Indefinite Urbanism: Airport Noise and Atmospheric Encounters in Los Angeles

Abstract:"Indefinite urbanism" is the aerial drawn into perceptibility through noise, glass resonating with aircraft noise and infrastructural edge spaces that remain as traces of a history of now inaudible sound. As the age of commercial air travel dawned in Southern California, those living around Los Angeles International Airport turned toward the sky as the roar of jet planes disrupted an otherwise pacific coastal climate. Attending to the (im)materiality of noise, I trace atmospheric encounters across the resonance of walls and the shifting sand of coastal dunes now home to an endangered species of butterfly.