Leisure Places Downstairs: A Pleasure or a Failure?

One of the urban environment challenges is to manage to locate such leisure places as cinemas, restaurants, or even discotheques, as close as possible to living quarters. While this can be reasonably achieved in brand new buildings, with careful acoustical and urban planning and engineering, it often proves tricky, or even impossible, to achieve in the kind of older buildings that usually are to be found at the core of European cities.

Whenever any benefit results from the presence of such leisure places close to homes, the neighbourhood can much more readily accept the acoustical implications. However, when no thought is given to the acoustical problems, the technical and relational efforts needed to correct the situation often prove to be beyond the capabilities of the operators.

Over the years, the authorities have tried to brush up community noise regulations so that they can cope with the new trends that include low frequency noise involving music.