Reading Sitings of public art, it was interesting to see the contrast between the top-down model of public art and the more inclusive and sensitive way of going about public art. It is a contrast that we have seen all through the semester, but one aspect of this that we haven't talked about is the idea of listening.

I had always been told to listen to people when doing socially-based or community projects, but I don't think I really got it until seeing the work people were doing in Greensboro Alabama. Greensboro is the place Rural Studio started. Much of the work Rural studio does is about listening. The students live in tents at the site of the house they are building, and the houses are tailored specifically to the needs of the people who will be living in them. I saw a lot of the houses built by early rural studio students, and there are definitely problems with the structure of the houses, but the aspect of Rural Studio that is really important and has lasted is the idea of listening to people and designing around that.

So many organizations have come from this idea of listening in design and while Rural Studio did not start this, they did put it into an institutional context really well and this has been the lasting effect of it.

Brooklyn Bridge Park

So Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates is pulling an Olmstead! I was reading an article in the New York Times about the new Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York.
Brooklyn Bridge Park
Green Space can be a great improvement to a neighborhood. I know we've talked in class about how community gardens and other types of green space can be totally beneficial and it's interesting to look at Baltimore in this sense as it is sort of on a small scale compared to NYC.
I wonder how this park will impact the neighborhood? The article talks about how the park has years before it is completed, though it is supposed to be one of many large "greening" projects in New York. Before the area was filled with dilapidated warehouses that lined the piers from the water. Now, for the most part they've been demolished to make room for recreational sports centers. This park should have an incredible impact on the city as central park did when Frederick Law Olmstead designed it. The article talked about how Olmstead viewed parks as a "refuge from the physical and psychological wear and tear of the industrial city" whereas the grittier elements of cities are focused on in a positive way. The connection between sustainable landscapes in urban environments aid to this link.

Walking around the city, I often find myself trying to imagine which areas of street and sidewalk are the most traveled and what parts of the city are most popular.  I had already seen some examples of maps that had done this kind of tracking,  but I enjoyed learning more about the process of creating and putting to use these kinds of maps to use in Sarah William's lecture.  Before the lecture, I thought of cell phone tracking as just a creepy way for the government and phone companies to keep track of our movements for surveillance and advertising.  While the lecture further confirmed this, it also showed me the positive side of using cellphone tracking to locate high-traffic areas for city planning.  

It was also interesting to hear about the innovative research methods that Sarah Williams used, such as the street sign posts and flickr photo sifting.  I'd seen projects like the text-in information posts before, but had never been aware of it's use in tracking areas where people had time for leisure.  Sarah William's presentation made me much more aware of the uses of cultural technology like texting and flickr, if not, perhaps, just a little bit more paranoid about it.

The Fine Art of Gentrification makes an interesting case in idea of gentrification. She makes the argument that it is more about the art market moving in than artists themselves. Too often it is the artists that get blamed for gentrifying an area when in fact, it is more the gatekeepers (gallery owners, writers and critics) that bring capital in and displace people. Yes, the writers were looking a the Lower East Side in a very different time when it seemed like bringing artists into an area to develop it was crazy, however, so much of the blame continues to be put on artists who move into lower income neighborhoods.
So much conversation happens about gentrification in Station North amongst it’s residents, but when you look at it as The Fine Art of Gentrification describes the process, gentrification in Station North is not much of a threat. This is mostly because there is very little capital invested into the arts in Baltimore. There are no galleries that are selling work in Station North, There is very little press regarding the art being made in Station North. Furthermore, the area continues to be virtually untouched by the art market.
That being said, we live in a time where the art market may not have to be the first investor of capital and interest in an area populated by artists. With all of the recent interest in Arts Economic Development, larger institutions like developers are catching on to the fact that artists can be good for an area’s economy. This begs the question: are they right? Is it right to assume that artists, without the support of the capital invested by the commercial art market are still economically good for an area? It seems that they are in some ways, but not in the ways that we have seen in cases like the Lower East Side. If artists are not making tons of money off of their work and being lauded in the art press, then there will not be the same influx of capital that there was in the Lower East Side. It seems that this initial push of capital made by the art market is what allows gentrification to happen because if artists in an area are making working class wages and no one injects some capital into the area to make it appealing to the upper classes, then none of the upper class people will move there.

Martha Rosler 2010

A few months back I was in New York at e-flux to see a panel talk about 'If You Lived Here' and Martha Rosler was there talking about her exhibition in retrospect. She discussed, half laughing/half serious how things hadn't changed much, how the attitude of the art world spoke volumes in its lack of response to gentrification in New York City alone. Unfortunately, I can't recall the whole of the discussion but I'm having e-flux mail me a copy of the talk! Hopefully it will arrive soon, in the meantime, here is the press release for the event I attended.

Press release here.

This events press release here.

And some reflections from the same group with some nice photos of the original 1989 exhibition. I'll share the video with anyone interested once I receive this in the mail!

Sarah Williams & The "Buzz Theory"

While speaking about her work at the Spatial Information Design Lab, Sarah Williams introduced the term “Spatial Data Traces”, or digital information registered by people in places that are left behind. She gave several examples of projects illustrating these data traces, the most compelling of which I found in the “Buzz Theory” project. The formulation of this project was rooted in the theory of “clustering”, a term we are not unfamiliar with from our readings by Richard Florida and Elizabeth Currid. The theory states, in short, that location and concentration is integral in developing a specific field-focused community. Silicon Valley, for example, is thriving due the clustering of engineers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in one area. The location of the “Buzz Theory” project began in Los Angeles, or more specifically, on the internet. Using the image repository site Getty Images, Sarah and her team mined for arts and cultural events happening in the area. They then divided the events by typology, finding that certain types of events developed “enclaves”, or their own concentrated areas. The team’s findings helped to make an interesting observation: the arts and cultural events were more common in commercial than creative areas. This supports the assumption that the Arts, though produced in creative enclaves, is celebrated by the public in commercial sectors. In addition, Sarah concludes that Getty Images is a market-driven site, used by those wanting to promote a commercial event. I was fascinated by this form of research- where the source of data and mapping of data serve to illuminate each other. Getty Images, though a provider of hard data, is made bias by its users. To recognize this, and use it to further your results, is what sets the research apart. When studying culture, why not use cultural data, and let the source and the results play off one another?

“Housing has to be rethought as a social resource, not simply a series of opportunity for profit. ‘Livability’, of course, means rational planning of city flows, from transportation to waste systems, but also requires attention to the fatal ills of human poverty and neighborhood blight.”
- Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here


I left our meeting with the People’s Homesteading Group with a sour resentment for city government. While touring through PHG’s developments, I as well as the rest of our group was struck by the quality and luxury of the renovated town homes. The difference between the market-rate and low-income housing was slight, with the former being more spacious and manicured. Logically one would assume that the better quality, higher resnt housing would require more time and financial investment. In a voice of marked exhaustion, our PHG representative pointed out that the low-income home took an additional 4 ½ years and tens of thousands of dollars to develop. This is due to the endless paperwork, stringent regulations, and stop-and-go building process characteristic of state involvement. Needless to say the low-income development was a major blow for PHG’s limited resources. The organization was recently forced to lay off all but two employees, both of whom are receiving limited incomes. This could have been avoided had had the PHG chosen to pursue market-rate housing alone. However this is contrary to the goal of the homesteaders, which focuses on aiding the existing community rather than profiting from incoming residents. I question a city policy that forces affordable housing developers into financial suicide. I would like to believe that the city values healthy, mixed-income urban development. However it is circumstances such as this that lead me to believe government policy supports high-income domination, ultimately leading to gentrification and displacement. Were this not the case, People’s Homesteading Group would be receiving ample support, as hope of a healthy city lies in organizations that favor social resources over profit.