What Gentrification? (original) (raw)
Related papers
Art, Gentrification and Regeneration - From Artist as Pioneer to Public Arts
European Journal of Housing Policy, 2005
The role of art and the artist has played a part in both of the main long-established theories of gentrification, looking respectively at 'culture' and 'capital' as key drivers. Cultural analyses of gentrification have identified the individual artist as an important agent in the initiation of gentrification processes in old working-class neighbourhoods. Alternative theorizations have recognized a second stage where capital follows the artist into gentrified localities, commodifying its cultural assets and displacing original artists/gentrifiers. The paper will argue that more recently a third key model of gentrification can be recognized where the main driver of gentrification is 'public policy' which seeks to use 'positive' gentrification as an engine of urban renaissance. This involves the use of public art and cultural facilities as a promoter of regeneration and associated gentrification.
2014
This version of the paper is what my committee bullied me into, not my original. They asked me to misquote and misrepresent Raymond Williams work at my defense. Feeling is his central concept; I was forced to go through the paper and change anywhere 'Feeling' was used and replace it with structure of experience. I decided to upload the dissertation they forced me to butcher Williams work. This dissertation examines art and artists in Detroit, in relation to the historical, political, and economic conditions of material life in the city. A primary concern of this project is to investigate how artists express claims to Detroit -- its past, present, and future. Specifically, I explore their responses to recent revitalization efforts. In turn, this project examines how artists’ creative self-expression potentially yields a reworking of memories and possibilities for the future.
Cracks in the Creative City: The Contradictions of Community Arts Practice
The recent flurry of research about arts-led regeneration initiatives illuminates how contemporary arts festivals can become complicit in the production of urban inequality. But researchers rarely engage with detailed empirical examples that shed light on the contradictory role that artists sometimes play within these spectacularized events. Similar research in performance studies connects the political limits and potential of social practice arts — interventions that encourage artists and non-artists to co-produce work — as civic boosters strive to stage cities in order to attract investment. In this article, I explore the case study of Streetscape: Living Space at Regent Park, a participatory artistic intervention programmed in a public housing neighbourhood that is undergoing redevelopment in Toronto, Canada. Streetscape was part of the Luminato festival, an elite booster coalition-led festival of 'creativity'. I refer to these arts interventions to demonstrate how artists engaging in social practice arts can become complicit in naturalizing colonial gentrification processes at multiple scales. But I also reveal how artists can leverage heterogeneous arts-led regeneration strategies to make space for 'radical social praxis' (Kwon, 2004), interventions that challenge hegemonic regimes. I conclude by interrogating the effectiveness of place-based efforts in unsettling the 'creative city'.
Gentrification in Spain and Latin America — a Critical Dialogue
Major social and political transformations such as the shift towards neoliberal urban policies have widely altered the contemporary structuring of metropolitan areas in Spain and Latin America. One key consequence is the recapture of city centres by wealthy tenants and the eviction of poorer households, a phenomenon usually designated by the term gentrification. In comparison to the comprehensive documentation of gentrification in the Anglophone environment, few scholars have paid attention to this phenomenon in this area of the world so far. This article responds to this gap, providing an exhaustive revision of the debates about gentrification occurring in Spain and Latin America during the last decade and tracking two theoretical motivations. First, it stresses the necessity of characterizing gentrification discourses in Spain and Latin America, preparing a conceptual appropriation and contextualization of the term itself. Second, it confirms that gentrification in Spain and Latin America varies substantially from processes observed in the Anglophone world. As a result, the review develops insights into emancipating and challenging debates that remain useful for the mainstream gentrification discourse too. Addressing this, it proposes a reconsideration and repoliticization of gentrification through the territorial and linguistic lens of Spanish and Latin American researchers.
Slavic Review, 2018
Much of the literature on post-Soviet ideology interprets ideology as the content of state-sponsored doctrines or measures it via persistent strands in public opinion. This paper relies on a different notion: we think of societal and state perspectives as engaged with each other in a contentious dialogue that is constitutive of ideology. With this dialogic conception of ideology, this paper provides a map of Russia's ideological terrain through an analysis of the debates surrounding Andrey Zvyagintsev's 2014 film Leviathan. We show that the film and the debates it provoked engaged with state-sponsored narratives and highlight three key themes of ideational contestation in contemporary Russian politics: authority, agency, and authenticity. An examination of these ideational battles in which provocative and resonant societal critiques challenge dominant narratives provides an original account of ideology in contemporary Russia. It also speaks to debates on civil society that have increasingly become interested in ideational politics.
Greening the urban frontier: Race, property, and resettlement in Detroit
In 2014, approximately 100,000 lots lie ‘‘vacant’’ in Detroit after decades of industrial decline, white flight, and poverty. Planners and government officials have proposed to repurpose Detroit’s highest vacancy neighborhoods, deemed to have ‘‘no market value,’’ as blue and green infrastructure (retention ponds, carbon forests, urban farms, greenways). According to the Detroit Future City plan, traditional public services (water, street lights, transportation, garbage pickup) and the ‘‘grey infrastructures’’ that deliver them will be reduced and eventually withdrawn from these zones. While Detroit is widely touted for its potential as a model green city, the costs and benefits of green redevelopment are distributed unevenly within the context of gentrification and bankruptcy. Through an analysis of media representations, a contentious citywide planning project, and the construction of a private urban forest, I demonstrate how settler colonial imaginaries and rationalities articulate with austerity measures to prepare a postindustrial urban frontier for resettlement and reinvestment. During the historical era of U.S. settler colonialism, economic development happened through westward expansion on a continental scale (and then imperial scale), but today, in the urban United States, it occurs through internal differentiation of previously developed spaces and is taking a new form. Where the rural settlers of the 19th century sought to conquer wilderness, ‘‘urban pioneers’’ in the 21st century deploy nature as a tool of economic development in a city with a shrinking population and a large spatial footprint. Yet accumulation by green dispossession still turns on some of the defining features of settler colonialism, e.g., private property as a civilizing mechanism on the frontier, the appropriation of collective land and resources, and the expendability of particular people and places. The production of this new urban frontier also depends, like any frontier, on erasure: the material and discursive work of presenting ‘‘empty’’ landscapes as in need of improvement by non-local actors. I argue that understanding the stakes of postindustrial urban development struggles requires attention to how concepts of (white) settler society – which have been absorbed into political and legal-juridical institutions, discourses, myths, symbols, and national metaphors – are used to claim ‘‘wild’’ and ‘‘empty’’ lands like those in Detroit.
Journal of Rural Studies, 2013
Amidst China's immense and rapid urbanisation, gentrification has spread from urban centres to periurban and rural areas. Employing an analytical perspective built from the literatures on counterurbanisation, rural immigration and rural gentrification, this study examines the two-stage gentrification processes in Xiaozhou village, Guangzhou, China. Situating rural gentrification in Xiaozhou against broader backdrops e such as urbanisation in Guangzhou and the preservation regulations imposed by the local state e this article unveils the ways in which interplays between the aestheticisation of rural living and indigenous villagers' rent-seeking behaviour fostered rural immigration and gentrification. In Xiaozhou, grassroots artists' aestheticisation and colonisation of the village ignited an initial stage of gentrification. The subsequent commodification of rural land and housing, induced by increasing concentration of art students and middle class "elite artists", led to deepened gentrification, studentification and eventually displacement of pioneer gentrifiers. In this process, local villagers' rent-seeking behaviour went hand in hand with aestheticisation and commodification of rural space. This finding questions the representations of victimised local rural residents in much of Western literature on rural gentrification. The special role played by the government policy and institutional arrangement in the stories of Xiaozhou also has the potential to add a new dimension to rural gentrification explanations. In sum, this paper shows that explanations of the perplexing dynamics of rural immigration and gentrification can benefit from more flexible and fluid conceptualisations of "gentrifiers" and "gentrification" as a whole.
Commodifying Street Art in Detroit: Permissive Location and Rhetorical Messages
ABSTRACT: Street art is a visual rhetorical tool that produces a discourse in opposition to elites and dominant classes. In the city of Detroit, there has been economic devastation, but an influx of artists into low cost housing available throughout the city. Do-it-yourself culture (DIY) is growing due to local government cutbacks and the culture of the people entering the city to live and work. One expression of DIY is through the creation of public art. Public art projects are becoming commonplace in Detroit, some with the permission of owners of property and others without. This paper aims to survey three public art projects in Detroit through the lens of Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry to see how DIY and public art with permission can serve to co-opt the rhetorical messages behind street art. The DIY nature of new public art projects serve neoliberal interests providing free labor and enhancement to the community for the benefit of property owners.
Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 2009
ABSTRACT Over the past few years, Toronto has experienced a massive reinvestment into the inner city, mostly in the form of high-rise condominium towers, which was followed by the largest population growth in over 30 years. The city that used to praise itself as multicultural, ethnically diverse and socially-mixed, has, as recent studies indicate, become spatially divided into three distinct cities: the constant city of the rich, the shrinking city of middle-income households, and the growing city of concentrated poverty. In this paper we suggest that the condominium towers are a new form of gentrification that contributes to the spatial trifurcation of the city. We call it the condofication of Toronto. We start with a discussion of some aspects on gentrification, followed by an analysis of policy documents and reports that have been guiding urban development in Toronto. We then take a look at the incoming condo-dwellers, before we conclude that the City needs to revisit its planning instruments in order to prevent further spatial segregation in Toronto.
This dissertation explores the contours of artistic economic activity through participatory action research conducted with artists and artisans in the Greater Franklin County, Massachusetts. The creative economy has drawn significant attention over the past ten years as a principle economic sector that can stimulate the redevelopment of post-industrial cities. However, dominant creativity–based development strategies tend to cater to the tastes of an economically privileged, and implicitly white, “creative class,’ leading to gentrification and social exclusion based on race, ethnicity, class, and gender. These exclusions also apply to artists and artisans, occupational groups whose economic activity and needs have been paradoxically erased from dominant creativity-based development prescriptions. The data were collected as part of a collaborative research project in which twenty-two artists and artisans were hired from the region to conduct interviews to explore the economic lives of their peers. These peer-interviews were embedded in a collaborative research process, which generated two data streams: one hundred and thirty-two peer-interviews conducted by the research team and the ethnographic data from the collaborative research process itself. Through analyzing the peer-interview data, I find that regional artistic economic activity spans both the formal and informal economy and derives from a wide range of non-market logics. I argue that the multiple values of artists and artisans give rise to heterogeneous economic practices and logics, which fall outside the formal economy and are thus largely ignored in existing entrepreneurial initiatives to support the arts. Within the already precarious situations of professional artists, I also find that these conventional initiatives intensify vulnerability for artists from marginalized groups. Through analyzing the ethnographic data from the research process, this dissertation also deepens understandings of community-based research methods. In particular, I extend the discussion of peer interviewing beyond how interviews are conducted to developing new ways to analyze the data produced by this method. I also illustrate the micro-political effects of conducting participatory action research on its subjects, arguing that this method offers an innovative model for transformative social change.