and abandoned, ongoing urban developments might be abruptly stopped, whole districts might be left shrinking and decaying by speculators waiting for an upswing, and mortgage-dependant flats and houses might end under foreclosures. The city as a functioning network of transports, energy supplies, and services might experience seizures and blockages. Certain districts might be stigmatised by a major presence of unemployed, and city centres might become the sites for demonstrations and resistance, maybe leading to violence and repression. All European cities have experienced, at least once, some of the above-mentioned real features of an economic crisis in their recent history.
Industrial cities have been particularly stigmatised under economic crisis, and the step towards new economic paradigms has deeply affected their nature. Born as articulations of space, they had to quickly submit to the dominance of place, that is, creating a brand, becoming recognisable, building a history, and assigning a marketable cultural value to themselves. As stated before, in some cases, popular music has been adopted as an instrument to achieve these goals.
What is more interesting for this book is to understand how popular music was affected by these changes in the material dimension of the industrial city, for instance, how urban decay has affected popular music production, consumption, and circulation. Of course, the consequences have been different in relation to national contexts, popular music markets, and other implications. However, one generalising argument could be made through the notion of cultural sensibility, which I defined elsewhere as an individual or collective reaction to certain social or spatial circumstances, which asserts a certain aesthetic or emotional value to a particular place. To offer an example, it is common in every European city to find a former factory turned into a theatre, a media facility, or a restaurant, sometimes with grotesque results. However, there is nothing culturally relevant in an abandoned factory; it is just the expression of a local or global change at the level of capitalist accumulation, a change that affected manufacturing or production. It is cultural sensibility and its spreading from the individual level to the collective that adds a particular symbolic value to the material building and makes it pleasant and inspiring enough to become an art gallery, for instance. There are, of course, very clear logistic elements to it—namely, the size, illumination, and location—nonetheless, its appeal originates in the cultural sensibility of an individual or a few.
What has been previously described as ‘industrial crisis atmosphere’ is therefore not something given, but it has an origin in a specific socio-economic context: the 1980s urban crisis and in relation to a specific group of people, which I identify with the post-punk scenes developing in the late 1970s in European and North American industrial cities.
The four cities I will refer to in the following chapters, again, belong to different regions of Europe. They are all secondary centres in their own national settings, but they maintain a strong regional supremacy and, during their industrial history, were central for the globalised movement of different goods.
At different stages, and in different modalities, all four urban conurbations had at least to partly modify their economic paradigm, following deindustrialisation and the 1980s urban crisis. Still, their architectural and planning features still maintain intact many features of their past.
From the late 1970s to the early 1980s in all four cities, popular music became a significant element in youth and cultural activism and leisure time, with the appearance of very active punk and post-punk scenes. Fanzines, bands, tapes, records, festivals, and demonstrations were conceived, produced, and traded within a growing, no-profit and self-organised network. Through interviews with musicians and practitioners, analysis of musical artefacts of the time, memoirs, and documentaries, I will highlight the contribution of anonymous industrial centres in the cultural production of 1980s Europe.
The contemporary economic regime of accumulation has been described as ‘flexible’. Flexibility is used metaphorically to describe the shift from mass production to the individualisation and target-oriented diversification of what was offered, from more or less secure and uniform working life to precariousness, from manufacture to services, and from concentration to vertical disintegration of large firms through subcontractors. All these steps are used to sustain the idea of a new regime of accumulation, overcoming Fordism as paradigm of production and consumption and Keynesianism as paradigm of economic development (Lash and Urry 1987; Harvey 1989). European deindustrialisation is a consequence of this change. The flexible regime of accumulation was also capable of muting successful subaltern voices, by including them into its project of profit making.
Chapter 2
A Genealogy of ‘Industrial
City Music’
Genealogies of noise tend to associate noise to modernity (Payer 2007; Bijsterveld 2008; Goddard, Halligan, and Spleman 2013; Epstein 2014), as if pre-modern history were a place of silence, sometimes broken by the clashes of armies in warfare. In truth, noise started being a problem in the Middle Ages, and its regulation was carried out extensively, especially in relation to the night time or to festivities. In Turku (Finland) every year on Christmas Eve at noon, the mayor reads The Declaration of Christmas Peace; this tradition dates back to the 1300s and advises people to behave peacefully and quietly during Christmas time.
It is, however, with modernity and the industrial revolution that noise starts taking its toll on everyday life and becomes a constant preoccupation. From technology to law, from health care to political control, modern institutions have tried to classify, tame, channel, and avoid noise as the unwanted side effect of modernisation. Factory work, political demonstrations, motorised traffic, warfare, and simple human density have increased the level of noise in cities across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There are studies indicating that noise might be another component of contemporary urban inequalities, with the urban poor having to cope the most with living environments where noise is increasingly concentrated.
The French classic book Le Bruit (Botte and Chocholle 1984), part of the popularising science collection Que sais-je?, identifies some general characteristics of noise. These are physical, including intermittence, erraticness, and randomness of acoustic vibrations, but are also relative to their disagreeable effects on the human ears. The authors also refer to the subjective dimension of this last element: what can be indifferent or positive to someone might be really annoying to someone else. According to them, noise has, however, some general features that can be agreed upon. The first one is intensity; all sounds, even the most agreeable, become noise if they are too loud. The second is complexity, because noise is considered as not having a salient tonal character or a dominant component. However, not all complex sounds can be considered noise. Brevity and high modulations also belong to noise because it is intermittent and irregular in pitch, frequency, and intensity. Noise originates at the presence of some or all of the above-mentioned features and to the disagreeable experiencing of them. This definition is instrumental to classifying and therefore finding solutions to what the book defines as its most common typologies in our everyday life: traffic and industrial noise. According to Botte and Chocholle, noise is something that can be measured, and its propagation can be tested and somehow limited institutionally; their main interest is providing reflections on how to reduce it and who is paying the most due to its propagation, in social and political terms.
Industrial noise originates with industrialisation and is linked to major inventions, starting with the steam engine and followed by the construction of mines, factories, abattoirs, warehouses, power stations, and vast areas for heavy production.
As seen in chapter 1, an industrial city features the intense presence of visual material with high ‘imageability’ (Lynch 1960), such as bare materials, like red bricks, bare concrete, and iron; forms that are linear, modular, and pattern-like; colours, like red and grey; and superficial phenomena, like rust and wear. Main architectural elements are chimneys, firewalls, and gasworks.
The
