This research project explores the transformative role of grassroots music collectives in (re)shaping urban politics in postcolonial, multicultural Europe, with a special emphasis on Berlin (Germany) and London (UK). Epitomising Europe’s contingent political moment, both cities sit between lived multiculture and sharply rising socioeconomic inequality, postcolonial melancholia, and strengthening ethnonationalism. Within these heightened junctures of urban politics, cultural work plays an especially formative yet contingent part. Certainly, Europe’s creative industries are themselves marked by precariousness and structural inequalities of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Yet, cultural production also offers sites of creative justice struggles and social change. Against this ambivalent background, this project addresses the question of how local music collectives reconfigure the fabric of contemporary urban life in creative and grounded ways. From foregrounding decolonial approaches that position music-making as an alternative cultural archive against an otherwise Eurocentric creative sector to using music performances as catalysts for building urban networks of solidarity, intimacy, and care, the project zooms into the motivations and practices these collectives enact in their work to reveal the strategies and mechanisms through which they navigate and intervene into the unequal city.

The project pursues three key interventions. First, it offers unique insights into how music can be a site of alternative (urban) worldmaking as well as how creative labour can itself be practiced in more equal and inclusive ways. Second, the project foregrounds an analysis of the concrete aesthetic and organisational practices of cultural production as an insightful way into researching and theorising contemporary urban politics. And third, it brings into more sustained conversation current debates in music studies and creative work scholarship with critical urban studies, feminist, and postcolonial theory.