Tuning In: Understanding Music in Your City

Music is something that impacts planners, whether they know it or not. But often, music is not something incorporated into wider strategic planning. Instead, it’s left to ad-hoc decision making - be it about welcoming a festival or strategizing a mixed-use development. This session introduces music as a core element of the pre-planning and early-stage planning process and how to go about understanding how music works in your community, why it matters, how to work with it & how to reimagine your city or place’s long-term strategic plan with it as an asset, rather than a potential noise-making liability. This includes site-specific planning such as downtowns, adaptive re-use, neighborhood plans and other issues.

Our panel is related to the recently published edition of APA's PAS QuickNotes (published September 1, 2023), which outlines the components of a music audit, a key tool planners can use to inform data-driven decision-making around music, and shares examples of how cities around the United States are using music to improve quality of life and achieve community goals.