[Column] Music and urban space: A history of mutual generation woven by streets, clubs, and media
Column en History Media Soundscape![[Column] Music and urban space: A history of mutual generation woven by streets, clubs, and media](/../assets/images/column-music-urban-space.webp)
Introduction Why do cities produce music?
Text: mmr｜Theme: Since the 20th century, music has interacted with urban space, tracing the history of how music has reshaped the shape and feel of cities while crossing streets, clubs, homes, and media, through examples from specific cities and genres.
Cities bring people together, divide them, and rearrange them. Population density, immigration, industry, transportation, regulation. When these elements overlap, music becomes not just entertainment, but the very rhythm of urban life. The sounds of a factory, the repetition of traffic, and the buzz of a crowd are structured through the musician’s sensibility and become a genre. Cities are not musical “stages”. It is a musical generator, and at the same time, it is an entity that is reinterpreted through music.
The city is a mirror that reflects music, and at the same time has been reshaped by music.
Chapter 1 Early 20th century: The birth of modern cities and popular music
New Orleans and Jazz
In the early 20th century, New Orleans was a port city where diverse cultures intersected. Black communities, Creole culture, the traditions of military bands, and religious music intermingled, and the music played at street parades and dance halls crystallized into jazz. Here, the public spaces of the city were themselves performance venues.
New York and Tin Pan Alley
In New York, music becomes organized as an industry with a concentration of composers and publishers. Broadway and the music score industry established a format for popular music that reflected the city’s speed and commerciality.
Modern cities had the power to push music from improvisation to industry.
Chapter 2 Expansion of postwar cities and subcultures
Chicago and Blues
As black immigrants from the South poured into Chicago, the acoustic blues became electrified and adapted to the noisy urban environment. Amplifiers and electric guitars were a necessity to counter the volume of the city.
London and youth culture
In post-war London, working-class youth culture became associated with music. Jazz clubs, skiffle, and rock”n”roll made urban class structures visible in sound.
Postwar cities became venues for expressing social tensions through music.
Chapter 3 1960s–70s: Urban conflict and the politics of music
Detroit and Motown
In Detroit, the center of the auto industry, Motown exported urban labor and hope as sophisticated pop. The studio was also a device to temporarily neutralize the instability of the city.
New York and Hip Hop
A DJ turned on the power and threw a block party in a run-down neighborhood in the Bronx. Hip-hop emerged from the gaps in urban infrastructure and functioned as a reoccupation of space.
Music emerged from the cracks of the city and gave it a voice.
Chapter 4 The architecture of a club: Establishment of a space dedicated to music
Chicago House and Warehouse
Clubs such as Chicago’s Warehouse created music for dancing and created spaces where architecture and acoustics became inseparable. The four-on-the-floor was an urban physical expression optimized for wide floors and repetitive movements.
Berlin and Techno
After the fall of the Wall, empty buildings and underground spaces in Berlin were repurposed into clubs. Techno resonated with undefined urban spaces and became a symbol of urban reorganization.
The club was a device by which the city transformed its own void into a landing space.
Chapter 5 Correspondence between music genres and cities
The genre is not an abstract style, but a reflection of the city’s function and history. The urban aspects of port, industry, and redevelopment have determined the rhythm and texture of the music.
Genre is like a city’s resume.
Chapter 6 Housing, Regulations, and Noise: Cities that control music
While cities produce music, they also regulate it. Overcrowding, noise ordinances, and redevelopment have all affected the survival of live music venues and clubs. As a result, music goes underground and moves online.
Cities allow music while simultaneously imposing silence.
Chapter 7 Media City and Non-Physical Space
Radio, television, and the Internet, which seemed to separate music from the city, actually created a new image of the city. Certain city names continue to function as sound brands.
The media expanded the city and made music seem free from geography.
Chapter 8 21st Century: Global Cities and Local Sounds
Globalization has rapidly reduced the musical distance between cities. Air networks and digital distribution will shorten relationships that once took decades to months. However, on the other hand, the acoustic environments, languages, and rhythms of life unique to cities were not completely homogenized. Rather, locality itself is consciously staged and redefined as musical value.
Although club music and hip-hop have formats that are shared across borders, they take on different expressions depending on each city’s housing conditions, traffic hours, and institutional differences in the nighttime economy. As a result, multiple urban dialects emerged within the same genre.
Contemporary urban music is constantly readjusting between homogenization and differentiation.
Chapter 9 Chronology Main milestones in music and urban space
World history
- Jazz formed in New Orleans in the early 1900s
- 1930s: Music industry concentrated in New York *Electrified blues established in Chicago in the 1950s
- 1960s: Motown flourishes in Detroit
- Birth of hip-hop in New York in the 1970s
- 1980s: House in Chicago, techno in Detroit
- Club culture combined with urban reorganization in Berlin in the 1990s
- Since the 2000s: Redefining urban music through the Internet
Japanese History
- 1960s: Imported rock and jazz cafe culture expands in Tokyo
- 1970s Live house culture took hold in Osaka and Tokyo
- 1980s: Spread of urban discos and clubs
- 1990s Club culture expanded mainly in Shibuya and Shinsaibashi
- In the 2000s, festivals and clubs began to coexist in regional cities.
- Since the 2010s, spatial reorganization due to redevelopment and tightening of regulations
Chapter 10 Osaka: Miscellaneousness and physical rhythm
Osaka has an urban structure in which commercial and residential areas, streets and indoor areas are relatively mixed. Even in music culture, physicality tends to come to the fore rather than logic. The acceptance of live house culture, dance music, and rock music has been linked to the city’s materialistic nature.
The scale of the city is smaller than that of Tokyo, making it easier to visualize the flow of people. Therefore, music circulates as a shared experience within the community, and scenes are established in units of visible faces.
Osaka”s music has transformed the city”s sense of distance into rhythm.
Chapter 11 Berlin: Blank City and Repetitive Sounds
After the fall of the Wall, Berlin was a city with many institutional and physical gaps. Abandoned buildings and undeveloped infrastructure created space for the repetitive sounds that are highly compatible with techno.
Here, music defines the space first, followed by urban functions. Clubs were more than just entertainment venues; they served as testing grounds for urban restructuring.
In Berlin, music predicted the future of the city.
Chapter 12 Detroit: Reverberations of an Industrial City
Detroit techno is an extension of the urban rhythms shaped by the automobile industry. Regular mechanical movements, wide roads, and the hollowing out that followed the population exodus fostered an inorganic and persistent sense of beat.
Techno here became more than just entertainment, it became a device for abstracting the urban state. The sense of time possessed by a declining industrial city crystallized into music.
Detroit’s music preserves in sound the form of what the city has lost.
Chapter 13 Interaction between urban structure and acoustics
Urban structures directly determine the volume, repeatability, and environment in which music is played. This is a consequence of living conditions, not a cultural choice.
The form of music unconsciously reflects the design philosophy of the city.
Chapter 14 Changes in public space and music
The places where music is played have moved in conjunction with changes in the public nature of cities. From the street to indoors to non-physical spaces. This is also a history of repeated privatization and re-commonization of music.
The place of music is an indicator of how a city defines its public.
Chapter 15 Tokyo: Overcrowded city and indoor music
Tokyo is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and its music culture has consistently moved toward indoors. Urban structures in which residential and commercial areas are intricately intertwined, and society’s high sensitivity to nighttime noise have suppressed the culture of loud music outdoors and encouraged the sophistication of closed spaces such as underground clubs, live music venues, and listening bars.
Since the 1960s, with the distribution of imported records and the spread of audio equipment, the ““listening environment’’ itself has come to have cultural value in Tokyo. Music has become both a shared experience and an object for individuals to select, collect, and play. The small size of the city makes people more interested in the resolution of sound images and knowledge that crosses genres than in volume.
From the 1980s to the 1990s, while club culture was imported, it developed independently as it adapted to the regulatory environment unique to cities. While operating for short hours, being underground, and downsizing were constraints, they also created a selective audience and an intense experience.
Tokyo’s musical culture has overcome the constraints of overcrowding through refinement.
Chapter 16 Osaka: Miscellaneousness and physical rhythm
Osaka has an urban structure in which commerce, residence, and entertainment are relatively mixed. It is easy to visually grasp the flow of people, and music culture tends to emphasize physical reactions rather than theory. Live house culture and dance music have developed in conjunction with the materialistic nature of cities.
The scale of the city is smaller than Tokyo, and the music scene circulates in visible units. The intensity of the venue is prioritized over the purity of the genre, and the live experience itself becomes the axis of evaluation.
Osaka’s music has directly translated the distance and physicality of the city into rhythm.
Chapter 17 Local cities: Updates from the periphery seen in Fukuoka and Sapporo
Musical culture in local cities has matured on its own timeline, while being influenced by the central government. Due to Fukuoka’s geographical proximity to Asia and its character as a port city, it has been quick to accept foreign culture, and clubs and live music venues tend to cluster in the city center.
Due to the climate and size of the city, Sapporo has a strong indoor orientation, and events that cross genres are held for a long time. The urban margins have functioned as a space for experimental expression.
Regional cities have matured music at a different rate than the central region.
Chapter 18 Club Regulation and Redevelopment: Institutions Shape Music
Clubs and live music venues have always had a tense relationship with urban institutions. Entertainment business regulations, zoning, and redevelopment plans affect the location and survival of music spaces. Although these institutions were designed not to prohibit music but to maintain urban order, they have reorganized the geography of musical culture as a result.
As land prices rise due to redevelopment, small-scale music spaces move to the periphery. In many cases, this movement does not lead to decline, but rather to the creation of new scenes.
The system has restricted music while simultaneously pushing it to the next place.
Final Chapter: How does music depict the future of cities?
Music records, critiques, and sometimes anticipates the city. As long as urban space continues to change, new music will continue to be born. Listening to music is the act of listening to the city’s present and future at the same time.
Music remains the most sensuous language through which cities speak about themselves.
