Gentrification as the appropriation of therapeutic ‘diversity’: A model and case study of the multicultural amenity of contemporary urban renewal

Abstract

Scholarship on urban renewal readily recognises the conversion of ‘cultural diversity’ from a progressive ethic that once addressed ethnic/racial marginalisation into a trope that services early-stage gentrifiers. Through successive rearticulations of cultural diversity as a middle-class lifestyle amenity by various actors, this paper presents a model and case study of gentrification as an incremental act of cultural displacement of racial/ethnic ‘Otherness’ from the valued social ideal of the immediate post-Civil Rights era. Successive waves of new actors in the inner city can be conceptually linked by their reformulation of the amenity of cultural diversity so as to service their interests.

Keywords

displacement diversity ethnicity gentrification urban renewal

Ethnic ‘Otherness’ and the fickle character of ‘cultural diversity’

As an ethic of development stemming from the institutional successes of the Civil Rights era (1960s), cultural diversity was initially envisioned in terms of marginalised racial/ethnic minorities receiving equitable access to opportunities in employment, education and housing. The popular comprehension of cultural diversity is much ‘softer’, asserting that distinct cultural groups/forms can functionally cooperate, and that it is beneficial to do so. The conversion of ‘cultural diversity’ from a social justice ethic to a middle-class amenity lies in its perceived revitalising properties of minority-flavoured difference for an increasingly alienated middle class. Ironically, amidst the alienation of industrial social relations, women and minority groups (particularly people of colour in the USA), whose socially constructed identities connoted a lesser state of consciousness, and thus a greater proximity to nature, have been viewed as possessing cultural elements that are therapeutic to industrial society (see Freud, 1919; Kallen, 1924; Lears, 1981; Pieterse, 1992). Weatherford (1992, 1994) and Leinberger and Tucker (1991) amongst others describe how the notions of kinship, mutual assistance and affection that are reflexively associated with cultural ‘Others’ are perceived as having the capacity to spiritually invigorate and humanise contemporary urbanites. Indeed, de Oliver (1997: 214) refers to the mainstream’s explicit adoption of the vitalising affectations associated with the constructed racial ‘Other’ as ‘therapeutic primitivism’ (i.e. expressionism, animism, mysticism, eroticism, rebellion, sensuality), while hooks (1992: 21) terms the atavistic consumption of this diversity as ‘Eating the Other’. Amidst the manifest realities of systemic discrimination, it is this dimension of cultural diversity that has dominated the popular conception of ethnic Otherness in Anglo-American consumer culture. Emerging in the post-Civil Rights period is a distinct spatialisation of cultural diversity as a lifestyle amenity. Over the last five decades there has been a notable marginalisation of underprivileged racial/ethnic minorities in the inner city as a result of the production of ‘diverse’ spaces by middle-class gentrifiers (e.g. Bennett and Reed, 1999; Berrey, 2005; Florida, 2002) – that is, a marked increase in the amenity of urban space infused with minority-flavoured affectations that contrast with suburbia.¹ This process of displacement has advanced beyond the variable incursions of ‘Bohemian pioneers’ from the suburban middle class who are often associated with the initial phases of gentrification. Presently, cultural diversity as a lifestyle amenity extends to gentrification driven by global and systemic forces that spearhead ‘a comprehensive class-inflected urban remake’ that integrates ‘housing with shopping, restaurants, cultural facilities … recreation, consumption, production, and pleasure, as well as residence’ (Smith, 2002: 443).

This paper reveals the cultural extent of gentrification-induced displacement. Just like urban real estate transfers to new owners who alter it, so too is the articulation of diversity within which the property is culturally embedded. The case study provided in this paper illustrates both broad themes and local variations in gentrification. The paper examines the case in terms of the management and leveraging of diversity as a symbolic amenity through successive stages of urban development in the post-Civil Rights era. Civil Rights, typically conceived as a struggle primarily waged in the southern USA on behalf of African Americans, in fact has important implications for the symbolic depiction of ‘Otherness’ throughout the USA. These effects are not limited to the understanding of African Americans. They include a post-Civil Rights shift in the loci of ‘the race problem’ and impacts the conception of other racial minorities – especially Latinos – who in cities such as San Antonio, Texas, stand in as the racialised ‘Other’. Drawing on the now extensive literature on gentrification, I conceptualise current developments in the Southtown of San Antonio, Texas, as illustrative of successive waves of gentrification, with each wave characterised by differing understandings of diversity as a social value, keyed to distinctive types of gentrifiers and particular alliances between the state and private developers.

The cultural displacement of ‘Otherness’ as stage model

Hackworth and Smith (2001) have described a systemic process of gentrification consisting of three waves that extend from the 1950s to the early 2000s. And Lees et al. (2008) identify a fourth wave emerging particularly in the USA since 2002 that is characterised by an increasing harmonisation of gentrification with non-local systemic forces. This paper asserts that cultural displacement through the legitimating trope of ‘cultural diversity’ is insinuated within each wave of urban renewal. But with each successive wave, the amenity of diversity is increasingly attuned to capital interests and rendered less relevant as an ethic that benefits minority communities. The transformation of cultural diversity from social justice ethic to lifestyle amenity thus represents another instructive perspective on the phenomenon of gentrification.

Figure 1 fits the evolving iteration of cultural diversity to Hackworth and Smith’s (2001) waves of gentrification (including Lees et al.’s (2008) additional wave). The figure shows how gentrification can be analysed by the appropriation of ethnic ‘Otherness’ as a valuable cultural resource. For example, note how Hackworth and Smith’s first wave of gentrification extends through the 1950s to early 1970s and is characterised by public-sector-led gentrification into blighted urban areas. This paper asserts that this period corresponds to the interpretation of cultural diversity as a social justice ethic that would come, in large part, to be focused on underprivileged ethnic minorities who were disproportionately located in the inner city. Subsequently the second wave, characterised by private investment in the inner city in a laissez-faire manner, coincides with the uneven incursion of ‘Bohemian’ middle-class pioneers in the inner city who envision cultural diversity as an anti-suburban lifestyle. Their conception of ‘Otherness’ is integrated into personal aesthetics, including the ‘sweat equity’ refurbishment of their dwellings.

Figure 1.

The articulation of cultural diversity as model of gentrification.

Being the only entities with sufficient capital to afford elevated real estate prices and operating costs in the wake of the recession of the early 1990s, large capital interests took the lead in the third wave renewal of the inner city (Hackworth, 2002; Germain and Rose, 2000). With state support to transform entire city blocks, ‘gentrification by capital’ emphasised high-density corporate rentals, flats and commercial enterprise (Curran, 2004; Kloosterman and Van Der Leun, 1999; Warde, 1991: 230). New residents (often renters) during this period generally lack the personal engagement in the direct production of diverse space or social reformation, valuing the consumption of the local environment and access to employment opportunities; they are joined by suburban day-visitors seeking to experience a sanitised version of non-suburban ‘Otherness’ made so by its unconventional commercial context (e.g. Butler, 2007; Davidson and Lees, 2005). Labels for these environments represent sanitised ‘Otherness’ made safe for mass-market consumption, such as ‘Urban villages’ (Bell and Jayne, 2004), ‘cultural quarters’ (McCarthy, 2005) and ‘Neo-bohemia’ (Lloyd, 2006). As stated by Leslie Doggett (1993: 8–9), Special Assistant to the Secretary of Commerce, ‘this [period] is an opportunity for communities that have unique cultural, historic, or natural resources to create jobs and income from the tourism industry even while other economic sectors are losing jobs’.

The fourth wave of gentrification reflects the full systemic integration of local urban renewal with global capitalist dynamics (Lees et al., 2008). This wave of gentrification represents the definitive departure from ‘welfarist modes of urban governance’ and a movement towards state-sponsored initiatives that are designed to ‘reclaim the city for business, the middle classes, and the market’ (Peck, 2006: 681). The emphasis on investment in the inner city increasingly abandons any of the preceding waves of anti-suburban ‘Otherness’ (cultural diversity) expressed in any organic, expressive, architectural or experiential quality, leaving only the urban geographic location of the investment to connote its distinctiveness to a society that is residentially based in the suburbs. Thus, Davidson and Lees (2005: 1183) describe the normalisation of the gentrification process where urban in-migrants buy into ‘a ready-made aesthetic’ that was pioneered by others. Tonkiss (2005: 91) states, ‘If the early gentrifiers rejected the sameness of the suburbs, the mass production of gentrified spaces now creates … enclaves of visual and social sameness’.

The successive iterations of cultural diversity described in this paper still draw on the inner city as the ‘site of difference’ (Lees, 1996: 458) – but the ‘site of difference’ as a lifestyle amenity that incrementally obscures its origins in race/ethnicity. The process of cultural displacement does not suggest that prior iterations of cultural diversity are extinguished; rather prior iterations are supplanted by a new ‘vanguard’ articulation of ‘Otherness’ that currently corresponds to the agenda and power of new actors in the inner city.

The new agents of cultural diversity in situ: An example from the Mexican-American cultural capital

San Antonio, Texas, is particularly instructive with respect to the analysis of the racial/ethnic dimensions of late-stage gentrification during a broad period of conservative urban policy. The city is characteristic of various southern cities in the USA whose direct linkages to the world economy took place after the Civil Rights period of the 1960s. ‘The timing of Southern entry into the wider economy, shedding its quasi-colonial status, left it as more or less virgin territory, its regional economy free to develop according to the logic of neoliberal, global capitalism’ (Lloyd, 2012: 491). Thus, immediately upon the heels of the Civil Rights era, San Antonio’s cultural identity as the ‘Mexican-American cultural capital’ was explicitly aligned with cultural pluralism in the commercial marketing of the city. The expansion of the city’s multicultural heritage tourism was highlighted by the hosting of the 1968 World’s Fair that bore the theme ‘The Confluence of Cultures’. In the late 1960s cultural diversity was strongly associated with the empowerment of racial/ethnic minorities who, as in other big cities, were disproportionately concentrated in the urban core after the suburbanisation of Anglos that surged in the previous decade.

In the last 15 years San Antonio has economically prospered based largely on employment in its healthcare, military and insurance sectors. But these economic activities have been most effective at stimulating peripheral areas of the metropolitan economy. Population growth in the urban centre has remained relatively stagnant, with some areas experiencing losses. Most notably in the last five years substantial economic investment has resulted from the boom in oil and natural gas production in the 400 mile Eagle Ford Shale geologic formation. But the employment and housing boom has overwhelmingly been concentrated in the small rural towns south of San Antonio and the immediate southern periphery of the city itself. In an attempt to channel revenue to the redevelopment of the urban core, the mayor declared ‘The Decade of the Downtown’ – a programme that set out to add 5000 housing units (a 130% increase) and at least 13,000 jobs (a 25% increase) to the downtown by 2020 (City of San Antonio, 2010). Central to this initiative has been the Center City Housing Incentive Policy (CCHIP).

Immediately contiguous to the southern periphery of the CBD and located within the zone of the CCHIP initiative is an area called the Southtown. Consistent with the underprivileged minority populations that envelop the urban core, the Southtown is predominantly comprised of a lower-income Latino population. As can be seen in the upper map [1967] of Figure 2, the King William neighbourhood comprises one of the neighbourhoods of the Southtown. Being the first neighbourhood in the state of Texas to be formally designated a historic district in 1968, King William is the premiere expression of cosmopolitan gentrification in San Antonio. The CCHIP programme was only the latest iteration of urban renewal in the Southtown; and with each iteration the articulation of ‘cultural diversity’ had changed accordingly.

Figure 2.

Gentrification in the Southtown, San Antonio, Texas: 1967 to 2010.

Analytical components and methodology of the case study

The purpose of the following subsections is to show – through a closer analysis of specific cultural elements of urban renewal – how an understanding of the gentrification process is enhanced by framing it as initially dependent on the displacement of ethnic ‘Others’ as bearers of cultural diversity. This process of displacement involves different articulations of cultural diversity that serve new and more powerful actors investing in the inner city. The specific facets of the gentrification process in the Southtown that will be focused on will be (1) housing/residents and (2) art. The reason these two facets of the diversity displacement process are featured is because (1) the aesthetic of diversity in terms of the composition of residents and their housing stock is a highlighted feature of the ‘new urban renewal’. Along with a disposition towards aesthetic experimentation, (2) the creative refurbishment of dilapidated cultural forms by the ‘art community’ makes their incursion into the ethnic inner city particularly conspicuous with respect to the appropriation of the aesthetic of diversity (see Ley, 2003; Lloyd, 2006).

The very subject of this paper – the expedient rearticulation of cultural diversity from an ethic of social justice to a lifestyle amenity – presents difficulties with respect to assessing public attitudes (e.g. Berrey, 2005). Employing standardised survey forms addressing the utility, value and support of cultural diversity is precluded by the devolution of the term over the last five decades. Establishing a definition of the term ‘cultural diversity’ before engaging a respondent corrupts and precludes a study of people’s construction of the role of cultural diversity in the development of the local environment. Therefore, the additional amount of interaction that I had with interviewees so as to clarify and explore specific expressions of cultural diversity mandates the qualitative mode of analysis that is central to much ethnographic research. This level of involvement with interviewees explains the 18-month period (extending from February 2012 to August 2013) necessary to gather 77 interviews. The interviews consisted not only of local homeowners (24) and renters (8), but also casual visitors (42; who originated from elsewhere in the city) as well as three local store managers. The iterative dimension of these interviews allows results to be presented by representative excerpts from discussions with respondents to convey what are essentially assessments of ethnographic field research. Additionally, aside from visitors encountered during the period of data collection, assessing the environmental incentives for residents based on the period they relocated to the neighbourhood contributes to illuminating the changing conception of ‘cultural diversity’. These field notes were joined by qualitative analysis of the municipality’s public advertising themes as well as the dominant interpretation of cultural diversity by the city’s sole-surviving newspaper (San Antonio Express-News) over the last two decades (as derived from every cultural use of the word ‘diversity’ in the newspaper’s metropolitan section during this period). Moreover, not being a major node of the international urban system, San Antonio, Texas, is not a ‘global city’; thus the local expression of an increasingly transnational form of cultural diversity (fourth wave) is not as advanced as can be found in larger cities. The stage of cultural diversity’s evolution in this case study is squarely in the early period of the third wave of gentrification. While examples of other waves of cultural diversity’s articulation are presented, it is the transition from the second wave of urban renewal (driven by Bohemian individualists) to the third wave (driven by public–private combinations with block-level commercial designs) that is most dynamic. This corresponds to the transformation of cultural diversity as a personal expression of an anti-suburban lifestyle to cultural diversity as a vitalising experience that is mediated by commerce (see Figure 1).

Residents/housing in the ‘place of diversity’

The two maps in Figure 2 show the dispersion of rental properties from the King William subset of the Southtown during its transformation from a decaying urban neighbourhood in 1967 to a landscape of cultural diversity in 2010. Rising land values initially resulted in the displacement of renters, who were disproportionately Latinos. The conversion of cultural diversity from a social justice ethic (first wave iteration) to the middle-class amenity of subsequent waves is apparent. Identified by longer-term residents as critical features of the environment’s appeal during the early phase of urban renewal privately undertaken by the middle class was the ability to economically obtain a residence – albeit it often in a state of disrepair – with distinctive architectural elements. In King William, the uniqueness of each house in orientation, size and design dramatically contrasts with the lack of architectural diversity in suburbia. ‘These weren’t cookie-cutter pre-fabs’, said one homeowner. Such properties could be personally refurbished and enhanced using the new owner’s sensibilities as well as personal labour. Diversity expressed in personal expression in land use and distinctiveness that essentialised the material environment was consistently identified by respondents as preferable to the functional rationality of suburban land use. ‘A house with personality has no need for a two-car garage’, said one resident. But the distinctiveness of the local housing stock was inseparable from the peripatetic character of the neighbourhood that is less subject to the automobile, integrated with naturescapes, and suggestive of more intimate socialisation opportunities on a daily basis. By way of extensive porches, balconies and outdoor seating, the area symbolised a valuation of leisure and repose that represented an alternative to the suburban social landscape. Environmental semiotics that weren’t auto-centric and connoted idiosyncrasy and lack of industriousness were urban re-conceptualisations of place that had only recently been stigmatised with ethnic ‘Otherness’. The emphasis on the cultural capital that gentrification initially brought in the second wave resulted in the characterisation of the environment as ‘funky’, ‘hip’ and having an ‘edge’ (in Lucio, 2009: 13A; Nazareno, 2002: 8H). It’s a ‘zone of open-mindedness’ commented the principal of an architectural firm. King William is expressly committed to being ‘a notoriously liberal and tolerant neighborhood’ that ‘illustrates just how diverse and colorful the city has become’ (in Wheretraveler, 2010; Apartment Therapy, 2010).

The Bohemian alterations to the landscape that re-inscribed the second wave iteration of cultural diversity in environmental and expressly stylistic terms served as a platform for an expression of local cultural diversity that corresponded to the next wave of newcomers. In the late 1980s-1990s third wave gentrification brought with it a surge of short-term visitors; this stage of change emphasised additional vitalising aspects of diversity that distinguished the environment from suburbia. Here was cultural diversity increasingly mediated by a retail commercial landscape. While residents who arrived during this period generally value the same architectural and land-use expressions of diversity of their immediate predecessors, unlike their predecessors their experience of cultural diversity is overwhelmingly mediated by commercial entities that differ from their suburban counterparts. Implicit in the dispersal of rental properties indicated in Figure 2, the reconstitution of low-rent subdivided houses (with architecturally distinctive elements) indicates a shift back to singular households and an increase in dedicated rental units with relatively higher rents. During this stage the popular profile of the environment is disproportionately reliant on the experiences of visitors as opposed to the expressionistic alterations of their immediate in-migrating predecessors. The perceptions of newer residents increasingly harmonises with the perspectives of visitors; both visitors and newer residents emphasise the enjoyment of the diversity conveyed by commerce-mediated experiences. Thus, when asked how this demographic personally participates in the cultural diversity of the environment, respondents overwhelmingly cite their patronising of these sites of consumption; this expression of diversity contrasts with the personal investment in the renovation of their properties cited by their predecessors. ‘The offbeat coffee shops down here … the little hole-in-the-wall joints downtown … and the diversity of quirky and sit-down restaurants you can walk to down here’ were joined by comments that pointed out the ‘old historical house’ tours and the ability ‘to easily rent bikes’. Central to the neighbourhood’s appeal for this demographic are non-franchise eateries, small-scale street vendors, commercial art fairs and direct peripatetic access to the city’s central business district, sports events and seasonal pageants. In short, unlike the Bohemian expression of diversity in the second wave, the new diversity of the third wave is dependent on a non-traditional (meaning non-suburban) consuming experience. ‘Its nice when the hostess remembers your name “and” your favorite table’, said one respondent.

Another critical difference in the transformation of the cultural diversity ethic from the second wave to the third wave is the role of public monies. While the second wave expansion of the ‘diversity-scape’ by Bohemian pioneers in the King William portion of the Southtown was largely spearheaded by the role of private investment in a laissez-faire manner, in the third wave of gentrification public resources have gained in prominence in the promotion of diversity. Built in 1941, Victoria Courts was a 660-unit facility that housed approximately 500 low-income families in 1998 (seen in the upper right of the upper map (1967) in Figure 2). The association of Victoria Courts with its pre-consumer culture narratives of humanism was recognised by San Antonio City Councilman Ed Garza in 2000 when stating that ‘We have to pay respect to Victoria Courts and what it has offered San Antonio for the last 60 years’ (in Laurel, 2000: 1A). The councilman was implicitly lamenting the passing of cultural diversity as an explicit ethic of empowerment and inclusion for underprivileged non-whites in the inner city (first wave iteration of cultural diversity in Figure 1). As part of an increasingly problematic inner city, Victoria Courts had long since ceased to represent a viable project of social reform. But once the aesthetics of urban multiculturalism and cultural dissent were elevated in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights period, early-stage gentrifiers only required the ‘place of diversity’ itself to complete their incremental transformation into the new agents of diversity. The transition towards new local agents of diversity was dependent on public goods (third wave of gentrification). Representing a substantial share of the US$118.8 million grant awarded to the city by HUD (US Department … Development, 2011: 14), Victoria Courts was targeted by the federal HOPE VI program that was designed to ‘deconcentrate poverty’ (Popkin et al., 2004: 15). The ‘diversification’ of the site is given philanthropic pretext by its presumptive intent to ‘integrate people who lack middle-class skills into neighborhoods with people who possess those skills and who insist on certain standards of behavior’ (Brooks, 2005: A29).

The residential project of diversification is apparent in the Southtown neighbourhood immediately between King William and Victoria Courts that is called Lavaca. The northern portion of Lavaca had been experiencing an upsurge in property development characterised as an uneven patchwork of gentrifying properties in the late 1980s and 1990s (second wave of gentrification). The HOPE VI federal grant explicitly stipulated that a key objective of its urban renewal was ‘to contribute to the improvement of the surrounding neighborhood’ (Popkin et al., 2004: 2). Despite protests and a lawsuit, the last residents of Victoria Courts were evicted in February of 2000 and the site was demolished. The lower-density housing that replaced it only reserved one-quarter of the number of units for low-income residents. The president of the San Antonio Housing Authority (SAHA) – the public agency directly controlling the land – stated that the redeveloped area was ‘intended to complement the adjacent Lavaca neighborhood’ (in Richelieu, 1999: 8B). Furthering the imperatives of third wave gentrification, shortly thereafter (2002) more public goods were applied to the project when the Lavaca neighbourhood was formally designated an historic district (see upper right of the lower map (2010) in Figure 2). Referring to the table in Figure 2, land values in Lavaca quickly rose upon securing its historic designation, leaving the non-historic remainder of the Southtown increasingly underprivileged when compared with its two historic neighbours and their increasingly eclectic modes of consumption and display. The once stigmatised public investment in the ethnic inner city expressed by prominent factions of the mainstream was re-conceptualised when attached to new embodiments of diversity. Reflective of other respondents when queried about the role of public-sector investment, one homeowner stated that, ‘It’s good we all have a stake in this. It means there’s a broad commitment’. Consistent amongst respondents was the perception that public resources were neither a symbolic or ideological detriment to local urban renewal, periodically qualifying their assertions only to the degree that it occasionally disrupted traffic flows or elicited unwarranted official scrutiny of their property’s compliance with district codes.

The transformation of cultural diversity from a social justice ethic in the first wave of gentrification to an urban middle-class redevelopment amenity in subsequent waves is not only environmental, it increasingly is invested in the gentrifiers themselves. In the core census tracts of King William² there was a substantial increase in Anglo population during the 1980s from single digits to 26.9% by the decade’s end, corresponding to cultural diversity articulated as a commerce-mediated experience. This trend would increase steadily until 2010 when the Anglo population constituted 42.6% (US Bureau of the Census, 1980–2010). For the northeastern periphery of the Southtown, and the Lavaca neighbourhood specifically, the ‘deconcentration of poverty’ of the HOPE VI programme implied the reduction of local (predominantly Latino) residents, and the objective to ‘redevelop with less density’ (City of San Antonio, 1998) meant the proportionate increase of predominantly wealthier (increasingly Anglo) residents. Diversity was trumpeted in terms of the changing profile of residents themselves, as the area became ‘whiter’. Said one glib individual who explicitly used a term of multicultural empowerment not as a social justice ethic but in reference to the diversifying ‘whitening’ of the area, ‘From monochrome to “rainbow”, progress can’t be stopped’. It is ironic that in the 1870s the site of Victoria Courts was once the home of the earliest African-American community in the city known as the Baptist Settlement, and prior to being demolished in 2000, the housing project was the sole-surviving patch of underprivileged Latinos in close proximity to both the CBD and King William. But the newly christened historic district trumpeted its new diversity while marketing itself to tourists (third wave iteration of cultural diversity), stating that it is ‘Proudly Serving San Antonio’s Oldest Living Neighborhood’ comprised of ‘Many people who … were born here. Many others have moved here from the suburbs, from Austin, and from places as diverse as New York, Wisconsin, and Northern California. Residents love the neighborhood because it is welcoming, diverse, walkable, and active’ (Lavaca Neighborhood Association, 2013).

The ‘art community’ in San Antonio’s new ‘place of diversity’

Public art has been particularly conspicuous in the urban Latino southwest as a medium of resistance to power; and as such, it has been a prominent medium conveying ethnic ‘Otherness’ to the mainstream. The medium of public art as political commentary was enhanced in the post-Civil Rights era by the valuation of cultural diversity as a very symbolic form of minority inclusion (first wave iteration of cultural diversity). The coupling of ethnic ‘Otherness’ with the vitalising conception of cultural diversity elicited the production of murals in cosmopolitan centres nation-wide (i.e. Moss, 2010; Sagarena, 2009). San Antonio was no exception. But for ethnic minorities in downtown San Antonio, public art as a medium to convey issues of social injustice and annunciate a dignified identity was being challenged in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights era. In areas undergoing gentrification, public art was in ascendance as a medium for cultural dissidents from the mainstream to personally express diversity in terms of counter-suburban sensibilities (second wave iteration of cultural diversity) rather than a social justice ethic.

Figure 2 portrays the distinct emergence of sites of contemporary art sponsorship in the Southtown between 1967 and 2010. The strong concentration within the King William District is apparent. The ‘paintbrush’ markers in the present-day map of the figure depict the location of artists’ rendition of cultural diversity as a social justice ethic (first wave) in the Southtown. As seen in the upper photo in Figure 3 this application of public art is prominent in the Southtown. The murals by Theresa Ybáñez adorning the Quick Wash laundromat exemplify this expression of cultural diversity that is widespread in urban San Antonio. The murals commemorate local Latina activists, the Civil Rights struggle, and are emblematic of the popular annunciation of Latino self-determination that is explicit in the large scripted message ‘We are not a conquered people’. As defined by minority and underprivileged advocacy groups such as the League of Latin American Citizens, the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, and Hispanas Unidas that comprise much of the Coalition for Cultural Diversity on the city’s Cultural Arts Board, fundamental to the ‘cultural diversity criteria’ for art organisations to receive the official imprimatur of the city was the establishment of ‘measurable goals for the ethnic and gender diversification of its staff, board, audiences and outreach services’ (in Greenberg, 1994: 1A). This was a clear expression of the pragmatic application of cultural diversity as a social justice ethic for urban underprivilege (a first wave iteration of cultural diversity).

Figure 3.

(Top) Public Latino art in the Southtown expressing ‘cultural diversity’ as social justice ethic during ‘First wave’ of gentrification. (Bottom) Emerging standardization of the gentrified landscape during incipient ‘Fourth wave’ of gentrification, expressing ‘cultural diversity’ merely as locational (urban) attribute of asset.

The transition to a second wave iteration of cultural diversity is clearly depicted by the ‘paintbrush’ markers which form a picket line along the formal edge of a gentrifying King William. Once that picket line is crossed in a westward direction, the mural tradition is re-inscribed in King William. The public murals which are such a prominent feature of underprivileged Latino neighbourhoods can also be found (indeed featured) in King William, but they are comprised of nostalgic advertisement art, benign astronomical fantasy and isolated Latina figures (no males). In short, the popular form of activist Latino art tied to the ideological agency of the immediate post-Civil Rights era is conspicuously absent. The declarative and invigorating character of this art in King William lies in its scale, positioning, colour and aesthetic qualities that are not uncommon in Latino neighbourhoods but are alien to conventional suburban landscapes; this is characteristic of the second wave iteration of cultural diversity.

Gauging the growing incidence of art as medium to express counter-suburban sensibilities is difficult, as the laissez-faire arrival of art production is not readily quantifiable during the second wave of gentrification (1970s through early 1990s). But the general pattern in terms of the growing art establishment is readily apparent, as dedicated galleries arose for the specific purposes of showcasing contemporary art of disproportionately local origins. Thus, situated in the old railside service buildings for San Antonio Belt and Terminal Railway, the Blue Star was established in 1986 as a grassroots reaction by locals who were excluded from mainstream venues. It has become the artistic hub of populist art in the downtown. The express focus on contemporary art as an act of aesthetic rebellion against establishment conceptions was representative of the counter-suburban aesthetic that was shaping King William. Not only do artists and the art ambience represent a dramatic contrast to suburbia, but the artists themselves are lauded as local embodiments of diversity. As exemplified by the neighbourhood association’s description of the site, diversity was a central theme: the site ‘has drawn a diverse group of artists, working in styles that range from Beth Eidelberg’s traditional watercolors to Holly Moe’s drawings, executed with cigarette and gunpowder burns on low-pile carpet’ (Texas State Historical Association, 2013). Cultural diversity as an ideological practice of inclusion had entirely given way to cultural diversity as non-suburban identity. An aspiring Anglo artist of long-term residence stated, ‘I never felt “right” out there [in suburbia]. Down here I feel – well – I’m amongst fellow travelers of sorts’. Said another visitor with respect to her alienation from the mainstream, ‘Where else do you go to feel the anger?’. Of the variety of residents and visitors alike who expressly relocated or visited the Southtown to experience its artistic offerings, respondents voiced a pervasive sense of personal confinement and numbing subordination to the uniformities of suburbia – an anxiety partially relieved by the aesthetic diversity that permeates King William. Additional galleries would open in the Southtown during the 1990s with a strong emphasis on local artists featuring ‘their own work’ (Gallista Gallery, 2014). The key point during this period is that the dynamic centre of art-associated reurbanisation that celebrated ‘diversity’ was – in keeping with a second wave iteration of cultural diversity – driven by art producers in a laissez-faire manner.

The success of second wave reurbanisation introduced a conception of cultural diversity associated with the display, content and the production of art that could convey the sensibilities of the consuming mainstream. Contextualised by the ‘art community’, the transition from the laissez-faire and uneven gentrification of Bohemian pioneers in the second wave of gentrification proceeded forthwith into the neighbourhood scale and public-sector-sponsored urban renewal of the third wave of gentrification that surged in the 1990s. Described as a ‘galvanizing force’ for San Antonio’s art community, the latest phase of art-mediated diversity as a public-funded tourist amenity is the full expansion of the Blue Star into an ‘Art Complex’. The site has expanded into a mixed use residential and commercial complex including lofts, galleries, work spaces, restaurants, retailers and bike rentals (third wave of gentrification). As the Federal Rehabilitation Tax Credit programme exemplifies, public goods were fundamental to the establishment of this local nuclei of art-mediated gentrification (King William Association, 2013). The four buildings of the site have been officially designated a new industrial historic zone, representing the further commingling of public and private resources in the environmental reconfiguration of non-suburban ‘Otherness’. As opposed to art-flavoured reurbanisation driven by pioneering art ‘producers’ in a laissez-faire manner (second wave iteration of cultural diversity), subsequent growth was driven – not by art ‘producers’ – but by art consumers attracted by the growth sponsored by large-scale capital acting in a highly deliberate and spatially strategic fashion (third wave gentrification). Thus, anchored in the Blue Star Arts Complex, a monthly outdoor commercial promenade called the First Friday Art Walk was established in 1995. The First Friday Art Walk proceeds past various galleries and restaurants located overwhelmingly within the historic district that host an expansive array of non-suburban experiences in the inner city that are mediated by commerce (trinket merchants, street foods, Bohemian music, etc.). By 2000 the event had turned into the ‘city’s biggest monthly fiesta … for everyone who wants to see and be seen’ (in Goddard, 2000: 1F). And corresponding to the growth of the commercialised ‘art-scape’, the King William Arts Fair which had started as a one-block arts exhibit, expanded to become an official event in the annual 10-day Mardi Gras called Fiesta with the express mission to generate financial support for ‘the arts, education, and community improvements’ (King William Fair, 2010). The identification of the arts-and-crafts street vendors by younger and first-time visitors was pervasive as a point of distinction from mass-market commercialism that prevails in the suburbs: ‘You see they’re all handmade’, said one customer. ‘No two are alike’. ‘You can even trade some of your own work for their’s over there’, said another. Locally linking art production with what was termed ‘diversity tourism’, the notion was forwarded that art was to be ‘painted as a way to bring more tourist dollars to the city’ (in Cooper, 1998: 10G; Greenberg and Hicks, 1996). The implications for the aesthetic of cultural diversity altered accordingly. Reflective of a third wave iteration of cultural diversity that further deemphasised the centrality of manifest racial equity policies, by the 1995–1996 cycle of municipal grants for the arts, the application form had omitted the racial-ethnic category. The perspective on cultural diversity that featured manifest equity measures for the practical participation of minorities would be publicly denigrated when called the most ‘simplistic and malignant form’ of cultural diversity (in Greenberg, 1995: par. 6). Experiencing the diversity of clientele, land use and architecture in King William has become fully contextualised by art-mediated commercial events – consigning cultural diversity as a social justice ethic (first wave iteration) or personal anti-suburban expressionism (second wave) to the background in favour of diversity as a commerce-mediated experience (third wave).

Implications and conclusions

The incremental appropriation of the cultural diversity ethic through urban renewal that is depicted in this paper is an affirmation of Roy Brooks’ (2012) assertion that ‘Within society’s most important mainstream institutions … cultural assimilation implements cultural diversity at the lowest level possible’ (p. 23). But where Brooks describes the elementary implementation of ‘diversity’ in terms of mere ‘coexistence’ or aesthetic ‘representation’ (p. 24), this paper shows that the lowest possible level is, indeed, the concept of diversity as a personal lifestyle amenity rather than a social justice ethic. The broad implementation of cultural diversity as a lifestyle amenity within the ‘inner city–suburb’ dichotomy has telling demographic and class consequences. While Portes and Rumbaut (2001: 45) described a downward assimilationist pressure for new arrivals of ethnic minorities to the inner city that increasingly form a ‘rainbow underclass’, the incremental appropriation of the cultural diversity ethic shown in this paper highlights the simultaneous creation of a rainbow ‘middle class’ initially comprised of cultural dissidents from a suburban conception of life. The emerging liberal urban culture with its emphasis on inclusion, tolerance, mutuality and ostensible lack of aesthetic hierarchy is entirely consistent with what is increasingly referred to as ‘transculturalism’ (or ‘cosmopolitanism’) – that being an unstructured convergence of distinct cultural forms into a singular progressivist blend that is increasingly evident in the urban centres of globalisation (see Appiah, 1997; Grosu, 2012). But another term for the transformation of cultural diversity as social justice ethic to middle-class lifestyle amenity is ‘post-racial liberalism’ – being an informal left-of-centre orientation ‘which has had its adherents dating back at least forty years, and which emerged after the Civil Rights revolution had largely accomplished its immediate goals in employment and public accommodations (1964), voting (1965) and housing (1968)’ (Wise, 2010: 17–18). And yet another consequence of the transformation of the cultural diversity ethic is what Phillips (2007) calls ‘multiculturalism without culture’ – an approach to cultural diversity that emphasises human agency and personal freedom as opposed to ethnic and cultural politics. But as this paper shows, an emphasis on human agency and personal freedom corresponds to ‘cultural diversity without social justice’.

The ethnically coded inner city as ‘site of difference’ (Lees, 1996: 458) and a white-coded suburbia as ‘the anti-city’ (Mumford, 1968: 132–133) were simultaneous and contingent outcomes of the same process of industrial decentralisation that is particularly applicable to North America. This needs to be acknowledged when comparing the pattern by which cultural diversity has become a lifestyle amenity in North America to gentrification patterns and processes in foreign cities with different demographics and a different history of suburban formation. The comparison is a compelling one, for gentrification is increasingly evident far from the cities of the developed world. As Lees et al. (2008: 166) state:

Increasingly … the class transformation of urban space in cities of the Global South involves systematic, large-scale reconstruction of large chunks of the urban fabric-backed by the financial support of transnational investors and the political support of state-led efforts to define indigenous populations as an undeserving poor.

In short, they are describing third (and fourth) wave gentrification as the initial stage of inner city renewal in large cities of the developing world. Nevertheless, what has emerged in these enclaves of renewal closely approximates cities of the developed world – that being a population largely comprised of a progressive and skilled demographic with substantial cultural capital. But any notion of like causation for the convergence of urban cultural forms in different international cities is likely to be obscured by the fact that international examples of gentrification disproportionately centre on what are termed ‘global cities’ – those being large cities that have ‘become increasingly disconnected from their broader hinterlands or even their national economies’ in favour of connectivity with other global cities in the systemic consolidation of capitalism (Sassen, 2005: 30). An increasing portion of gentrification in global cities has been qualified by Lees (2000: 392) as ‘financification’ – a process of urban renewal driven by large, and often international, capitalised interests directly into areas that were never previously gentrified (i.e. Butler, 2007; Davidson and Lees, 2005). Whether these are truly novel expressions of gentrification in international cities or just the importation of an advanced form of urban renewal whose development traces through the larger Anglo-American cities of the latter portion of the 20th century is a compelling question. Equally compelling is the degree that the vitalising otherness that has been so substantially racialised in the USA is represented in other counter-suburban forms of urban diversity in other countries (i.e. historic architecture, immigrants, working class members of the same ethnicity as the gentrifying middle class). Lacking an era of race-conscious Civil Rights legislation that celebrated and partially institutionalised multiculturalism in the USA, how could the rise of cultural diversity as a lifestyle amenity in these international sites of gentrification represent the transformation of what was never a social justice ethic? Or, contrarily, was the social justice aspect of the cultural diversity ethic in the USA just an insignificant social feature of vulnerable sites of urban renewal in the 1960s that was destined to be overwhelmed by the interests of wealthy gentrifiers? – Just like any particular social happenstance of the impoverished underclasses of the developing world is presently a feeble obstacle to overcome by those interested in redeveloping the inner city? Whether a gentrification project is of local or international origin, the mutual culmination of both in a permissive and progressive-minded urban enclave demands scrutiny; for the manifest reproduction of inequality that is necessary for both the formation and maintenance of the ensuing liberal enclave suggests that its cultural diversity is best qualified – for the moment – as a ‘lifestyle amenity’ rather than a judicious expression of tolerance and inclusiveness.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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