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Artists as Gentrifiers: A Process of Urban Renewal From TriBeCa to SoHo to Dumbo, artists tend to agglomerate in well-publicized art centers rich in loft space.
Submitted by hessian on August 21, 2005
Category: Miscellaneous
Words: 4748 | Pages: 19
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From TriBeCa to SoHo to Dumbo, artists tend to agglomerate in well-publicized art centers rich in loft space. However, the paradox of artistic agglomeration is that artists are eventually priced out of the region of agglomeration as their presence attracts bourgeois residents and capital-rich businesses that together bid up rents. Art centers thus possess a dynamism that other regions of agglomeration, like Silicon Valley or Route 128, do not share. While the dynamic quality of art centers is well-known, artists' crucial role in gentrification is not. Often, artists are considered victims of gentrification since they are often the ones being priced out of a region by more affluent businessmen. However, artists play a crucial role in the gentrifying process as they help revitalize areas of past stagnation and crime. That artists are eventually priced out of the regions they helped to revive is not necessarily inefficient as they move on to improve the next low-rent industrial area leaving the old art center with increased land value and more businesses.
To understand how artists act as gentrifiers and fit into capitalist plans to raise land value, we must first establish a working definition of gentrification as:
"A process by which dilapidated subdivided dwellings or slum neighborhoods are taken over by the wealthy or their agents through purchase, the non-renewal of leases or occasionally, the harassment of tenants, and then converted to expensive single-family housing. Gentrification is a reversal of the normal filtering process, for it involves old substantial dwellings that usually filter down the social hierarchy but in this case are recolonised and filtered back up." (Yardley 3-4)
Since identifying artists' role in the gentrification process is the subject of this paper and since the process relies on the establishment of an arts center, we must first ascertain artists' reasons for agglomerating.
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