[Commlist] New book: Urban Music Governance: What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy and Our Cities

New book

/Urban Music Governance: What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy 
and Our Cities/ (Intellect, 2025) by Jess Reia (Assistant Professor of 
Data Science, University of Virginia).

 From the back cover:

What happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data 
collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands? Buskers have 
been part of our cities for hundreds of years, but they remain invisible 
to governments and in datasets. From nuisance to public art, this 
cultural practice can help us understand the politics of data 
collection, archives, regulatory frameworks, and urban planning. Busking 
also responds to underlying questions on the boundaries of the rights to 
the city, and who has a voice in shaping how our cities are planned and 
governed. A transnational exploration of street performance, /Urban 
Music Governance/ examines the intricate limits of legality, data 
visibility, and resistance from the perspective of those working at the 
social and regulatory margins of society. Based on a decade of fieldwork 
in Rio de Janeiro and Montreal, this book offers a lively account of why 
such an often-overlooked practice matters today. By investigating the 
role of busking in contemporary society, /Urban Music Governance/ 
presents an original interdisciplinary study that exposes how power 
dynamics in policymaking decide issues of access—and exclusion—around 
us, above and below ground.

Overview of chapters:

Foreword by Will Straw

Introduction: What Does Street Performance Teach Us about Cities?

Part I: Numbers and Norms

1. More than Numbers: Counting, Categorizing and Describing

Buskers across Time

2. Regulation: Engaging with (Dis)order in Everyday Life

Part II: Above Ground and Beyond Regulation

3. Legitimation: The Blurred Boundaries between Policy and Control

4. Disputes: Busking as Public Service and Lawmaking

Part III: Going Underground, Being Understood

5. Disobedience: Lawbreakers and Talented Stars

Afterword: Pandemic, Digitalization and Evidence-Based Policy

The e-book version is now available and open access: 
https://doi.org/10.18130/px27-tn03 <https://doi.org/10.18130/px27-tn03>

The print version is also available for purchase from most booksellers 
or from the University of Chicago Press (Americas, Australia or New 
Zealand): 
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/U/bo245009492.html 
<https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/U/bo245009492.html> 
and Intellect Books (rest of the 
world):<https://lnkd.in/eTK762AZ>https://www.intellectbooks.com/urban-music-governance 
<https://www.intellectbooks.com/urban-music-governance>.


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