Frequently refuted deflection: “Cities are noisy”
We’ve heard this a lot from noise denialists who try to dismiss or justify excessive, unhealthy, and unnecessary levels of noise — the idea that cities are inherently noisy, and therefore no one who lives in one should either complain about noise or try to do anything about it.
According to this rationale, any level of noise for any reason in any part of a city at any time is OK, because “cities are noisy.” This is often accompanied by the statement that, “If you don’t like it, you should move someplace else.” (The fact that 270 million U.S. residents — more than 80% of the population — live in urban areas renders this second dismissive deflection utterly impractical, not withstanding the financial impediments to doing so.)
Moreover, these pro-noise advocates never seem to apply this supposedly ‘common sense’ view to other aspects of city life. For example, cities generally have much higher levels of air pollution and trash on the streets than suburban or rural areas, but no one seriously argues that people should be allowed to burn garbage or throw it on the ground because “cities are dirty” — and that if other residents don’t like breathing toxic air or living in trash-strewn neighborhoods, they should move someplace cleaner.
Similarly, cities have long been known for having much higher living costs than other areas, yet many of the same people who dismiss excessive sound levels because cities are noisy do not apply that same idea to housing costs — i.e., that “cities are expensive” and those who can’t afford to live there shouldn’t complain or try to do anything about it, but should just move someplace cheaper.
In fact, quite the opposite: Many noise denialists actively complain about “other” people (real-estate developers, wealthy homebuyers, speculative investors, etc) making urban housing more expensive, and then go even further by demanding that the government adopt policies and spend millions of dollars of public money to keep housing affordable for those of lesser means — but not try to reduce noise.
In other words, they assert that it’s the government’s responsibility to actively alter the nature of cities so that everyone can live there, but conveniently — and hypocritically — simultaneously claim that nothing can or should be done about excessive urban noise, because (again) “that’s the way cities are.”
Needless to say, the degree to which cities are noisier than less-populated areas hardly serves as a reason to insist that they remain that way forever — especially at the cost of people’s health — or that we tolerate the actions of those who deliberately make them even noisier, any more than urban pollution serves to justify defending people who feel entitled to deliberately pollute cities even more. The existence of a problem does not serve as a justification for perpetuating it or making it worse.
Many Noise Project resident volunteers and supporters have lived in much larger cities than Providence, with far higher populations (and population densities), including Boston, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. Yet with the exception of New York — the largest and most densely populated city in the U.S. — few of those cities are as consistently loud as Providence, and all actively regulate sound levels precisely because they are noisy.
Yet here in Providence, ardent noise denialists insist that people should be allowed to make as much noise as they want, whenever and wherever they want, despite the documented adverse effects it has on other people’s health, on the basis of the recursive logical fallacy that “cities are noisy,” so it’s OK to make noise — which makes them noisier, and thus justifies making even more noise. We can’t make this up.
In fact, Providence and other cities can and should be less polluted, less economically stratified, and less noisy. None of those things is an immutable condition, but rather the result of public policies that can and should be changed. The first step is acknowledging that these are choices — and so we can change them. The second step is to stop justifying or tolerating excessive and unnecessary noise on the basis that “cities are noisy.” Cities are only as noisy as their residents allow them to be.