Journal of Urban Cultural Studies - Volume 2, Issue 1-2, 2015

This editorial questions the accepted view among militant researchers in the academy and radical activists outside of it that activism is not possible within higher education. The notion that theory is not practice fails to see that humanistic enquiry does not take place outside of material reality. Thinking and doing cannot be compartmentalized. They form part of greater cultural processes. This editorial argues that research and courses addressing urban cultural studies can offer the space to imagine activism both inside and outside our classrooms and institutions.

In narratives that demonstrate the mutual imbrication of urban and ecological imperatives, Henrietta Rose-Innes complements planners’ work that analyses and strives to sustains human and other native and migrating species in Cape Town. Squeezed between cliffs and oceans, urban life here must deal with mountain topography that appears to escape development and with environments that seem to frustrate civic order, particularly the informal settlements on the edges of this cosmopolitan tourist port. Drawing on anti-apartheid tropes of social justice and on post-apartheid challenges to neo-liberal speculation, her fiction and non-fiction writing traces the steps of biped, quadruped and hexapod figures along the borders between habitation and wilderness, urban street and bare earth to capture the beauty and violence of this singular South African city.

This article studies the ‘imaginative mapping’ of a real-world neighbourhood in one comic book series: lower Manhattan’s Alphabet City in writer David Hine and artists David Yardin and Lan Medina’s District X (July 2004–January 2006). In contrast to a long-standing claim to ‘realism’ in Marvel’s use of New York City, this article argues that the real Alphabet City – at the time a contested and rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood – is nowhere to be found in District X, replaced by a voyeuristic fabrication, a sensationalistic node of concentration for middle-class fears about urban decline and blight amid prosperity and contemporary discourses about drugs, crime and homelessness that reproduces long-standing cultural representations of the neighbourhood as different and inferior. In doing so, the series polices a boundary of identity, empathy and imagination and tells readers that force in favour of clearing out radical difference in the neighbourhood and making it into a space fit for ‘normal’ people is natural, rational and logical and in the best interest even of those who might be displaced by gentrification, disproportionately incarcerated in the name of ‘law and order’, or put at risk of their lives in dangerous shelters.

Music scenes are inseparable from their spatial environment, and thrive under certain spatial conditions. Urban regulations and planning play a defining role in the development of local scenes. This article examines two epicentres of the EDM scene, Berlin and Amsterdam, in order to show how factors such as availability of distinctive and affordable spaces for music production, and the regulation and planning of such spaces, impact the ways in which the EDM scene unfolds. In Berlin, the abundance of vacant spaces and lack of (enforcement of) regulations following the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 1980s are key factors in the city’s consolidation as a world-renowned club scene. Stricter enforcement of regulations and a shortage of inner-city space for creative activity in Amsterdam favour a music scene of festivals and foot-loose actors, mostly promoters.

This article explores the representation of Buenos Aires during the climax of the Argentine neo-liberal crisis in Vagón fumador/Smokers Only by Chen (2003), through an analysis of the spatial practice of its characters. It is not argued here that the film sets out to capture this crisis. The opposite could be argued: the film – even when attempting to avoid referring to its socio-economic moment – works as an involuntary register of these most critical of times, capturing its context tangentially, in a clear example of the forms in which New Argentine Cinema embarked in the production of meaning in ways that are not necessarily dependent on narrative. Buenos Aires in the film is portrayed as a thoroughly commodified space, deeply embedded in the economic logic of the time, where everything is consumed like a spectacle: neo-liberal space perfected.

This special section of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies engages with the idea of activating a ‘sonic turn’ in urban cultural studies scholarship, in part through the evocation of the paradigm of critical and participatory citizenship, as well as through critical approaches to understanding how sound and music are implicated in the texture of a city. This work is therefore informed by theorizations of topdown and of bottom-up approaches to engagements with, and representation of, the city, through sonic and musical means. Drawing on a variety of disciplinary approaches, including urban ethnomusicology, urban sociology, cultural geography, acoustic ecology and soundscapes studies, this introductory article examines what is meant by ‘the sonic turn’ as it relates to sound and music studies and how and why this should matter to the study of cities and of the urban experiences of citizens in the broadest sense. This introduction also summarizes aspects of the five papers in this collection, signalling the different approaches taken by each of the authors as evidence of the richness such sonic and musical investigations into the city and the urban experience can bring to urban cultural studies. With a focus on urban ethnography and on applied dimensions of research, particularly in the contemporary city, this article seeks to underscore the importance of listening to and hearing the city, especially for those citizens that do not necessarily have an ‘official’ voice or the technical means to interpret and engage with their sonic environments. Finally, this article suggests how sonic cultural interventions and engagements may assist, if not in social regeneration, at least in promoting a greater understanding of the complex sonic dimensions of city life as mediated and experienced by urban dwellers and as imagined by others.

Economic crisis and popular music have often been put in synergic relation to each other especially in the context of industrial cities. Disparate genres first conceived in industrial cities, ranging from hardcore punk to house, and from post-punk to heavy metal, seem to be the most fitting score for a grey, gloomy, decaying built environment or for its evocations, but is there an organic relation between de/industrialization and cultural production? This article addresses these issues, trying to unfold the relation between industrial soundscapes and landscapes, symbolic representations, material changes and attempts to make sense of the crisis by dramatizing it, in the context of 1980s European industrial cities. It also considers the ongoing ‘heritagization’ of popular music, taking place in contemporary (post?)industrial cities and the way this relates to tourism, local economies, place perception and branding.

This article explores the ways in which musical, sonic, and more broadly sensory experiences of Berlin provide the ground for an ambivalent sense of civic belonging for a cadre of migrants affiliated with the city’s local electronic dance music scenes. Drawn from ethnographic fieldwork, the accounts of these ‘techno migrants’ articulate an identification with the local music scenes, the built environment of the city, its urban soundscapes, its pace of life, its low population-density, its socio-economic and multicultural mix, the attitudes and sartorial styles of its residents, and the palpable sense of both recent history and imminent future. The affective dimensions of these identifications provide a means of sustaining a fantasy of belonging to a place where one remains foreign, relying on immersion in and identification with the city’s atmospheres to hold in abeyance the alienating aspects of migration. Thus, the feeling of being ‘at home’ in Berlin stands in for other modes of civic belonging (e.g., legal, ethnic, cultural) to which techno-migrants have limited or obstructed access. These musical migrants seem to engage in a form of ‘affective citizenship’ (Berlant 1997; Jones 2001; Mookherjee 2005), where a sense of belonging is sustained through affective experiences that index belonging, sometimes regardless of whether such belonging has juridical or social recognition.

What happens when, in recording an urban soundscape, the actual recording process is handed over to a city’s people? This article explores the methodological, technological and ideological challenges and opportunities faced in a project based in the small, multicultural and post-industrial city of Limerick, in the Midwest of Ireland. The city is currently undergoing a process of urban ‘regeneration’ following decades of challenges (high unemployment rates, rapid demographic shifts brought about by global migration, social disenfranchisement in marginalized neighbourhoods, gangland criminality, and considerable stigmatization by the national media). Facilitated by an interdisciplinary, university-based team involving urban ethnomusicologists, sociologists, media and information technology specialists, and soundscape composers, ‘LimerickSoundscapes’ activates ‘citizen collectors’ as critical collaborators in the research process, as well as partners with a vested interest in representing and recreating their city through local sounds as part of lived experience. The project connects soundscapes and acoustic ecology studies with cultural geography, and with urban, applied ethnomusicology’s focus on human subjects. Through an evocation of ‘critical citizenship’ and ‘creative regions’, ‘LimerickSoundscapes’ offers a particular kind of model for soundscape generation that has the individual as a networked, social being and creative, critical citizen at its core.

This article engages with how our auditory engagement with a particular soundscape helps frame and construct the places we move in and influences the ways we relate to our surroundings, to others and to ourselves. Its empirical focus is a series of urban audio walks that were made and carried out within a public engagement project designed to actively involve the participants and walkers in a relationship with(in) the place, community, history and culture. The article explores how this project worked with and challenged the form of the traditional, tourist-orientated audio walk, which tend to represent the city as a smooth, historicized space ready to be consumed. The walks produced in this project were more improvisational; they were vehicles for expressing the ragged, common sense topographies or place in the world of the participants. This tension draws to the surface questions of critical citizenship, as we trace how the participants ‘mapped their world’ within the pre-existing and often overwhelming cartographies of their world and how this, in turn, allowed us to think more about the ways in which they position themselves and are positioned within dominant discourses as a particular type of citizen and urban dweller.

‘Our Sonic Playground’ is the name of a public event organized by the author in 2013 for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago. This project attracted the participation of a number of local artists interested in sound, music and the environment. Many were members of the ‘World Listening Project’ and Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology. ‘Our Sonic Playground’ suggested that this event could serve as a model for actively engaging the public in soundscape awareness, an oftenneglected aspect of life in urban and other environments. This model is potentially useful for future engagements by providing a ‘recipe’ or set of practical suggestions for educators and ‘critical citizens’ as it relates to broader concerns with environmental change, urbanism, and awareness of place and public space. The author’s pedagogy of play and free improvisation emphasizes the importance of community and a type of aural-tactile engagement with listening and sound making that critically employs the physical, social and aesthetic role of media technology. This interest in public engagement is informed by the foundational work in the early 1970s, by the ‘World Soundscape Project’, and subsequent activities led by Canadian composers R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp and Barry Truax. Partnerships with local arts institutions, community organizations, led by faculty and students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the city’s large creative community show how art and technology can reach out of the academy and into daily lives of people by effecting the acoustic identities of cities in positive and socially meaningful ways.

This article examines how Marshall Berman’s writings on urban culture and politics illuminates and extends our understanding of the role that culture plays in Henri Lefebvre’s emancipatory notion of the right to the city, a role that tends to be underplayed by contemporary critical urbanists. The article begins by summarizing Lefebvre’s arguments about the importance of culture in understanding the right to the city. Next, it is suggested that Berman understands culture in two ways that are helpful in terms of augmenting Lefebvre’s arguments. The first is urban culture as spectacle and the second is culture as appropriation. The article then reviews Berman’s account of the birth of hip hop from the South Bronx in order to demonstrate how urban culture is imbricated in the right to the city before discussing the implications and challenges posed by Berman’s arguments.

These three books take on varying responses to the forces of neo-liberalism. Jeremy Gilbert’s book Common Ground approaches the problem through theory, seeking to challenge the ideology of individualism at the heart of neo-liberal projects. Drawing on a diverse group of post-structuralist and democratic thinkers, he critiques the neoliberal fear of the crowd, offering an alternative vision of community based on radical creativity and participatory democracy. Claudio Cattaneo and Miguel Martinez, in their edited volume The Squatters’ Movement in Europe, provide a more practical approach to resisting neo-liberal capitalism: urban squatting. Framing squatting as a movement against capitalism and for the right to the city, the contributors document a wide range of case studies across Europe and the United States, describing a movement simultaneously challenging neo-liberal urban development and increasingly under threat by the forces of capital and the state. Lesley J. Wood’s book, Crisis and Control, on the militarization of protest policing investigates these issues from the other side, showing how protest policing is not only a means to defend neo-liberalism, but also caught up within these same forces. She traces militarization as the outcome of growing interactions between local and global forces, the more ambiguous nature of contemporary threats, and a push towards professionalization that links military, security forces, and police more tightly together. Read jointly, these books provide important insights into the ideological and structural conditions underpinning neo-liberalism, as well as efforts to change them.

In 2014 Jack Becker was the recipient of the Public Art Dialogue Award in recognition of his contributions to the field of public art. Becker is the executive director of Forecast Public Art, which he established in 1978, and publisher of Public Art Review. Building on Becker’s education in the arts and career experience as an Art in Public Places programme coordinator (Minneapolis) and Arts Development manager (St Paul), Forecast Public Art has developed into a non-profits arts organization that seeks to connect ‘the energies and talents of artists with the needs and opportunities of communities’ and works closely with artists, stakeholders and communities to develop and realize projects responding to their needs.

A major urban project begun on 4 April 1910, the Gran Vía is a street in central Madrid, Spain, constructed in three segments that connect Calle de Alcalá with the Plaza de España. Imagined on the heels of other urban reforms of the mid-to-late nineteenth century – chief among them the Puerta del Sol, which gained more recent international notoriety as the base of protests by the Indignados – the Gran Vía sought to establish Madrid as a modern European city and by extension testify to the urban modernity of the Spanish state. This famed thoroughfare has been represented in artistic products (theatre, novels, films and paintings) throughout the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries as an enduring symbol of the Spanish capital’s urban modernity. This short-form article explores the potential for social sciences and humanities approaches to combine in a site-focused, interdisciplinary approach to urban culture. At the same time, it also documents the potential of digital projects on cities to involve students and faculty in collaborative research within a new educational paradigm.