About this city

A small city in 2050, drawn on the plan of a real one. Everything you can hear in it was put there by somebody else.

What it is

Milltown is a place you can walk around and listen to. Its streets, blocks and buildings are fixed; its sounds are not. Anyone can claim a building, a park, a stretch of river or a street corner and leave something there — an ambience, a piece, an advertisement, a recording of a machine that doesn't exist yet, a notice read aloud. The city fills up as people arrive, and it stays open.

There is no brief and no theme. The only thing contributors have to decide is whether their piece belongs outdoors, where it mixes with whatever is nearby, or inside a building, where it waits behind a wall until somebody goes in.

Why

[ A paragraph in your own voice. Something like: most sonic futures we're offered are warnings — the dystopia is easy and it is boring. This is an attempt at the harder thing, which is imagining a near future somebody might actually want to live in, and arguing about it in sound rather than in prose. Twenty years out, close enough that people alive now would live in it. ]

[ And a sentence on why it matters that many people build it rather than one: a city imagined by one person is a proposal; a city imagined by forty is a disagreement, and the disagreement is the interesting part. ]

Where its streets came from

Milltown's plan is traced from a fire insurance survey of St Stephen and Milltown, New Brunswick, drawn by the Charles E. Goad Company in 1903 and held by Library and Archives Canada. Those surveys recorded every building in a town, its footprint, its construction material and how many storeys it stood — which makes them, incidentally, maps of how sound would have travelled. Milltown borrows that plan and nothing else: what stands on it now is 2050.

The real Milltown sits on the St Croix, which is the international boundary: the far bank is Maine. The plan still carries its saw mill, its customs house, its fire hall and its railway, and in one place the surveyor has annotated a street as "Pleasant (late Middle)" — a town noting its own history on the map, sixty years before anyone thought to call that a design device.

How to read it

• Buildings are tinted by what they are: civic darkest, then industry, then ordinary, with housing palest.
• A rust-coloured roofline means somebody has left a sound there.
• Hover anything for its name; click it to open its panel and whatever it holds.
• The mix follows your view. Move around and things fade up as you approach; go inside and the wall opens.
• Parks, the square, the river, the bridge and the streets can be claimed as readily as buildings.

Who

[ Your name, what you do, one line on the research this sits beside, and a link. Keep it short — people are here for the town, not the CV. ]

Milltown is administered, in fiction, by its Sound Office, which issues residents their cards and takes an interest in what may be heard and where.

Taking part

Contributors become residents, with a page of their own and a card issued by the Sound Office bearing their number and the waveform of their first sound. Everything is published under CC BY 4.0, so the whole city can be reused, remixed and taught from by anyone who credits its makers.

Colophon

Built as a static site: the plan is a GeoJSON file traced by hand, rendered with MapLibre GL; the mix runs in the browser on the Web Audio API. Trees, street furniture, track and headstones are generated from the plan itself rather than drawn. Source survey: Charles E. Goad Co., Fire insurance plan of St Stephen & Milltown, N.B., 1903, Library and Archives Canada. [ any other credits ]