Beyond the Open Scene: Mobility, Belonging and Cosmopolitan Music-Making in Berlin

This project explores how translocal mobility shapes musical practices and self-concepts among cosmopolitan musicians embedded in the popular music scenes of Friedrichshain–Kreuzberg. Drawing on research with internationally mobile musicians from the Global North, it examines how relocation into a cosmopolitan urban context reconfigures processes of identification, belonging and musical creativity beyond ethnic-national or diasporic frameworks.
The material also raises questions of classed mobility, linguistic capital and access to urban musical infrastructures, as well as forms of gatekeeping that operate within ostensibly open music scenes, and the role of local cultural policy in producing "cosmopolitan" musical spaces.
Situating these questions within debates on translocality, cosmopolitanism and urban ethnomusicology, the project treats Berlin not as an exceptional case, but as a starting point for comparative inquiry into the politics of cosmopolitan music-making in contemporary cities.