In arguing that improvisation and noise-making are effective and inevitable modes for conducting ... more In arguing that improvisation and noise-making are effective and inevitable modes for conducting urban interventions, I begin with a digression, a dilatory vamp on musical themes. Its point is to provide a framework for showing how urban development may be considered in terms of musical categories and also composed through musical actions, as well as through political actions whose elements of strategy and spontaneity find analogs in musical discourse. One theme reverberating throughout the paper pertains to anarchy, the political disposition whose musical analog might seem to be dissonance or noise. Music without law, the analogy would go, is dangerously, even violently clamorous and chaotic, as would be a society without law. It is a corollary of this paper that dissonance instead reflects unsettled law -but law nonethelessand can also signify the advent of a new music whose unexpected cadences, temporarily abrasive and jarring, are nonetheless musical. I next introduce three Urban Studies scholar-designers who expressly engage noise and improvisation in their practical and theoretical work. Their work suggests that music serves figurative, socially mediatory, and oppositional functions, both in how planners and designers work and in how cities and communities grow and transform. Invoking these designers also helps to demonstrate that a seemingly forced correspondence of improvisation with planning is neither without intellectual roots nor affective satisfactions.
In arguing that improvisation and noise-making are effective and inevitable modes for conducting ... more In arguing that improvisation and noise-making are effective and inevitable modes for conducting urban interventions, I begin with a digression, a dilatory vamp on musical themes. Its point is to provide a framework for showing how urban development may be considered in terms of musical categories and also composed through musical actions, as well as through political actions whose elements of strategy and spontaneity find analogs in musical discourse. One theme reverberating throughout the paper pertains to anarchy, the political disposition whose musical analog might seem to be dissonance or noise. Music without law, the analogy would go, is dangerously, even violently clamorous and chaotic, as would be a society without law. It is a corollary of this paper that dissonance instead reflects unsettled law -but law nonethelessand can also signify the advent of a new music whose unexpected cadences, temporarily abrasive and jarring, are nonetheless musical. I next introduce three Urban Studies scholar-designers who expressly engage noise and improvisation in their practical and theoretical work. Their work suggests that music serves figurative, socially mediatory, and oppositional functions, both in how planners and designers work and in how cities and communities grow and transform. Invoking these designers also helps to demonstrate that a seemingly forced correspondence of improvisation with planning is neither without intellectual roots nor affective satisfactions.
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