What is it about?
Arts-led urban regeneration strategies are typically distinguished from the grassroots authenticity of community mural projects, but this article examines how the trope of community facilitates gentrification in Oakland, California. I critique gentrification as a dualistic insider and outsider dynamic; such structural analysis elides ‘community’ as a contested category that may be complicit with urban restructuring.
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Photo by Randy Tarampi on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Through ethnographic research, this article contributes to art and gentrification debates, understandings of urban change, and concepts of community, as some community murals visually change urban space in ways that work against the neighborhood.
Perspectives
After being displaced from San Francisco during the first “dot com” information technology boom in the late 1990s, I moved to an affordable mixed-use neighborhood in West Oakland. Through street-level ethnography I chronicled everyday relationships among artists and residents, along with the effects of various art projects on the neighborhood, during extreme socio-economic change from 2000 to 2020. This decades-long project puts a face on terms like disinvestment, displacement, and gentrification.
Dr. Robin Balliger
San Francisco Art Institute
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Painting over precarity: Community public art and the optics of dispossession, gentrification and governance in West Oakland, CA, Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, March 2021, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/jucs_00035_1.
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