Sounding out the creative city : De/Composing Experiences in Urban Space

With the growing importance of the cultural economy in many Western cities the experience of public space has become a focal point in the organization and planning of urban life. While this aesthetic reengineering of urban life clearly follows the paradigm of the entrepreneurial city, it raises the question if and how other modes and moods of ordering urban public space can participate in its shaping and thus keep urban public spaces alive as places of lived democracy. Against this thematic backdrop the paper addresses the question if and how urban public space can resist the aesthetical streamlining of the entrepreneurial city and stay alive as a place of multiple modes and moods of existence.

Empirically the paper presents the analysis of an audio-visual ethnography of guerrilla concert in the city of Berlin. The concert was planned and played by a young Berlin chamber orchestra which has set itself the task to prise open the traditional concert settings and to experiment with new forms of experiencing classical music. The study explores how this performance relates to multiple other logics of organizing Berlin's public spaces.

Conceptually the study presents music making as a set of socio-material practices which aesthetically organize a wide range of people, technologies and places. Drawing on the literature of Actor-Network Theory (and its developments after) as well as on conceptual advances made in human geography under the label of "More-than-representational theorizing", the paper aims at analyzing the complex politics of organizing the aesthetic experience of public space. I will argue that such a politics cannot simply be framed as a struggle for or against specific aesthetic modes but instead relies on the unfolding of affective dynamics which allow to accommodate multiple and contradictory ways of participating in urban life.