IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

Cultural heritage is a social process of protecting, working out and contesting cultural identities. A process of urban heritage consists of a dialogue of bottom up consumer culture and top down Authorized Heritage Discourse (AHD). In our paper we discuss the different layers of urban heritage in a mid size Finnish industrial city of Pori. We begin with the layer of industrial heritage of Pori. Then we ask how the popular music culture has since the 1960’s been mixed with the historical industrial identity, and involved in the urban place-making in Pori, its transitory townscapes and a translocal urban communities. Since the late 1960s, the city center of Pori, along with its adjacent Kirjurinluoto park area, has served as a setting for the annual Pori Jazz Festival – one of the longest-running jazz festivals in Europe. The festival week turns the townscape to a platform for a translocal community of music lovers. How do different ways of conceiving and using cultural heritage intersect in Pori during the festival? Then we analyze the urban heritage layer of an alternative music scene in Pori. In the early 1990’s Pori—along with the rest of Finland—fell into a deep economic depression. New musical influences, such as grunge, trip-hop and shoegaze began to land in Finland. Experimental, and even avant-garde ways of musicing and scene-making emerged in the city of Pori. How did the alternative scene of Pori emerge and how was it actually built on the other layers of urban heritage?