The recent trend of creative placemaking is hailed by the National Endowment of the Arts as a means to reinvigorate cities and neighborhoods through arts and cultural programming. And although societies have been conceiving and constructing creative spaces for centuries, current tensions in culture-led redevelopment are rampant. Ever since Sharon Zukin explained in her SoHo-specific treatise Loft Living (1983), “gentrification is accomplished through the artists’ symbolic appropriation of space, which is in turn seized by investors to attract capital reinvestment in the built environment,” many people accept this as a de facto natural law of post-industrial development. This perceived link between artists and gentrification is one reason why mayors, developers, and business improvement districts buy into the potential of creative placemaking. As a one-time supporter and now critic of the movement, Roberto Bedoya warns, “A troubling tenor of creative placemaking discourse is the avoidance of addressing social and racial injustices at work in society and how they intersect with creative placemaking projects.” It is crucial to our understanding of the potential of public space that we further explore how projects can result in expanded opportunities for low-income communities, people of color, and artists, and weigh them against undesired outcomes like displacement. This paper explores some of the more striking and subversive cases of creative placemaking in recent years, including the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, the 5 Pointz Aerosol Art Center, Fourth Street Arts Block, and the rise of urban exploration and trespass theater. In defining certain ways of engaging in a space, are we in effect distinguishing certain types of creative acts within a community context and disregarding others? Are there nascent creative capabilities and ambitions that are already present in a community that we should find new methods of tapping into?
About the presenterGina Marielaina Tribotti
Gina graduated from UC San Diego with a Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts, and is currently completing a Master’s degree at Columbia University. From 2010 to 2012, Gina served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan, where she developed arts curriculum, taught participatory theater as a means to overcome conflict, and led development initiatives at Bishkek Contemporary, a network of galleries and artist studios housed in a former Soviet factory.