The study approaches silence not merely as a measurement in decibels but as a social and legal construct. Since the composer and sound theorist R. Murray Schafer introduced the concept of the soundscape in 1977, geographers have recognized that what counts as silence varies enormously across space and time. A park can feel silent even with children playing, so long as those sounds are considered legitimate. Producing silence, in other words, is a selective activity: it requires deciding which sounds to erase and, by extension, controlling the people or things responsible for them. Cemeteries, as highly regulated spaces designed to connect the living with the absent dead, represent perhaps the purest example of this engineered quiet.

To understand how French law imagines the cemetery soundscape, Dall’Aglio collected 34 sets of local cemetery rules and regulations from municipalities across the Lyon metropolitan area, a territory of 58 municipalities and roughly 1.4 million inhabitants that contains 91 cemeteries. The documents, ranging from a single page to more than 60 pages, were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The findings were unambiguous. Twenty-five of the 34 documents explicitly forbid making noise, typically with formulaic language prohibiting visitors from screaming, shouting, singing, arguing, or holding loud conversations. Making noise turned out to be among the most heavily regulated behaviors in the entire corpus, outranking even eating and smoking, and second only to the ban on bringing dogs into the cemetery.

The regulation extends well beyond explicit sound bans. Twelve documents forbid meetings within the cemetery that have no connection to funerary matters, effectively silencing friendly or professional gatherings before they can become audible. One document optimistically prohibits disputes outright, while two produce singularly curious rules: one banning telephone alarms and another forbidding laughing. Professional workers face their own acoustic discipline. Stonecutting is forbidden in 17 documents, meaning monument companies must deliver finished gravestones rather than carve them on site. Machinery-heavy work is banned on weekends in 25 documents and on holidays in 27, particularly around All Saints Day. Twenty-five documents forbid driving within cemetery grounds except for funeral processions, removing the mechanical drone of vehicles from the sacred space.

Perhaps most revealing is what the rules permit. Twenty-two of the noise-prohibiting documents carve out an exception for funerary ceremonies, and several specifically allow music. But the framing of that music betrays an implicit religious heritage: one municipality permits no music except religious music, two allow only the recital of psalms, and another restricts singing to liturgic chants, wording strongly associated with Catholic practice. The study argues that this produces a lawscape populated by ghostly, implicitly Christian visitors engaged in solitary silent meditation, while excluding funerary traditions common elsewhere in the world, such as eating at gravesides or ritual dancing, practices that do occur in France on Buddhist graves. The overall principle, the author concludes, is the evacuation of the organic, the bodily, and the mundane from the cemetery soundscape.

But do these ambitious regulations actually produce silence? To answer this, Dall’Aglio turned to publicly available noise data collected by the local association Acoucités, which measured automobile and train noise across the metropolis using fixed and mobile sonometers in 2022. Averaging these measurements within cemetery polygons using GIS software yielded a sobering picture. The average traffic noise level inside Lyon’s cemeteries was 54 decibels, ranging from 41 to 71 decibels. For comparison, those levels correspond to soft music, a lively conversation, or a busy street. Far from being silent, many cemeteries are acoustically indistinguishable from ordinary urban space, and during rush hours the sound of traffic is essentially impossible to escape.

The geography of this noise is no accident, and it tells a two-century-old story. In the early 19th century, French municipalities were pushed by national authorities to relocate cemeteries out of city centers onto secluded, elevated terrain, driven by sanitary fears of miasmas emanating from the dead. This expulsion pushed cemeteries toward the urban margins, where they found themselves neighbors to other space-consuming infrastructure that was likewise relegated to the periphery: landfills, railway lines, and later highways. The pattern persists. The Guillotière cemetery opened a decade after the Lyon-Marseille railway lines beside it were completed. The Bron metropolitan cemetery, built in 1988, was conceived as a way to fill empty land near major roads. A beltway ramp in Villeurbanne was constructed on land originally intended as a cemetery extension. Meanwhile, the quietest cemeteries in the study are either in northern municipalities without major highways or on 19th-century hilltop sites chosen for their fresh air.

This gap between legal promise and acoustic reality leads the study to its most provocative argument. Under French law, the dead occupy a peculiar intermediate status: they are not persons, yet profaning a body is classified in the criminal code as harm to a person rather than harm to property. Since a 2008 law, the respect due to a human body does not cease with death, and violating a deceased person’s funeral instructions is a criminal offense. Yet despite this legal dignity, the dead cannot invoke it. They cannot file complaints, organize, or protest the highways built beside their graves. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city, the author argues that the dead, as a socially produced category, are deprived of that right in practice: they hold a right not to the city with its silent heterotopias, but merely to the urban, with its continuous flow of noise.

The comparison extends to other groups excluded from urban consideration. Following Christelle Chivallon’s notion of the in-human, beings excluded from humanity in ways that grant humans power over them, the study suggests that noise pollution, like any other form of waste produced by the metropolitan metabolism, is poured into spaces inhabited by those considered lesser citizens or lesser beings. The dead are presumed insensitive, unable to hear or suffer, a sentiment the researcher encountered half-jokingly in conversations with visitors. And because the dead cannot speak, they become prime targets for political instrumentalization: advocates and cemetery managers routinely claim to speak on their behalf, making it difficult to distinguish genuine defense of the dead’s right to rest from political leverage. As Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics implies, the problem is not that the dead are treated like a marginalized group, but that some marginalized groups are treated as if they were already dead.

The study’s conclusion is deliberately exploratory but methodologically suggestive. The failure of cemetery regulations to produce silence says less about the inefficiency of local law than about its virtual nature: rules always require spatial actualization, and the dead cannot perform that work themselves. The changing soundscape is driven primarily by the growing entanglement of cemeteries with the urban fabric, not by any deliberate policy of noise. How to resolve the contradiction between an inherited legal and spiritual order and a contemporary urban and technical order is, the author insists, fundamentally a political question. More broadly, the work proposes that mapping noise pollution, like mapping any urban flow, can reveal geographies of power and relegation, offering geographers a new way to listen to inequality in the city.

Subject of Research: Noise pollution and the legal production of silence in French urban cemeteries

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

Article References: Dall'Aglio, L. (2026). When the city wakes the dead – silence, noise pollution, and politics within the contemporary French cemetery. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 361-373. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-361-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-361-2026

Keywords: cemeteries, noise pollution, soundscape, legal geography, urban planning, silence, Lyon, right to the city, necropolitics, traffic noise, death studies, France

The publication of congress abstracts in a peer-reviewed journal is a well-established practice in academic medicine, but its significance is often underestimated by readers outside the research community. Abstracts are condensed summaries of studies that are typically still in progress or recently completed, and they allow scientists to stake a claim on new findings months or even years before full papers appear in journals. For paediatric research, where patient populations are smaller and studies often take longer to recruit than in adult medicine, the rapid dissemination of preliminary findings through abstract collections can be especially consequential. It allows clinical teams across Europe to see, almost in real time, which questions their colleagues are asking and which approaches are producing results.

The decision by the European Society for Paediatric Research and the European Academy of Paediatrics to merge their meeting calendars into a single congress reflects a broader trend in European medicine toward consolidation. Both organisations have long histories: the society for paediatric research has traditionally focused on the biological and translational science of child health, spanning neonatology, developmental physiology and experimental paediatrics, while the academy has represented a broader clinical constituency, including general paediatrics, subspecialty practice and the training of the next generation of paediatricians. By convening jointly, the two bodies effectively create a single venue where laboratory scientists, neonatologists, hospital paediatricians and primary care researchers can encounter one another’s work without the disciplinary silos that have historically separated them.

Lyon, the host city, is itself a fitting choice for a congress of this scope. The French city sits at the heart of one of Europe’s densest biomedical corridors, with major university hospitals, research institutes and a strong tradition in infectious disease, immunology and clinical research. For the several thousand delegates expected at a congress of this kind, the combination of an accessible European location and a concentrated four-day programme is a practical consideration as much as a symbolic one. Congresses of this scale depend on the ability of clinicians with demanding hospital schedules to attend, and the compressed format of an inaugural joint meeting is designed to maximise scientific exchange per day away from the ward.

What does the publication of the abstract collection actually contain? As is typical for such collections, the document comprises the accepted abstracts for oral presentation, organised by the congress’s scientific tracks. Each abstract represents a study that has passed through a review process conducted by the congress’s scientific committees, which evaluate submissions for originality, methodological rigour and relevance to paediatric practice. The selected oral presentations are, in most congress systems, the highest-ranked subset of a much larger pool of submitted abstracts, with the remainder often presented as posters. Publication in the journal gives these contributions a citable form, which matters for young researchers whose careers depend on documented output, and it preserves a permanent record of what was presented even for work that may never reach full publication.

For the wider readership of Pediatric Research, the collection serves a second function as a barometer of the field. The distribution of abstracts across topics reveals where European paediatric research is concentrating its energy. In recent years, congresses in this space have been dominated by themes such as neonatal brain injury and neuroprotection, the long-term consequences of preterm birth, the rising burden of allergic and inflammatory disease in children, the impact of the microbiome on early development, and the application of genomic diagnostics to critically ill infants. The oral presentation lineup at a joint ESPR and EAP congress would be expected to span the full arc from bench to bedside, reflecting the combined identity of the two parent organisations.

The timing of the publication, roughly a month before the congress opens, is deliberate. Delegates can use the abstract collection to plan which sessions to attend, and research groups can identify potential collaborators whose work dovetails with their own. In an era when much scientific networking happens asynchronously online, the congress abstract book retains a distinctive role: it is a snapshot of an entire community’s priorities at a single moment, unfiltered by the lengthy delays of the journal publication pipeline. For journalists, clinicians and policy makers, it is also one of the few places where the questions being asked at the front line of child health research appear together in one document.

The creation of CEPAS as a standing congress brand also carries implications for how European paediatric science is coordinated. A single annual joint meeting reduces the fragmentation that comes from parallel conferences competing for the same delegates and the same speakers, and it strengthens the negotiating position of European paediatrics in its exchanges with counterpart organisations in North America, Asia and Latin America. The two founding societies have complementary memberships, and a shared congress gives early-career researchers in particular a single, larger stage on which to present, with a correspondingly larger audience for their work. The abstract collection published in the journal is, in this sense, the first public artefact of a new institutional structure.

There are also practical considerations for readers approaching an abstract collection for the first time. Abstracts are by design preliminary: they report findings that have often not yet undergone the full scrutiny of peer review that a complete paper receives, and sample sizes in paediatric studies are frequently modest. The standard caution in the field is that abstract findings should be treated as signals rather than conclusions, to be confirmed or refuted as full manuscripts emerge. At the same time, the review process that selects abstracts for oral presentation is not trivial, and historically many of the most influential ideas in paediatrics, from advances in neonatal respiratory care to new frameworks for developmental screening, circulated as congress presentations long before they appeared in final form in the literature.

As the Lyon congress approaches, the published collection will function as both a programme and a promise: a programme of the oral sessions that will unfold over four days in late October, and a promise of the fuller studies that many of these abstracts are expected to become. For a field in which the health of children often receives a smaller share of research funding and publication attention than adult medicine, the visibility afforded by a joint congress of two major societies, and by a dedicated abstract collection in a leading paediatric journal, is a meaningful step. Whether the inaugural CEPAS meeting establishes a durable new fixture in the European calendar will be judged in Lyon, but the groundwork, in the form of the research its members will present, is already in print.

Subject of Research: Publication of selected abstracts from the inaugural Congress of the European Paediatric Academic Societies (CEPAS 2026)

Article Title: CEPAS abstracts

Article References: CEPAS abstracts. (2026). Pediatric Research. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-026-05383-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41390-026-05383-9

Keywords: CEPAS 2026, paediatric research, ESPR, EAP, Pediatric Research, congress abstracts, Lyon, child health, neonatology, academic medicine, oral presentations, European paediatrics