Document | Hörstadt

Linz Charter

Acoustic space is everything we hear. In it our living conditions become both concretely direct and – since we cannot turn off our hearing – unavoidable. Acoustic space can be formed. It can be designed, cultivated and developed.
We recognize acoustic space as an elementary component of our habitat and commit ourselves to taking into consideration the following values in designing and developing it:

• Acoustic space is a public good. It belongs to everyone.
• The arrangement of acoustic space is the right and the concern of all people. Participation in this requires equal opportunities.
• Participation in acoustic space requires the right to acoustic self-determination and the development of a sense of acoustic responsibility.
• Cities are places of acoustic diversity and acoustic richness that should be open to all without barriers.
• In acoustic space people also have the unlimited right to personal physical sovereignty and the right to personal health.

Based on these values, we are oriented to the following goals:

• We want to enable and foster acoustic diversity and richness of sound.
• We understand construction, traffic and urban development processes in our city also as acoustic processes.
• We want to keep all publicly owned spaces, including all public transportation, free from permanent noise imposition.
• We seek a reduction of noise imposition in the public sphere for the protection of workers and consumers.
• We want to ensure full public participation for all hearing-impaired persons.
• We call on all educational institutions – especially kindergartens – to focus on the acquisition of auditory skills in their work.
• We want to promote responsible, innovate and socially engaged acoustic behavior and take new directions in fighting noise pollution.

With the “Linz Charter” we make hearing one of the core areas of our politics and invite other communities to join the “Linz charter”. We appeal to law-makers to take acoustic space into consideration as a central area of life. We do so in the knowledge and the conviction that human beings are influenced and touched by what they hear even in their innermost being.
Acoustically aware action creates quality of life and fosters individual participation in social communication.

Wording of the Linz Charter as it is to be brought before the Planning Committee (September 2008)