. Rarely is the concept of “harmful air” extended to more subtle and elusive forms of atmospheric disturbance like fluctuations in air pressure. Yet, as Air Pressure shows, these more subtle disturbances, which slip beneath and between sensory thresholds, constitute another form of toxic air: an infiltration at the level of waves. Such an infiltration demands attention not only to the elemental aspects of the city — its airs, soils, and waters — but also to its energetic dimension, to wave dynamics as they compose and recompose the city. The city of airs is also, necessarily, a city of waves.

City of Waves

The city of waves is a dynamic field of colliding, interfering, “intra-acting” energies that underpin urban life and shape urban space: a fluctuating field of forces that emanate, radiate, propagate, surge, and flow through expanding networks of technology, infrastructure, and architectures.⁶⁸ These energies unfold across multiple registers, mapping onto different spectra yet remaining irreducible to mere frequency bandwidths. Radiant energies carried by electromagnetic waves emanate from radio towers, cell masts, power lines, and surveillance systems; electrical energies surge through power grids and data centers; seismic energies propagate as mechanical vibrations beneath the earth’s surface; atmospheric energies gather and dissipate as air currents and pressure systems. To attune to the energetic city is to attend to these flows while examining the forces, technologies, and agents that channel, harness, or impede them.

The city of waves comes into focus in studies such as Rahul Mukherjee’s Radiant Infrastructures, which examines the social and political dynamics of Indian metropolises saturated with electromagnetic emissions generated by infrastructures ranging from dense networks of cellular antennas to nuclear power plants.⁶⁹ Mukherjee reveals how such “radiant infrastructures” operate as both energetic and political mediators, entangled with political economies that shape how they are perceived and contested.

Just as “thinking through aerial assemblages” unveils the city of airs,⁷⁰ thinking with energy assemblages reveals the city of waves. Analyzing the energetic city requires attending to wave behaviors such as “compression and rarefaction . . . reflection, refraction, and diffraction” as they modulate urban environments;⁷¹ examining the effects of energetic processes like transduction (the conversion of energy from one form to another); and interrogating the technologies, infrastructures, and regulatory frameworks that govern energy production, circulation, and consumption. Further, just as tracing historical violence and subtle disturbances reveals how the city of airs is constituted and weaponized, attuning to residual and infrasensory energies — those that linger or lie beyond sensory thresholds — illuminates how the city of waves is formed.

Safa’s “The Loudest Ever” offers critical insights into Beirut as a city of waves, particularly through its examination of shock waves — explosive energies that shatter architectures, destroy infrastructures, fracture psyches, and claim lives. Tracing the history of shock wave science, Safa reveals how these energies were made legible to science and subsequently integrated into military strategy, where their auditory dimensions were weaponized. In particular, he draws attention to the deployment of shock waves in the form of sonic booms, whether in Cold War-era military testing on US civilians or their more recent use as instruments of psychological warfare in Lebanon and Gaza.⁷² In a paradigm-shifting analysis, Safa argues that shock waves — and wave propagation more broadly — are entangled with urban morphologies. He reframes the city not merely as a backdrop for wave dynamics but as both a medium and subject of violent energies. He writes:

While the very asphalt of the desolate streets tremble[s], threatening eruption, sound waves and their reverberations are intensified by the additional sonic emissions and reflections. The once-solid ground transforms into a treacherous sea of shattered glass. Slowly, rippling destructively, a distinctive scar shapes the city’s morphology. Emanating from the target’s coordinates, these sonic emissions and shockwaves surge forth, annihilating surrounding infrastructure. Extending perceptibly, collateral effects radiate aurally in the city, sensed by military control rooms and civilians alike. Urban surroundings, a once familiar environment to the listener, morph into an alien terrain that becomes impossible to navigate.⁷³

The propagation of shock waves through the city not only intensifies their destructive force but also extends the violence inflicted on those who encounter them, rendering listeners “collateral damage.”⁷⁴ In their wake, the city becomes unrecognizable, an “alien terrain” where once-solid ground dissolves into a “sea of shattered glass.”⁷⁵ The propagation of waves through the urban environment triggers cascading effects, with violence radiating outward through the city. Destruction spreads through wave mechanics such as propagation and radiation, amplifying disorder. These cascading disruptions, this radiating harm, constitute another form of turbulencing. Turbulence — the chaotic motion of gases or liquids — is characterized by unpredictable flow patterns. Here it operates both as a wave phenomenon (the erratic movement of air) and a military strategy: weaponizing disorder to maximize destabilization.

Fast Violence in the City of Waves

As a city of waves, Beirut has been shaped by both slow and fast violence. Slow violence manifests, for example, in the city’s chronic electrical outages — disruptions that not only fracture everyday life but also consolidate electrical and political power in the hands of a few. Fast violence erupts in moments of war, invasion, occupation, catastrophic governmental neglect, endemic corruption, and state repression. One of the most devastating examples in recent years is the Beirut port explosion of August 4, 2020 — a nuclear-scale detonation of improperly stored ammonium nitrate that killed at least 218 people, injured more than 7,000, and displaced over 300,000.⁷⁶ In “Planning and Crisis, Planning in Crisis,” Beirut-based urban theorist and planner Mona Fawaz remarks that the explosion “gave another massive blow to an already devastated population, shattering the lives and livelihoods of thousands and damaging at least one third of the city’s housing stock.” Even two years after the blast, she remarks, “more than half the apartments in the zones affected by the blast are uninhabited,” while the country’s financial meltdown is “as striking as its speed; in less than two years, 75 percent of the Lebanese population and 80 percent of the estimated one million refugees living in the country have slid below the poverty line. . . . The perfect storm is still unfolding, with no resolution in sight.”⁷⁷

A scientific study linked the blast not only to devastation on the ground but also to disturbances in the upper atmosphere, since the blast triggered ionospheric disruptions — the production of atmospheric waves typically observed only after nuclear detonations.⁷⁸ Indeed, the blast’s impact extended far beyond Beirut: infrasonic activity was detected as far away as Tunisia and Germany; seismic waves were registered up to 500 kilometers from the explosion’s epicenter; atmospheric waves were detected in the ionosphere. These infrasonic, seismic, and atmospheric waves exceeded the city itself, transmitting the violence done in and to Beirut across spatial and geological scales.

In Beirut 2020: The Collapse of a Civilization, a Journal, writer Charif Majdalani documents the explosion as part of a chronicle of a year marked by violent upheavals: uprising, state repression, economic catastrophe, pandemic.⁷⁹ His diary of that fateful year positions the blast in a longer history of “wild urbanization” that took root during the Lebanese Civil War — what he describes as an era of “total deregulation, anarchy, and the absence of any oversight.” This “breakneck urbanization” only accelerated during the postwar period, when “all excesses were legalized, as long as they earned money, always money, more and more money.”⁸⁰ This perspective is nuanced through meticulous research by Beirut-based planners, urbanists, and architects, including Mona Fawaz, Mona Harb, and Howayda Al-Harithy — co-directors of Beirut Urban Lab — and Hiba Bou Akar in The War Yet to Come.⁸¹ Fawaz, for instance, argues that Beirut’s urban planning has been shaped by liberal policies since Lebanese independence in 1943.⁸² During this period, newcomers to the city, predominantly Shiite Muslim migrants from the country’s impoverished rural areas, participated in the production of their own neighborhoods, building informal settlements that grew around kinship networks.⁸³ Fawaz traces the evolution of this liberal planning ethos from these self-built settlements, to the weakening of city planning agencies by hostile militias during the civil war, and ultimately to postwar neoliberal policies that further entrenched sectarianism. After 1990, public administration was increasingly outsourced to private actors, including powerful sectarian religious-political organizations such as Hezbollah.

Within this broader landscape of neoliberal urbanism and the relentless monetization of urban space, Majdalani captures the moment the world erupts — when bodies and buildings, air and ground, become entangled in a field of waves:

Suddenly the floor begins to move with incredible violence, accompanied by a sort of hideous roar. I’m petrified as I feel the terrace come and go beneath me like an old swing, and I think it’s an earthquake. . . . 

And then everything suddenly stops moving and roaring, and I’m about to rush inside, but at the moment I’m nailed to the spot again, submerged by the deafening, interminable blast of a monstrous explosion, and this time my eyes seek out the familiar landscape around me, the trees, the buildings in the distance, everything that is always there before me and which now seems to be thunderstruck by the ghastly soundtrack flattening it. . . . 

In a single second hundreds of cafés, restaurants, pubs, and stores are reduced to ruins, while scores of cars . . . are hurled into the air, projected upward, then fall down again like toys. . . . And during those same few seconds the shock wave sweeps all the way up the hill of Achrafieh right to the top, then down the first few streets on its southern slope, laying waste in the blink of an eye to all the buildings. . . . After that . . . the streets everywhere are filled with a white haze from all the dust and smoking debris, and the haggard pedestrians and residents who manage to get out are nothing but a fright of bloodified ghosts . . . .⁸⁴

In Majdalani’s account the city under pressure combusts in a moment of irreversible shock, erasing the distinctions between states of matter. Earth dissolves into atmosphere; architecture disintegrates into particulate residue, settling onto people, rendering them spectral — “ghosts.” Immovable structures — cars, streets, entire cityscapes — take on wave behaviors, propagating through space. Once-solid things become wavelike.

The energies of a “monstrous” blast radiate outward, obliterating the boundaries between the city, its surrounding geographies, and even geological strata. Infrasound propagates for hundreds of miles, seismic waves tear through the subterrain, atmospheric disturbances ripple across the ionosphere. These forces do not merely collide; they intra-act — triggering, distorting, and amplifying one another, reshaping space in their wake. The city is no longer a discrete, bounded entity but an entangled field of forces in which energies fracture conventional boundaries and destabilize the very distinction between ground and sky.

Disciplining Through Disorder

The classical urban plan carried within it a latent violence, one that materialized in its execution. Through divisions and slashes, it separated social groups and classes, curtailing democracy by diminishing the possibilities of togetherness. This spatial reordering did not merely restructure the city — it ushered in a reign of silence, a tool of Western modernity and a form of antidemocratic urbanization: a city-making for the few. Beirut operates under a different order: a reign of noise, an acoustic regime that emerges through dark planning. It is not a site of enforced quiet but of engineered disorder, which manifests in part as perpetual noise: sonic residues that linger; wartime reverberations that endure, acoustically locking residents in anticipation of future wars. As Bou Akar observes, “In Lebanon, the end of civil war has not brought peace, only mutations in the logic of war. The war yet to come approaches war . . . as a state of affairs expected to reoccur.”⁸⁵ Such a logic of perpetual war is sustained, in part, through sound, vibration, and their afterlives in bodies, psyches, spaces, and atmospheres. In the words of a Beirut port explosion survivor, “Sometimes I feel like the ground is shaking, exactly as it was before the explosion. I don’t just remember it. I feel it shake.”⁸⁶

The city-as-grid — a two-dimensional surface targeted for destruction — has expanded into an entire world stretching from the subterrain to the ionosphere. In contemporary conflict, not only visible structures but also air, atmosphere, and energy have become battlegrounds, subjected to harnessing, control, and disruption. As a city of airs, Beirut is the site of atmospheric occupation — a political project in which air is weaponized through turbulencing. This violent air troubles conventional notions of noise pollution. Whereas noise pollution is typically associated with excessive loudness, turbulent air does not necessarily manifest as overly loud, nor is it limited to “the pollution of the sonic environment through noise.”⁸⁷ Instead, it operates as a persistent destabilization of atmosphere — “confusing” the senses and disrupting spatial orders, drawing the sky closer to the earth.⁸⁸ As Peterson observes, “The sky is not off in the distance, but is grounded by acoustic frequencies that move air, bodies, plants, buildings, roads, and floor.”⁸⁹ This grounding of the sky is the result of a pressurizing strategy, one that exerts force upon a city and its inhabitants.

To grasp the logic of a reign of noise, we must move beyond conventional understandings of noise pollution and attune to the more elusive, atmospheric politics of disturbance and disorder — a vibrational politics whose terms are oscillation and flux. Who is afforded stability, and who is subjected to engineered disorder? In Beirut, disorder is applied through wave mechanisms — pressurizing, turbulencing — that enforce a state of disequilibrium. The wave nature of acoustic energy is central to this politics of disturbance. Waves do not merely traverse space; they generate cascading, dynamic, and unpredictable effects. The city of waves demands a radical rethinking of urban space — not as a collection of distinct structures, streets, and zones, but as a dynamic, shifting field in which currents of air and energy function as vectors of power and violence, a perspective already embraced by nation-states and their militaries.

To understand contemporary techniques of power, one must attend to waves. Today states and political organizations weaponize wave mechanisms to manufacture disorder, making democracy elusive in a new way — not by imposing order but by enforcing instability. These mechanisms exploit the wave nature of energy to produce a form of violence that radiates outward, unfolding across spatial scales. Waves can dissolve distinctions between states of matter, turning once-solid things into fluid, oscillatory forms; they can also traverse geological strata, triggering interactions — sonic, seismic, atmospheric — that cause once-discrete zones to overlap and interfere. Eyal Weizman’s concept of vertical apartheid in Palestine shows how power operates three-dimensionally, with colonial rule extending from the subterrain to the sky.⁹⁰ In Beirut, violence extends into seismic and ionospheric realms, where power operates through the physics of vibration and flow. Control was once maintained through order; today, it is exercised through engineered disorder. This marks a shift in political strategy: disciplining through disorder. In this paradigm, turbulence is not an effect but a governing logic, and instability is not incidental but a condition of rule.

Acknowledgements

This article was developed in the context of my forthcoming monograph The Trembling City: The Sonic and Atmospheric Violence of Vibrational Warfare (MIT Press, 2026). I am grateful to the peer reviewers for their generous and insightful feedback; to Samantha Sebastian and Jacob Kingsbury Downs for their careful reading and thoughtful comments; and to the artists, researchers, investigators, and writers whose work informs and inspires this article. I extend my warm thanks to María Edurne Zuazu and Sandra Moyano Ariza, together with the editorial board and staff of S&F Online, for their wonderful work in bringing this special issue to fruition.

This article has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program as part of the project Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism (Grant Agreement No. 865032).

Endnotes

1. Richard Sennett, Democracy and Urban Form (Harvard Design Press, 2024), 33–7, 45–6.[↑]
2. Sennett, Democracy and Urban Form, 30.[↑]
3. Sennett, Democracy and Urban Form, 57.[↑]
4. For discussions on “throwntogetherness” and “thrownapartness” in the urban context, see special issue “Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action,” City 26, no. 2–3 (2022).[↑]
5. Sennett, Democracy and Urban Form, 25; see also Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (Knopf, 1977).[↑]
6. Sennett, Democracy and Urban Form, 27.[↑]
7. Sennett, Democracy and Urban Form, 25.[↑]
8. Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (Knopf, 1970).[↑]
9. Richard Sennett and Pablo Sendra, Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City (Verso, 2020).[↑]
10. Nadim Mishlawi, “Dissonance and Urban Discord,” New Soundtrack 2, no. 2 (2012): 159–67.[↑]
11. Mishlawi, “Dissonance and Urban Discord,” 162.[↑]
12. Mishlawi, “Dissonance and Urban Discord,” 162.[↑]
13. Mhamad Safa, “The Loudest Ever: Entangled Legalities of Listening and War Trauma” (PhD diss., Westminster Law School, University of Westminster, 2024), 13.[↑]
14. See María Edurne Zuazu, “Acoustic Hailing Devices: Securitization and Sound Technologies,” Sound Studies 10, no. 1 (2024).[↑]
15. As Anna Feigenbaum and AM Kanngieser observe, “Atmospheres of terror are built through the escalation of military governance into the air in which everyday life is enveloped”; see Feigenbaum and Kanngieser, “For a Politics of Atmospheric Governance,” Dialogues in Human Geography 5, no. 1 (2015): 83.[↑]
16. Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Ghalya Saadawi, “Air Pressure: A Conversation between Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Ghalya Saadawi,” in Militant Media, ed. Riccardo Badano, Tomas Percival, and Susan Schuppli (Spector Books; CRA Press, 2024), 197.[↑]
17. Peter Sloterdijk, “Airquakes,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27, (2009): 47.[↑]
18. Nerea Calvillo, Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds (Columbia University Press, 2023).[↑]
19. Naomi Waltham-Smith, Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham University Press, 2021).[↑]
20. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Semiotext(e), 2009).[↑]
21. Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith and Frederick Farrell (Dallas Institute Publications, 1988).[↑]
22. Mark Clapson, The Blitz Companion: Aerial Warfare, Civilians and the City since 1911 (University of Westminster Press, 2019).[↑]
23. Gerald J. Fitzgerald, “Chemical Warfare and Medical Response during World War I,” Public Health Then and Now 98, no. 4 (April 2008): 611.[↑]
24. Bruce Hoffman, British Air Power in Peripheral Conflict, 1919–1976 (RAND Corporation, 1989).[↑]
25. Hoffman, British Air Power in Peripheral Conflict, 10.[↑]
26. Hoffman, British Air Power in Peripheral Conflict, 10.[↑]
27. Earshot argues that sound plays a central role in community formation, stressing that “land” cannot be reduced to mere “soil and territory” but also comprises intangible dimensions that shape experiences of place, such as sound. See Earshot, Zifzafa: A Video-Game Fighting Green Colonialism in the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights (Al Jawlan), investigation, January 27, 2025, https://earshot.ngo/investigations/zifzafa.[↑]
28. Abu Hamdan conducted research into “background noise and atmospheres of violence” in Lebanon between 2020 and 2021. This research led to several works, which include: the interactive website airpressure.info (2022); an installation with images and video, Air Conditioning (2022); a fifty-minute performative lecture, Daght Jawi: A Live Audio-Visual Essay (2022); and the film Air Pressure (The Diary of a Sky) (2024). See Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Pressure, http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/airpressure.[↑]
29. Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Earshot, Air Pressure, 2022, https://www.airpressure.info/.[↑]
30. Virginia Roy Luzarraga, “Acoustic Leaks and Listening Walls,” in Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Crímenes transfronterizos / Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Cross-Border Crimes (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2023), 25.[↑]
31. Abu Hamdan says, “The [Air Pressure] project arose from a very simple desire: to make the first publicly accessible database of every Israeli military and combat aircraft that has circled Lebanon since 2007. In doing this, I found that for more than half of the last fifteen years, there has been a vehicle in the sky over Lebanon, a combined flight time of eight and a half years.” See Abu Hamdan and Saadawi, “Air Pressure,” 194.[↑]
32. Abu Hamdan himself has used the term “atmospheric violence” to describe these violations. In connection with his installation Air Conditioning (2022), he writes: “the Lebanese atmosphere is a nexus of high pressure in a global weather system. The air is not a sovereign space but a volatile compound; of noise, carbon dioxide, monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and all the other toxic emissions of international militarism.” See Abu Hamdan, “Air Pressure,” http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/airpressure, 2022.[↑]
33. Feigenbaum and Kanngieser propose the term “atmospheric policing” to describe “technologies and techniques for controlling populations that are fundamentally predicated on their relationship with air; through requiring air for their transmission and dispersion.” They reference the use of tear gas, sound warfare, stun grenades, and other technologies of control that materialize in and through air, suggesting stronger critiques of atmospheric governance. While their concept of “atmospheric policing” emphasizes techniques and discrete acts of control (for example, the use of tear gas during protests), “atmospheric occupation” suggests a more enduring colonization of airs and atmospheres by occupying forces and violent regimes. See Feigenbaum and Kanngieser, “For a Politics of Atmospheric Governance,” 81.[↑]
34. Civilians’ auditory impressions of Israeli military aircraft — many documented in social media posts — are collected on airpressure.info, along with recordings of various aircraft sounds. These include the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon (fighter jet), Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II (fighter jet), Popeye AGM-142 (missile), Airbus A320 (passenger jet), IAI Eitan Heron TP (UAV), Elbit Hermes 450 (UAV), DJI Matrice 100 (quadcopter drone), Cessna AC-208 Combat Caravan (military aircraft), and Embraer EMB-314 Super Tucano (fighter jet).[↑]
35. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “400 Billion Dollars of Air,” lecture at the Royal College of Art, London, October 11, 2023. I develop this discussion further in Gascia Ouzounian, “Audible Cartographies of Power,” LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture 21 (2024): 94–9.[↑]
36. Abu Hamdan and Earshot, Air Pressure, 2022, https://www.airpressure.info/.[↑]
37. Abu Hamdan, “400 Billion Dollars of Air.”[↑]
38. Abu Hamdan, “400 Billion Dollars of Air.”[↑]
39. Abu Hamdan, “400 Billion Dollars of Air.”[↑]
40. Abu Hamdan and Saadawi, “Air Pressure,” 197.[↑]
41. This quote by Benny Gantz comes from Air Pressure (A Diary of the Sky), directed by Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Lebanon, 2024), 44 min.[↑]
42. Marina Peterson, “Sounds Are Raining: Frequencies of Atmospheric Listening,” in Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Air Pressure (A Diary of the Sky), ed. Irene Calderoni and Amanda Sroka (Yale University Press, forthcoming), 42.[↑]
43. Peterson, “Sounds Are Raining,” 42, 40, 44.[↑]
44. See Mhamad Safa and Gascia Ouzounian, “Aftersound: Mhamad Safa in Conversation with Gascia Ouzounian,” Resonance 4, no. 4 (2023): 381–90. See also Mhamad Safa, “Reverberations and Post-War Trauma: The Sustained Aftermath of Aerial Strikes on Lebanon in 2006,” Sound Studies 8, no. 1 (2022): 73–99.[↑]
45. Peterson, “Sounds Are Raining,” 42. Safa also writes: “Political power becomes immersive, affective, and at times, seamless, as the qualities of sound possess a transformative potential that surpasses mere instantaneous perceptual experiences.” See Safa, “The Loudest Ever,” 24.[↑]
46. The idea of sonic residues recalls sound artist Nuno da Luz’s concept of “echology,” an “ecology made primarily of echoes.” Da Luz challenges the notion that sounds merely fade. Rather, he suggests, they sustain, chronicling “past events which linger on as their acoustic imprints successively reflect, reverberate, diffract, refract, and resonate on surfaces and bodies across time.” See Nuno da Luz, “Notes on Poetry as an Echological Survival; or On the Possible ‘Value’ of Artworks, for the Future,” in Poetry as an Echological Survival, ed. Nuno da Luz (Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Escola das Artes, 2022), 128.[↑]
47. Rayya Badran, “ص.د.ى (Reverberation),” The Derivative, July 20, 2020, https://thederivative.org/reverberation/.[↑]
48. Mishlawi, “Dissonance and Urban Discord,” 161.[↑]
49. I develop the idea of sonic weather at greater length in an essay on Nuno da Luz’s work; see Gascia Ouzounian, “Sound as Weather: On Nuno da Luz’s Echologies,” in Enredos II: Nuno da Luz (Fundación Botín; Mousse Publishing, 2025).[↑]
50. Badran, “ص.د.ى (Reverberation).”[↑]
51. Badran, “ص.د.ى (Reverberation).”[↑]
52. Badran, “ص.د.ى (Reverberation).”[↑]
53. Safa, “The Loudest Ever,” 194.[↑]
54. Safa, “The Loudest Ever,” 197.[↑]
55. Safa, “The Loudest Ever,” 197.[↑]
56. Safa, “The Loudest Ever,” 206.[↑]
57. On meteorological approaches to sound, see Margarida Mendes, “Ecophilosophy as Practice,” in Poetry as an Echological, edited by Nuno da Luz, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Escola das Artes, 2022.[↑]
58. Sloterdijk, “Airquakes,” 47. See also Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 23–4. In Terror from the Air, Sloterdijk uses the phrase “black meteorology.”[↑]
59. Sloterdijk, “Airquakes,” 47.[↑]
60. Steven Connor, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (Reaktion Books, 2010), 39.[↑]
61. Calvillo, Aeropolis, 45.[↑]
62. Ignacio Farías and Lisa Kemmer, “Elemental Urbanism: Engaging the Terrestrial in City Making,” Berliner Blätter 87 (2024): 4.[↑]
63. Marina Peterson, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles (Duke University Press, 2021).[↑]
64. Marina Peterson, “Cloud Seeding Los Angeles: Elements of an Unsettled City,” City and Society 37, no. 1 (2025): 8.[↑]
65. Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 47.[↑]
66. See Umut Yıldırım, ed., War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East (ICI Berlin Press, 2023).[↑]
67. Sumayya Vally, “Ingesting Architectures,” Architectural Review 1482 (June 8, 2021), https://www.counterspace-studio.com/projects/ingesting-architectures-the-violence-of-breathing-in-parts-of-joburg/. See also Calvillo’s discussion on the project Yellow Dust, which examined how particulate matter is entangled in tensions over between “local and foreign air,” reflecting colonial biases; see Calvillo, Aeropolis, 170–3.[↑]
68. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007). See Safa, “The Loudest Ever,” for a longer discussion of Barad’s concept of diffraction in relation to the analysis of harmful waves.[↑]
69. ^[1] Rahul Mukherjee, Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (Duke University Press, 2020).[↑]
70. Calvillo, Aeropolis, 45.[↑]
71. Stefan Helmreich, A Book of Waves (Duke University Press, 2023), 5.[↑]
72. Safa, “The Loudest Ever,” 231–2, 266–71.[↑]
73. Safa, “The Loudest Ever,” 194.[↑]
74. Safa, “The Loudest Ever,” 121–96.[↑]
75. Safa, “The Loudest Ever,” 194.[↑]
76. Human Rights Watch, “‘They Killed Us from the Inside’: An Investigation into the August 4 Beirut Blast,” August 3, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/08/03/they-killed-us-inside/investigation-august-4-beirut-blast.[↑]
77. Mona Fawaz, “Planning and Crisis, Planning in Crisis,” Planning Theory 22, no. 4 (2023): 449.[↑]
78. Bhaskar Kundu et al., “Atmospheric Wave Energy of the 2020 August 4 Explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, from Ionospheric Disturbances,” Scientific Reports 11, no. 1 (2021): 2793.[↑]
79. Charif Majdalani, Beirut 2020: The Collapse of a Civilization, a Journal, trans. Ruth Diver (Mountain Leopard Press, 2021).[↑]
80. Majdalani, Beirut 2020, 75–6.[↑]
81. Beirut Urban Lab, “Home,” https://beiruturbanlab.com; and Hiba Bou Akar, The War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers (Stanford University Press, 2018).[↑]
82. Mona Fawaz, “Neoliberal Urbanity and the Right to the City: A View from Beirut’s Periphery,” Development and Change 40, no. 5 (2009): 827–52.[↑]
83. Fawaz, “Neoliberal Urbanity and the Right to the City,” 843.[↑]
84. Majdalani, Beirut 2020, 128–33.[↑]
85. Majdalani, Beirut 2020, 7.[↑]
86. Michael Safi et al., “Beirut Blast: A Night of Horror, Captured by Its Victims,” The Guardian, November 12, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2020/nov/12/beirut-blast-a-night-of-horror-captured-by-its-victims.[↑]
87. Peterson offers this helpful definition of noise pollution — pointing out that it is “not a form of air pollution” — together with a discussion of the role of aircraft noise in framing noise as pollution; see Atmospheric Noise, 78.[↑]
88. Brett Mommersteeg, “Two or Three Confusions about Vibration,” Science, Technology and Human Values, OnlineFirst.[↑]
89. Marina Peterson, “Sounds Are Raining,” 42.[↑]
90. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso, 2007).[↑]