Building Cities on Basslines: How Techno Music Mediates Urban Space

Abstract

This thesis examines the role of two techno-clubs, Moloch and Südpol, in urban development processes that currently take place in the east of Hamburg's city centre. Against the backdrop of creative city theories, it explores how the socialities and spatialities contribute to the production of 'hip' urban space. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (December 2017 - April 2018), it takes a closer look at the mechanisms through which these clubs attract their audiences and confer meaning onto their surrounding areas. I begin by reviewing a number of theoretical approaches to music and urban space, especially using Georgina Born's theory of musical mediation to outline how music is embedded into the production and use of space beyond questions of musical representation. I then discuss the development plans of the Hamburg city government in the light of Richard Florida's creative class argument. In so doing, I argue that the scarcity of space suitable for creative usage has led to the establishment of different technologies on part of the city government that aim at a distribution of space in a top-down manner. These technologies now serve the city's development plans as they allow for the spatial governance of creative projects with the potential of conferring hipness onto their surrounding areas. The subsequent analysis of Moloch and Südpol focuses on the genre-specific reinvention of priorly existing urban space in the form of music-clubs and the ways in which these clubs demarcate the socialities in them from other spheres of urban life. The final chapter investigates techno music as a cultural expression of hipness and discusses how techno clubs manifest hipness spatially.