Deindustrialisation and Popular Music. Giacomo Bottà
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on the classic Marxist division into base and superstructure.
These approaches neglect the role played by popular culture in ‘dramatising’ the crisis and making sense of it and, by doing so, in giving imaginary or material solutions to it. The aim of this book is to attain a better understanding of the impact of the crisis on the dreams, aspirations, struggles, expectations, activities, Weltanschauung, and feelings of citizens. 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.
This book aims at reformulating the relation between industrial cities and popular music, from homology-ridden narratives of rhythms and structures to a more multifaceted understanding of intertwining economic regimes and cultural expressions. It also takes into consideration distinctive sounds and scenes that are able to signify the industrial city as a socio-economic urban conurbation, and its crisis. Addressing the ‘elective affinity’ between industrial cities and certain forms of popular music is, therefore, a way to better understand the 1980s urban crisis.
Crisis under capitalism has been explained in various and sometimes discordant ways. Schumpeter’s thought has had a great impact, first of all, because it recognised that capitalism is highly unstable due to social and natural changes, but especially for technological reasons. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) Schumpeter affirms that technological growth is not steady; it is based on sporadic ideas, which are absorbed and implemented slowly along decades. When they reach the full integration, a ‘creative destruction’ occurs. The imaginative power of this term has provided much common sense in dealing with the material consequences of the crisis as some kind of ‘price to pay’, to restore a guiding development. In case of cities, the passage from industrial to post-industrial could be as well examined as a sort of creative destruction. The new organisation of work based on flexibility, growth of the third and fourth sector, the centrality of the information technologies, and specialisation has been described as the main factor behind cities’ transformations. Nonetheless, this shift occurred because of a precise political programme, implemented in the United States by Ronald Reagan and in the United Kingdom by Margaret Thatcher, in the name of liberalism (Harvey 2005).
Various thinkers and researchers gathered into the ‘Regulation School’ also address widely the concept of crisis in capitalism, focusing especially in its being embedded within the system itself. Their concepts of ‘regime of accumulation’ and ‘modes of regulation’ help in shedding light on the contextual elements at play during a crisis and during the consequent change in the mode of capital accumulation. Arrighi (1994) explains economic crisis by the contradiction between the goal of capitalist accumulation and the means used to achieve this goal. The author identifies the main feature of capitalism in the late twentieth century in the cyclical tendency to first expand on the material level, thanks to production. When this reaches its limits, capitalism offers a temporary solution by giving way to financial accumulation, which is unsustainable and eventually brings about the reorganisation of the whole global capitalist system. Industrial cities and their development served capitalist expansion at the material level, thanks to continuous production. Capitalism quickly dismissed European industrial cities and preferred to decentralise and move to countries where labour forces could be better exploited, and where there was a lower cost of means of production, while at the same time ‘financialising’ the crisis.
Looking at the economic history of the twentieth century, it is easy to identify business cycles and their impact. The Great Depression of 1929 towers as the longest downturn, while the economic boom after 1945 was the longest period of expansion. After the first energy crisis of 1973, it is possible to identify an increasing volatility in the proliferation of short crises and of short-term expansions (like the ‘dot-com bubble’ of the 1990s) around the globe, together with an increase in financialisation. It is therefore possible to identify a huge change, which the Regulation School describes as a shift in the regime of accumulation. From the 1980s onwards, economic instability affected the very nature of the industry in general and of industrial cities in particular, bringing a change in the very urban regime of accumulation. At the time, industrial cities in Europe started tagging themselves as ‘post-industrial’ or ‘post-Fordist’, without exactly knowing the modalities and consequences of the ‘creative destruction’.
David Harvey in his analysis of the ongoing economic crisis started in 2008 (Harvey 2010) has identified four explanations used in media and common sense: human nature, institutional failures, failure of certain theories, and cultural origins. The first explanation relies on the animal spirit leading to excessive greed and therefore to the collapse of the market; the second looks at the possible reconfigurations that the global market should accomplish in order to work better. The third explanation appeals to the reprise or dismissal of certain theories followed by investors and governments. The fourth identifies specific foreign countries (for instance, Greece or Italy within the European Union) or specific political cultures (the ‘Anglo-Saxon disease’) as the causes of the crisis. Building on classic Marxist theory, Harvey argues that capitalism is never able to solve its problems; it just moves them around the globe, in areas that are unevenly developed. Cities are, at the same time, the places where flexible accumulation takes place and the most important product of this accumulation. At the height of an economic boom, real estate prices are high, interest rates are rising, and people are buying. Higher costs slow down building new construction; therefore demand and the rate of investments fall, and the whole economy falls into a crisis.
The role of cities in the crisis is therefore double: they are the arenas where the business cycles play out, and at the same time, they face the immediate material consequences of their downturn, namely, urban decay. Cities have been the first victims of any economic crisis, while their upper class and elite only have been the best beneficiaries of financial upswings and developments. Harvey sees the intensification in the frequency of economic crises as a consequence of the historical turn in world economic and political history in 1979 and 1980, when neoliberalism became the dominant discourse (Harvey 2005). There is a common understanding in urban research that industrial cities in Europe and the Western world disappeared to make space for the post-industrial ones. This assumption is based on the quick and still unresolved transfer of production to enormous urban conurbations in countries with cheaper workforces, such as China and India. Of course, this shift transformed and it is still transforming many city centres in Europe and the United States.
Industrial Crisis as Atmosphere
Nowadays, any European city would find it difficult to define itself as industrial; for instance, Sheffield brands itself as green and innovative, and it describes its industrial past only in terms of history and cultural heritage (Marketing Sheffield 2018). There is a growing conformity in European cities around the idea that capitals, citizens, and tourists should be attracted through spectacular infrastructures and intense cultural life. Not all cities were obliged to completely reshape their economic structure, and some of them, under the innovation surface, are simply continuing to function as industrial centres. Taking into account two cases from this book, in Torino, the FIAT Mirafiori plant in the southern end of the city is still producing, at least partially, real cars, and in Tampere, the Metsä Board Tako paper mill puffs out smoke in the city centre, a few hundred metres from the reconverted ‘post-Fordist’ factories. This is, of course, not to undermine the fact that the 1970s crisis and subsequent deindustrialising left a big impact on former industrial cities in terms of unemployment, distress, and empty and vacant industrial premises and spaces. Every economic crisis is bound to leave material debris behind. The concept itself of creative destruction implies a material legacy of ruins. This has been particularly true of the 1970s paradigm change, which erased much employment in the industrial sector from Western Europe and transformed industrial cities into decaying, empty, shrinking centres, abandoned by labour forces. This happened at various speeds and in different national contexts across Europe, and the way this was carried out in the United Kingdom is striking in its quick and painful operationalisation. However, the results were similar in terms of built environment: what was once a thriving mechanism of technological production became ruins. Ruins are nothing new in European continental understanding. For