Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles (review)

Recently, the world's population became "urban" in its majority. For some, this demographic fact concretizes an underlying truth—the city is one of the greatest, most spectacular achievements of humanity. Of course, this "beacon of modernity" is a dynamic palimpsest of the material realm of urban planning and the ideological sphere of social relationships. While it is certainly not difficult to imagine that there is an important correlation between spatial design and identity formation, the question of empirical "proof" remains a challenge. In other words, how, exactly, do we feel like "New Yorkers," for example, and create such a sense of belonging? Can we trace this sentiment in the contours of the cityscape?

In Sound, Space, and the City, Marina Peterson has taken on this challenge as it relates to Los Angeles. As a counter current to the copious scholarship on this "empty" and fragmented model of the "post-modern condition," Peterson argues that, indeed, one can identify and qualify Los Angeles' "center." Instead of interpreting the multiple movement of sub-urban sprawl as leaving LA's downtown in a vacuum, Peterson takes seriously the Community Redevelopment Agency/Los Angeles (CRA/LA) and their discursive term of "neutrality" regarding downtown. As discussed in the opening chapters, one can only understand such "neutrality" in relation to and transportation through the surrounding segregated neighborhoods. It is this latter process of entrepreneurial urbanization and public policy that inspired the widely read, provocative essays by Mike Davis and theoretical musings of geographer Edward Soja. Peterson is more upbeat as she focuses on the potentiality of socio-spatial transformation in the public space of 2 California Plaza in the neighborhood of Bunker Hill, and the role of "Grand Performances" in a managed process of urban collectivity under the banner of diversity.

Similar to a modernist, Bauhaus piece of furniture, Peterson has streamlined her narrative as a cogent mix of social theory and ethnographic data in her formal comments on the potential impact of public art on the civic subject. In the slim text, she provides urban and institutional history, as well as phenomenological insights into "Grand Performances" as a problematic but ultimately successful articulation between "neutrality" and multiculturalism. Peterson assumes a relatively informed reader as she gestures to the primary models of thought concerning "multiculturalism." "Grand Performances" fits well, because the events package identity as a consumer product and contribute to the privatization of public service (e.g., nonprofit organization and management) while simultaneously stretching the parameters of civic inclusion. Peterson is more rigorous in tracing the lineage of "multiculturalism" as an expressive arts movement in the Los Angeles area and contextualizing "Grand Performances" within the political and market logics of ethnicity and identity formation across this particular urban landscape. Since the talent comes from the city itself, "Grand Performances" directly attracts a wide variety of community groups and invites them to occupy 2 California Plaza as emblematically theirs. Furthermore, "Grand Performances" emphasis on the local is an intentional pitch to the audience that this downtown space is a synecdoche of the city. The extent to which this occurs during a performance or over the course of a concert season is captured in the phrase: "Los Angeles at its best" (a phrase from an audience member used as chapter title).

What distinguishes Sound, Space, and the City from the current wave of anthropological analyses of citizenship is Peterson's ethnomusicological perspective. As a performing cellist, Peterson invites the reader to consider her position in the field as a meaningful location of knowledge. In particular, her participation as a member of the DaKAH hip hop orchestra emerged as a productive site for socio-musical analysis. Drawing from linguistic anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, Peterson begins with a maxim: "genre is both musical and social, constituted through inter- and intramusical identifications" (79). In short, DaKAH is an ideal type of "sonic embodiment" and sounding out the city of LA, because the group remains explicitly local in...