The power of local networking: Bologna’s music scene as a creative community, 1978–1992

Musicians have always established a symbiotic relationship with the urban environments in which they live and work, with a tendency to aggregate into place-based relational networks. Bologna provides a clear example of this phenomenon to the point that the evolution of its musical scene can be characterized in terms of its relational dynamics. We study a network of artists whose main common trait has been the deliberate choice of coming or returning to live and work in Bologna, locally producing their records in the period 1978–1992, a sort of “creative golden age” in the recent musical history of the city. We use Social Network Analysis to reconstruct the structure of the relationships that have bound together the Bologna’s singers-songwriters scene in its relationship with the urban context. Making use of the Newman Community Detection algorithm, we find a dense, vital and collaborative scene, organized around four different, musician-centered communities, that are permeable to collaborations with each other. This vital system of related creative communities has been the driving force of Bologna’s salience in the national musical scene in the 1980s and early 1990s, and its analysis provides insights for the design of cultural policies aimed at leveraging the potential of urban creative scenes.