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Giacomo Bottà is researcher in urban and cultural studies at the University of Helsinki in Finland. His research deals with urban cultural studies on a comparative European level. His interests include popular music, urban branding and creative cities. He is the author of, among others, Urban Creativity and Popular Music in Europe since the 1970s: Representation, Materiality, and Branding (2008), The city that was creative and did not know: Manchester and popular music, 1976-97 (2009) and Lo spirito continua: Torino and the Collettivo Punx Anarchici (2013).&#160;Interview by Loïc Riom (October 2017)&#160;Can you tell us a little bit about your career and how you became involved in studying music?My academic career started with a post-doc in urban studies at the University of Helsinki in 2004. Since then, I have been part-time lecturing and enjoying research grants and projects in Finland, apart from a five-year gap, when I worked in Freiburg ZPKM and at the Karlsruhe Musikhochschule in Germany.I describe myself as a scholar of urban cultural studies. This definition doesn’t come without a cost; despite the stress on interdisciplinary training at the EU level, disciplinary paradigms are still very much strong in academia. Funnily enough, I have never studied musicology, apart from a brilliant course on film music in Mainz as an undergraduate, still, music has always been there. Partly because I spent a great deal of my life listening and playing actively, partly because music has always shaped my understanding of spatiality and urbanisation, at least since my PhD.I wrote my PhD thesis at the IULM University in Milan. It was about literary representations of Berlin in the 1990s and music kept on coming up all the time. At the time, people were talking a lot about Popliteratur. Young Berlin authors saw the centrality and potential of music (techno, especially) in shaping their work but also the new ‘cool’ districts, and in bringing people together in safe, warm, unconventional and free spaces. This was very easy to test for myself during my ethnographic rounds in Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg. Furthermore, in Germany I also discovered magazines such as Spex and Testcard, where people like Martin Büsser and Diedrich Diederichsen were writing about popular music in interesting and unconventional ways, on the borderline between journalism and cultural studies. Since then and for the last 14 years, I have been working extensively on popular music.A large part of your work deals with the relation between (post-) industrial cities and music. What is the importance of such cities in music history? What links music to such urban contexts?Well, I believe that popular music is a side-product of Fordism. It responds to anonymous, mechanized modern life and kidnaps its means of production for expressive purposes. This is particularly clear in industrial cities, where music becomes the media capturing the city soundscape, its organization of work and its crisis. Genres ranging from electric blues to techno, from heavy metal to dream pop originated in industrial cities and always responded creatively to this kind of environment. This relation cannot be understood as something purely organic, of course, it was enacted in various ways and responded also to geopolitical contingencies. Tolyatti in Russia was a very important industrial city, but I have no knowledge of its music scene.In addition, the industrial city is also a lucrative myth. Nowadays, cities that tried to completely erase their connection to their industrial past after the crisis are recreating it as heritage and tourist attraction. What was dirty, ugly and economic is now hip, cool and cultural. Music mediated such environments and can easily be implemented in this remobilization.Your research tackles the question of creativity. However, this concept is very controversial, in particular in light of Richard Florida’s “creative class”. How do you approach it? In your opinion, in what ways is "creativity" still a relevant concept for capturing urban music production?In urban marketing and consulting, creativity is nothing more than an empty signifier than can be filled with anything. Still, its role in cultural practices must always be kept in mind. Without creativity, I see very little music being written.If I would have to use the term again in my research, I would try to tackle the role that creativity plays for musicians themselves, at very basic, individual, subjective levels and try to work my way from there up to music scenes, districts and cities as a whole.You worked on the case of Manchester, which is of course very famous for its vibrant cultural life, but also on other, less influential cities in terms of their musical scene (e.g. Tampere in Finland). Was it intentional to work of more ordinaries cities too? For which reasons?My aim was to test the industrial city myth in non-British settings. What I found out is that industrial ‘second’ cities always share a couple of things, within their own national settings: they have produced plenty of popular music and they have strong football teams. This thing fascinated me and I wanted to dig more into this (at least into the music connection, not so interested in football). I also believe very much in the power of comparing cities, scenes and bands.One aspect I found really engaging in your papers is the question of professionalization. In the case of Manchester, you argue that the professionalization of Factory Records and the Hacienda enable the consolidation of a sort of "creative milieu". In sociology of arts, certain authors tend to oppose artistic creativity with cultural industries. In the case of Manchester, in what ways were economic and artistic dynamics tied?I don’t believe such an opposition is possible within capitalism. Artistic creativity cannot exist outside the ‘art world’. Reading some autobiographies or interview transcripts from independent musicians something became clear: there was an immense clerical work they were doing to keep their art going. Fax machines, stamped letters and telephone bills run the most independent creative production of the late 20th century, but also brought its demise, despite that the internet made a lot of this kind of work a lot easier. I don’t see professionalization in itself as something negative, however clear is the fact that music anticipated a lot of what is happening right now to a lot of other professions, including ours. The chance to be creative comes with a high price to pay in terms of precariousness and poverty.The case of Manchester epitomizes all I have just written. It was the first industrial city in the world and it can be considered among the first post-industrial ones. The cultural industries played a very important role there, both at the level of individual districts and for the city image as a whole. Without a synergy between economic and artistic dynamics, this would have been impossible.Music worlds tend to create a lot of myths and mythologies. In one of your papers, you mention for instance the first gig of the Sex Pistols in Manchester, which is seen as a key event in the history of the local scene. On a methodological level, how can we deal with such mythification when we work on music history? What would be your advice to young researchers?Music is, of course, very much about storytelling. This is how strong bonds with places are built. It is very boring for an audience to read interviews about new software plug-ins, effect pedals or reverbs used in a particular album. It is much more exciting to read about places, people and events, especially if these stories are repeated, varied or offered as exclusive and defining. In addition, often musicians in popular music are not trained and cannot express in words the musicological technicalities of their work. Places and events work as media to talk about music.Mythification is embedded into music history. We are left with the choice to work with full-on historiographies and deal with archival work and interviews from witnesses to ‘set things straight’. This can of course bring some results. The second alternative is to work with myth as it is and question how it came to be and how much it reveals in terms of self-representation, memorialization, heritage and power.To conclude, let's look at the future. In your opinion, what are the emerging topics in the field of popular music studies? On which topics are you planning to work in the forthcoming years?I would like to see popular music studies become more comparative and look at supranational scales (such as the European one - very fascinating for me). At the same time, I fear compartmentalization of popular music studies in individual genres (heavy metal, punk, hip-hop studies come to mind).I don’t know what the emerging topics in popular music studies are right now, but I love to read about topics such as the commodification of the urban night, safe spaces in EDM, temporary uses and cultural appropriation.&#160;Images: by consent from Giacomo Bottà