Amplified music as part of urban design: Toulouse copes with the inherent complexities

Abstract

In Toulouse, the urban development project that was consolidated at the end of the 2000's has led to repositioning culture as a lever in favor of metropolitan construction. A broad-based steering committee reached out to the city's artistic actors in seeking to define a novel project involving amplified music that called for, among other things, construction of a complex dedicated to the local performing arts scene, known as the "Metronum". Inaugurated in 2014, this facility is intended over the long run to bolster a territory that had been weakened by a lack of venues of artistic creation and performance. The location chosen in an outlying district of Toulouse was also aimed at easing the social and geographic transformations shaping a metropolitan area, where buoyant growth had stretched the urban fabric over a much broader scale. However, the roundtables held on integrating music into the urban planning and development process attested to the presence of tensions between the political and artistic communities, opposing the desire to facilitate widespread musical activities with artists' tendency to spontaneously converge their craft at the city center. This article shows the extent to which the study of amplified music reveals a city's unique spatial dynamics, capable of undermining the priorities of an urban design project.

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