Metro Music: Networks and Meanings of Creative Scene Development in Toronto's Queen Street West

• In Event: 023 - Regular Session. Popular Culture: Spaces, Places, and Scenes

Abstract

This paper examines the development of a historic urban creative scene. The case of the punk and new wave scene of the late 1970s/early 80s in Toronto's Queen Street West neighborhood addresses debates on the causal force behind scene development: spatial agglomeration versus social networks. Ethnographic and historical evidence demonstrate the contributions of a pre-existing social network, as a clique of youth from the Toronto suburb of Thornhill directed creative labor toward the social and cultural ecosystem of a key neighborhood institution, an art college, that in turn fostered spatial infrastructure, artistic practices, and creative identities associated with the neighborhood. The findings give new attention to local constituencies and their local structures of feeling — suburban boredom, sexual identity, contested meanings of musical genre and scene membership — in the development of creative scenes.

Author

• Leonard Nevarez, Vassar College