Cultural Precincts,

Creative Spaces

Giving the Local a Musical Spin

1
Sarah Baker
Andy Bennett
Griffith University, Australia
Shane Homan
Monash University, Australia

This article examines the role of three community-based music projects—in Newcastle (Australia),
Thanet (United Kingdom), and the City of Playford (Australia)—in engendering notions of
regionalism, locality, and identity. Through their involvement in these projects, young people are
placed at the intersection of music program management, city mythologies, and national policy.
Each of the three projects examined attempts to facilitate urban regeneration through supplying
their target community with what one regional arts development officer has coined a “musical
spin.” However, within wider cultural frameworks, youth’s lived experience is often at odds with
grander ideals of community arts space. Thus, although the discourses of “creative” urban regener-
ation articulated by the facilitators of community-based music projects may appear credible at the
level of cultural policy, their practical implementation is problematized by competing local narra-
tives that are grounded in established local knowledges and often highly resistant to intervention
by outside sources.

Keywords: community; cultural policy; identity; locality; music making; youth

This article examines the particular ways that popular music activity is corralled
and channeled within local city plans for cultural investment. We specifically analyze
three community-based organizations (CBOs) that are part of wider “creative youth”

space and culture vol. 12 no. 2, may 2009 148-165

DOI: 10.1177/1206331208314615
© 2009 SAGE Publications
148
149 C u l t u r a l P r e c i n c t s , C r e a t i v e S p a c e s 149

discourses focused on urban regeneration and a renewed sense of regional identity.

The three community music projects—located in Thanet (Kent, U.K.), Newcastle
(New South Wales [NSW], Australia), and the City of Playford (South Australia)—
formed part of the series of sites investigated in Playing for Life, a comparative inter-
national project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) that explores how
marginalized youth engage with popular music in postindustrial societies and how
they develop their music and technological skills by using local cultural resources that
exist outside of formal schooling.2 Young people engaged in music making can be sub-
ject to varying claims about the role of music in geographical place making. For all the
discussions of the global cultural economy, there is still much evidence that regional
music knowledge and experiences are employed to distinguish the local from the
global (Bennett, 2000; Homan, 2003; Leyshon, Matless, & Revill, 1998). Through an
examination of three specific music projects—encompassing very different regional
cultural strategies, governance, and media contexts of youth music activity—we wish
to provide insight into how young people are situated at the intersection of music pro-
gram management, city mythologies, and national cultural policy.

Background

Playing for Life was an international, comparative, and longitudinal project funded
by the ARC from 2003 to 2005, exploring the everyday music practices of disadvan-
taged or marginalized youth as strategic pathways to agency, employment, and socio-
economic inclusion. With research sites in Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom,
and the United States, the project acknowledged that popular music is affectively and
culturally central to young people at risk; that such young people have often clearly
developed informal music-related strategies, networks, and opportunities; and that
these youth usually draw on particular places and expertise in their local communities
to further develop these skills. The project sought to explore three interdisciplinary
areas of youth studies:

• to explore the disaffection of young people in postindustrial societies and the causes and
effects of social exclusion;
• to provide new insights into the ways young people use popular music to negotiate margin-
alization and how music can be a pathway to agency, self-esteem, and social inclusion; and
• to examine the ways that CBOs act as alternative learning spaces where young people
seem particularly able to develop their own sense of creativity and cultural meaning.

While Playing for Life project members possessed previous experiences and knowl-
edge in working and commenting on youth and popular culture—and some also had
music industry experience as musicians and music teachers—we understood our
involvement as a form of “outsider-in” approach. This applied not just to the young
people’s empirical and symbolic links to a variety of cultural practices and scenes but
also to wider relationships and knowledge about the geographical spaces and cultural
politics in which the community projects operated. At the same time, the familiarity
gained with projects and their participants over a considerable length of time led to
invitations to some Playing for Life researchers to be actively involved in music work-
shops. Such invaluable experiences, however, inevitably complicate understandings of
“researcher” and “researched.”
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The project shared some of the attributes of a youth-centered study: Regular semi-
structured interviews with music project participants ensured the opinions of young
people remained central, and their views on music, creativity, and space are evident in
this article. This remains different, of course, to young people’s involvement in the
initial construction of the project’s aims and methodology, which enables youth to
“participate in the research project themselves” (Clark, Dyson, Meagher, Robson, &
Wootten, 2001, p. 2). Arguably, our very presence alerted the youth involved to the
project’s preoccupations with music workshop outcomes and their wider relevance to
local ambitions in relation to music and cultural policy. This was certainly the case
with the adult staff of the community music projects.
The proximity of researcher (the Playing for Life team) to the researched (staff,
youth who agreed to be case studies, and other young people and youth/cultural
administrators encountered at all the sites) “affects all aspects of the research process
from gaining access to analysing and writing up data” (MacRae, 2007, p. 51).
Acknowledging this, we have sought the views of the youth case studies and music
project staff in the writing-up phase of the project, inviting responses to the team’s the-
ories and understandings in early article drafts. This process went some way to filling
the various gaps in knowledge that can occur within more straightforward, textual
analyses of youth music genres, styles, and attitudes. Crucially, it allowed a post-
research forum for dialogue between researcher and researched that allowed differ-
ences in perspectives and motivations to be highlighted, and this is evident to some
degree in what follows. Apart from an implicit acknowledgement of their considerable
involvement, obtaining the responses of young people and adult staff to our initial
findings partially redressed the usual balance of “professionals who control the inter-
pretation and reporting of the research” (Clark et al., 2001, p. 2).

Youth, Space, and Place

Central to the Playing for Life project was an examination of the music-making
practices of young people situated in local, community-based settings. Inevitably then,
issues of space and place affected the research process, the young people at the center
of the research, and the data generated in a variety of ways. Considerations of the rela-
tionship between youth, space, and place must be situated in the context of a rapidly
developing theoretical discourse concerning the fundamental nature of space and
place in a late modern social context. The importance of space has long been acknowl-
edged in studies of the ways that youth operationalize cultural resources, notably fash-
ion and style, in forms of collective behavior (P. Cohen, 1972; Patrick, 1973). Early
studies tended to consider such spatializing practices of youth in the broader context
of a spectacularized turf war in which youth engaged in a territorial struggle, for exam-
ple, with forms of institutional authority, such as the police, or newly arriving immi-
grant groups (Clarke, 1976; Jefferson, 1976). In other cases, winning space was linked
to the magical recovery of a working-class community spirit threatened through the
breakup of traditional communities and reallocation of working-class families to new
housing estates (P. Cohen, 1972).
More recent work, however, paints a rather more sophisticated picture of the
sociocultural complexities underpinning the appropriation (both physical and sym-
bolic), use, and ultimately contestation of space and place. Most pertinently, it is now
widely acknowledged that, in addition to its physical properties, space and place have
 C u l t u r a l P r e c i n c t s , C r e a t i v e S p a c e s 151

significant “cultural” dimensions, the latter facilitating their own forms of reflexive
engagement with space and place that produce a plurality of “spatial” discourses. Thus,
as Massey (1993) observes,

if it is now recognized that people have multiple identities, then the same point can be
made in relation to places. Moreover, such multiple identities can be either, or both, a
source of richness or a source of conflict. (p. 65)

For Massey, the multiplicity of identities that are attached to spaces relates not to
the type of postmodern decentering of meaning through which theorists such as
Baudrillard (1983) and Lash (1990) strive to interpret the contemporary urban land-
scape. Rather, Massey sees the plurality of meanings attached to space and place as a
more organically created process—a product of the way in which physical spaces are
envisaged and discursively constructed by different interest groups. Although these
groups may be distinct—culturally, politically, educationally, economically, and so
on—their situatedness in shared spaces and places brings them into contact and in
some cases conflict (to varying degrees) on a routine basis. According to Massey (1998),
“social spaces are best thought of in terms of complicated nets of inter-relations in
which each particular culture is differently located” (p. 124). It is this quality of space
and place that supplies its multiply articulated character.
Examples of the constructedness of social space were evident across all three
research sites focused on in this article. In each case, local discourses of space and place,
often harboring local knowledges fixating around issues of regionalism, commingled
with knowledges and sensibilities acquired through local appropriations of global
youth cultural styles and musics—notably rap and graffiti—the latter transforming
the local into a particularized space for the acquisition, practice, and development of
stylized forms of collective identity. In terms of their own symbolic construction of
their local spaces and places, the young people involved in the research often articu-
lated their music-making practices as forming part of a local scene (Peterson &
Bennett, 2004; Straw, 1991) in which the physical and symbolic attributes of a given
locality were operationalized to describe a sense of uniqueness. Such emphasis on the
local in this way also supports findings by Miller and Slater (2000) that, despite the
appeal of information technology and the Internet (the latter having wide applications
in contemporary music practices), the “local” remains an important site for forms of
youth interaction of a more conventional face-to-face nature (Miller & Slater, 2000).
In the case of some of the research sites, preexisting discourses of regionalism also
played their part in the gendering of space and place. For example, in the Thanet proj-
ect, the relative absence of female participants may well have been explained by a pre-
dominant form of male camaraderie, firmly embedded in local cultural discourse and
3
thus permeating every aspect of this, including the creative practice of local musicians.
There was also evidence that, in working through locally ingrained racist sensibilities
(all three research sites had a predominantly White, working-class demographic),
research participants practiced a discourse of “neighborhood nationalism,” a term
coined by Back (1996) to express how young people of different ethnic backgrounds
are able to reconcile such physical differences through claiming shared local knowledge
and experiences, often punctuated by common preference for a particular music
and/or style, an ability to rap, or participation in street art activities.
One topic that has remained noticeably underresearched in the literature on youth,
space, and place is the increasing cooption of youth cultural practices, and in many
cases the spaces where such practices are enacted, by organizations operating under the
152 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 9

auspices of national and local government arts policy. In each of the sites studied, a
particular region or locale had been identified as a “problem” zone and the young peo-
ple within that zone as being “at risk.” In each case, the presented solution had been to
take existing forms of youth-musical practice and to channel these via dedicated proj-
ects and/or outreach resources as a means of combating the social exclusion (as deter-
mined through national/regional policy initiatives) experienced by young people and
“reinvigorating” those social spaces in which the targeted youth are situated. Such
forms of policy-driven intervention, their harnessing of preexisting youth cultural
discourses and practices, and the constructions of space and place that they bring to
bear on particular communities open up a new range of issues concerning the contes-
tation of space and place. Indeed, such spaces and places become “landscapes of
power” (Zukin, 1991), being at once both the testing ground for a range of top-down
spatio-cultural discourses orientated around buzz words such as creativity and the sites
for more spontaneous forms of youth cultural practice grounded in established local
knowledge of space and place.

Music and Civic Boosterism

In keeping with the Playing for Life project’s emphasis on marginalized youth’s uses
of popular music, the three community sites scrutinized here are located within large
working-class populations that have been identified by local and national policy bodies
as areas with high levels of unemployment and household incomes below national
averages. Thanet, a region of East Kent (2-hr drive southeast of London); Newcastle, a
midsize city in NSW (2-hr drive north of Sydney); and the City of Playford, a local
government area on Adelaide’s northern urban fringe, have all witnessed a significant
decline in their traditional industries. Like its British namesake, Newcastle has histori-
cally relied on heavy manufacturing (principally steel and coal). Although coal remains
a key export industry, the primary steelworks closed in 1999. In the City of Playford, the
satellite town of Elizabeth was developed in the mid-1950s to serve car manufacturing
industries and the weapons research establishment. The area has since experienced sim-
ilar fluctuations and downturns as Newcastle in these industries. Within the Thanet
area, its historic preeminence as a coastal holiday destination has long vanished, with a
subsequent decline in the hospitality and tourism sectors. Moreover, unlike many other
regions of postindustrial Britain, Thanet has not benefited from the growth of the
service industry sector, which has become an alternative source of employment in many
of those areas worst hit by the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The closure of traditional employment pathways is reflected in the high levels of
youth unemployment: the City of Playford’s youth (ages 15 to 19) unemployment rate
is 27.5% and growing (Ellershaw, 2003); the Newcastle youth unemployment rate
stands at 20% (compared to the citywide rate of 8.6%), with claims that it is much
higher than the “official” rate (Newcastle City Council, 2003). Areas with ongoing and
high levels of (youth) unemployment often have a negative stigma attached. Youth in
Playford, for example, have identified “being from Elizabeth” as negatively affecting
their ability to gain employment within and outside the area because of the persisting
stereotypes of the “Elizabeth drop-out” (Bukva, 2004, p. 9). Newcastle youth are stig-
matized by perceptions shared by the local population and press that the city has a
“youth problem” of illegal drug use, street violence, binge drinking, and other forms of
antisocial behavior (see Tomsen, Homan, & Russo, 2003).
 C u l t u r a l P r e c i n c t s , C r e a t i v e S p a c e s 153

Although Playford Council has only recently made youth a priority (Bukva, 2005)
and recognized the potential of music as a way to combat the areas of current negative
stereotypes, popular music has been viewed as a vital Newcastle youth leisure industry
since the 1980s (Groenveld, 1998). More recently, through explicit commitments to
funding a youth venue (the Palais Royale) in its Social Plan (in 2002) and Young People
of the City (in 1999) statement and the generation of more music spaces for recording
and rehearsal in its Cultural Industry Policy (in 1999), music has been designated to
play its part in

the trigger that would transform the image and appearance of industrial Newcastle from
that of a stigmatized, second-rate, “coal town” into a vibrant, attractive and enviable
“great” port city. (Stevenson, 2003, p. 103)

Similarly, the City of Playford’s planned development of the Northern Sound

System, a regional community music center with a “youth accent,” endeavors to create
a “cultural industries incubator” (City of Playford, 2005). As part of broader Council
plans to provide Playford’s youth and unemployed with opportunities to gain life
skills, training, and pathways to employment and social inclusion, the Northern Sound
System will offer “a range of performance, training, rehearsal and recording facilities”
(City of Playford, 2005). While at the time of writing the Northern Sound System did
not have a physical “home,” it had been involved in the provision of a number of youth
music workshops in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, including the “Show Us Your Riffs
Goes North” series of workshops for female and cogender bands.
For Playford and Newcastle, calls for popular music activity to stem both youth
unemployment and adverse perceptions of youth were built on longer mythologies of
the Australian music industry. British immigrants were lured to Elizabeth by the prom-
ise of stable work in the car and white goods manufacturing industries. Some years on,
their sons fronted some of the nation’s hardest rock bands in the 1970s: Doc Neeson
(the Angels), John Swan (Swanee), and Jimmy Barnes (Cold Chisel). Newcastle has
always pointed to the success of the Screaming Jets and Silverchair as evidence of its
local live music culture. On a less grand scale, the establishment of the Palais Royale
Youth Venue in 2000 signaled new funding for Newcastle youth activities: fire twirling,
magazine production, hip hop sessions, break dancing classes, drum ensembles, and
rock concerts. Palais staff and youth are integral to other Newcastle cultural events,
such as the This Is Not Art festival. Its primary funding is derived from the city Council,
with significant grants from the NSW government.
In Playford, the Council funds a youth development officer and youth officer who
have a small budget to sponsor youth events and activities in the City, for example a
weekly youth-led community radio show (see Baker, 2007), the Battle of the Bands
held during National Youth Week, and occasional hip hop workshops. The Council
also has a community cultural development officer (CCDO), a post primarily funded
by Arts SA. “Youth” is a target group in the CCDO’s brief, with one objective being to
identify and promote youth “shed bands”—bands rehearsing in suburban garages that
are yet to perform in a live music venue. Consequently, the CCDO has been instru-
mental in the development of the Northern Sound System, a project receiving the bulk
of its startup funding from the Federal Government’s Sustainable Regions program.
This funding has paid for the feasibility study and infrastructure of the Northern
Sound System. The Council has also contributed a significant sum, but questions
remain as to where funding will be sourced for the ongoing running costs.
154 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 9

Thanet, although lacking the industrial past common to both Newcastle and
Playford, occupies a similarly peripheral position socially and economically.
Unemployment in the region is high—currently running at around 9.8% (“London
Worst Region in the UK for Unemployment,” 2005)—as is the instance of alcohol and
substance abuse and drug addiction. Additionally, Thanet has the highest teen preg-
nancy rate in Britain, while a recent influx of families from ethnic minority groups
raises new issues of racism and cultural intolerance within what was once an all-White
population. Roughly forming the shape of a triangle between the towns of Margate,
Broadstairs, and Ramsgate, the region’s full name of the Isle of Thanet relates to its
unusual geographical past. Historically, Thanet was a real island, separated from the
mainland by a body of water known as the Wantsum Channel. During the Middle
Ages, the Wantsum Channel began to close because of shingle deposits from the North
Sea. Land reclamation by local monasteries also contributed to this process, with the
result that by the early medieval period the Wantsum Channel had been reduced to a
stream and Thanet effectively became part of the mainland (Bolton, 2006). However,
Thanet’s once physical status as an island remains ingrained in local knowledge, with
many indigenous residents of Thanet retaining something of an “island mentality.”
Thanet people rarely travel out of the region or even to the next town. As a result,
strong local ties exist between individuals, especially among Thanet youth, who often
exhibit a fierce territorialism. As a local youth worker explained, in cases where fight-
ing breaks out at events organized for young people, this is frequently as a result of
gangs and individuals from neighboring towns coming together.
As with Newcastle and Playford, in recent years, community-based music-making
projects have been established in Thanet as a means of combating social exclusion
among the region’s youth. A major contributor to youth music making in the Thanet
region is Pie Factory Music, an organization that coordinates a variety of music-
making initiatives in the Thanet region. Much of Pie Factory Music’s funding is pro-
vided by Youth Music, a national organization established in 1999 to further young
people’s involvement in music of all kinds (see Youth Music Web Site, 2005). In
December 2000, Youth Music began to establish Youth Music Action Zones (YMAZs,
2005). Thanet was among the first of six regions in England and Wales to be desig-
nated as a YMAZ. There are currently around 22 YMAZs spread throughout
England, Wales, and Scotland.
In setting up YMAZs, Youth Music targets socioeconomically deprived areas. Each
YMAZ comprises a consortium of experienced partners that link together organizations
from the public, voluntary, and private sectors. The aim is to provide music-making
activities for young people up to the age of 18 from disadvantaged backgrounds.
YMAZs are designed to respond to the particular needs of the community in which
they are based. However, they each share a common set of aims and objectives, which
are as follows:

• to improve the overall standards of music making across all music styles and genres;
• to champion the value of music making, proving that music has an invaluable part to play
in advancing the educational and social development of young people; and
• to establish the value of music-making opportunities as a force for regeneration in com-
munities, fostering social inclusion and community cohesion. (Youth Music Web Site, 2005)

YMAZs deliver a wide range of music making covering all music styles and genres,
including funk, folk, reggae, jazz, classical, choral, garage, and gospel. Activities run by
 C u l t u r a l P r e c i n c t s , C r e a t i v e S p a c e s 155

projects associated with YMAZs include workshops, rehearsals, performances, one-to-

one teaching, and mentoring.
In its capacity as the key coordinator of the Thanet YMAZ, Pie Factory Music runs
a number of regular training sessions together with one-off workshops. Some of these
take place at the Pie Factory building in Ramsgate, whereas others are held off-site in
venues such as local youth clubs and church halls. The two main workshops that
attract young people within the age range covered by the Playing for Life project are
The Zone, a fortnightly turntable and MCing workshop (held at the Pie Factory site),
and Loud Living, a monthly rock workshop held at a local Ramsgate youth club.4
The research at Pie Factory has chiefly focused on The Zone, a fortnightly session
comprising two separate workshops that run concurrently. The first workshop con-
centrates on turntable skills and is primarily a hands-on, mentor-led session. In
addition to teaching basic and more advanced turntable skills, workshop partici-
pants occasionally do public performances. For example, in September 2004, they
performed a short set as The Turntable Orchestra at Margate’s Winter Pavilion. The
second workshop, which takes place in Pie Factory’s recording studio, provides an
opportunity for local DJs and MCs to record their material free of charge (though
sessions are time limited to 2 hr). The sessions are run by an experienced studio
engineer who operates the digital recording equipment in the studio and oversees the
creation of backing tracks for the MCs’ work. These sessions are not essentially
intended to teach recording skills to those young people present—and indeed, some do
not seem that interested in the recording process itself. However, those young people
with an interest in learning more about recording are at liberty to ask the engineer
questions during the sessions.
Although both the turntable and studio workshops are run on an informal basis,
The Zone does not have an open-door policy as such. Rather, young people who show
promise at other open-door workshops are invited to come along to The Zone by the
two facilitators. In 2004, there were about eight young people who regularly attended
The Zone. Many of these had been “cherry picked” from D’Expressions, a turntable
workshop that takes place in 6-week blocks held on Monday evenings in a local
church hall.5
The youth music-making projects initiated in Newcastle, Playford, and Thanet
reflect a growing trend in urban areas to mitigate the effects of deindustrialization
through revitalization projects and employment schemes based around the “creative”
industries. The managers of the Newcastle and Playford projects regard this as an over-
simplification. The Playford management argued that “the NSS is first and foremost
about providing marginalised young people with new opportunities to undertake cre-
ative activities and make music” (personal communication, June 5, 2006). Those work-
ing at the Loft stressed that “the underlying ethos of the [Newcastle] venue is as a safe
place for young people to express themselves, hang out with friends, meet new people,
and gain skills as organisers of their own activities” (personal communication, May 19,
2006). In both cases, mitigating the effects of deindustrialization is seen as only one of
many reasons for the establishment of youth music projects.
However, results have arguably been mixed; the “creative industries” solution has
been criticized in terms of a lack of tangible long-term outcomes and of the social dis-
placement enacted through gentrification and resulting urban redevelopment
(Hudson, 1995; O’Connor, 1998). This raises quite separate questions from funding
debates about the place of youth in the city mix and their levels of visibility and input
into cultural frameworks. In short, how do young people, and youth cultural workers,
156 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 9

navigate the various demands placed on music-making activities to alleviate social and
economic problems?

“Youth” Space or “Creative” Space?

Since its inception in 2000, the Palais in Newcastle has operated a mixture of hip
hop–related activities: rap writing workshops (Beats and Rimes), graffiti workshops
(U Write Mate?), public rock and hip hop concerts, and skateboarding. The graffiti
workshops have been popular, in part because of the provision of free paint cans and
the occasional public/commercial contract work on particular buildings and park
brickwork. The Palais and other public graffiti work operated without controversy
until a series of graffiti tags were sprayed on shop fronts in January 2005. This pro-
voked a demand from the local press and some business people to curb streetscape
graffiti, with the Palais programs questioned. The Palais staff ’s efforts to distinguish
between the weekend “illegal” graffiti and its own public, Council-sanctioned activities
undertaken by a regular group of Palais visitors were largely ignored. Considerable
effort by Palais/Loft staff to subsequently negotiate an aerosol art agreement for the use
of the South Newcastle Beach area as a shared use facility proved successful:

The agreement re-introduces a managed presence and clean up at the area and provides
a freeform wall for use by all; community murals designed and implemented by Loft
members and a “Seniors Wall.” Young people are involved in the Reference Group which
is responsible for the ongoing management of aerosol art activities in the area. (Loft man-
ager, personal communication, May 19, 2006)

The negative media debate about graffiti art occurred at a time when the existing
Palais site is to be demolished for a development that incorporates a combination of
apartment and retail spaces. As some youth visibly make their mark on an increasingly
commercialized eastern beachfront, the abolition of the Palais also symbolizes the loss
of “their” spaces along the western areas of the Hunter riverfront. Its relocation to the
Hunter Street Mall (with the center now known as The Loft) is perceived to possess
two advantages: placing youth activities much closer to the proposed Civic Arts
Precinct and attracting greater “through traffic” of youth, frequent users of the mall. In
addition, despite Council commitments that young people have access to the (nearby)
Honeysuckle Buildings and Civic Arts Precinct (Newcastle City Council, 2003), fears
were raised about an increased profile of youth in a mall that already has a reputation
for high rates of youth crime. Labeling mechanisms were deployed to denote youth as
“trouble” according to particular dress codes. This was inverted by one hip hop DJ at
a meeting between Palais youth and Central Business District (CBD) business owners:
“I don’t like your suit so you can’t come here” (field notes, 2004). Debates about access
to the inner CBD are heightened by the knowledge that many of the Palais/Loft youth
live in the outer fringes of Newcastle. These tensions between class and space are often
richly evoked in their work at the Palais:

Newcastle, the City of Steel

Built upon BHP and the forgotten coalfields
The trains creep slowly at night
Like an underground artery, bleedin’ raw life
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But don’t forget we’re one in a million

From westie to Charlestown
Out to Shortland and back to Thornton
The four elements is what we’re about
So be proud of this town, or move the fuck out
(Nameless crew, “One in a Million,” 2004)

In many discussions, youth who frequented the Palais cited its importance in over-
coming their sense of exclusion from the city center. For those participating in the
Beats and Rimes program, many acknowledged it as the first postschool environment
where music and other cultural interests were respected and encouraged:

Another thing about coming in here that’s helped us is, a couple of months ago we were
down in the dumps, you know, “what are we doing this for if we’re not doing anything with
it?” So we come in here and find out different options and opportunities we can have, dif-
ferent events that happen, like the battles and open mic nights. . . . [Music at the Palais]
probably kept me a bit sane, like, it’s hard to explain . . . you forget about yourself and
concentrate on elsewhere. (interview with Alan, personal communication, June 6, 2005)

Unlike in Newcastle, where youth had a sense of “their space” by way of the Palais,
youth in Playford did not feel they had space in the city they could call their own.
Young people articulated a similar sense of geographical isolation to those we worked
with at Newcastle. This was evident in the lyrics of one rhyme constructed at a com-
munity hip hop workshop. The rhyme was initially devised to serve as the signature
piece to the “Guerrilla Radio” program funded by Playford Council:

In a time of revolution, gotta step back and listen

In the midst of confusion, find a voice in the system
While we’ll offer up a dose of social comment and wisdom,
We’re giving you the most because we’re youth on a mission . . .
We got the music that you like, all the reviews which you need.
With Playford Council helping keep us all up to speed.
Because we’re from the North, we like to say what we mean,
We question all the reasons why we’re stuck in our scene . . .
(field notes, 2004)

During the Council’s consultation for its Youth Issues Paper, young people noted a lack
of both “legitimate youth space” and access to appropriate and affordable performance
and rehearsal venues in Playford (Bukva, 2004, p. 10). To rectify this, the Council built
The Launch Pad, a skate park, in Elizabeth and in 2003 began planning for a multi-
spaced community hub. This hub would have a “musical spin” in the form of the
Northern Sound System with areas where youth could gather and pursue various
interests such as music, arts, culture, and creative industries training.
In the initial plans, the Northern Sound System was to comprise a community
music center to “foster new music” and the Cradle of Rock, a museum “which would
celebrate the Rock Music history of Playford” (Playford Arts Community Team, 2004).
The museum concept was said to be much supported by Council and the Federal
Government but community consultation revealed that young people in the area were
not enthused by the idea. Young people expressed their ambivalence about the
158 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 9

museum’s perceived focus on rock music and responded with comments like “rock
sucks,” that the museum idea is “too old school,” and that it is not relevant to young
people interested in other styles of music like hip hop and dance (Anglicare, 2004,
p. 21). The museum was to have celebrated “local” musicians of the ’60s and ’70s such
as Glenn Shorrock (the Twilights/Axiom/Little River Band) and Jimmy Barnes (Cold
Chisel), artists whose careers began in a time when Elizabeth was considered by some
in the Australian music industry to be “the cultural centre of rock music in Australia”
(Colin Beard, as cited in Zion, 1987, p. 298). The Council hoped that by refocusing
attention on “the region’s proud music heritage” (City of Playford, 2005), the Northern
Sound System would recapture the spirit of live music and innovative cultural practice
that had disappeared from the area in the past decade or so.
The growth of a live music industry in Elizabeth during the 1960s has been attrib-
uted to the significant numbers of British-born immigrants settling in the newly devel-
oped area (Zion, 1987). The immigrants, many of whom were musicians, brought with
them “beat” fashions, new music releases, music publications, and other subcultural
information (Fitzgerald, 2002; Zion, 1987). The steady stream of new arrivals ensured
that throughout the ’60s, Elizabeth youth had the latest information on changing
nuances in music styles and fashion. Elizabeth became a hub of beat activity, with a
number of amateur groups having regular gigs in the area and playing at local dances.
The development of a live music scene for contemporary Playford is very different
from this in that its growth is planned and facilitated by the Northern Sound System.
The proposed Cradle of Rock and some responses by older community members in
the Anglicare consultation suggest that the desire to rejuvenate the music industry in
Adelaide’s northern suburbs is representative of the nostalgic yearning of baby
boomers for the bygone eras of “beat” and “pub rock.” Five respondents for the
Feasibility Study had been active in the Elizabeth beat scene in the ’60s. This older
group’s vision for an ideal “neighborhood of sound” included “Friday night bands in
the Anglicare Food Barn, with volunteers to run the teas and coffees” and “Do you
remember when?” open mike nights (Anglicare, 2004, p. 33). One of the older com-
munity members participating in the Anglicare consultation expressed surprise when
a much younger resident reported to never have seen a band perform live. Perhaps in
response to this, another vision for the neighborhood of sound was to “introduce
teenagers to live music venues—what it means, how to support it and how to get
involved” (Anglicare, 2004, p. 33).
According to the Council’s Youth Issues Paper, young people’s vision for Playford is
one of a “creative community” (Bukva, 2004, p. 19). Young people in Playford have
expressed an interest in nurturing a live music scene, but to do so, they require access to
appropriate rehearsal space, affordable recording studios, and live music venues that are
free of poker (slot/pokies) machines (Anglicare, 2004). Although young people rejected
the concept of a Cradle of Rock museum, the broader Northern Sound System project,
which would provide the desired, accessible, and affordable spaces for performance,
rehearsal, and recording, was welcomed by young people living in the region.
At the time of writing, the Northern Sound System was to be located in a disused
building adjacent to the skate park. In addition to housing the community music center
and a café, it has been proposed that part of the site will be a “youth services hub”
housing several regional youth agencies as well as the Council’s youth development
officer, youth officer, CCDO, and graffiti prevention officer. This would potentially
bring a further conflation of “youth space” and “cultural space,” with “youth work space.”
As such, it is suggestive of “youth containment” and could potentially curb certain
 C u l t u r a l P r e c i n c t s , C r e a t i v e S p a c e s 159

forms of youth creativity. Responding to such claims within this article, the project
manager of the Northern Sound System (NSS) argued that

in an environment where there are so very few community-based music making

resources, the question of whether youth music programs have a normative role in con-
taining or corralling youth creativity is just not the most important question to ask . . .
the co-location of a range of youth focused activities and programs in the one area
enables synergies to develop between the various programs. This critical mass enables
new opportunities to grow, and serves to attract new resources, which in turn increases
the options that are available to young people. (personal communication, June 5, 2006)

Although the development of the youth-focused community music center next to

the skate park seems to go some way in creating a significant proportion of—and syn-
ergies around—youth space, with the Council defining youth space as “any space where
a young person feels safe and welcome” and able to “hang out” legitimately (Bukva,
2004, p. 10)—it may also represent a containing of youth in one area. The skate park
(and the proposed Northern Sound System building) is located beyond the regional
shopping center car park and across a main road. Although still being central and
accessible to public transport, this physically distances youth from the oft-contested
space of the mall (Sercombe, 2000), potentially rendering them less visible and less
threatening. This is not to suggest that the Northern Sound System will not be a valuable
asset for young people or the wider community in Playford. Rather, such a discussion
highlights the tensions and difficulties of implementing and living with formal and
6
informal youth policies as they affect the “local.”
Similar tensions and contradictions emerging from conflicting notions of space and
place are evident in Thanet. Despite being less than 70 miles from London, in the
densely populated southeast region of England, Thanet is a culturally isolated place. As
noted earlier, this problem has been exacerbated because of the decline in the hospi-
tality and tourism sectors and ensuing socioeconomic dislocation in the region. As a
member of the Pie Factory team observed, “a lot of the buildings are empty or crum-
bling, and there is a sense of deprivation, which lends itself to people’s lack of confi-
dence and worth; the area has fallen behind in many areas” (personal communication,
September 17, 2004). It was further added that youth, in particular, are routinely stig-
matized as a major contributor to the branding of Thanet as a “problem” area: “The
local media never say anything good about the area and I think this does influence how
young people see themselves” (personal communication, September 17, 2004).
In response to this situation and in an attempt to begin the task of re-instilling a
sense of pride and self-worth among Thanet youth, the Pie Factory project is endeav-
oring to reinvent the region as a “creative space.” In an interview with a member of
the Playing for Life research team, the Pie Factory’s strategic manager explained this
concept in more detail:

The idea is to turn [the Pie Factory] into a place that the kids own . . . basically where they
have a sense of ownership and they want to come through the door, and the reason we chose
that building [the Pie Factory premises] was that it is a nonthreatening building. It’s an old
pie factory! It’s industrial, it’s a brick box. . . . We want it so that kids go “ooh what’s in there?”
. . . there’s graffiti panels, there’s chill out spaces, there’s creative rooms, there’s rehearsal
spaces, there’s recording facilities, where they can just feel they wanna be there! ‘Cause I think
that’s part of creative space [it’s about] people wanting to be there. If you’re there and you
7
hang out, then the juices start to flow. (personal communication, July 23, 2004)
160 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 9

The immediate aims of Pie Factory, then, are to appropriate a building/space that is
already familiar to local youth and where they feel comfortable using that space to their
own creative ends. The long-term aims of Pie Factory, however, are more ambitious in
that they involve the transformation of Thanet from its current status as a region on
the periphery of UK cultural creativity to a culturally active center in its own right.
Later in the interview, the project’s strategic manager spoke of a desire to nurture a
sense of creative space that would gradually radiate outward from the Pie Factory proj-
ect and inform creativity throughout the Thanet region. The long-term goal of this, he
claimed, was to transform the wider Thanet region into a creative space with its own
creative hub and supporting cultural industries—a very similar goal to that expressed
by those instrumental in establishing the Northern Sound System in Playford,
Australia, which aims to foster a renewed cultural and creative vitality in the Elizabeth
area. As various members of the Pie Factory team have observed, many young people
in Thanet with aspirations to become successful artists or musicians either give up
because of lack of support or set their sights on London as a place in which to achieve
success. The transformation of Thanet into a creative space, it is argued, will hopefully
encourage young people to develop and practice their skills within the region and ulti-
mately provide Thanet with its own creative identity.
Despite this expressed agenda, members of the Pie Factory team are only too aware
of the obstacles they face in attempting to realize the project’s aims in bringing about
change in the Thanet region. Thus, as one member of the Pie Factory team explained,

we’re coming from one end and trying to push through, and it would be lovely to think
that other people are pushing from the other end. We can only do so much with music; a
lot of the deeper structural problems remain unaddressed. (personal communication,
September 17, 2004)

Similarly, members of the Pie Factory team acknowledge the problems inherent in
encouraging active participation and decision making among local youth when it
comes to the provision of music-making opportunities and resources: “We always ask
the kids ‘what do you want to do?’ We ask them what programs they would like, but it’s
hard because they’re not used to being asked if they like something or not” (personal
communication, September 17, 2004). Moreover, in common with other community
arts-based projects whose primary funding comes from government and/or local
Council sources, the Pie Factory team also perceives an inherent problem in the short-
term, “quick-fix” ideology that often underpins the funding rationale for urban regen-
eration schemes. Speaking about the local Council in the Thanet region, one Pie
Factory employee suggested that once the area had been given a makeover and “looks
good again, they’ll forget about funding and youth” (personal communication,
8
September 17, 2004).
Finally, and although such matters are beyond the immediate control of the Pie
Factory project itself, there may ultimately prove to be a discrepancy between the project’s
agenda of creative transformation in the Thanet region and what project users them-
selves hope to get out of their involvement with Pie Factory. Although no direct one-to-
one interviews have been conducted with users of Pie Factory Music, extensive
nonparticipant observation has been carried out, particularly at the fortnightly Zone
workshops. On the basis of this research, one thing seems clear from listening to con-
versations between the users and facilitators. Users appear to perceive The Zone, and by
definition the Pie Factory project, as serving an interim purpose as a place in which they
 C u l t u r a l P r e c i n c t s , C r e a t i v e S p a c e s 161

can gain access to equipment and expertise necessary to progress their own individual
careers. Despite involvement in The Zone from upwards of 18 months, none of the reg-
ular users appear to have a sense of either Pie Factory, or Thanet, as a “creative space”
in its own right. Both are seen simply as a space in which the young MCs and DJs can
work on and promote their product with a view to eventually breaking into the world
of professional music making. Certainly, Pie Factory users are aware of the potential of
local resources in Thanet in relation to this aim. For example, many of those who par-
ticipate in The Zone recording sessions speak of using the CDs they record there as a
means of securing gigs in local clubs. However, this is entirely consistent with the long-
standing perception among aspirant, local bands, and artists of the “local” as a launch
pad for professional success—a place in which to hone one’s musical skills, secure an
initial following, and attract attention from record companies, music journalists, and so
on (S. Cohen, 1991; Frith, 1983). Although lack of commercial success may ultimately
conspire to restrict the artistic ambitions of Zone users to Thanet, this is essentially a
by-product of the local “talent pool” effect rather than reflecting in any direct sense on
Pie Factory’s ambitions of encouraging its users to invest their musical talent and
creative aspirations in Thanet rather than further afield.

Conclusion

In this article, we have presented a preliminary exploration of gaps between project

rationales and actual usage of CBOs in the Playing for Life research. Clear differences
have emerged regarding how space is enacted and perceived by different users and
providers. Although in this article we have looked at specific organizations in Thanet,
Newcastle, and the City of Playford, these findings relate to the majority of sites Playing
for Life investigated during 2003-2005. Our interest in this article has been how creativ-
ity is constructed and nurtured within wider notions of opportunity and constraints for
youth. What is clear is that gaps between abstract and lived experience of space (the
CBOs and their locales) reinforce the influence of competing agendas and aims.
Arguably then, there is a clear sense in which the concept of a creative space exists
only as an abstract notion, coined by CBO directors and staff with a vested interest in
pursuing a particular policy agenda. From the point of view of funding organizations
and policy makers, the term creative space works in that it consolidates the universal
aims of youth/cultural policy. Clearly, for a concept of Thanet/Newcastle/Playford as a
creative space to assume a cultural resonance among the local young people, it needs
to be perceived as having credibility in an organic sense. As it is, however, creative space
appears more a “forced” concept. At a local everyday level, the concept remains too
abstract to enter into and become part of local discourse and may ultimately prove to
be intrusive from the point of view of local youth, whose perceptions of what they are
pursuing in their various musical projects remain quite distinct from organizational
perceptions. In response, the NSS project manager believes that it remains “possible to
establish creative spaces that develop organically and resonate culturally with young
people in the local area” (personal communication, June 5, 2006).
This means balancing the rhetoric of the “cultural industries” that currently exists
within local, state, and national strategies with particular kinds of pragmatism about
the claims made for both individual and regional creativity. Much older questions
about youth, space, and place—in this case, where youth music activity is allocated in
162 s p a c e a n d c u l t u r e / m a y 2 0 0 9

cities and to what broader purpose—must be continually assessed against the more
immediate and understandably practical aims of the youth involved.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference Post-Colonial Distances:
The Study of Popular Music in Canada and Australia, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, June 24-29,
2005. Thank you to Dr. Bruce Cohen for his comments on a previous draft. Thank you also to
the organizations and youth coresearchers involved in Playing for Life.
2. The Playing for Life Web site, created by Andrew Plummer of Scenestealer, can be found at
www.playingforlife.org.au. The research team comprised Associate Professor Geraldine Bloustien
and Dr. Margaret Peters (University of South Australia), Dr. Shane Homan (Monash University,
formerly University of Newcastle, NSW), Dr. Sarah Baker (University of Leeds; formerly ARC
Post-Doctoral Research Fellow 2003-2005, University of South Australia), Professor Andy
Bennett (Griffith University, Australia; formerly University of Surrey, U.K.), Dr. Bruce Cohen
(University of Auckland; formerly Humboldt University, Germany, and ARC International Fellow
2005-2006, University of South Australia), and in 2003, Professor Tommy DeFrantz
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA). Australian research assistants were Julie
Pavlou-Kirri (University of Newcastle) and Danni Nicholas-Sexton (University of South
Australia). Additional research assistance was provided by David van der Hoek, Peter Dutton, Mia
Bennet, Nikolas de Masi, and administrative assistance by Jane Broweleit. International advisors
to the project were Professor Shirley Brice-Heath (Brown University, Providence, RI), Professor
Henry Jenkins (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA), Professor David
Buckingham (University of London, U.K.), and Professor Hartmut Häußermann (Humboldt
University, Germany).
3. A broadly similar scenario was discovered by S. Cohen (1991) in her study of the local
music-making scene in Liverpool.
4. Loud Living is now Loud: Living Rock Academy.
5. Since the completion of the research at Pie Factory, The Zone has progressed to a weekly
workshop focusing on DJing, MCing, human beatbox, engineering, and production and works
on an open-door policy. The Zone is currently working on producing a CD of music created at
the workshop. The aim is to market the CD. The success of The Zone has also led to a special-
ized weekly workshop Zone Live!, which gives young people the opportunity to hone their skills
and work with in-house performance crew, Dekforce 1.
6. The Northern Sound System project manager argues that “it is necessary and legitimate to
incorporate a range of agendas,” including those relating to creative industries development,
when external agencies/resources are involved. The danger, he says, “is that these agendas can
take on a life of their own with little regard for the stated needs of young people and the reali-
ties of how young people operate creatively in their own communities” (personal communica-
tion, June 5, 2006). Balancing the competing agendas and the needs of young people is identified
as a specific challenge by the Northern Sound System.
7. Since this interview took place, plans to develop the original Pie Factory building in
Margate have been abandoned. However, plans are being discussed for improvements and exten-
sions to Pie Factory Music’s premises in Ramsgate. The building already offers a new recording
studio, live room, office space, and two workshop areas, but the extension will offer further
rehearsal areas and space for a new Music Business School from which to work. The Music
Business School is a 3-year project funded by the Young People’s Fund, which Pie Factory hopes
to develop into a sustainable entity. The Business School will offer modules for young people to
develop skills and become accredited in various aspects of the music business outside the “nor-
mal” educational routes. Therefore, the original aim of Pie Factory to present its facilities as a
“creative space” for local young people remains the same.
 C u l t u r a l P r e c i n c t s , C r e a t i v e S p a c e s 163

8. Developments have taken place in recent months with a visit from the Minister for
Culture, David Lammy MP, to the Pie Factory project. As a member of the Pie Factory team
explained,

he was very impressed with the level of music being produced and the meeting led to him
orchestrating a music leader meeting to discuss with people delivering workshops on the
ground level to ascertain the way forward, what problems deliverers face with regard to
funding and sustainability. (personal communication, May 31, 2006)

Another important development has been Pie Factory’s affiliation with Music Manifesto, an
organization comprising musicians, composers, educators, music industry representatives, and
policy makers whose collective aim is to consult with youth music organizations with a view
toward developing ways to maximize the provision of music-making facilities and opportunities
for young people. Finally, there have also been major efforts with regard to youth consultation,
with several consultations taking place locally and nationally in which young people from
Thanet have played an essential role. According to a member of the Pie Factory team

this is a huge step forward as the young people have not previously had a voice and they
are now being taken seriously at funding levels, which demonstrates that attitudes higher
up the ladder are beginning to change as well as those of the young people who are begin-
ning to see that what they think counts for their future and they have the opportunity to
make changes happen. (personal communication, May 31, 2006)

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Sarah Baker is a lecturer in cultural sociology at Griffith University, Australia. From 2003 to
2005, she was an Australian Research Council postdoctoral research fellow at the University of
South Australia’s Hawke Research Institute and has since held research fellowships at the Open
University and University of Leeds, United Kingdom. Her most recent work on young people’s
music making can be found in Journal of Youth Studies (2007) and Youth & Society (2008).

Andy Bennett is a professor of cultural sociology and director of the Centre for Public Culture
and Ideas at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He has authored and edited numer-
ous books including Popular Music and Youth Culture, Cultures of Popular Music,
Remembering Woodstock, After Subculture, and Music Scenes. He is a faculty associate of the
Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University; an associate of PopuLUs, the Centre for the Study
of the World’s Popular Musics at Leeds University; and a member of the Board for the European
Sociological Association Network for the Sociology of the Arts.

Shane Homan is a senior lecturer in communications and media studies at Monash

University, Australia. Research interests include the music industry, youth, and cultural policy,
and his most recent book is Sounds of Then, Sounds of Now: Popular Music in Australia,
co-edited with Tony Mitchell and published by ACYS, Hobart in June 2008.