The research proposal sets out to explore sonic urbanisms and soundscapes as an extended sociotechnical (Latour, 2005; Simondon, 1958/2017) and eco-infrastructural (Bélanger, 2009; Easterling, 2016; Morton, 2010) mode of capitalist extraction. It examines how global infrastructure and regeneration projects like Ocean Gateway in the Northwest of England reassemble and spatialise an urban economy of diverse aural experiences.

Using the Manchester Ship Canal (MSC) corridor as its empirical site, the proposal develops a design fiction (Hales, 2013, 2025) for a speculative logistics scenario where this strategic corridor transforms into an autonomous robotic geography—a multi-scalar landscape where autonomous aerial and surface vehicles operate independently. The MSC corridor is viewed not merely as a site of commerce and transportation but as an anthropological (Schober & Leivestad, 2022) and communicative space (Mattern, 2023; Peters, 2015; Starosielski, 2015), embedding material (Hutton, 2020), logistical (Cowen, 2014; LeCavalier, 2016), and technological (Nesbit & Waldheim, 2022; Shayya, 2021) trajectories within its environment. Through this lens, the corridor is conceived as a site for futuring sonic design fictions by “terraining” (Shayya, 2021) the prospects and potentialities of aural experiences in urban plans. This methodology aims to understand and anticipate the impact of extractive soundscapes on surrounding human and non-human populations.

The inquiry proposes hybrid methods for its research design to formulate an epistemology of “aural technics.” Although the specific techniques are yet to be determined, Shayya’s work on “terraining,” a process where obstacles become the means of realisation and Hales’s prior research on listening in cyborgian geographies (2011), noise and sonic fiction (2012), noise machines in speculative design (2015), and genetic algorithms and listening to machine noise (2016) provide points of departure.

• Bélanger, P. (2009). Landscape as Infrastructure. Landscape Journal, 28(1), 79–95.
• Cowen, D. (2014). The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. University of Minnesota Press.
• Easterling, K. (2016). Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. Verso.
• Hales, D. (2013). Design Fictions an Introduction and Provisional Taxonomy. Digital Creativity, 24(1), 1–10.
• Hutton, J. (2020). Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements. Routledge.
• Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press.
• LeCavalier, J. (2016). The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment. University of Minnesota Press.
• Mattern, S. (2023, July 31). Notes, 2023-07-31. Scope of Work. https://www.scopeofwork.net/2023-07-31/
• Morton, T. (2010). The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press.
• Nesbit, J. S., & Waldheim, C. (2022). Technical Lands. In Technical Lands. JOVIS Verlag GmbH.
• Peters, J. D. (2015). The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. The university of Chicago press.
• Schober, E., & Leivestad, H. H. (2022). Past the Canal: An Anthropology of Maritime Passages. History and Anthropology, 33(2), 183–187.
• Shayya, F. (2021). Politics of Survivability: How Military Technology Scripts Urban Relations [PhD Thesis]. University of Manchester.
• Simondon, G. (2017). On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (C. Malaspina & J. Rogove, Trans.; 1st edition). Univocal Publishing. (Original work published 1958)
• Starosielski, N. (2015). The Undersea Network. Duke university press.