Event/Talk: Christina Ballico "music cities and chronourbanism" (22.02.2024)
The chronourbanist music city: A consideration of the disconnects between two placemaking strategies.
22 February 2024, 13:00 - 15:00
More information here.
Increasingly recognised for the vital role it plays in our day to day lives, music is globally acknowledged for its capacity to contribute strongly to place-based creative and cultural identity initiatives within our cities and our neighbourhoods. To this end, the uptake of music city frameworks has grown exponentially around the world over the past decade. Such frameworks leverage place-specific music histories, heritages, and/or present-day activities for a range of social, cultural, and economic benefits and consist of a range of formal and informal approaches and strategies (Ballico and Watson, 2020; Johansson, 2023). Furthermore, music-specific placemaking reveal the depths of positive social, cultural, and economic impacts of music activities on the locations in which they occur (Alonso-Vazquez and Ballico, 2021; Cannady, 2021; Fauteux, 2021), while creative clustering (cf Chapain and Sagot-Duvauroux, 2020; Gibson, 2014) assists us in being able to understand the strong connections and associated benefits afforded to such industries operating in place-based contexts. Interestingly, concurrent to the growth in the music cities movement has been the uptake of chronourbanist planning frameworks. Chrono-urbanism posits that the majority of one’s day-to-day professional and personal life should be accessible via either active (i.e., walking or cycling) or public transport, using a time and/ or distance-based calculation to inform related planning (Moreno et al., 2021). Places designed in this way – known as 10-, 15-, or 20-minute cities or neighbourhoods – provide opportunities and services which support six social functions of a “decent” urban life 1) living, 2) working, 3) commerce, 4) healthcare, 5) education and 6) entertainment (Moreno et al., 2022). The growth in uptake of this approach to planning can largely be attributed to the ways in which the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic reconfigured how we engage with our neighbourhoods as well as the urgent need to address the climate crisis through decarbonisation and decentralisation – two key tenants of chronourbanist planning approaches.
Curiously, however, despite entertainment being identified as a social function, and the recognition of the vitality of music to the places in which such industries and activities occur, music (and more broadly arts and cultural activity) remains largely missing from city-level applications of chronourbanist frameworks. This presentation examines this disconnect through 1) an examination of the structure, approaches, benefits and challenges of enacting both formal and informal music cities frameworks, and 2) a consideration of the benefits of formally recognising arts and cultural activities and industries such as music within chronourbanist planning frameworks.