ABSTRACT
Charles Perry, in his history of San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district, describes a network of places, shops, newspapers, groups, events, and people that together constituted a kind of hothouse within which the hippie counterculture took root and ourished. In Perry’s words,
This is the kind of social and spatial infrastructure that one often sees around more culturally oriented social movements. We call places like Haight-Ashbury a scene. In this chapter we elaborate a working denition of a scene, drawing distinctions between it and other free-space concepts. We then offer several propositions about the roles that scenes may play in social movements, and close with a few words about the future utility of the scenes concept.
