Jamming with Urban Rhythms

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork, this article analyzes alternative rhythms of youth culture. The aim is to illustrate how young people improvise and organize rhythms in the city as a part of their place-making. I develop the concept of a spatial jam session, which provides a framework suitable for analyzing spatial dimension of contemporary youth culture. Developing Henri Lefebvre’s rhythm analysis through empirical material, a phenomenological understanding of place and jazz theory contributes an analytical framework that takes bodily, material, spatial and temporal dimensions of the place-making practices of young people into account. Using the concept of a spatial jam session, I argue that a central aspect of young people’s place-making is being able to improvise through materiality, sociality, cultural norms and musical expression. I illustrate how young people create spatial and temporal obstructions in order to maintain a practice of improvising, which to these young people is a way of constructing meaning in everyday life.