Reimagining the Urban: Ying-Fen Chen

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 Ying-Fen Chen, a PhD student in Architecture at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: A Vision of Site-Responsive Arts Collaborations in Communities

It had been a blue Monday for me before I arrived at the symposium, Reimagining the Urban: Bay Area Connections Across the Arts and Public Space, at noon. I had just finished a class in the morning and was still suffering from the flu. In the crowded auditorium, there weren’t many seats left, but I found one next to a stranger. After brief introductions, I lapsed into silence and wished the symposium end soon that I could go home to recover from my virus. Ten minutes later, in the third section of the day, I not only knew the name of the stranger near me, but had enjoyed a stimulating conversation with her about her vision—site-responsive community-led arts collaborations—against the gentrification phenomenon in Bay Area.

Raquel Gutiérrez is a manager for IN COMMUNITY Program of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, facilitating community collaborations through the arts in SOMA, Mission, and West Oakland. Sometimes, she introduces artists to the communities, and sometimes, her group works with the residents, using arts to represent the minor ethnic groups’ histories, to bridge differences among multiple groups within a neighborhood, and to create a public space for the community. It seems a promising vision for combing arts and community work, avoiding a way that arts are often used by the capital in gentrification process. However, given my previous experience as a participatory planner in Taiwan, I know that the participation of arts in community often faces several problems, especially in low-income or minority communities: some selfish-interested artists easily get into conflicts with residents; arts may become a gate keeping some residents away who believe they cannot participate in the program without enough previous education; the sometimes ambiguous role of major actors can influence the result of the program, deviating from the original goal and undermining the community; the ownership of the arts after the program also brings different impacts to the community. Arts are a useful tool in community work, but we need to carefully consider these possible difficulties before we naively jump into the collaborations as an organizer, an artist, or a resident.

Accordingly, in Raquel Gutiérrez’s vision, the concept of “responsibility” is the most important factor in the success of the collaboration of art with communities. Although the way of being responsible is actually based on individual organizer, having no approach to follow, I still appreciate that Raquel tries to bring this concept and its practice to her vision of community work. But, more discussion and informed application is needed to develop and share this concept. Then, a promising and alternative role of arts will actively participate in community collaboration to achieve the goal of creating a livable urban space without the dominating influence of gentrification.

Reimagining the Urban: Kuan Hwa

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 Kuan Hwa, a PhD student in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: "We?"

When Linda Rugg spoke of how “we” define ourselves in relation to the bay, who are the “we” to whom she refers? When Brad McCrea said that the bay is different for “us” as it was then compared to now, are these generations of people in the past and in the present even the same entity? What if some family, previously included in the “we” during the 1970′s, moved away from the bay area in the 2000′s?; would the “we” be substantively changed or does the “we” persist to inscribe those who no longer belong to an area but identify themselves as having once come from it? What would justify an invocation of the “we” to transcend a specific temporal collectivity and ideology? I just moved to the bay area. What justifies me to take claim over the bay as my home, and my inclusion in the “we” of the bay area?

When Ava Roy and Lauren Dietrich Chavez names the “we” in “We Players,” who is this collective invoked through their speech? For “We Players,” the collective pronoun in the title seems at first to refer only to the actors themselves, but in the dramatic performance being integrated into a site with audience participation, the “we” clearly refers to what Roy repeatedly called “the people” at the art event. The true extent of this collectivity is hard to measure, because the degree of transformation within the participants at the theater production has no such thing as a unit. What is the criterion to adjudicate the degree or kind of collectivity of the “we” in this case (was an adequate feeling of togetherness produced? Was a new kind of collectivity effectively achieved?)? Even if a demographic survey were to be taken of the participants, it would not ensure that a public had been formed. If photographs show that people convened, how is this any different from the plethora of photographs on twitter and social networking sites that expose people convening for the shopping mall on Black Friday, or from convening during traffic? I’m doubtful that people’s senses are attuned to others’ bodies and the surrounding environment only in the event of an aesthetic staging, or that a possibility of a new community needs to emerge specifically from this kind of event. As Brad McCrea seemed to authoritatively conclude, even poetic license is subject to the law (and when, at least in Western art history, is art ever independent of rich patronage or the institutional support of a hegemonic force?). At that point then, will art be necessary to fulfill the needs of the various “we” and the public it seeks; why? What is inadequate to all other forms of collective participation already in daily life (and already in dynamic change– education, the factory, the street, yoga studios…) that is somehow inadequate to the formation of a public for which Roy seeks, and why?

Reimagining the Urban: Photostream

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. Graduate student Megan Alvarado Saggese took pictures of the event, which can be seen on her photo stream here.

Reimagining the Urban: Kate Mattingly

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 Kate Mattingly, a PhD student in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Connectedness

Before the symposium began, a cluster of people on the waitlist stood next to the balcony. Their view of the floor below looked something like this. Threads held tiny pieces that resembled straws or mini-bones and were constantly waving, but at first glance, the mobile appeared motionless. It took a moment to notice these pieces were in motion, and even closer inspection showed that tiny weights (visible in the picture below) ascended and descended just below the ceiling, mapping the mini-bones’ movement in vertical axes.

If I could choose not a keyword but a key-image, it would be this sculpture. It captured the interconnectedness of shifting landscapes that were broached during “Reimagining the Urban.”

The word “connectedness” comes from the phrase “an intimate connectedness,” which I heard Shannon Jackson say just before Session IV. It seemed prescient. Brad McCrea of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, then spoke about ways in which his work involves a delicate coordination of four elements: environmental issues, historical preservation, real estate development, and social justice. I thought of an image Dr. Jackson had used earlier of “picking up a corner of the rug” and looking at a situation from a certain perspective.

When the rug is pulled too sharply by one of McCrea’s four “corners,” the others shift. This reminded me of reading Jamie Peck’s “Struggling with the Creative Class,” in particular his critique of Richard Florida’s proposal: “The less creative underclasses have only bit parts in this script. Their role is secondary and contingent, in economic terms, to the driving and determinant acts of creativity. Their needs and aspirations are implicitly portrayed as wrongheaded and anachronistic, their only salvation being to get more creative. And the libertarian politics that envelops the creativity thesis, in as far as it concerns itself with the underclasses at all – for the most part these are portrayed as servants of the creative class, or the stranded residents of ‘hopeless’ cities – peddles only voluntaristic and usually moralizing solutions.”[1]

Dr. Peck shows how a lack of attention to equitable distribution plus a privileging of certain forms of creative action (namely those that benefit gentrification) can de disastrous for certain communities. This recalls a question posed to Raquel Gutierrez after Session III by someone who had worked in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin and who faced the dilemma (paraphrased): “are we working in these places to benefit people who live in these neighborhoods or to benefit people who want to change these neighborhoods into more exclusive places for upper and middle classes?”

Gutierrez acknowledged the interconnectedness of ethics and poetics in artists’ projects, the “complicated” environments she works within, and the possibility that each of us gravitates toward a different place on the spectrum of priorities between social justice and aesthetics. Throughout the day, I found myself thinking about cities as mobiles, constantly shifting, negotiating ever-moving variables. A tricky task emerges when qualitative differences transfer into quantitative data: the mini-bones fluctuate at seemingly random intervals/these weights chart their movement vertically.

Other phrases stayed with me: the examination of our “ever-increasing levels of connectivity” and what they enable and foreclose in a “hyper-individualistic” world; the definition that “design sits somewhere between art and technology;” the importance of meeting people where they are, and the phrase “radical conditions of possibility.”

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[1] Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 29.4, Dec. 2005,  p. 759.

Reimagining the Urban: Alec Stewart

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 Alec Stewart, a second year PhD student in Architecture at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Revitalization (=Gentrification?)

Kicking off the Reimagining the Urban symposium, Margaret Crawford spoke of a real estate development boom in San Francisco that has contributed to an exodus of roughly 10,000 artists from the city. This familiar narrative is one of rising real estate prices forcing the working classes out of neighborhoods such as the Mission while yupsters move in, bringing with them expensive restaurants, high-priced boutiques, and exclusive national chains. A similar process is occurring on a larger scale in the Mid-Market area, where over40 active real estate projects will bring several million square feet of new office, residential and retail space—not to mention new entertainment and dining options—into a previously “seedy” neighborhood. It is hoped that these infrastructure investments will provide the amenities desired by the so-called “creative class,” “revitalizing” the Mid-Market neighborhood while driving San Francisco’s economy forward.

Revitalization is a word frequently used by city officials, business improvement districts and other civic boosters in cities ranging from DC to Portland to describe their efforts to pave the way for young creatives and their lifestyles. I think it is related to, if not synonymous with gentrification. In Mid-Market, it refers to the A.C.T.’s conversion of a boarded up porn theater into an arts school and performance venue and the arrival of numerous arts foundations from pricier parts of town (like the Mission). It means numerous new condo towers and office buildings. And it will be fueled by collaboration between arts institutions and developers in creating comfortable ‘eco-systems’ for tech workers, makers, hackers, and food truck aficionados.

Such partnerships are central to the revitalization strategies being deployed in the Mid-Market area. Forest City’s 4 acre, 1.7 million square foot 5M Project highlights but one example of this phenomenon, where the economic utility of an arts organization is demonstrated through its interactions with a large real estate developer. In exchange for financing and a venue for its activities, Intersection for the Arts lends its curatorial expertise to Forest City, which deploys it for the benefit of its tenants and corporate bottom line. This relationship may be “mutually exploitative,” as Andy Wang and Deborah Cullinan suggest–Wang’s Forest City clearly views it as a solution to an image problem, while Cullinan’s Intersection for the Arts sees it as a means for survival. San Francisco’s sophisticated tech employees are turned off by blatantly formulaic Starbucks and other chains, says Wang, and it is for this reason that Intersection for the Arts is indispensable. As it programs 5M’s public facing spaces with popular events such as Off the Grid and live jazz concerts, it plays a strikingly similar role to that of a business improvement district. Both seek to enliven public spaces with memorable experiences that attract talented workers and middle/upper-class consumers.

In any gentrification narrative there are winners and losers, and surely absent from visions of a revitalized Mid-Market are dilapidated single room occupancy hotels and the homeless. Where are they in this story? And what will become of the artists and arts institutions currently moving to the neighborhood to do the city’s economic development/revitalization work? I’d wager that–as in the Mission–they too will be shown the door as the local real estate market heats up.

San Francisco’s mayor, Ed Lee, recently noted  that, “without that culture of San Francisco and the arts, I don’t think the technology workers would actually want to be here.”[1] In light of this acknowledgement, should the city of San Francisco do more to support the arts given its clear role in economic development? How can the city, developers and arts institutions better incorporate homeless and low-income people into decision-making processes that impact their neighborhoods? How can artists and arts institutions be liberated from their role in cycles of neighborhood revitalization and displacement?

[1] See: John Coté and Marisa Lagos, “Arts Groups Sparked Mid-Market’s Rise, Mayor Says.” http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Arts-groups-sparked-Mid-Market-s-rise-mayor-says-4864615.php