Soundscape, engagement and spatial planning : an exploration of perceived control, annoyance, indirect health outcomes and wellbeing in the context of UK aviation expansion projects

Abstract

The sound environment directly affects human health and wellbeing. Essential to soundscape design, management and implementation in spatial planning are people’s perceptual responses to the existing and/or imagined sound environment. Internationally standardised soundscape practice places stakeholders as co-specifiers of projects from the planning inception stage, but crucially challenging to assessing/predicting stakeholders’ response to sound is the impact of non-acoustic factors, accounting for at least one-third of the human response to sound in context. The non-acoustic factor of ‘perceived control’ critically influences person-environment spacetime interaction/s, making it essential to physical and mental health, while perception of engagement in spatial planning substantially impacts stakeholders’ perceived control. This qualitative study explores perceived control and engagement in the context of spatial planning for UK aviation activities. Constructivist grounded theory methodology was used while data collection comprised of a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews, focus groups, stakeholder engagement activities and autoethnographic observations. Three project outputs were delivered. First, the emergent Grounded Theory from the data conceptualising a trauma informed response to contextually salient and relevant non-acoustic factors and the impact on perceived control and engagement. Next, a Conceptual Framework applying the Grounded Theory to environmental impact assessment. Third, recommendations and implications of the outputs to inform salutogenic spatial planning were considered for aviation and for large and small infrastructure projects. This project builds on existing soundscape, transportation noise and health research adding a novel applied Grounded Theory to the corpus. Finally, a dimensional evolvement of stress-related noise annoyance theory is posited regarding perceived control and the impact on wellbeing.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant EP/R003467/