Sara Adhitya is an urban designer and Research Associate with the Accessibility Research Group at UCL. Awarded a European Doctorate in the 'Quality of Design' of Architecture and Urban Planning by the University IUAV of Venice and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, she draws on her multidisciplinary background in environmental design, architecture, urbanism, music and sound design, in her interactive and multisensorial approach to urban design. She collaborates with a range of non-profit and governmental organizations around the world towards improving urban liveability and sustainability through participatory design and planning.

This book examines Electronic Dance Music (EDM) scenes in 18 cities across Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, North America and Australia. It focuses on the historical development of these scenes, with an emphasis on the post-2000 context, including the COVID-19 pandemic and its far-reaching effects. Expert contributors highlight the influence of geographical contexts, as well as cultural and political histories, in the development of mainstream EDM scenes and underground Electronic Dance Music Cultures. This expansive work offers additional insights on cultural and creative policies, planning interventions and regulations associated with nightlife management, and provides a detailed analysis of current challenges inherent to the governance of EDM scenes in contemporary cities.

After discovering a derelict record plant on the edge of a northern English city, and hearing that it was once visited by David Bowie, Karl Whitney embarks upon a journey to explore the industrial cities of British pop music. Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, Hull, Glasgow, Belfast, Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol: at various points in the past these cities have all had distinctive and highly identifiable sounds. But how did this happen? What circumstances enabled those sounds to emerge? How did each particular city - its history, its physical form, its accent - influence its music? How were these cities and their music different from each other? And what did they have in common? Hit Factories tells the story of British pop through the cities that shaped it, tracking down the places where music was performed, recorded and sold, and the people - the performers, entrepreneurs, songwriters, producers and fans - who made it all happen. From the venues and recording studios that occupied disused cinemas, churches and abandoned factories to the terraced houses and back rooms of pubs where bands first rehearsed, the terrain of British pop can be retraced with a map in hand and a head filled with music and its many myths.

"Musical Cities represents an innovative approach to scholarly research and dissemination. A digital and interactive 'book', it explores the rhythms of our cities, and the role they play in our everyday urban lives, through the use of sound and music. Sara Adhitya first discusses why we should listen to urban rhythms in order to design more liveable and sustainable cities, before demonstrating how we can do so through various acoustic communication techniques. Using audio-visual examples, Musical Cities takes the ?listener? on an interactive journey, revealing how sound and music can be used to represent, compose, perform and interact with the city. Through case studies of urban projects developed in Paris, Perth, Venice and London, Adhitya demonstrates how the power of music, and the practice of listening, can help us to compose more accessible, inclusive, engaging, enjoyable, and ultimately more sustainable cities." -- from UCL Press website.

How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”

In the 1960s, as gentrification took hold of New York City, Jane Jacobs predicted that the city would become the true player in the global system. Indeed, in the 21st century more meaningful comparisons can be made between cities than between nations and states. Based on case studies of Melbourne, Austin and Berlin, this book is the first in-depth study to combine academic and industry analysis of the music cities phenomenon. Using four distinctly defined algorithms as benchmarks, it interrogates Richard Florida’s creative cities thesis and applies a much-needed synergy of urban sociology and musicology to the concept, mediated by a journalism lens. Building on seminal work by Robert Park, Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs, it argues that journalists are the cultural branders and street theorists whose ethnographic approach offers critical insights into the urban sociability of music activity.

Go-go is the conga drum–inflected black popular music that emerged in Washington, D.C., during the 1970s. The guitarist Chuck Brown, the "Godfather of Go-Go," created the music by mixing sounds borrowed from church and the blues with the funk and flavor that he picked up playing for a local Latino band. Born in the inner city, amid the charred ruins of the 1968 race riots, go-go generated a distinct culture and an economy of independent, almost exclusively black-owned businesses that sold tickets to shows and recordings of live go-gos. At the peak of its popularity, in the 1980s, go-go could be heard around the capital every night of the week, on college campuses and in crumbling historic theaters, hole-in-the-wall nightclubs, backyards, and city parks. Go-Go Live is a social history of black Washington told through its go-go music and culture. Encompassing dance moves, nightclubs, and fashion, as well as the voices of artists, fans, business owners, and politicians, Natalie Hopkinson's Washington-based narrative reflects the broader history of race in urban America in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. In the 1990s, the middle class that had left the city for the suburbs in the postwar years began to return. Gentrification drove up property values and pushed go-go into D.C.'s suburbs. The Chocolate City is in decline, but its heart, D.C.'s distinctive go-go musical culture, continues to beat. On any given night, there's live go-go in the D.C. metro area.

Examines musical culture in the towns and cities of Renaissance Europe and the New World.