Introduction: The Great Music City, Exploring Music, Space and Identity

Abstract

Music cities with their popular economic focus are omnipresent and are one of the world’s fastest growing urban spaces. Building on urban sociability discourse, laced with a journalism lens, this chapter introduces the rationale, scope, aims and significance of the book. Adopting a western perspective, it interrogates the music cities paradigm, its history, development and future. Highlighting that urban sociability offers a much-needed social, cultural and emotional perspective of music activity, it introduces a set of algorithms to assess its value, for example, A (Economics), B (4 Ts creative index), C (Heritage) and D (Music Cities Definition). Grounded in urban, cultural and political contexts, and based on rigorous, place-specific data, this chapter introduces the case studies of the book, Melbourne, Austin and Berlin.