Creative Placemaking: Art and Gentrification in the Age of Neoliberalism

• In Event: 1451 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Exploring Gentrification

Abstract

Creative placemaking (CP) is an integrative approach to urban planning and community development with the twin objectives of promoting local community development and inducing meaningful and sustainable civic engagement among existing populations. A fundamental premise of CP is that culture and the arts can be harnessed to empower members of marginalized communities. However, CP’s efforts to engage and include local residents in community development may or may not align with existing urban policy frameworks or conventional economic development mandates. How do CP initiatives aimed at a more inclusive form of development engage, address, and deal with the practical realities of gentrification? This paper provides an analytic framework for an ethnographic study of two community-based arts organizations in two cities that have embraced creative placemaking as part of their core strategies for urban renewal. We use Bourdieu’s field theory as a theoretical model for analyzing how the structural processes of gentrification brought about by neoliberal models of urban revitalization may have differential effects at the micro level, providing opportunity structures for community organizations in the form of enhanced funding, but simultaneously laying the foundation for the displacement of vulnerable populations. The adoption of a Bourdieusian framework allows for a nonreductive approach that departs from the economic determinism characteristic of traditional accounts of the role of the arts in gentrification as well as a reconceptualization of the concept of resistance among local populations.

Authors

• Anne Elizabeth Bowler, University of Delaware

• Christopher Mele, University at Buffalo