Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape

Tijen Tunalı, Tijen Tunalı

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000391343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape brings together various disciplinary perspectives and diverse theories on art's dialectical and evolving relationship with urban regeneration processes. It engages in the accumulated discussions on art's role in gentrification, yet changes the focus to the growing phenomenon of artistic protests and resistance in the gentrified neighborhoods.

Since the 1980s, art and artists' role?s in gentrification ha?ve been at the forefront of urban geography research in the subjects of housing, regeneration, displacement and new urban planning. In these accounts the artists have been noted to contribute at all stages of gentrification, from triggering it to eventually being displaced by it themselves. The current presence of art in our neoliberal urban space?s illustrates the constant negotiation between power and resistance?. And there is a growing need to recognize art's shifting and conflicting relationship with gentrification. The chapters presented here share a common thesis that the aesthetic reconfiguration of the neoliberal city does not only allow uneven and exclusionary urban redevelopment strategies but also facilitates the growth of anti-gentrification resistance.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, urban cultures, cultural geography and urban studies as well as contemporary art practitioners and policymakers.

Part I

Art’s Conflicting Relationship to Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century

1 Gentrification and the Critique of the Contemporary Urban Dream-World

Luke Carroll

Introduction

Central to gentrification is consumption, and fantasy lurks within consumption through enchantment and discipline of bodies into structures of desire. To understand the fantasy of gentrified space is to, partially, understand its production. These phenomena will be explored through empirical engagement with gentrified spaces, and through walking interviews with subjects who “consume” it. A libidinal map will be produced, to better understand the ideological boon that gentrified space promises to these subjects for example the surplus it is perceived to have, which “typical” space lacks.

Capitalism is reproduced, in part, through the production of desires and fantasies which motivate consumption and labor (Böhm and Batta 2010; Cremin 2011). However, there is no singular structure of desire into which all subjects are interpellated (Lordon 2014). A libidinal map sketches out a particular structure of desire within this totality. The term “libidinal” signifies the process by which commodities become attractive or repulsive; able to spark desire or extinguish it. The rotations within fashion itself show this logic at its most elementary. A commodity is libidinally invested into while “in” and disinvested from when “out”; from aphroditic to anaphroditic, from desirable object to detritus (Benjamin 1999, 73–74).

In some respects, fantasy is itself spatial; stretching across and unifying, disparate interlinking phenomena. With this in mind, the libidinal map will be drawn through sketching the interconnected fragments, which constitute the fantasy; the objects within gentrified space, and the places they orbit. Each section will trace the fantasies projected onto these elements of gentrified space and, by extension, late-capitalist space more broadly. In particular, I will outline the constitutive role played by fantasies of labor, and temporality, in sparking the subject’s desire. Once complete, I will show the overarching constellation binding these fragments, arguing that the gentrifier’s fantasy is that of dichotomization, whereby subjects split capitalism into neat distinctions, for example, good/bad, real/unreal, and so on.

The negative projections, the unreal and lacking, totalize into the fantasy of “Crass Capitalism.” This imagined specter makes the libidinal fragments of gentrified space possible—“gentrified” objects, and places, derive their desirability from its “lacking” characteristics. Consequently, gentrified space exists as a contemporary dream-world. One where the dream of a life beyond the alienation of late-capitalism is commodified, and these critical desires are twisted into violent agents of capitalistic urban restructuring. The content of this chapter—the gentrifier’s fantasy, desire, and so on—is missing from the gentrification literature due to over-reliance on either Bourdiesian, or economistic Marxist, ontologies. Consequently, this material contributes to an understanding of gentrification unhindered by the deficiencies of these approaches. I do not suggest that these ontologies are redundant, rather that they are incomplete due to an abstraction of desire. By opening this theoretical ground, we can understand gentrification from a new perspective, while also providing correctives to previous paradigms.

While this libidinal map helps illuminate desire, it needs to be recognized as an abstraction. The neat categorizations enabling the representation of fantasy simultaneously work to obscure reality. In social reality, where fantasy is lived and ossified, libidinal fragments cross-pollinate and merge. Fantasy is messy and indivisible. Attempts to overcome this limitation will be pointed out throughout. Likewise, lived fantasy is never as universal as my representation may suggest. My socially blind illustration of fantasy must be subject to rigorous intersectional critique. Who can access this dream? How does this dream tilt? These essential questions are beyond my scope. Finally, my aim here is not to produce an exhaustive account of this dream-world, but rather illuminate its existence.

Sociological explanations of gentrification cluster around production and consumption paradigms. Before discussing each, one should note that neither side usually wishes to abstract the other’s considerations entirely. An important point to stress following Chris Hamnett’s (1991) seminal paper, which represented the gentrification literature as populated with hard-line opponents. Slater (2006) has argued this representation was detrimental, contributing to a stalemate where many researchers lost interest in gentrification; viewing it as trapped in production versus consumption dogma. I aim to circumvent such representations, through highlighting that both paradigms under-theorize the desiring subject.

Firstly, the production school. This paradigm is best characterized by Neil Smith’s “Rent Gap.” The “Rent Gap” seeks to explain gentrification by asking “what are the conditions of profitability?” (Smith 2005, 57). Such a question is relevant as, under a capitalist mode of production, land and the improvements built upon it, are produced and exchanged as commodities. Consequently, the built environment takes on the characteristics innate to the commodity form (Smith 2010). The land is valorized through being imbued with socially necessary labor-time, labor that is directed toward the production of a use-value, such as a home. The land’s exchange-value is then aligned in accordance with this. These improvements are also subject to devalorization, such as the decay produced via use itself.¹ When the exchange value of the land falls, so too does the rate of profit. However, while “the capitalized land rent” falls, the “potential ground rent” may not. This is the exchange-value the landlord could acquire, should the land be put to its “highest and best use” (Smith 2005, 63). This term, borrowed from neo-classical economics, denotes the form land must take to generate maximum profit. The distinction between these two values “The Rent-Gap” determines the likelihood of a space gentrifying.

Consequently, gentrification is a product of value in motion.² However, the economistic presuppositions of Smith’s account represent gentrification as a process without any consuming subjects (Hamnett 1991).³ The consumption school seeks to rectify this by considering the gentrifying subject. Such arguments follow that, as a “consequence of changes in the industrial and occupational structure of advanced capitalist cities” (Lees and Ley 2008, 90), the city has become postindustrial; entailing the expulsion of industry and working-class jobs. As postindustrial white-collar jobs supersede the old blue-collar, the city becomes populated by middle-class workers, rather than working-class laborers. This new, and increasingly numerous, postindustrial middle-class stratum, termed the “creative” or “cultural class” (Florida 2002; Ley 1996), has its own distinct habitus (Bourdieu, 2010). They seek to consume places and commodities with high-levels of objectified cultural capital (Jager 2013; Ley 1996), such as gentrified space and that which it commonly contains, as a means of either pleasure (Caulfield 1989), social distinction (Ley 2003), or both. In short, changes in our social re/production have centralized a new dimension of the middle-class with a taste for gentrified space, and it is through their demand that gentrification is driven.

The shared flaw within both these approaches is an abstraction of desire. Smith (2005) argues that the consumption school posits a kind of market voluntarism, whereby individual consumers determine the form taken by markets, thus abstracting away the requirements of capital in favor of privileging the power of taste. While I am somewhat sympathetic to Smith’s claim, it is apparent that his rent-gap falls into a similar logic. By lacking a substantial understanding of subjectivity, through his abstraction of the subject, Smith leaves us with two possible conclusions. Firstly, those subjects are fundamentally unimportant to the process of gentrification. Secondly, whilst important for the process, subjects have an “innate” desire to consume gentrified space. If we wish to maintain that subjects are important to gentrification, due to the necessity of value-realization through market exchange (Clarke 1991), it would appear that Smith naturalizes the process of gentrification through desire. The desire to consume gentrified space is assumed.

The consumption school claims to illuminate this abstraction, through an evocation of middle-class taste disciplined via the habitus—for example, the subject of gentrification is middle-class, and the middle-class desire gentrified space. However, they simply replace one abstraction with another. The abstraction of the subject, by the production school, is replaced by an abstract subject. This is not an issue with the consumption school per se, but rather its heavy-handed use of Bourdiesian theoretical frameworks. A key flaw within Bourdieu’s ontology is, to use the language of Object-Oriented Ontology, an “over-mining” of objects (Harman 2011). This entails that an object is seen only through its social function. For Bourdieu, an object’s truth content is the role it plays in mediating, and reproducing, a social agent position within the symbolic order. While I do not deny the importance of an object’s place within a habitus, and correlating field, this analysis in isolation is incomplete; as critical interpreters of Bourdieu have previously argued (Bidet 2008; Pensky 2004).

To outline why we must apply Walter Benjamin’s critique of Kant’s transcendental theory of perception to Bourdieu’s framework. Benjamin argued that historical mutations in perception are “mythologies” embedded in the structure of knowledge and the products of culture⁴ (Osborne and Matthew 2015). Objects, and the perceptive experience they produce, are historically grounded and mediated; they are symptomatic, in some manner, of a particular moment (Buck-Morss 1991; Miller 1996). While these symptomatic objects unavoidably become intertwined with social distinction and so can partially be understood through a Bourdiesian framework, it is an error to argue this approach is exhaustive.⁵ In short, just because gentrifiers acquire cultural capital through the consumption of their dream-objects, such as artisanal coffee or vinyl records, this does not mean there is no historical reason why these objects have become the standard by which cultural capital is currently accrued. In effect, objects, and places, have a certain surplus, which cannot be captured by a Bourdieusian analysis and it is within this surplus that desires, in part, lurks.

Consequently, the gap to be filled is in understanding the production of the gentrifying subject, through interrogating the desire to consume gentrified space: the aesthetic it emanates, the cultural artifacts it contains, and so on. In effect, to synthesize production and consumption approaches through desire. While I aim to reopen theoretical space within the study of gentrification, I do not wish to suggest current paradigms have no explanatory value. It is essential to recognize that gentrification, like any social phenomena, can only be understood through interlacing approaches—political-economy, class identity, desire, and so on. Each approach reveals elements of gentrification while simultaneously obscuring others. Importantly, the flaws within one are negated through the insight provided by opposing paradigms. In...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editor
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Dialectic Role of Art in Late Neoliberal Urbanism
• PART I: Art’s Conflicting Relationship to Gentrification in the Twenty-First Century
• PART II: Alternative Voices, Visualities and Performances Against Gentrification
• PART III: Community Building in the Gentrified Urban Space
• Index