LITMIR.BIZ

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8 revises the main lines of analyses and methods presented in the book to achieve a nuanced and complete understanding of the relationship between sound, space, and place, mostly based on the use of Jameson’s concept of the ‘vanishing mediator’. This is achieved by a comparison of the four case studies. In addition, it shows how a comparative analysis can overcome limitations based on a one-scene or one-city approach or on the adoption of a superficial ‘global’ scale.

      In the conclusion I discuss the issues arising from examining the popular music cultures of deindustrialising cities. I recap the main arguments I examined in the central chapters. I also reflect on the difficulties of working across nations and languages and offer some ideas about possible continuations and extensions of this research.

      This book has some clear temporal and spatial limitations. I am aware that industrial cities are a global phenomenon, and so is popular music. By following contemporary music media, I became aware of the extent and variety of cases still reflecting the elective affinity of industrial settings and cultural production, especially outside Europe, and the continuous influence that the ‘industrial paradigm’ in music still exerts. As Tony Mitchell puts it, ‘identity formation through music is an active, fluid process of production, creation and construction, not a question of mere reflection of nation state, place, landscape or environment’ (Mitchell, 2009, 187–88).

      Notes

      1.

      I use the Italian Torino instead of the English Turin. Both have been widely used in English texts, including during the 2006 Winter Olympics, when the municipality decided to consistently use the Italian version of its name.

      2.

      I am using several first-hand interviews in these chapters. All details of an interview are shown at its first occurrence, in text. Then, subsequent references to the same interview are simply shown as ([surname, if needed], interview, year). The name of the interviewed is shown in full in the first occurrence and later I adopt just the first name, surname, or nickname, according to the most common use within the scene and for readers’ clarity.

      Chapter 1

      The Industrial City

      Looking at a European industrial city today might be a bit like looking at a Sony Walkman TPS-L2 cassette player. They both bring back memories of a recent past. We all know that they both used to be very popular; they shaped innovative ways of production and consumption for a certain period of time, and they both involved mass production, each one of them looking not dissimilar from others. As many individuals wanted a Walkman, many governments needed a city or an urban region that could produce wealth through industrial production and manufacturing.

      With the invention of the CD and its portable player, the Walkman lost its value and turned into technological trash or a cheap, out-of-fashion flea market item. Its colour, shape, and composition suddenly looked shabby, depressing, and a bit dirty, weak in technical qualities and producing a sound that was poor in comparison to the new arrivals.

      The same could be said about industrial cities. The post-industrial discourse, together with the transfer of industrial manufacturing premises beyond the West, had the same effect that technological advances had on the Walkman and made industrial cities look anonymous, shabby, depressing, and a bit dirty. During the 1980s, they became places that were waiting to be updated for a new era, where culture—

      rebranded as creativity—would take the place of the economy, similar to the way laser discs replaced magnetic tapes. Also in capital cities, in centres with mixed work division, and in port towns, former industrial districts were reshaped to lodge new forms of work, in connection to services, information technology, education, and culture, or a combination of them. This process also had social consequences: new inhabitants with new jobs often invaded the most appealing working-class parts of towns, looking for authenticity and picturesque housing with industrial atmosphere. This process was labelled gentrification, and it capitalised on industrial spaces as fetishised commodities.

      This happened under different circumstances in the Lower East Side (NYC), in Neukölln (Berlin), in Kallio (Helsinki), and elsewhere, and it continues to happen around the world. But it is not merely gentrification as a sociological phenomenon that interested many former industrial districts around the world. Christopher Mele, in reference to New York’s Lower East Side, refers to the tendency of the new inhabitants ‘to gesture toward and even mimic the look and feel of the very social elements they threatened to displace’ (Mele 2000, vii). This process cannot be described merely as a social and physical upgrade, as a flow of capitals, or as aesthetic sanitation; it implies an aesthetic command, appreciation, and fetish of a certain kind of atmosphere.

      With the 1970s economic crisis, industrial cities stopped understanding and imagining their futures as sites of manufacturing and production and preferred to emphasise services and consumption. Industrial cities began marketing themselves as distinctive, cool places where people could both have fun and do business. All material elements that offered a reminder of the industrial past were emphasised, individualised, and aestheticised. However, this did not happen with the same level of success in all ‘pure’ industrial cities (only Bilbao and Manchester come to mind), many of which often did not experience gentrification and simply became desolate, shrank, or had to rely on state intervention to see premises reconverted so as not to completely lose their real estate value.

      The Walkman did not disappear, thanks to a second cycle of fetishisation (McRobbie 1989); it turned into some kind of retromania icon, its picture to be ironically worn on a T-shirt, for instance, or reproduced on protective cases for mobile phones. At the same time, cassettes are still produced and used by specific scenes as an element of differentiation, responding to a logic related to the subcultural capital of certain groups of consumers. The Walkman may well be sought after as a nostalgic fetish of one’s own personal history; nowadays a working Sony Walkman TPS-L2 can often attract bids of around five hundred euros on online auction sites, though we can ask ourselves what for. In the same way, the atmospheric and aesthetic ambience of the industrial crisis has never been so sought after in contemporary cultural production. Not only do films celebrate them but subcultures that developed within them are inspiring contemporary fashion and museum exhibitions, and music genres born in them are painstakingly being reproduced. Even the brutalist architecture is still very much present in the popular imaginary, and it is continuously adopted to convey many different meanings throughout popular culture.

      The 2008-originated and ongoing economic crisis brought surprisingly real manufacturing into the forefront of economic and political discourse as means for stability and growth. For instance, in the 2012 French political elections, the need to save the national manufacturing industry came to the forefront of electoral campaigns, in relation to the closing down of an ArcelorMittal steel mill in the Florage area of northeast France (Leigh 2012). Suddenly, Europe seems to remember that the manufacturing sector is still a relevant element in its core economy. Although the service industry has made up for the losses in hard industry, the ongoing economic crisis puts the development of the last thirty years in perspective.

      During its existence, the industrial city challenged city officials, architects, and planners in channelling the needs of an expanding but unstable capitalism into urban planning. Their efforts should have increasingly provided welfare and self-realisation to the citizens, as workers and as consumers. Nonetheless, the industrial city was also realised in strikingly similar ways in noncapitalist societies, like the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe and more or less with the same aims.

      Definitions

      The industrial city might simply be defined as a city shaped by the highly organised material interaction of capital and labour in manufacturing. This definition is kept so general to include as many centres as possible. There are in fact different kinds of industrial cities: classic ones from the first Industrial Revolution, one-company towns, utopian towns planned via social engineering or philanthropy, highly specialised centres, industrial agglomerations, and even port towns. It is in the nineteenth century, thanks to the so-called first Industrial Revolution,

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