A Tale of Two Cities: The Discursive Construction of Space and Education in Lynn, Massachusetts

• In Event: Spatial Justice and Educational Geographies of (In)Opportunity

Abstract

Objective and Theoretical Perspective
For nearly a century community arts organizations have been bastions of urban cultural production. As educational settings, learning has been centered around helping young people shape the symbolic dimensions of urban space through a variety of artistic media. Although prior research has highlighted the role of community arts organizations in shaping urban space, less attention has been paid to the ways such organizations have been shaped by urban space. This paper engages concepts from organizational theory to
(1) examine how organizational actors at City Art Space—a community arts education organization located in Lynn, Massachusetts—engaged with broader civic discourse as they established their goals for urban culture; and
(2) trace links between urban discourse, culture, and issues of spatial justice.

Methods
To understand how City Art Space evolved in relation to local circumstances, this paper draws on a qualitative discourse analysis of news media artifacts (N=105) and interviews conducted with organizational staff and youth (N=43). I systematically coded local newspaper media over a fifty-year period to identify themes in community discourse before returning to interview data to examine how organizational actors situated their work within broader community discourse.

Findings
In this paper’s findings, I discuss how civic discourse in Lynn, Massachusetts created various spatial imaginaries about youth, and I discuss how educational policy and practice evolved in response. In Part 1, I explain how media representations characterized Lynn, Massachusetts as the “city of sin,” a discourse that construed the city’s problems in terms of crime and cultural dysfunction rather than post-industrial economic distress. I then discuss how this tale of urban decline gave rise to the “Massachusetts Experiment”—a series of community-based intervention programs designed in the 1980s to deter “at-risk” urban youth from a life of crime. Against this backdrop, I trace the emergence of City Art Space and explain how the organization was shaped by—and at times contested—a burgeoning “at-risk” discourse on urban youth.

In Part 2, I trace the rise of a new urban discourse. I discuss how city leaders turned towards the arts to usher in a new golden era of development by solving the city’s longstanding “image problem.” In this tale of urban renewal, I explain how City Art Space staff and youth were omitted from the city’s creative placemaking strategy, in favor of non-local cultural producers who were tasked with “painting over” the city’s existing culture to appeal to a new, wealthier demographic.

Discussion
This paper’s discussion will zoom out to consider how discourses of urban decline and renewal have carried two spatial implications for youth: “at-risk” of becoming locked up under the logic of urban decline and in danger of becoming locked out in the current era of urban renewal. I conclude by reflecting on (1) the significance of self-determined cultural production in urban space and (2) the shifting role of community arts education spaces in an era of widespread gentrification.

Author

• Raquel Jimenez, Harvard University