Giacomo Bottà

postdoctoral fellow, Urban Studies Network, Department of Social Policy, University of Helsinki (FI)

The city that was creative and did not know: Manchester, pop music and cultural sensibility

Keywords: popular music, place representation, urban regeneration

This paper aims to put some light on the way 'popular music capital' is able to formulate new place-images and to affect the built environment.

My claim is that pop music is able to implement places in powerful ways, forming new modalities to conceive and perceive them. This is the result of a layering: popular music mediates places as 'textscapes', 'soundscapes' and 'landscapes'. Song lyrics referring to places make up a band's textscape. The use of local music tradition, vernacular or typical city noises constitute a band's soundscape. Finally the landscape consists of all the visual elements (e.g. covers) referring to the same particular locality. Turning to the regeneration level, it seems important to note that music in itself is ethereal, but its production, circulation and fruition rely on material factors located in cities.

This kind of implementation on the representational and regeneration level, could be analysed in Manchester. Since the late 1970s, the local popular music scene has adopted a particular 'cultural sensibility', i.e. the ability to react to certain social and spatial circumstances, with a cultural expression. Bands such as the Smiths, the Fall, and Joy Division were able to root their poetics in the city, offering a chance to re-imagine it. In the same period, the independent music entrepreneur Tony Wilson developed a project like The Haçienda, which set the trend for the regeneration of a whole district.

This case represents a convincing example of a cultural innovation, which relies on redefining the symbolic value of the own architectural and social past.

Giacomo Bottà (1974) is working as a postdoctoral fellow with the Urban Studies Network, at the Department of Social Policy, University of Helsinki, thanks to a financing by the Finnish Cultural Foundation. His doctorate, in comparative literatures and cultural studies, was awarded from the Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM (Milan, Italy) in 2003. His dissertation is entitled Ich steh' auf Berlin! City, Individual, and Text in Berlin Prose of the 1990s .

Bottà is particularly interested in the unbundling of the relation between urban planning on one side and urban representation on the other. How does the work of architects, planners and city officials influence the one of film makers, musicians, poets or web-designers and vice versa? Lately, he has been analysing the way popular culture (and popular music in particular) is able to construct powerful images of places and to circulate them. He has researched in particular how these aspects were conceived and used in Manchester during the 1980s and 1990s.

His recent publications include the article 'All the Way from Berlin to Helsinki: Three Modes of Urban Representation in Literature' in RTN: UrbEurope Working Paper Series 2 (2006) and 'Interculturalism and New Russians in Berlin' (2006), in: CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture.