Community well-being, post-industrial music cities and the turn to popular music heritage

In this chapter, we interrogate how a turn to popular music heritage can represent an important strategy for reinstating a sense of well-being for disenfranchised communities in post-industrial music cities. Our specific interest is in the potential of popular music heritage initiatives to enhance community members’ participation within the socio-cultural (online and offline) spaces of Birmingham, the UK’s largest city outside London and one in the process of being branded a ‘music city’. With its rich musical heritage, our case study of Birmingham highlights how heritage initiatives can have a positive impact on individuals within a community impacted by industrial decline. The turn to popular music heritage, we argue, can enhance civic pride (Power and Smyth 2016) through the creation of spaces that foster a greater sense of well-being and attachment to place among the community of interest involved in such heritage activity. As this chapter demonstrates, the heritage sector, and in particular the community heritage sector, can make significant contributions to the making of the music city in ways that support the flourishing of local communities