Venture capital cities & DIY punk spaces
Grace Rochelle Guimond
Following the publication of Richard Florida's seminal creative city thesis in 2004, cities around the world were inspired to adopt municipal development policies for attracting these creative classes and their capital. Meanwhile, the ‘tech start-up renaissance’ of the mid-2000s inspired new forms of global communication and cultural production: often likening themselves to creative artists and cultural innovators, this new generation of younger, hipper, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and start-ups are increasingly drawn to these so-called creative cities, made attractive by their status as pre-established cultural industry and infrastructure hubs (Florida & King, 2016). This new and sudden influx of tech capital in such cities sees a growing disconnect between use and exchange value of land, as these ventures prompt large-scale redevelopment projects of old industrial land and warehouse spaces––popular sites for quasi-legal, DIY (“do-it-yourself”) and underground music venues due to their distance from city centres and relative affordability.
Thinking about the local implications of these burgeoning types of tech-start up, I wondered how these new creative and cultural-tech industries intersected geographically with the infamous acceleration of DIY music venue closures within the past decade. This object is a map that I created from Florida's list of the top 15 North American cities for venture capital tech investment in 2015 that shows a small handful of the DIY punk spaces, that is, underground, community-run venues hosting a majority of punk shows. It includes both the quintessential “punk house” as well as a number of non-residential, unlicensed, and/or commercial locations that are not zoned for music that have shut down in these cities since 2014. Fluctuating geographical and temporal boundaries, the shifting extent of DIY and punk/adjacent scenes, and the transient, temporary, and esoteric nature of punk houses et al. make maps and lists partial and provisional, by definition. My aim in this map is to help visualize a small slice of the relationship between these two phenomena.
Words and interactive map by Grace Rochelle Guimond