Abstract
This article argues that the creative drive of cultural workers to envision alternative urban futures and to make real changes in neighbourhoods in the urban present, while politically powerful and imaginatively seductive to urban decision-makers, contains destructive impulses. Such a drive can challenge, but also reinforce, the established social order and unequal power relations. This article critically examines the spatial politics of creative destruction that can unfold in the place-making wake of cultural workers. A case study is used from the mid-sized, industrial city of Hamilton of a deprived inner-city neighbourhood that is informally being reimagined as an arts district. In this neighbourhood, some cultural workers selectively practice middle-class disaffiliation. Individual acts of avoidance, control and destruction function as withdrawal strategies to help minimise the negative externalities of crime and social disorder and to realise a vision of this neighbourhood in their own image.
Introduction
Cultural workers have a well-documented history of living and working in socially diverse, transitional neighbourhoods where poverty and affluence co-exist with shifting market pressures to develop. These neglected pockets of the urban fabric are appealing because they are not entirely regulated, aestheticised or predictable. Cultural workers are said to ‘congregate where opportunities exist and relish the neighbourhood social and commercial diversity that may offend others. In the process, they increase the desirability of the surrounding real estate’ (Molotch, 2002: 677). The ‘others’ in this quotation refers to the middle and upper classes. This article critically examines how the spatial politics of cultural production can be damaging to the social fabric of low-income neighbourhoods. It argues that cultural workers, while long-framed positively in occupational terms as mediators between the embodied manual work of the working class and the professions of the middle and upper classes, can, when faced with social diversity and urban decay, be creatively destructive neighbours. In place of inter-class mediation, cultural workers may choose to align more closely with the middle class and practice neighbourhood artistic disaffiliation, asserting their power to control processes of neighbourhood change and physical attachments to place (Paton, 2014). I understand exerting control at the spatial scale of the neighbourhood to include having a political voice, a degree of freedom of choice over housing circumstances and access to power to influence local social interactions and material circumstances.
As the ‘super core’ of Richard Florida’s ‘fuzzy’ creative class (Markusen, 2006), professional cultural workers are widely celebrated for their risk-taking mindset, place-making urge and urban visionary potential, but, as this article asserts, it is important to remain cognisant of the creative destruction that often follows in their wake. From Marx onward, scholars have written about how the urban built fabric is created and destroyed in cycles of creative destruction that correspond to rhythms of the capitalist economy. Capital disinvestment and devaluation destroy invested value in a way that creates new opportunities for investment. Harvey (2003: 26) contends that ‘the economically, politically, and socially driven processes of destruction through abandonment and redevelopment are often every bit as destructive as arbitrary acts of war’. When cultural workers converge on affordable urban real estate to realise its possibilities, street-based livelihoods and local patterns of organisation can be destroyed. The creative drive of cultural workers to imagine alternative urban futures and to make real changes in the urban present, while politically powerful and imaginatively seductive to decision-makers, contains destructive impulses. Such drive can challenge, but also reinforce, the established social order and unequal power relations.
This article explores the contested nature of culture-led urban redevelopment in one deprived, inner-city neighbourhood to reveal some of the relational tensions and social displacements that can arise from the place-making practices of cultural workers. Following Benson and Jackson (2013) and Elwood et al. (2015: 125), place-making refers to the spatial and discursive practices through which ‘residents enact their imaginaries of what a neighbourhood should ideally be’, by normalising particular values, tastes and aesthetics in everyday life activities and interactions. This article provides an empirically grounded micro-study of local interactions and conflicts between cultural workers and disadvantaged social groups who share the neighbourhood of Landsdale in the mid-sized Canadian industrial city of Hamilton. Such a textured contextual analysis reveals how cultural workers can simultaneously practice elements of neighbouring in conjunction with what can be interpreted as a passive-aggressive version of ‘middle-class disaffiliation’ (Atkinson, 2006). Selective acts of avoidance, control and destruction are shown to be temporary withdrawal strategies of insulation and incubation occasionally deployed by a small faction of ‘culturepreneurs’ (Lange, 2006) to minimise the negative externalities of crime and social disorder and to realise a vision of this neighbourhood in their own image as an arts district.
Discussion begins by summarising a significant trajectory of urban studies scholarship on culture-led gentrification. The intent is to complicate the motives and practices of artists in processes of neighbourhood change and to reflect upon the potential for destruction within artistic attachments to place and arts district branding strategies. The research design is then outlined and the case study of Hamilton, Ontario introduced. The remainder of the article focuses on representations of the inner-city neighbourhood of Landsdale and The Pearl Company (TPC), a multi-purpose neighbourhood arts space, in order to reveal some of the social ruptures produced by practices of artistic disaffiliation.
The ambivalent politics of culture-led redevelopment
For over three decades, urban studies scholars have studied the involvement of artists in neighbourhood gentrification and redevelopment in large Western cities, demonstrating how the arts and its practitioners can change the symbolic meaning and material form of urban space. The dominant narrative about artists within this literature is of risk-taking urban pioneers, memory-makers with strong emotive attachments to places, and people who initiate, but also actively oppose and are displaced by, gentrification (Bain, 2006, 2013; Catungal et al., 2009; Cole, 1987; Harris, 2012; Ley, 2003; Mathews, 2008, 2010, 2014; Miles and Paddison, 2005; Pratt, 2009; Zukin, 1982). Following McLean (2014: 2157), in this article I too aim to disrupt ‘the often one-sided portrayal of artists as either conscious agents of gentrification policies or helpless victims’.
The relationship of artists to gentrification is complex and controversial. As Deutsche and Ryan (1984: 110) persuasively argued over 30 years ago with respect to New York City’s Lower East side, the art world simultaneously exploits and accrues avant-garde glamour from neighbourhoods where artists can identify with ‘marginal figures and social outcasts’ and can aestheticise poverty. The real victims of gentrification, they assert, are not artists, but the displaced poor who have little choice about where to live. For Deutsche and Ryan (1984: 111), gentrification is not inevitable; it is ‘aided and abetted by an “artistic” process whereby poverty and homelessness are served up for aesthetic pleasure’. But artists, they remind us, ‘cannot be exempt from [social] responsibility’; they need to actively ‘decide whether they want to be part of a process that destroys people’s lives’ or to deliberately avoid acting in their own best interests by settling elsewhere (Deutsche and Ryan, 1984: 104). These authors were some of the first to associate artists with destruction at the scale of the neighbourhood.
In a more recent critical reflection on the lives of artists in Berlin and London, Forkert (2013) asks: why are artists positioned as exceptional and assumed not to experience the urban pressures of poverty, spatialisation of inequality and gentrification in the same way as other local residents? She concludes that the historical development of the artist as an exemplary and self-reliant figure whose career success is rooted in individual talent and the principle of artistic autonomy reinforces an expectation that an artist operates by different rules to the rest of society – that s/he can always ‘create something from nothing’. When extended to urban policy, it is mistakenly assumed that artists can create regardless of the material or social conditions of cultural production and that artistic experiences of poverty are less ‘real’ than those of long-term residents. Despite lived experiences of poverty and displacement, many of the artists interviewed in Forkert’s study are disengaged from anti-gentrification and affordable housing campaigns. Forkert (2013: 61–62) attributes this lack of political engagement to a shared belief that artists are ‘living in particular neighbourhoods by choice rather than necessity’ and that ‘the artist’s role [i]s ultimately a transient one, which does not by definition include involvement in local politics’. Unlike the sharp critique leveled at the art world by Deutsche and Ryan (1984), Forkert does not hold artists socially or politically accountable for enacting neighbourhood change. Instead, Forkert (2013: 3) asserts that artists are not ‘a homogeneous social elite, [but] rather … a varied group with different degrees of socio-economic privilege, and thus, different resources for supporting themselves’, who experience the spatialisation of poverty and inequality in neighbourhoods the same as other local residents.
It should be remembered, however, that artists are in an unusual social and occupational position. Many artists are born, raised and educated within the middle class, socialise and service the middle class with their cultural products and only out of financial necessity choose to live amongst the poor (Bain, 2005). They have the cultural capital and the occupational creative class policy recognition to be considered social elites, while income trajectories and embodied labour practices align them with working classes. They are recognised for their role as agents of gentrification, but they also experience its displacement effects. What has been less closely examined by urban scholars are the middle class practices of urban disaffiliation that some artists may engage in as residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods – what I term in this article neighbourhood artistic disaffiliation.
I have deliberately chosen to use the concept of ‘disaffiliation’ rather than ‘elective belonging’ (Savage et al., 2005) to describe the neighbourhood practices of some cultural workers in order to emphasise the potentially socially dis-associative rather than associative dimensions of artistic presence. For Savage et al. (2005), ‘elective belonging’ is the distinctive place-based attachment of an incoming group that conveys how newcomers attach a residential biography to a ‘chosen’ locale despite having no prior connection to it as a way of articulating and stabilising a social identity. While such neighbourhood attachment has been described as ‘a middle-class reaction to ontological insecurity’ and an assertion of agency (Paton, 2014: 97), its selective deployment suggests that a lack of belonging is also present – what other scholars refer to as disaffiliation.
My understanding of artistic disaffiliation is inspired by Atkinson’s (2006) threefold typology of self-imposed urban disaffiliation, in which he makes a distinction along a continuum between insulation, incubation and incarceration. His descriptions of insulation and incubation are useful for thinking about the residential choices of cultural workers and their engagements with disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Much as for the middle classes, the residential choices of cultural workers are also often motivated by affordability, value and a perceived need for safety and belonging. For Atkinson (2006: 822), insulation is a withdrawal strategy of ‘relatively “open seclusion”’ that is driven by a ‘need for relative immunity from the negative externalities of such problems as crime, disorder and anti-social behavior’ and a need to ‘band together to create a sense of refuge’ with people ‘like-us’. He describes incubation as a strategy for producing a greater sense of personal security – a home that can facilitate the daily tasks of social reproduction. To extend Atkinson’s understanding of incubation to cultural workers using Forkert’s (2013) research on artistic lives is to acknowledge the important role played by material conditions (e.g. cost of living, and affordable living, working, exhibition and performance spaces) in contributing to a sense of creative security and affecting the time and space available for individuals to be cultural producers. In this article, I show how insulation and incubation have been practiced by some culturepreneurs through occasional acts of avoidance, control and destruction in the everyday spaces of a neighbourhood in a quest to transform the neighbourhood into an informal arts district.
To initiate urban revitalisation, Western city leaders frequently identify and brand neighbourhoods with a concentration of cultural activity as cultural quarters and cultural districts (Evans, 2009). Cultural quarter is the terminology that is popular in Britain, while cultural district and arts district are more commonly used within North America (Brooks and Kushner, 2001). To formally brand a neighbourhood as an arts district usually necessitates that it be of mixed-use with cultural venues of different sizes that contain space for artistic production and consumption and where the programming of these cultural facilities sustains the cultural economy (Roodhouse, 2006).
In urban studies scholarship, a distinction is made between ‘formal’ (resulting from state-led cultural planning and policy and public investment) and ‘informal’ (emerging organically and spontaneously from grassroots stakeholder involvement in the absence of a civic plan) arts districts (Chapple et al., 2010); however, in practice, the designations of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, what Vivant (2010) terms ‘in’ and ‘off’ cultural production systems, may also be economically interdependent and emergent from the agendas of different social actors. Arts districts tend to develop where there is an embryonic cultural presence – suggesting a formal capitalisation on an initially informal presence. But municipal political and financial support for arts districts, particularly informal ones, as this case study from Hamilton illustrates, is not always forthcoming and can be cross-cut with socio-spatial contradictions.
Research design and methodology
This article is drawn from a larger research project on the role of artist-run centres in neighbourhood change. The goal of this project is to identify the socio-spatial impacts that artists, and the spaces and organisations that they establish, have upon neighbourhoods through presence, programming and practice. Through 45 semi-structured interviews 1 with city officials, cultural workers, arts administrators and residents living and/or working in downtown Hamilton (18 of these in Landsdale), attention was directed to: the municipal cultural planning and policy framework established to guide investment and development; the visual, material and symbolic urban built fabric impacts of artistic practice; the relationships between artists and non-artist residents and neighbourhood institutions; and the place-making practices of artists. The interviews were supplemented by secondary data from the national census, planning documents, municipal government reports and print media coverage as well as participant observation at neighbourhood community meetings and events. Together these data helped to construct a portrait of artist-led neighbourhood change in downtown Hamilton.
A creative vein of steel: Hamilton, Ontario
Hamilton is located in southwestern Ontario, approximately 55 kilometres from Toronto and 60 kilometres from the United States border. Since founding in 1816, Hamilton has endured cycles of financial and industrial growth and decline. It is now the ninth largest city in Canada and the third largest in Ontario with a census metropolitan area population in 2011 of 721,053. As the monikers Steeltown and The Hammer suggest, steel mills and other heavy manufacturing industries have shaped the city’s development trajectory through the 20th century. In the 1980s and 1990s, global economic restructuring and local deindustrialisation contributed to factory downsizing and closures. By 2010, only 20 percent of the population was employed in manufacturing and 75 percent in service industries (with retail and health and social services being the most dynamic sectors of the economy) (Weaver, 2010). Scarred by the steel industry and the steady loss of manufacturing jobs, Hamilton’s neighbourhoods show significant disparities in social capital (Kitchen et al., 2012; Williams et al., 2010). Social divisions are reinforced by geographic divisions. The Niagara escarpment cuts the city in half, creating an upper ‘Mountain’ and lower downtown. Affluence concentrates in the south, west and upper areas of the city, and poverty is found in the east, north and lower areas of the city in proximity to industry and the downtown. Urban poverty also intersects with a deep history of trade and making things, and an elevated sense of local pride.
A cultural scene flourishes in Hamilton where neo-bohemia and its associated entrepreneurial derivatives are being leveraged through urban planning and policy, as they have been in so many North American post-industrial cities (Lloyd, 2006). In 2005, the Hamilton Creative City Initiative was established with the mandate to report on how to nurture cultural development in the city. The first report, released in 2007, highlights the importance of fostering an emergent downtown cultural scene. A subsequent Building a Creative Catalyst Feasibility Study asserts that the city ‘seeks to harness the potential of the creative sector to boost Hamilton’s economy and transform the urban landscape’ (Norton and Shaker, 2009: 13). City councilors provided the political and financial support to undertake the three phases of cultural mapping to inventory arts, stakeholder engagement and consultation that were foundational to the production and approval of a cultural plan – Transforming Hamilton Through Culture (2012). The cultural plan is overseen by 12 community cultural leaders and 18 city staff advisors from different departments; they have a mandate to implement the 12 recommendations and 78 actions. In the words of a senior project manager (25 January 2016), city staff, while ‘engaged and committed’ to the topic of culture, are:
already busy and they have their own budgets. It’s really well and good that council approved the plan and that we’ve had all of these successes [partnering in projects with institutional stakeholders], but it isn’t necessarily on the top of everyone’s priority list. It’s been baby steps.
Developing a report card that can track outcomes of the cultural plan to demonstrate social impacts and per capita contributions of culture to the economy is a priority for city staff. While the cultural plan emphasises the value of culture-led downtown renewal and neighbourhood revitalisation in general terms, it does not advocate branding the growing downtown arts scene along James Street North as an arts district.
The concept of an arts district is one that municipal leaders in Hamilton have chosen not to take an official position on: ‘We haven’t specifically created arts districts but we haven’t discarded the opportunities of it. We’re allowing it to evolve on its own and seeing where it goes’ (Manager, Neighbourhood Action Strategy, 17 February 2016). After inventorying arts uses throughout the city and noting the presence and movement of different pockets of arts use as well as the grassroots arts-led development of James Street North and the ripple effect it had on surrounding neighbourhoods, like Landsdale, urban planners recommended to city council that zoning restrictions be loosened throughout the city to permit the adaptive re-use of buildings for studio usage in place of establishing community improvement planned areas for the arts. While the zoning category of ‘studio use’ has not yet been activated because approval of the official plan has been delayed, a motion was passed by city council on the 13th October 2010 specifying that ‘the enforcement of the zoning and sign by-laws for Arts and Culture uses … be suspended until the results of the study are presented to Council and any recommendations implemented’. Such waiving of by-law infraction enforcement reinforces that the city recognises both the spatial challenges experienced by cultural workers for affordable workspace as well as the urban regeneration and economic asset capacity of the arts and culture sector. Despite such municipal recognition, significant tensions remain in neighbourhoods, like Landsdale, where artistic practice intersects with everyday lived experiences of poverty.
Landsdale: ‘The hood, the bad and the ugly’
Landsdale is a neighbourhood of 60 blocks east of downtown with a history of disinvestment, political neglect and social exclusion (see Figure 1). It is composed of late Victorian terraced, semi-detached and detached houses without driveways on residential streets bisected by commercial arteries. The occasional thriving business is interspersed with boarded up shopfronts.
Map of the City of Hamilton and the Landsdale neighbourhood. Map designed by R Fiedler.
Like so many low-income, inner city urban areas in North America, Landsdale is constructed in the middle-class public imagination as a place to avoid because of its perceived pathology. In the local print media, Landsdale has been described as a ‘besieged’ (Howard, 2002), ‘fragile’ (Fragomeni, 2006) and ‘troubled’ inner-city neighbourhood that is devoid of big ‘C’ culture (Mahoney, 2009a). Over the last decade, articles about this neighbourhoood in the city’s newspaper, The Hamilton Spectator, report: assaults on women, street sex work, arrests for drug possession, the presence of crack houses, homicides and shootings.
In 2010, a collaborative project between academics and Hamilton Spectator journalists, entitled ‘Code Red’, examined the impacts of social determinants of health on Hamilton residents (http://thespec-codered.com/). Articles combined data on a range of social, economic and health variables to reveal significant neighbourhood disparities and motivated city council to invest C$2 million in the development of a Neighbourhood Action Strategy to ensure an equitable distribution of resources and services throughout the city. Eleven of the most socially deprived neighbourhoods in the city, including Landsdale (and its neighbour to the north, Gibson, combined into the acronym GALA – Gibson and Landsdale Area) have been targeted for community development support through resident-led neighbourhood planning initiatives and investment partnerships to support ‘healthy’ neighbourhoods (https://www.hamilton.ca/city-initiatives/strategies-actions/neighbourhood-action-strategy).
Before journalists and academics inspired Hamilton City Council to pro-actively address neighbourhood disparities in quality of life, a cultural worker and an arts administrator bought a building in the heart of Landsdale with the intention of creating a multi-disciplinary theatre, gallery and arts facility. In 2006, when these middle-class owners first moved in, their property and car were repeatedly vandalised. Wanting a greater sense of personal security, they established lines of defense that could both symbolically and physically protect the property from external threats and justify a stronger police presence. In addition to reinforcing building access points, surveillance cameras were mounted to collect footage of public disorder. Without consent, candid photographs of poor and desperate women were taken:
Stopping men, leaning into car windows, squatting in the open to take a pee with no hint of self-consciousness. There are women with track marks up and down their arms, on their necks, women teetering on high heels, others in running shoes, some laughing, some with faces drained of all expression. (Mahoney, 2009b)
When these graphic images were included in a group art exhibition in a downtown gallery in 2009, they permitted selective disaffiliation with the neighbourhood by reinforcing micro symbolic socio-spatial distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘better’ and ‘bad’, ‘pure’ and ‘polluted’ (Pinkster, 2014; Watt, 2009).
The exhibition ‘The hood, the bad and the ugly’ was framed as: ‘turn[ing] lenses on the city’s underbelly and mind[s] to the immense question of how we can make positive social change’ (quoted in Sur, 2011: n.p.). The ‘we’ speaks to cultural workers contributing to and attending the show with little acknowledgment of the cultural capital privilege and insularity of this vantage point. Artwork was created for an audience of creative peers whose understandings of social change are bound up with a range of fears and judgments about socially marginalised others.
From the outset, the exhibition was controversial. It drew criticism from social service agencies and sex worker advocates for showing the faces of women without their knowledge and consent. By revealing their identities, it undermined their privacy and personal safety. While the intention was to portray Landsdale and its street sex workers as victims of economic decline and political neglect, the further risk these women were exposed to was unaddressed. The sex workers had no voice in this exhibition. They were not invited to tell their own stories of survival and their understandings of place.
In response to the public criticism of the photographs, a public statement of apology was issued regretting the hurt and fear caused to street sex workers. Unfortunately, this apology did little to diffuse growing public hostility towards street-based sex work. For a local academic, Amber Dean, ‘the show further dehumanized, stigmatized, and blamed the women for destroying and making [this] downtown neighbourhood unliveable’ (http://www.bigsusies.com/). Dean responded pro-actively by founding Big Susie’s in 2010, a sex-positive advocacy group for sex workers. In a co-authored journal article, Antwi and Dean (2012: 24) argue that this ‘exhibit of stereotypical images of inner-city “degeneracy” can be read as a way of pointing [a] finger back at the city, as if to say “this is what passes for culture in this neighbourhood? And you want to make it difficult for me to run my business?”’. The exhibition was the starting point for my interviews with the founding activists of Big Susie’s as well as the owners of The Pearl Company (TPC) about their efforts to build a community performance venue and their vision to make the neighbourhood into an arts district.
Artfully reclaiming neighbourhood space: The Pearl Company
TPC is a 100-year-old semi-industrial building that once manufactured cardboard boxes and costume jewellery. The building now has two floors of performance, event, rehearsal and gallery space. The potential exists for a bar, but under the current zoning by-law, city licensing does not permit this use. Instead audience members receive a discount at a nearby bar.
TPC has been renovated with Do-It-Yourself sweat equity and resourcefulness, using recycled and donated building material, seating and lighting and sound equipment. With hard work and ingenuity, the owners have applied a hacker mindset and re-appropriated everyday spaces, objects, rules and routines. While cultural workers may deploy the ‘alchemy of art’ to transform objects and places with little perceived inherent value into ones of consequence to urban elites, it is important to appreciate some of the ways in which this ‘advancing colonizing arm’ of the middle class into urban areas previously considered too ‘dangerous’ for financial investment or personal safety can also be socially destructive (Ley, 2003: 2533).
For a decade, this 12,000 square foot warehouse has been at the centre of a publicly waged zoning dispute to have its legal, non-conforming use as a multi-disciplinary, live/work community arts space recognised. The owners have fought the city because they are resentful that artists have had their creativity exploited for the economic benefit of others and frustrated by examples they have witnessed of contradictions in the local urban redevelopment process. Moreover, they see property ownership as the key to survival as professional cultural workers. The owners partially embody the political and subversive potential that David Harvey (2012) sees in cultural workers to not only mobilise and self-organise, but also to appropriate, transform and undermine the forces of capital.
In the past, the owners of TPC actively engaged in public acts of resistance by challenging the authority of city officials and planners in by-law court, in letters to the Hamilton Spectator, in radio interviews, on their website and by establishing a magazine. Through these different communication outlets they documented their efforts to obtain zoning permits and to participate in political debate. By making their claims to neighbourhood space visible and heard in the public realm in an Arendtian sense, they have built a capacity for political action. The TPC owners are artist-entrepreneurs – what Lange (2006) terms ‘culturepreneurs’. This role affords them particular advantages as neighbourhood change agents. The professional arts occupational title offers creative and critical distance while property ownership provides the benefit of speculative advantage from real estate development. Nevertheless, despite the urban revitalisation potential the TPC presents as an infrastructural investment that aligns with the lifestyle and entertainment dispositions of middle-class households, this initiative has not yet received municipal endorsement.
When it was first established, the TPC was subject to multi-agency taskforce raids (e.g. alcohol, police and public health), fines (for broken windows), fire certificate requests, enforcement of parking space requirements, commercial tax rates that are 50 percent higher than residential rates (yet they are not permitted to sell food or alcohol) and substantial rezoning fees (despite obtaining mixed-used commercial/residential use in the new official plan). The former Manager of Zoning By-Law Reform and, later, of Licensing for the City of Hamilton (Manager, 17 February 2016) who liaised between the city and TPC attributes the lack of municipal support to a difference of opinion with respect to property use: ‘I think it was a clash of personalities and just a real disagreement about what was right and what was wrong and what should happen and what shouldn’t happen’. Arts and culture are a new spatial use, which voids the previous industrial zoning and reverts it to residential zoning, yet without parking neither residential nor commercial use can legally be permitted. The local city councilor was concerned that, if the property was rezoned as a public hall, it would be vulnerable to real estate speculation by ‘biker-related and drug-related … underworld actors’ (Manager, 17 February 2016) and to potential future conversion into a dance hall. From the city’s perspective, the TPC is a private business, and therefore cannot receive financial benefits or special planning treatment different from any other business in the city. Thus, the TPC was expected to follow the same urban development process as other property owners – something they resisted from the outset: to file an official plan amendment and re-zoning application to legalise the use; to obtain building permits to complete renovations necessary to comply with building and fire codes; and to pay the development charges related to the increased value of the land. These phased costs were initially C$5500 but over a four-year legal challenge (ultimately resolved by an admission of guilt of zoning non-compliance by the TPC as a business) and the approval of a new official plan, the costs increased to upwards of C$25,000 – a figure deemed unaffordable by the TPC owners. In place of paying and following the development solution laid out by the city, TPC owners have continued to look for opportunities to further educate city officials about the obstacles that the arts community faces in bringing a building into compliance with zoning by-laws.
While the tension between the owners of TPC and city officials has dissipated on both sides, the original intensity and protracted nature of the confrontation and the continued lack of resolution demonstrate the singularity of vision, stamina, bureaucratic procedural knowledge and financial capital needed to make changes to the urban built fabric. There is what Latham and Wood (2015: 304–305) describe as an obduracy – an inertia and resistance – that ‘socio-material configurations’ of the urban fabric ‘exhibit in the face of efforts to alter them’ and a corresponding process of ‘infrastructural settlement’ that reinforces what constitutes acceptable patterns of use through legal rules and entrenchments of conventions within social structures. Zoning by-laws and urban development policies can render buildings like TPC obdurate, yet individual perseverance and resourcefulness can also present opportunities for adaptive re-use.
From the outset, TPC owners (22 September 2013) have been committed to ‘implement[ing] our vision’ in this ‘beautiful and affordable space’ and to ‘be[ing] part of the rehabilitation of our neighbourhood’; ‘our goal is diversity – creating a sustainable economy in the immediate neighbourhood’. They aspire to ‘play a small part in the transformation of our city’ and have sought to implement their vision in strategic increments. The repeated use of the word ‘our’ in these quotations indicates a scaled sense of proprietorship that extends outwards from their home, to the neighbourhood, and to the city. They have the socioeconomic resources – social, cultural and economic capital – to participate in neighbourhood civic life. Their neighbourhood-focused activism has positively served the community (e.g. by providing evidence of criminal activity to police, advocating for municipal attention to the neighbourhood, founding a neighbourhood association, supporting local businesses, operating affordable performance space for local cultural producers and offering youth community arts programming), but it also has a problematic dimension to it – namely, that it is ‘symbiotically linked to avoiding “others” whose tastes and lifestyles one finds distasteful’ (Watt, 2009: 2876).
After TPC owners moved in, they organised Sunday neighbourhood ‘clean ups’ in which they swept the streets and collected beer bottles, needles and condoms. This detritus was initially perceived as a physical hazard symbolic of the disorder and incivility of the neighbourhood. In an effort to both define neighbourhood problems and to proactively develop solutions, they established the now-defunct Landsdale and Area Neighbourhood Association (LANA). While this organisation was instrumental in bringing residents together for the first time and in redesigning a local park, it also reproduced class relations through micro-practices of procedural protocol and agenda setting:
Most of the people coming to LANA meetings … came with one thing in mind, ‘get the girls off the street’. They had very little awareness of formal meeting protocol and wouldn’t put up their hand. They struggled. But now there are so many people who moved here who are differently educated and participating in GALA and they want to see everything change. (Cultural worker, 31 March 2014)
This neighbourhood association was one way for the incoming middle class to engage with concerns of long-time residents and also to influence ‘the terms and conditions of engagement under which they live in “their” neighbourhood’ (Bridge et al., 2014: 1138). LANA practiced community-building through problem identification, which in turn partially obscured complex power dynamics and hardened some socio-spatial boundaries. When the municipally-funded Neighbourhood Action Strategy was implemented, LANA was replaced by the Gibson and Landsdale Area (GALA) community planning team (which covers a larger, but equally socio-economically deprived, catchment area). Participant observation at monthly GALA community meetings and interviews with members has revealed that owners of TPC and other local cultural workers are not active in GALA or its community development programming. This lack of involvement could be interpreted as political apathy or an unwillingness to either share decision-making power or to work within the disciplining confines of a bureaucratic framework that offers only a minimal annual budget of C$5000. It could also be interpreted as having only limited time and energy to expend outside of artistic practice and secondary employment. Whatever the reason, cultural workers, like many GALA members, continue to manage the perceived risks associated with their central city residential choice by calling police.
In the past, TPC owners undertook informal neighbourhood patrols to identify the squats of homeless people and sex workers, occasionally disposing of personal belongings without consent or social service agency support. Although the owners have built few agency alliances, they have effectively collaborated with local business owners to secure parking and to employ some local residents on disability support as parking attendants. Such community relationship building is mutually beneficial, but it is also a means to assert ‘one’s control over their fixity to place’ by influencing access to local resources and employment opportunities (Paton, 2014: 97).
The owners have also leveraged enough financial capital through the real estate market to buy six additional residential properties around the warehouse and to become private landlords. The units in these houses are rented to a mix of artists and non-artists who support their neighbourhood vision. The choices to act individually, to be entrepreneurial and to control their housing situation are key indicators of middle-class privilege (Paton, 2014). Through word-of-mouth, the owners have encouraged some members of Hamilton’s arts community to buy property and live in the neighbourhood. This activation of creative class networks to help generate a critical mass of cultural workers could be interpreted as an insulating and incubating strategy to help make residence in the neighbourhood compatible with their personal occupational and class identities.
Through all of these initiatives, the owners of TPC (22 September 2013 and 31 April 2014) insist that their efforts are ‘post-industrial rehabilitation and have zero to do with gentrification’:
We have been accused of gentrification, but we have made the neighbourhood livable for everyone. It used to be a nightmare. The noise, the screaming, the fighting, the throwing of beer bottles, and the peeing everywhere … we now have a totally calm neighbourhood.
This quotation demonstrates that judgments, whether conscious or unconscious, are being made about what constitutes, and who contributes to, urban livability. A degree of disgust is expressed about perceived social disorder, which can be interpreted as a desire for ‘exclusionary closure’ and ‘spatial decoupling from other social classes’ (Watt, 2009: 2875). The register of disgust is used both as ‘violation of taste in relation to class’ (Lawler, 2005: 429) and as justification for the expulsion and exclusion of an underclass. Through such processes of othering, TPC owners appear to align themselves with the middle class and to differentiate themselves from the underclass, demonstrating that they are not what Brown-Saracino (2004: 135) terms ‘social preservationists’. Their actions suggest a disinterest in preserving the authentic social space of this inner-city neighbourhood by either preventing the displacement of marginalised, original residents or by working to better understand their habitus. Efforts to sanitise, order and own neighbourhood space around TPC suggest a desire to ‘limit the presence of low-income residents … to the obedient and the minimally visible’ (Tissot, 2014: 1192). The selective practices of sanitisation and ordering exemplify enactments of artistic disaffiliation as ‘other avoidance’ (Watt, 2009: 2890). Although the owners may assert that they are not gentrifiers, their support for policing and social order are actions that do relate closely to a gentrifier’s agenda.
New settler cultural workers and gentrification
The ideology of gentrification supports a reduction in crime and an increase in social control. In Landsdale, street-based sex work has been displaced from around TPC concomitant with a decrease in absentee landlords and gains in home ownership rates by more affluent incomers. Statistics Canada census data summarised in Table 1 for Landsdale relative to the Hamilton CMA reveals, from 1991 to 2006, increases in average individual income and home ownership rates, acquisition of university degrees and employment in arts and culture professions. 2 The local demographic composition of the neighbourhood is changing and working-class residents are gradually becoming the minority.
Demographic statistical portrait of Landsdale and Hamilton.
Note: *Data for 1991 corresponds to artistic, literary, recreational and related occupations.
Data sources: Statistics Canada, Census of Canada, 1991, 2001, 2006; retrieved via the University of Toronto’s Canadia Census Analyzer. Compiled by R Fiedler.
Many of the incomers to Landsdale are artists and other professionals. They have higher levels of education and household income and ‘are creative and willing to work with the issues’ (Rogers, 2013). The adverb ‘with’ in conjunction with the generic word ‘issues’ (rather than ‘people’) demonstrates care through material and financial reinvestment in property. Securitisation strategies have been implemented and sweat equity used to renovate properties in ways that aesthetically ‘improve’ the built environment.
A local business owner (12 June 2014) describes the experience of being one of the first people to reinvest in Landsdale:
Beautiful stone masonry, Victorian house, a lot of natural charm still there, and syringes all over the place and hookers everywhere. I had to really persevere. The local politicians did not want any development going on here. They fought me all the way, in everything that I did … There were drunks, crackheads, hookers, junkies all lining up to come in and I wouldn’t let them … Every opportunity I had, I was on to the police and to council members about what was going on … We’ve taken down trees, put up alarm systems and cameras, and we’ve maintained strict rules about your behavior and conduct.
This quotation captures a sense of the redevelopment frustrations endured by some business owners as well as the stamina needed to negotiate municipal bureaucracy and the different lived agendas of residents. The hidden beauty of residential architecture is contrasted with a typology of embodied marginality, emphasising a disjuncture between exchange and use value. Strategies articulated here for interacting with social difference and neutralising its perceived danger involve regulating the design of private and public space and the bodies that transgress its boundaries. Strategic informal alliances have been built with other business owners through committee of adjustment hearing testimonies, co-advertising events and providing discounts to shared patrons.
On nearby residential streets, individual property reinvestment has gathered momentum. One cultural migrant (21 March 2014) from Toronto who bought a restored heritage home a decade ago for C$200,000 attributes the affordability of the house to its location:
I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with this house that it was so cheap. Of course it’s the area … there’s crack houses and prostitution … I don’t feel safe walking at night … there’s been stabbings and murders … At nighttime I also hear lots of action and screaming. I watch and I call the police, if I see something, and I know other people do too.
Nearby, another cultural worker (31 March 2014) who has invested significant sweat equity into renovating a dilapidated heritage house describes some of the changes:
There are very few working girls on the street now … and there is less likely to be a crack house. They’re not far, though. I see more people dressed finely and they’re going to The Pearl for a show or a meeting. A lot of the politically engaged people are moving here with disposable income, fixing up their houses, starting neighbourhood associations, distributing newspapers, voting for healthy communities. But the underlying message is get rid of the poor, we want this place to be polished and then we’ll start creating rules.
The bar owner and the cultural workers follow predictable middle-class trajectories that culminate in the acquisition of property as asset. They justify their residential choices with value- and quality-for-money arguments that highlight the architectural features, size and location of their properties relative to downtown. Unfavourable neighbourhood elements, like its stigma and disorder, are offset by the economic and practical value of an affordable property in an accessible location.
Cultural workers do have a choice about whether and how to attach and unattach themselves to neighbourhoods. Individuals do demonstrate a willingness to form neighbouring relationships with their fellow residents, balancing proximity and privacy and emotional and rational engagements (van Eijk, 2012). Bonds of trust and familiarity have been built with immediate neighbours through conversations, small acts of support (e.g. snow shoveling, pet- and baby-sitting, loans of tools and labour and house watching), house parties and playful interventions. Despite these moments of connection, social distance remains between many of the cultural worker newcomers and the long-time residents from the First Nations, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish communities and more recent Vietnamese and Czech immigrants 3 as well as residents who labour in sex work, receive welfare or deal with complex addictions and mental health challenges.
Every day many cultural workers grapple intellectually and physically with the challenges and opportunities presented by living in a socially diverse neighbourhood. As one cultural worker (12 June 2014), who readily praises the generosity and support of a retired working-class neighbour, explains:
I am not opposed to prostitutes being on my street. But I think that the question becomes about building a space that is diverse … You get concerned about pushing people out … The threat is that you’re going to make the neighbourhood unaffordable, monotonous, and bland having people be all the same. There’s a reason I moved here. Here I can feel that I am connected to struggle … [but] there needs to be some balance struck. It can help people to see some money being injected into the neighbourhood, so that there is a hopefulness to it, so that there is a way for them to feel engaged and imagine a different future for themselves.
This quotation clearly demonstrates concern for people hardest hit by the unjust and uneven effects of urban poverty who survive through street-based cultures. The connection to social struggle, however, seems due to propinquity and a drive to find affordable real estate to support creative practice rather than a desire to build strategic political alliances. An ‘us’ and ‘them’ distinction is still reinforced by suggesting that help is best provided through financial investment in the built, rather than social, fabric and by modelling a middle-class way of life. Yet there is also recognition that modelling through social proximity can produce sterile and homogenous cityscapes. As is rightly noted, too few opportunities exist in Landsdale to collectively imagine a future and to negotiate a socially sustainable balance.
The majority of cultural workers I interviewed do not treat the urban poor in Landsdale as another part of the decrepit streetscape. However, the culturepreneurs of TPC and other business and property owners do often treat the urban poor as people who require surveillance and policing. Examples of neighbourhood ‘clean-ups’ reveal that it is often the activities, bodies and possessions of people who participate in street-based cultures that are deemed to require clearance and are discursively framed as bad for the neighbourhood. While many cultural worker newcomers express verbal concern over the hardships of lower-income residents, few know to where they have been displaced or have actively prevented that displacement. Whether with their economic constraints, understanding of social struggle or appreciation of the aesthetic flavours of neo-bohemia, this article argues that some new settler cultural workers are consciously or unconsciously creatively destroying the original culture of Landsdale.
Creative destruction: Envisioning an informal arts district
The owners of TPC partially authenticate their right to envision the neighbourhood in their image through the proclamation of a working-class lineage:
my grandparents lived in Ward 3 and worked in the steel industry and my father was a firefighter for the City of Hamilton for over 30 years … I have spent the majority of my childhood and working life in the downtown core performing, teaching, and operating a business. (The Hamiltonian, 2009)
This quotation demonstrates a concerted effort to be in biographical control through a narrative of individuality, self-motivation and responsibility. It also conveys a strong sense of pride and satisfaction derived from the mental and physical challenges of making and repairing – those cognitive and corporeal practices that have helped to actualise different ways of living in this neighbourhood. TPC culturepreneurs narrate resilience, resourcefulness and risk-taking in the face of obstruction and hardship. Their stories are reminiscent of the urban pioneering mentality that has long-characterised artists’ movement into working class neighbourhoods to ‘settle’ the ‘untamed’ central city for the middle class. While there is much to admire in TPC culturepreneurs’ hard work and dedication to a neighbourhood and a city, Neil Smith (1996: xiv) has cautioned that this language of urban colonisation ‘is as arrogant as the original notion of “pioneer” in that it suggests a city not yet socially inhabited’. How, then, can neighbourhood change occur ‘without it ignoring the imaginings or ruining the lives and culture of those who have long lived’ there (Antwi and Dean, 2012: 26)? At minimum, multiple forms of culture and place-making need to be appreciated and valued – not just the artistic. Such alternative valuation frameworks necessitate artistic affiliation across classes.
The Pearl District vision has gathered little momentum since it was first proposed at an informal meeting of local business owners five years ago. Reasons suggested for this are that the initial discussion was too focused on developing a name, logo and borders rather than on the practicalities of business and institutional collaborations for addressing city hall in a unified voice. One business owner (12 June 2014) recounts:
The discussions around The Pearl District had little to do with how to create a support system among the business owners and schools. What was talked about for three hours was a logo, flowerpots, and whether you could legally call it The Pearl District, since there was another one.
For TPC owners, mobilising their vision of The Pearl District has been challenging due to limited time and financial resources. Maintaining and programming an arts facility is demanding, made more so when combined with prolonged municipal legal and urban planning confrontations. While The Pearl District, with TPC as its arts anchor, is an imaginative vision for an inner-city neighbourhood that stretches the horizon of socio-spatial possibility, its transformative potential is limited because it is neither a shared nor a cooperative vision. The Pearl District was about connecting and creating with like-minded people and disconnecting from others who do not support this vision or who do not share the same understanding of culture.
Conclusion: In the shadows of arts district emergence
This article has shown that while arts districts are frequently idealised in urban planning and policy circles for their capital accumulation, cultural innovation and urban redevelopment potential, it is essential to address their shortcomings – namely, the social exclusions and creative destruction that can, whether intentional or not, be the by-product of neighbourhood artistic disaffiliation. The case study of the Landsdale neighbourhood in Hamilton as an emergent arts district serves as a cautionary reminder that culture-led place-making can involve expressions of disconnection and disengagement with social and physical environments.
The Pearl Company is an example of culture-led neighbourhood change that presents numerous challenges to social inclusion. It is primarily a personal cultural entrepreneurial rather than a collective, community-building venture. The logic used to realise this multi-purpose arts space and arts district is highly individualising; it offers few opportunities for artists and non-artists to share their different interpretations of culture, lived experiences of the neighbourhood or visions for its future. Artistic disaffiliation is shown to be a strategy to protect property assets and to reinforce socio-spatial divides rather than to nurture neighbourhood inter-class and artist/non-artist relations. Opportunities for openness to ‘others’ rather than hostility towards them are present in this example, but the potential these new interactions afford for more socially inclusive engagement with neighbours and neighbourhood spaces are under-realised.
This case study has offered insight into the complex and contradictory attitudes that cultural workers can have to the inner-city neighbourhoods where they live and work. Quotations from interviews with local cultural workers revealed prominent themes of socio-economic divides between long-time residents and newcomers coupled with emotive narratives of urban decline, judgments about unwanted others and strategies for managing the intertwined social and physical presence of difference. Selective acts of avoidance, control and destruction were shown to be withdrawal strategies used by some cultural workers to minimise the negative externalities of crime and social disorder and to realise a vision of a disadvantaged neighbourhood in their own image.
The example of the Pearl Company in the Landsdale neighbourhood of Hamilton, Ontario raises important questions that remain unanswered about how sensitive cultural workers are to the social and political realities of place. How and why can artistic practice be ineffectual at engaging with places and the lives and histories of non-artistic residents? What conflict-generating aesthetic strategies are deployed by cultural workers and with what consequences? When cultural workers are caught, intentionally or otherwise, in processes of gentrification it has significant social repercussions. Thus it remains essential for urban scholars to continue to critically examine the limitations of artistic practice – to consider the ideological agendas of cultural production and to question the assumption that working artists are necessarily social and economic assets to neighbourhoods.
Footnotes
Funding
This research was funded by a Minor Research Grant from the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University.