Creative Time 2013: Margaret Crawford

On October 25 and 26, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts partnered once again to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees were asked to submit a paragraph that touches upon the topics relevant to the summit's theme: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City. This posting is by Margaret Crawford, Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley.

Two words that I hate: placemaking and vibrant. Yet I constantly hear these buzzwords in urban planning and design, public art and arts funding, often paired, implying that the first invariably leads to the second. Although I would be happy to blame Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” thesis (see my previous ARC keyword) for popularizing them, this definition of “successful” urban spaces has a much longer history. Both words can be traced back to the 1960s, a key moment in American urbanism, when a new set of values appeared that inverted the dominant view of cities. In 1961 Jane Jacobs dismissed in a single sentence the entire history of 20th century planning. Instead she celebrated the life of the sidewalk in her Greenwich Village block. A decade later William H. Whyte documented the social life of midtown public plazas and vest-pocket parks. Both aimed their descriptions, defining public space as feel-good, human-centered urban experiences, at white suburbanites, hoping to attract them back to the city. Surprisingly, in Manhattan, where race was a key metric by which white people evaluated urban space, neither mentioned race at all. Both also ignored the radical redefinition of public and private spaces that civil rights activists were demanding at lunch counters, on buses, and with massive marches. Their followers, such as the Project for Public Spaces, codified Jacobs’ and Whyte’s observations into a theory of placemaking that underlies many current efforts to create pleasant and lively experiences for tourists and affluent residents. They define successful public spaces as those untroubled by the tensions and politics of race, class, ethnicity, gender or age.   

The latest inheritor of this tradition is Mayor Michael Bloomberg. During his term he closed Broadway to traffic, started a public bike program, installed miles of bike lanes, and sponsored the High Line and other parks. But can placemaking efforts and vibrant public spaces offset other forms of spatial restriction directed at specific publics, such as “Stop and frisk” laws that largely target minority residents? Should placemaking hide the less visible realities of an increasingly gentrified and unequal city where, as the New Yorker recently reported, there are more homeless people than at any time since the 1970s?  This is a question that placemaking advocates have yet to answer.

Creative Time 2013: Kate Mattingly

On October 25 and 26, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts partnered once again to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees were asked to submit a paragraph that touches upon the topics relevant to the summit's theme: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City. This posting is by Kate Mattingly, graduate student in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: demonstrate

Listening to speakers during the Creative Time Summit today, a keyword emerged that was not so much repeated throughout the afternoon (like “vibrant” or “grassroots,” both of which deserve more attention and analysis) but present through the presentations’ modes and priorities: demonstrate.

I’m not sure if the format of the summit, its brief but animated snippets of projects and ideas, generated this tendency to emphasize what the artists, professors, writers, critics, and educators consider essential and worthwhile. Making the benefits of a project or concept the priority of a talk is laudable, but one after the other these presentations took on a similar tone. I started to wonder where reflection on such projects can happen, or where do we discover when things don’t end up as expected or planned? If an element of indeterminacy is shared among many projects that are grouped under the “social practice” umbrella, why can’t a sense of unpredictability exist as part of these reports? What about unexpected results and relationships?

The verb “to demonstrate” suggests a display of skills that are mastered or proof of knowledge learned. As a dancer I have watched and participated in my share of lec-dems (lecture-demonstrations) during which some technique or form of dance is explained and showcased. In public spaces, “to demonstrate” takes on an explicitly political tone: to make oneself heard and seen. All these connotations relate to what I saw today at the summit, and this makes the event an important occasion to highlight ideas, outcomes, and practices that are happening today and shifting individual and collective thinking. Demonstrations are important and can rally support for various causes.

My question becomes what does demonstrating allow and what does it foreclose? Who are we demonstrating for? Do the summit’s audiences need to be convinced of the worth of these projects and research? Could other outcomes be generated by extending the lengths of some presentations so we can learn about the arcs, blind-spots, or pitfalls of some works? If similar words appear in multiple presentations can we pause and consider their different valences?

To me, a demonstration suggests more of a pedestal to display one’s ideas than an incubator to explore a concept. When we demonstrate can we, at the same time, allow for tensions, for disagreements, for failures?

I was inspired by many of today’s speakers, particularly Rick Lowe, who acknowledged the slippery slope of “impact.” Like demonstration, the word “impact” necessitates similar questions: for which groups of people? How is it measured? Is it synonymous with a project’s value? I also liked Lowe’s response to a question about how to know if a project is working: “The project hasn’t become real because we haven’t encountered tensions,” he said. Later he added that he senses how people are responding to a project “intuitively,” which, to me, defies quantifiable analysis.

If an experience evades easy display or demonstration, how can we not diminish its value or even its necessity? 

Creative Time 2013: Lauren Kroiz

On October 25 and 26, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts are partnering once again to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph that touches upon the topics relevant to the summit's theme: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City. This posting is by Lauren Kroiz, Assistant Professor in History of Art at UC Berkeley.

In this list of terms, I’m particularly interested in dislocation. Unlike “art” and “place,” which I think of as solid nouns and things in the world, “dislocation” invokes the action of dislocating. I wonder about the obscured verb’s subject, object, and their relation. Is what I experience as urban flux, mobility and vibrancy always also the cause of dislocation for someone else?  Can there be movement without displacement? 

I’ve spent much more time thinking about the relationship between art and dislocation in cities of the 20th century than the 21st.  At the risk of perpetrating my own historical displacement of this year’s theme, I’d like to consider a series of sixty paintings Jacob Lawrence finished in 1941 to explore the notion dislocation. 

You can see the odd numbered panels in this Flash experience from the Phillips Collection:

http://www.phillipscollection.org/migration_series/flash/experience.cfm

and should be able to access the even numbers from Lawrence’s MoMA record:

http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=3418

Entitled The Migration of the Negro, Lawrence’s paintings envisioned the early twentieth-century movement of more than a million and a half African Americans from the rural South to northern industrial centers. Early panels chronicle the difficulties faced by blacks in the South, from boll weevils to lynchings. Middle panels illustrate the opportunities found in northern cities, but also show improved housing becoming increasingly scarce and dilapidated. Bombs explode from the homes of migrants who try to move to new parts of the city.  Lawrence suggests the ways violence limited class and racial mobility in the urban North as it had in the South. Ultimately Lawrence envisions the results of the Great Migration as mixed; his migrants contract tuberculosis in the crowded city, but also exercise the right to vote. 

I’m thinking of Lawrence because his abstracted forms and narrative show African Americans dislocated from the South by white racism and the failure of Reconstruction, but that’s only half of a story that also includes active agency.  African Americans moved themselves North to new economic, political, and cultural opportunities and challenges. Lawrence dramatizes the complex links between dislocation and mobility in this early twentieth-century context.   

Artists probably can’t take too much “credit” for gentrification or control it (Lawrence couldn’t even keep his panels together). But, I wonder if it is possible for art use its irrationality to hold two views. Can we preserve the utopian promise of urban mobility even as we critique the dislocation caused by that movement? 

Creative Time 2013: Shannon Jackson

On October 25 and 26, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts are partnering once again to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph that touches upon the topics relevant to the summit's theme: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City. This posting is by Shannon Jackson, Director of the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley.

I think it is so interesting to see Creative Time take questions of artistic social engagement to issues of place and creativity in urban and regional planning.  In my own work, I find that these streams of thinking and making are strangely un-aligned, often talking past each other.  Socially-engaged art expands the parameters of visual and performing art practice.  Sometimes this work seeks to explore relationality as such; sometimes this work is connected to a fairly explicit social justice mission.  Meanwhile, urban arts planning and placemaking uses a language that sounds familiar to many politically-minded artists; words like "engagement," "participation," "community," and "intervention" come trippingly off the tongue of many city planners and "creative class" promoters.  But the goals of such projects often have very little to do with addressing issues of social and economic justice or of provoking a critical consciousness beyond what can be safely absorbed by the palatable ironies of a boheme marketing campaign.  Urban "vitalization" seems quite far removed from bio-political "vitalism."  

And yet, here we are, trying to see if we can find a sweet spot where political engagement and "creative class" engagement might redirect and redefine each other. Does this conjunction mean building different skills across artistic and civic sectors?    Is it about learning to intervene at economic scales and in institutions to which artists have only occasional access?  Is it about changing our conceptions of how we define "political" or "radical" practice in a city, a neighborhood, in a community center, or down the block?  Is it about trying to find formal innovation and political resistance in urban planning sectors where we usually find "instrumentalization"?  Can we redirect the discourses of urban vitalization to support a platform for the so-called creative "under-class"? Perhaps this the sweet spot.  If so, occupying the sweet spot seems to be about deploying a discourse that is always on the edge of deploying you.

Creative Time 2013: Megan Hoetger

On October 25 and 26, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts are partnering once again to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph that touches upon the topics relevant to the summit's theme: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City. This posting is by Megan Hoetger, graduate student in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Placemaking

In his 2012 article, “Placemaking and the Politics of Belonging and Dis-Belonging,” Robert Bedoya writes: “What I’ve witness [sic] in the discussion s and practices associated with Creative Placemaking is that they are tethered to a meaning of ‘place’ manifest in the built environment….” Further, Bedoya asserts, “its insufficiency lies in a lack of understanding that before you have places of belonging, you must feel you belong. Before there is the vibrant street one need an understanding of the social dynamics of the street – the politics of belonging and dis-belonging at work in placemaking in civil society.”

What happens if we begin to understand place not just as stabilized and visually manifest site, but as a complicated network of non-visual cues and codes that would seem to choreograph our movement in certain spaces? Would seem to choreograph our very sense of belonging?

The word placemaking has become far-reaching in its deployment—it can at once be mobilized by city officials to ‘talk strategy’ for a ‘vibrancy plan’ (city revitalization, public engagement and interaction), by private business to promote commercial interests (a festival, a restaurant district, a mall), or by artists or cultural producers aiming to create a sense of community through the establishment of shared spaces (alternative galleries, co-ops, and multi-use centers). The undertones of Richard Florida’s creative class can also be heard echoing in the term—maybe hidden somewhere in that narrowed gap between the two conjoined words, place/making. Bringing that gap out indeed helps to bring out the gaps and the fissures in vision’s making of place-ness.  

I come back to the notion of choreography now as a means to propose an alternative scene for the making – that scene being the moving itself, or the structures and organizing principles (economical, technological, and so forth) that control movement. Whose bodies are moving when and where? And how does the organization of that movement, visually manifest but never stable enough to produce a clear image, make a place? How does it make a place that welcomes some and bars others?

Creative Time 2013: Jesse Rodenbiker

On October 25 and 26, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts are partnering once again to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph that touches upon the topics relevant to the summit's theme: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City. This posting is by Jesse Rodenbiker, PhD student in Geography at UC Berkeley.

Two Eiffel Towers stand in nearly identical proportions in vastly different locales. Their embodied histories and the meanings they signify are highly divergent. So are the symbolic and material relations to those who live in their vicinity. What does the Tianducheng’s Eiffel Tower replica connote? How is it approached on-the-ground by those who live daily in the shadow as well as those displaced residents moved for its construction?  What statements of capitalism, art, intra-colonial state formations or the neo-colonial present does it convey?  Does it constitute a form of urban forgery or urban mimesis in creation of a make-believe spaces that serves to attract capital from the competitive sphere of inter-urban regional place making in China? The recent proliferation of mockumental architecture raises many questions about art and urban praxis. From Europe-themed towns, ‘traditional’ Chinese new-towns, and supra-technical eco-cities quickly dotting the Chinese landscape these post-modern creations of idealized spaces offer many questions that intersect art and urban (dis)location.

This corpus includes MAD architect’s design for China’s natural-themed shan-shui city combines an essentialized Chinese cultural aesthetic, which incorporates classical landscape gardening features with contemporary techno-centric sustainable architecture. The building project now slated for construction in Guiyang grew out of an art exhibit in Shanghai that aimed at thematically bridging human-nature relationships. Through literature surrounding this conceptual bridge, modeled art exhibition, as well as dialogical reformulation of a culturally resonant signifier (shan-shui 山水) the discursive discourse generated was integral to the processes of producing the possibilities that allow for new places to come into being, both in material and imaginary forms. Reified through urban forms of the future and building on historical antecedents, the contemporary Chinese imaginary is reformulated through both the art installation, digital artifacts, and emerging urban forms.

Yet, the radical on-the-ground transformations, often times mask dispossession and accumulation within soothing development narratives that suggest continuity with the past vis-à-vis the reality of rapid change. These contradictions require a deep reckoning.  Articulations of urban developments and urban forms that creatively embellish and remake the past create meaningful forms of representation, which are significant in constructing the present. Creative re-imaging leads to creative imagining.  This summit could seek to engage and begin to unfold the interpolations of place-making, art, and social justice with forms of cultural hegemony and contestation expressed through venues of art exhibition, urban forms and urban political processes of becoming in hope that strongly informed approaches for generating possibilities for strengthening understanding of art, social justice, and the urban may emerge.

Creative Time 2013: Hannah Merriman

On October 25 and 26, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts are partnering once again to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph that touches upon the topics relevant to the summit's theme: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City. This posting is by Hannah Merriman, artist and educator.

"An artist organizes a political rally about a local issue. The project, which is supported by a local arts center in a medium-size city, fails to attract many local residents; only a couple dozen people show up, most of whom work at the arts center. The event is documented on video and presented as part of an exhibition. In truth, the artist can claim to have organized a rally?"  This is one of the provocative questions that Pablo Helguera raises in his bookEducation for Socially Engaged Art.  How should we evaluate the success of social practice art projects?  On their aesthetic merit or their social agenda?  These are crucial questions for those of us who aim to have a social impact our creative work.  Is it important to clearly defined goals at the outset or a project or is an art project more like a living entity which should grow and change depending on who is participating?  I often hold up Lily Yeh's transformative work as a one of the most inspiring examples creative placemaking.  Her collaborative methodology allows everyone to have a sense of ownership in the process which in turn makes the new space truly communal - not the work of a single artist.  She also seems to be working outside the confines of the academic art world and liberated from some of the critical theories that might seek define or narrow her approach.  For me, she is the model of a socially engaged art practitioner who’s work embodies a courageous ethos of collaborative making – a shining example for those of us who fear getting caught up in theoretical “rallies”!

Reimagining the Urban: Megan Hoetger

As part of the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center co-sponsored the Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space on September 30, 2013. Participants have been asked to submit a blog post "on a keyword you see debated in the Bay Area arts, policy, and planning landscape." This posting is by Megan Hoetger, a second year PhD student in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Long-term

The long-term is a durational temporality. If I set this against the continuous present of the participle, ‘re-imagining’–the keyword which leads the title of the symposium–what kind of time do I find myself in? The call for the long-term engagement is a particularly fraught one for the field of visual art practice forcing the surface a series of questions, like: how long is enough for an artist to engage a community? How long should the dialogue be? How long does the project go? How long should the artist *be* in that space, or need she be there at all? What point, if ever, should/can she dis-engage and move on to the next community, city, country? When I shift these questions to arts organizations we might similarly ask: how long is long enough? And, coming more sharply in focus at this level, if long-term is the desired time, where is funding to sustain that continuous present coming from? How might that conflict with the very conceptual root of the continuous present action, to re-imagine? What costs must we / are we / should we be willing to pay to secure that duration temporality? And what do we imagine to be the relationship between the artist / the arts and communities across the long term?

Radical Connectivity — Joel Slayton, director of the Zero 1 biennial in San Jose, delivered a presentation on the topic of digital public art practices, which is the focus of the biennial. Slayton proposed two forthcoming changes (which a consensus has agreed are forthcoming, although whose consensus I am not quite sure): the first, radical connectivity; the second, infinite data. The former brought ‘the radical’ to bear on the ways in which Cloud will revolutionize our connections, shifting us into a culture of reciprocity; that is, a culture of give and take. What Slayton’s proposition, as great as it sounds, seems to ignore is the basic issue of access that surfaces as soon as we begin to talk about Cloud and infinite data.

Radical parasite– Raquel Gutierrez’s presentation on her work with the new program YBCA in Community brought ‘the radical’ to bear in a fundamentally different way, directly taking up issues of access. Gutierrez’s deployment of the term was paired to with a relation based on reciprocity but with a self-recognized leechlike relation. Gutierrez is from Los Angeles and only recently relocated to the Bay Area for this job at YBCA; here with within the communities in San Francisco, as a result, is as that of an itinerant outsider. What she proposed though, was not to try to overcome that status as outsider, but the possibility of operating as a radical parasite and working within the realities of uneven power relations and precarious duration to create space for youth outreach. 

Slayton and Gutierrez proposed seemingly opposing visions of a radical long-term relationship, so what do we make of the viability of the extended duration as a mode of artistic engagement? Can the relationship be both reciprocal and parasitic?

Reimagining the Urban: Kimberly Richards

As part of the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center co-sponsored the Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space on September 30, 2013. Participants have been asked to submit a blog post "on a keyword you see debated in the Bay Area arts, policy, and planning landscape." This posting is by Kimberly Richards, a first year PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Collaboration

The complexity of the discourses about the city, arts, and public spaces has prompted me to reflect upon the merits, necessities, and challenges of interdisciplinary work. In order to assess the strategies that are being employed in the Bay Area to navigate this difficult terrain, I traced the conference’s discussion around collaboration and recorded when the prefixes “inter,” “cross” and “trans” were used so as to reveal something about the nature of the “connections across the arts and public space.” This approach was, in part, inspired by the final line of the conference program, which asks, “what is the potential and what are the limits of cross-arts, cross-sector coalition-building … and what new skills and platforms are required to facilitate it?” This loaded question acknowledges that tensions can be high when we move across these boundaries; nevertheless, there remains a sense in which navigating these movements and discovering and inventing new strategies and modes of collaboration are, in fact, the preferable—if not the only—way in which to “reimagine the urban.”

Over the course of the day we heard from artists and academics, designers, and commissioners, civic activists and arts administrators, and several of these presentations were collaborative in form. We celebrated intersections of artists with communities, publics with spaces, and artistic performance in site-integrated places. We learned about the cross-pollination of audience experience within We Players’ performances and the geographic specificities of building crossroads in the Tenderloin district. I admired the transparent maps that showed the movements of the city’s transportation and the efforts to produce transparent agendas at 950 Center for Art and Education. Vocabulary that indicated movement across, between, and amongst artists, communities, and places saturated the discussion, revealing the essential need to work together, forge partnerships, and build bridges across different and multiple disciplines.

The benefits of collaboration were clearly articulated by Andy Wong and Deborah Cullinan, who shared their vision for 5M–an intersectional place designed to facilitate idea creation across traditional boundaries. Cullinan admitted that collaboration requires complex negotiation, but “If we are not going to see each other across boundaries, we’re not going to see solutions to the problems.”

Reimagining the urban is an intensely local project, and there are pragmatic and political justifications for building from the ground up, but if we really are all one ecosystem, and we’ve accepted that we need to work across boundaries, what collaborations might we seek beyond the legal boundaries of the bay? How can we translate and interpret good ideas in other urban centers to suit the needs in our community? Who are the interlocutors that can and should be mobilized, and what spaces do we need to create in order to facilitate these cross-cultural collaborations?

Reimagining the Urban: Leslie Dreyer

As part of the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center co-sponsored the Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space on September 30, 2013. Participants have been asked to submit a blog post "on a keyword you see debated in the Bay Area arts, policy, and planning landscape." This posting is by Leslie Dreyer, a first year MFA student in Art Practice.

Keyword: (In)equity, Inevitable?

Dr. Shannon Jackson, who co-organized Reimagining the Urban, opened the symposium with questions including, in summary: What kinds of creativity are valued and for whom? And how can collaborating across sectors create solutions rather than obstacles? Another question to ask here would be: solutions for whom? Margaret Crawford, who blogged about Richard Florida’s theory and Creative Class policies “pushing up rents and displacing local businesses and residents,” restated Jackson’s questions by mentioning San Francisco’s “success” alongside the displacement of long-time local and influential artists. I was curious how the panelists would address questions of equity and access in their strategies of “reimagining.”

Session I seemed focused on creative business models for arts organizations and survival under neoliberalism, especially in the new tech boom. Andy Yang of Forest City described the 5M project, which is a 4-acre mixed use network of buildings and organizations, all of which Florida would categorize as belonging to the “creative class.” He mentioned new enterprise opportunities emerging from 5M, including a “homeless to hacker” success story, which showed what is possible but perhaps not probable for the majority of the surrounding disenfranchised community. He also acknowledged the low rate of community attendance during Grey Area Foundation’s (backed by 5M) Urban Prototyping Festival. I started to wonder how the arts orgs involved in the symposium interpreted “serving the community” and “community-based” art. Do they serve those fortunate enough to afford market-rate rent, those with a longer history of residency that are facing displacement, both?

Deborah Cullinan, executive director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, emphasized wanting a “place at the table” and parity between the “indigenous” community (using a potentially controversial definition meaning long-time residents), arts organizations and developers, though she didn’t explain how this parity would be achieved. She said that “instead of standing on the sidelines in protest” they were going to “throw [themselves] into the change and make it better.” Unfortunately there wasn’t enough time for me to ask the questions: 1) Better for whom? 2) Instead of standing on the sidelines in protest, can’t we stand on top of the “table” (the one at which arts non-profits hope to sit alongside city reps, tech industry reps and developers) and not accept the change, specifically the displacement of long-time locals, as inevitable? 3) Who is not at the table, and is sitting there with “unlikely allies”[i] an act of survival of the fittest or solidarity for those who aren’t invited?

In Session II the speakers described technology-driven urban arts projects while avoiding the equity question. The projects were “accessible” meaning one didn’t have to be tech savvy to use or understand them. Some of them appropriated vast amounts of user data prompting Dr. Teresa Caldeira to ask how technologies that collect such data is being / could be used in this era of expanding surveillance. Joel Slayton of Zero 1 responded that it was inevitable that it would be used to surveil the public but that the arts could be a “cultural watchdog,” which seemed to elude tech developers’ role in public surveillance and privacy infringement.

Why were increasing inequity and surveillance imagined to be “inevitable” by many in this symposium, and what would it take to move participants to reimagine that they’re not? Is our only hope as artists or arts orgs to become “radical parasites,” a phrase mentioned by panelist Raquel Gutierrez, feeding off the tech industry for money and disenfranchised communities for content and perhaps more grant money (or is she using the phrase in more of a Robin Hood sense: feeding off tech to give to the poor)? I don’t have quick and easy answers as to how to achieve equity in a city with such high rates of evictions, economic inequality and unaffordable housing, but I know the policy changes that we need to stem the tide of gentrification and class-warfare, starting with mid-market as ground zero, require the sheer force of the masses. Will non-profits play a role in muting dissent, a critique posed in INCITE!’s book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-profit Industrial Complex? Will they leverage their “place at the table” to inspire support for policies that help keep the disenfranchised in their homes and in the community arts programs designed for them? In what ways can artists reimagine the urban that makes equity inevitable?

---

[i] A term used numerous times in Session I of the symposium

Reimagining the Urban: Hallie Wells

As part of the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center co-sponsored the Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space on September 30, 2013. Participants have been asked to submit a blog post "on a keyword you see debated in the Bay Area arts, policy, and planning landscape." This posting is by Hallie Wells, a third year PhD student in Anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Spontaneous

What is spontaneity if not serendipity—a surprisingly pleasant encounter, saying yes to adventure, walking up the steeper street on a whim and being rewarded with the better view? Spontaneity, perhaps because of its association with creativity and positive action, popped up throughout the conference as a human potential that urban art projects and development plans should tap into. Spontaneous interactions can be facilitated by architectural and design features, as Deborah Cullinan and Andy Wang noted of the 5M Project, or by technological innovations such as those discussed by Joel Slayton of Zero1. From Jake Levitas we heard about the unexpected hand-holding with strangers made possible by the “I Just Wanna Hold Your Hand” urban prototype project, and Ava Roy gave an eloquent description—both at the conference and in her blog post—of the moments of spontaneous joy engendered by the interactions between the natural and built environment, performers, and audience members during the We Players’ performances.

Spontaneity is not unique to urban environments, of course, but throughout the conference we heard calls for urban planners, arts administrators, policymakers, and artists to incorporate possibilities for spontaneous interaction into their projects. This seems particularly necessary as a means of countering the violent, painful, and troubling forms of spontaneity: police brutality, evictions, muggings, shootings, rapes, catcalls, stop and frisk, and on and on. The things that make us think twice about walking alone in certain places. The things that make us stop and stare or, conversely, avert our eyes. The things that, as Raquel Gutiérrez put it, make us hard.

Of course, many of these things aren’t spontaneous at all, at least not in the dictionary sense of occurring through some inner impetus, without an exterior force. In the same way that certain built spaces and landscapes lend themselves to certain kinds of human interactions (dark alleyways at night, sunny expanses of grass …), structural racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty make certain kinds of human interactions predictable. We are not surprised when they happen, except when they happen to us. And when they happen enough, surprise gives way to a mixture of despair, anger, and apathy.

We may spend energy and time and money on a heart-warming project one day, and someone will steal it the next. BART platforms become murder scenes, daytime playgrounds host nighttime drug deals. In planning for the serendipitous moments of spontaneous connection, we cannot forget or ignore the possibilities for harmful confrontation. Is there a way to create projects that acknowledge these possibilities but provide opportunities—and reasons—to treat each other better? 

Reimagining the Urban: Christina Gossmann

As part of the ongoing campus initiative Global Urban Humanities: Engaging the Humanities and Environmental Design, the Arts Research Center co-sponsored the Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space on September 30, 2013. Participants have been asked to submit a blog post "on a keyword you see debated in the Bay Area arts, policy, and planning landscape." This posting is by Christina Gossmann, a second year in the Master of City Planning program at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Public Nature?

The last session of the day, What is the “Bay” in the Bay Area? Creating Nature, acknowledged the elephant in the room—the Bay—but it also revealed the ambiguity of ownership surrounding this, “our” Bay. From Brad McCrea’s mention of changing legal rights (“Most things you can do on land, you can’t do in the Bay.”) to Louise Pubols’ historical account of the Emeryville shoreline as a “junky throw-away space” where artists/students/people were not afraid of “messing up,” we caught a glimpse of an immensely complex puzzle: public nature.

The concept of public space is hard enough to define, let alone create, as planner after planner has learned in practice and we, as a class, have read and discussed this semester. Applied to natural space, the level of complexity around its publicness increases significantly—possibly naturally so. To enforce guidelines around public space and disallow appropriation, certain rules apply. In the face of nature’s vulnerability in cases of misuse, these rules weigh heavier.

An exceptionally illustrative—and timely!—example is currently unfolding as a result of the U.S. government’s shut-down, enacted on Tuesday, the 1st of October: America’s 401 national parks are closed. Why? Because “the only way I can protect these places during this period is to shut them down,” as National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis told National Public Radio earlier today. The government would expect vandalism, theft, poaching, if national parks remained open to the public without appropriate enforcement.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/10/03/228719015/national-parks-close-as-other-public-lands-stay-open

Curiously, and somewhat confusingly, national forests remain open. On one hand, public forests have more access points than parks and are therefore, simply logistically, harder to control. On the other hand, “those lands are open to a wide range of public activities,” explains Jarvis.

This reasoning is dissatisfying to me on multiple levels, and this is where I will bring us back to “our” Bay. As Susan Schwarzenberg, Brad McCrea and Louise Pubols have engagingly articulated, the Bay is very much contested (just remember the “outlaws,” imperial powers and polluting corporations all claiming a piece of the Bay). Moreover, I would argue that, unlike National Park Service Director Jarvis claims, the extent to which land can be used does not determine, or even slightly influence, its access. Again, I’d like to point us to a timely example.

The Albany Bulb is a landfill located just off of the Golden Gate Fields racetracks. Graffiti enthusiasts, dog-walkers and the homeless have been mingling on the half-island for years. In short, the land is used extensively. And yet, illegally. The City of Albany has recently voted to begin enforcing no-camping laws at the Albany Bulb. The 70-odd homeless are expecting the authorities any day now.

The Albany Bulb. Source: http://www.berkeleyside.com/2013/09/05/whats-that-san-francisco-bay-as-seen-from-the-air/

My provocation is this: Maybe the question Linda Rugg raised around the extent to which we define ourselves as people living by the Bay and our impact on nature as well as nature’s (creative) impact on us, could be altered to become a self-examining one: Who is the “we” interacting with nature, and does every Bay Area resident have the access or right to this interaction?

Christina Gossmann loves the challenge and thus impatiently awaits your email: christinagossmann@berkeley.edu