Using and composing the landscape, attending to the making of place through sound in London’s East End. Lila, a case study

This paper is based on an ongoing PhD research project having London’s East End as its field area. It will focus on the case study of Lila and, through analysing her narrative of the East End, it will argue for the importance of the senses, notably of the sense of hearing, in using and composing a landscape. Throughout the paper, I will argue for the effect of attending to the soundscape in the making of place, notably around the notion that the soundscape is made by the uses given to a landscape and its inhabitants. I will also introduce my argument towards an awakening of our bodies as sensuous entities (Latour, 2004) and the recovery of those qualities instead of the rationalisation and standardisation of everyday life. For this, I will focus on the bearing of researching what could be seen as mundane everyday acts, that are, in fact, the constructing blocks of relating and inhabiting a landscape. However, because this paper is just one of the case studies of my research, I cannot offer an exhaustive review of all the literature that is in the research, I will though, present the theoretical literature that is most relevant to the case study.