"Celebrate the world... celebrate L.A.!": public concerts and the making of the global city

• Autores: Marina Peterson
• Localización: Géocarrefour: Revue de géographie de Lyon, ISSN 0035-113X, Vol. 78, Nº. 2, 2003 (Ejemplar dedicado a: La ville, le bruit et le son), págs. 139-145
• Idioma: francés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • Urban diversity is being newly imagined as some-thing helping to create a global city. Through their intentions and programming, public concert series help create global cities as they connect local urban public spaces with global circuits of people, ideas, music, and capital. Los Angeles' Grand Performances' claims for how ethnic diversity consti-tutes the city as global are reflected in particular through its programming of world music, used as a means of forming interna-tional connections and representing ethnic and racial groups in the city. Downtown public concerts are meant to bring people together from around the city, with the aim of increasing cross-cultural awareness, understanding, and cooperation through observation of a different culture's musical tradition and the simultaneous participation in the event of people with different backgrounds. For cultural understanding to occur, audiences should be representative of the ethnic and racial groups present in the city. What these groups are understood to be, how they are identified at concerts, and their relation to musical genres helps produce the city's diversity. That diversity is understood as international, comprised of immigrant groups strong-ly linked to the traditions of their home country. Their presence at public concerts both maps the city ethnically and constitutes local public spaces as global, reflecting and helping to produce a new transnational urban space.