Dramatizing the crisis. Declining industrial cities and popular music in Europe since the 1970s.

This project examines European industrial cities, starting from their crisis in the 1970s, following their shrinking in the 1980s and partial recovery in the 1990s. This has been examined either as creative destruction due to a technological change or as a cyclical moment of crisis, embedded in the nature of capitalism itself. Both theories tend to define cultural expressions as mere reactions to economic, social or technological structures.
In my view, this approach neglects the role played by popular culture in mediatising the crisis and making sense of it. Inspired by the work of Antonio Gramsci on cultural hegemony (1975) and of Raymond Williams on culture as a ‘structure of feelings’ (1980), I intend to attain a better understanding of the impact of the crisis on the dreams, aspirations, struggles, expectations, activities, Weltanschauung and feelings of citizens.
In order to achieve this, I will focus on the role played by urban popular culture and by popular music in particular in four different European cities: Turin, Hamburg, Sheffield and Tampere.On the imaginative level, popular music focused on the representation of the collapsing industrial space and on its effects on the individual.
On the material level, it began appropriating and transforming space, Dense local scenes began developing in many industrial centres. Popular music was pioneering a discourse, which will lead to the industrial cities’ rebirth as ‘post-industrial’ or ‘creative’ centres. Popular music led the way for the current adoption of cultural industries as new paradigm of economic development.
The results of such a research are important also to better understand the processes originated by the ongoing recession and by the way it affects the contemporary social and spatial structure of former industrial cities and their cultural production.