- Sam Wetherell | “Richard Florida is Sorry ” If decaying cities wanted to survive, they had to open cool bars, shabby-chic coffee shops, and art venues that attract young, educated, and tolerant residents. Eventually, the mysterious alchemy of the creative economy would build a new and prosperous urban core.” “Richard Florida, one of the most influential thinkers about cities in postwar America, wants you to know that he got almost everything about cities wrong.”
- Roberto Bedoya | “Spatial Justice: Rasquachification, Race and the City” “Rasquachification is also what the community activist Jenny Lee calls placekeeping—not just preserving the facade of the building but also keeping the cultural memories associated with a locale alive, keeping the tree once planted in the memory of a loved one lost in a war and keeping the tenants who have raised their family in an apartment.”
- Carribean Fragoza | Art and Complicity: How the fight against gentrification in Boyle Heights questions the role of artists “We are still waiting to see an example of where an arts district didn’t displace a community. The designation of an arts district is a tool of development.”
- Colin Kinniburgh | How to Stop Gentrification “What happened? The explanation is simple enough: Freret was designated a “cultural district” by the state in 2012, allowing new businesses—but not existing ones—to operate tax-free. A slew of restaurants opened in quick succession, turning Freret Street into a “dining hot spot” for young, white, subsidized crowds while long-running businesses like the local barber shop were left to fend for themselves.”
- Irfana Jetha Noorani | “Who is it for?” “While the 11th Street Bridge Park and similar projects across the country are addressing factors of economic displacement in surrounding neighborhoods (see the Bridge Park’s Equitable Development Plan), we often struggle to tackle the less tangible effects of our projects—cultural displacement.” Though cultural displacement can take different forms—from change in a neighborhood’s physical characteristics (like architecture or landscaping), demographic shifts, or a new coffee shop that opens down the street—it’s about when residents feel a dwindling sense of ownership over their space.
- Megan Wilson | “The Gentrification of Our Livelihoods” (San Francisco, CA) “To help reverse this current trend we must continue to further our discussions on how we each operate and impact our immediate and expanded communities. It is important that we hold individuals, organizations, funders, small businesses, and corporations accountable for the roles they play and the impacts they have on our communities and the greater culture.”
- Sam Gould | “The Afterlife: Art for Art’s Sake in the Experience Economy” (Portland, OR) “Today artists, by varying degrees, are more and more being given the task of embodying the social and experience economies that prop up the free market and illustrate wealth where it doesn’t yet exist and, likely, only will in the future for a lucky few. They are tasked with being the vanguard for developers and business interests, governments, and non-profit’s funded by all three, to advance into situations wherein the veil of “creativity” acts as sleight of hand, a temporary distraction while the heavy lifting is being played out behind the scenes.”
- Alex Rayner | “ArtHouse: Los Angeles and New York artists tackle the inequity of real estate” “Month2Month is a response to the way contemporary artists are sometimes employed, unwittingly, as tools of the real estate industry. “There’s often an attempt to do art projects in areas that are being prepared for the next level of gentrification,” says Dalton.”
- Rebecca Solnit | “Gentrification’s Toll: It’s you or the bottom line and sorry, it’s not you” “Contemporary gentrification is an often violent process by which a complex and diverse urban environment becomes more homogeneous and exclusionary. It does to neighborhoods and cities what climate change is doing to the earth: driving out fragile and deeply rooted species, and pushing the poor past the brink.”
- Roberto Bedoya | “Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-belonging” (Tuscon, AZ) “The relationship of Creative Placemaking activities to civic identity must investigate who has and who doesn’t have civil rights. If Creative Placemaking activities support the politics of dis-belonging through acts of gentrification, racism, real estate speculation, all in the name of neighborhood revitalization, then it betrays the democratic ideal of having an equitable and just civil society.”
- Joel Kotkin | “Richard Florida Concedes the Limits of the Creative Class”
“…following the “creative class” meme has not only meant wasted money, but wasted effort and misdirection. Burning money trying to become “cooler” ends up looking something like the metropolitan equivalent to a midlife crisis.” - Gentrification and the Artistic Dividend: The Role of the Arts in Neighborhood Change” (working paper) | “A great deal of case study work demonstrates that individual artists, artistic businesses and artistic spaces (e.g. small galleries, theaters, music venues and art studios) function as a ‘colonizing arm’ that helps to create the initial conditions that spark gentrification.”
- Neeraj Mehta | “The Question All Creative Placemakers Should Ask,” “Let’s define “who benefits” as a clear indicator of our success or failure. We need to be more purposeful, targeted and explicit about who our creative placemaking strategies are intended to benefit. And if we’re working in communities that are distressed, poor or have been historically populated by communities of color, then we need to make sure that whatever strategies we design, or investments we make, are creating benefit for them.”
- “Creating a Better Neighborhood for the Same Neighbors” (Oakland, CA) “The challenge for those trying to preserve the integrity of these newly desirable neighborhoods is to institute improvements that appeal to residents but repel developers. “
- Next City | “Rick and Dick: A visual primer for social impact design” “How can community-engaged practitioners, instead, be a part of breaking down persistent barriers and building the capacity of communities who have been denied access to resources (in some cases for generations) to take ownership of the neighborhood’s future?”
- “Artists of Transported + Renewed Weigh In” (Houston, TX) “Throughout the planning, initiation, and implementation of the project, concerns that might seem basic to creative placemaking projects were either dismissed or met with a defensive and disrespectful response”
- The Conversation | “From dissident to decorative: why street art sold out and gentrified our cities” “Much of the street art pumped out through the festival apparatus provides an aesthetic of transgression, while remaining perfectly numb to the social realities of its setting, treating public space like a blank canvas, rather than a site already loaded with cultural, historical and personal significance.”
- Village Voice | “Bushwick Natives Protest Hipster-led Gentrification” “People have been pushed out more and more and we have nowhere left to go, so this is our chance to kind of push back using the same tool that was used to displace us, which is art.”
- Creative Time Summit | “Art, Place, & Dislocation in the 21st Century”
- Thomas Frank | “Dead End on Shakin’ Street,” “The public art of the thirties was often heavy-handed, close to propaganda even, but it was also critical of capitalist institutions and intensely concerned with the lives of ordinary people. The vibrant, on the other hand, would separate the artist from such boring souls. The creative ones are to be ghettoized in a “scene” which it is their job to make “vibrant,” thereby pumping up real estate prices and inspiring creative-class onlookers.”
- Anne Godwa Nicodemus | “Artists and Gentrification: Sticky Myths, Slippery Realities “The perceived link between artists and gentrification is one reason that mayors, developers, and business improvement districts “buy” creative placemaking’s potential.”
- Sean M. Starowitz and Julia Cole |”Thoughts on Creative Placetaking” “Let’s begin by giving the majority of Creative Placemaking endeavors their real name of ‘Rebranding Campaigns’.”
- “A Tale of Two Street Mural Projects” (Bushwick, NY) “Street artist gilf!, who has participated in both mural projects but doesn’t see herself painting new walls in Bushwick anytime soon, summed up her frustration colorfully: “I don’t want to be the asshole who gentrifies myself out of the neighborhood I helped create.”
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“Hipster-mites” and “Evil crops developer” are the villains in West Bronx gentrification mural “Gentrify these honeycombs with your cultural appropriation and privilege!” the villain commands, “Give rise to luxury condos and coffee shops.”
- “Meeting Place” (Portland, ME) An NEA “Our Town” funded project. “The Meeting Place project was organized around five key goals: 1) engaged, active members that reflect the diversity of the community; 2) a collaborative culture with recognized and supported leaders; 3) a knowledge of its challenges and assets; 4) a good relationships with other neighborhoods and city government; and 5) an environment of respect, caring, hope and vision.”
- “Grafitti Writer ZEXOR Declares War on Gentrification, Street Artists, and The Bushwick Collective” (Bushwick, NY)
- Megan Wilson’s Clarion Alley Project
- “How Do You Make An Arts Community Explode? Feed ‘Em Jargon and Very Little Respect” (Milwaukee, WI)
- Right to Wynwood (below) from Right to Wynwood on Vimeo (Miami, FL)
east 9th st. placekeepers 