When the city wakes the dead – silence, noise pollution, and politics within the contemporary French cemetery

This article underlines how cemeteries, despite being designed and managed as silent spaces, have recently started to see their soundscapes become increasingly entangled with the surrounding urban noise. I propose an analysis of the soundscape produced by local cemetery rules and regulations from the Lyon metropolitan area (France) through the lenses of legal geography before contrasting their normative ambitions with observed noise data. I then discuss those results' meaning through reference to H. Lefebvre's Right to the city (1968) and C. Chivallon's definition of the “in-human” (2023). The dead, as a socially produced category of people or things who or which, despite being granted a legal status that should shield them from degradation, lack the ability to leverage legal resources and are consequently deprived of their right to the city. While local rules and regulations aim to produce a silent soundscape, actual noise data show that contemporary urban cemeteries, because of their geographical locations within the metropolis, are noisier than expected.