Creativity and the New Colonialism

Urban Landscapes in America • Winter Round Table • November 16, 2007

Creativity and the New Colonialism Changes a-­‐Comin’ If you drive down Evans Avenue in San Francisco, past Third Street and what most city dwellers consider the “edge of town,” (continue as the street becomes Hunters Point Blvd, pass the defunct power plant, pass the housing projects, pass BeBe’s market, where the locals are throwing dice, merge onto Innes Avenue, face the abandoned navel shipyard) You will see a strange sight: the severed head of a giant fiberglass horse, speared on a pole, watching. Several yards away, guarding a broken bench where the 19 bus stops with only a tangential regard for the published schedule, is the horse’s decapitated body. This is Headless Point, home of artists Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito. Das Mann set up shop here over a decade ago, eventually making it his home as well. Within a few years, he had successfully started his own company out of the space, selling custom-­‐made metal work locally, and shipping it nationally. He had a number of full-­‐time employees, and the spot become a hub for the local art scene.

Das Mann then expanded, helping establish a second fabrication space just down the street from Headless Point. The Box Shop is a whimsical, almost Dr. Suessian compound of artists working out of a multicolored maze of stacked recycled shipping containers. Members of the impromptu community produce everything from decorative scrollwork to large-­‐ scale art installations that have appeared around the city. But the city isn’t always supportive of the creative initiatives that grow out of these spaces: over the summer, Das Mann was bullied into renting a full-­‐sized crane so that he could move several tons of art and equipment – stored well within the borders of his property at Headless Point – seven feet to the left. This was to make way for renovations to the adjacent building, the shell of a former restaurant burnt out by a fire that had once engulfed both properties. The new prospective tenant? Starbucks.

Aflame: In 2004, Headless Point caught fire, along with its neighbor, the newly opened independent Café Lola.

© Emily Appelbaum 2007 • emily.appelbaum@yale.edu

Urban Landscapes in America • Winter Round Table • November 16, 2007

Though gritty by some standards, the Box Shop’s affordable rent and shared space provides a low barrier to entry for artists and craftspeople making all kinds of products. At night, the space serves an additional social function, all while integrating well into the existing neighborhood.

Just down the street, a much larger project is being redeveloped, headed by Lennar, a transnational corporation operating under the slogan “Everything You Want.” The catchphrase, and the trendy new neighborhood it promises, already has trucks heading to and from the Lennar site from eight in the morning, well into the night. Hunters Point, an area already affected by high rates of asthma and lung disease (as well as cancer and other legacies of its nuclear waste-­‐site origins) is now covered in a thick layer of dust. Cusolito and Das Mann no longer work adjacent to their home; they now rent space in a 40,000 square foot industrial warehouse in West Oakland. Their workspace, though larger, is sandwiched between a commercial metal shop and a composite solid-­‐ surface fabricator. Even so, they’re considering renting several additional bays in the warehouse, currently used as garages for a bus line, to sublet to other displaced artists. Because their numbers are growing.

Karen and Dan hate the bus fumes, the fabrication noise, and especially the daily commute. But changes are coming to Hunters Point. “To be honest,” Karen says, when asked about her concerns for the future of her home, The Lennar Corporation is focused on macro-­‐ “I don’t even know how much longer until we’re level redevelopment anchored by large-­‐scale projects, such as a new football stadium for the going to be forced from here.”

San Francisco ‘49ers

The New Colonialism

In Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference, Deborah Root describes the way in which Western culture co-­‐opts and commodifies “native” tradition. In her book, Root describes a system of cultural consumption, where “appropriation occurs because cultural difference can be bought and sold in the marketplace.”1 At a time when Eastern religions are tried on and dropped like clothing in a store, sacred symbols turn up screen-­‐printed on tee-­‐shirts and dangling from necklaces, and there are travel agencies dedicated specifically to tourism of indigenous cultures, Root

1 Deborah Root. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodlfication of Difference. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. 68.

© Emily Appelbaum 2007 • emily.appelbaum@yale.edu

Urban Landscapes in America • Winter Round Table • November 16, 2007 expresses contempt for a society where cultural heritage and ideology can be picked up, willy-­‐nilly, and adopted.

Root has isolated a (perhaps the) key characteristic of modern American culture — the omnipresence of the consumer market, and its ability to sweep up and assimilate even the most distinct and innate facets of life. She situates this mechanism – its ubiquity serving as the foundation for commentaries like Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle2 – within the context of colonial expansion. Her critique of the process whereby we establish a connection to an idealized ‘authentic’ or ‘organic’ culture fits in neatly with the postcolonial critical approach, as popularized by Edward Said’s notion of the ‘other’ in his foundational Orientalism, while ipso facto challenging a term that implies that the problem of colonialism has somehow been solved, and all that remains is an analysis of the after-­‐effects. That this is a misconception is undoubtedly illustrated by the continuing appropriation of culture, not only where a legacy of colonialism still exists, but where culture is being digested, repackaged, and dispensed, for profit, within our own cities. The new ‘other’ being processed for popular ingestion is the indigenous culture that erupts spontaneously from the margins of our own mainstream society — be it minority culture, youth culture, urban culture, queer culture, or counter-­‐culture in any other form. And just as the colonial phenomenon that Root describes begins with physical conquest and extends to the appropriation of ideas and customs, so too does the parallel process that starts with the battle for land in places like Hunters Point.

Gentrification, Redevelopment, and the Changing US City Neil Smith begins his book The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, with an allusion to Fredrick Jackson Turner’s classic description of American expansion into the untamed West. Turner argued that the frontier was crucial in developing our national consciousness and remains integral to our character; this national pastime of conquest now manifests itself on the urban front. Through this allusion, Smith suggests that the process of gentrification — the phenomenon by which low income, economically and physically depressed areas undergo a ‘revitalization’ that generally results in repopulation by wealthier classes – parallels the settlement of native land.3 Masquerading under names like urban renewal or rehabilitation, the forces that lead to social displacement are widely accepted in the name of progress, with urban developers making tidy analogs to early American land speculators in their assumptions about the civilizations (or perceived lack thereof) that they overrun.

Urban redevelopment is as much an indicator of its historical climate as expansionism had been in colonial America. Scholars such as Sharon Zukin and John Hannigan have placed changing patterns of urban development within a framework that identifies a shift in the primary economic mode of cities, from industrial manufacturing to the production of ideas.

2 The first thesis of which is, “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” Guy Debord. The Society of the Spectacle, Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books. 1967.

3 Neil Smith. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge. 1996.

© Emily Appelbaum 2007 • emily.appelbaum@yale.edu

Urban Landscapes in America • Winter Round Table • November 16, 2007

The Florida-­‐based international Lennar Corporation has been a presence in the Bay Area for the past decade, nestling into the abandoned naval bases which had previously provided, amid the dust and traces of nuclear toxins, affordable rents for the city’s low-­‐income families and especially, artists.

The project proposed in Hunters Point includes plans for a variety of housing options, including market rate, reduced cost, luxury and “green.” But the corporation’s plans for this 771 acre project involve the demolition of 1,500 already existing below-­‐ cost residences. The project will provide approximately 8,500 new housing options, and while the literature presented by Lennar continually references a “robust affordable housing program,” it neither elaborates on this program nor denotes a specific percentage of the housing which will be dedicated to low-­‐income residents. (www.sfredevelopment.org) Even more importantly, however, the development’s proximity threatens hundreds of additional units of affordable housing not directly slated for demolition, which already stand under the watchful eye of advancing rows of new waterfront condos. While this real estate never would have been considered desirable pre-­‐Lennar, the government is finally sponsoring efforts to purge the area of bio-­‐toxins left over from decontamination experiments conducted at the shipyard following the navy’s nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. This movement will advance in step with the Lennar development, now that huge housing revenues seem likely. The existing residents of the area will likely be evicted or forced to leave with the rising rents of gentrification. . . of course, not before they have contracted the area’s typically higher rates of asthma, cancer, and other maladies. (Since 2001, Bayview-­‐Hunters Point has had the highest incidence of breast cancer, for women over 40, of any city in the United States.)

Old city centers have lost their middle class to the suburbs, and their manufacturing to the strengthening jaws of globalization and labor outsourcing.

Meanwhile, the technology boom of the past few decades has injected cities with a growing number of educated young professionals. The oft-­‐cited example of this phenomenon is the 1990s Silicon Valley explosion into San Francisco’s economy and housing market. The resulting mix of degraded inner city and upwardly mobile elite provided the perfect stage for widespread urban renewal projects catering to the influx. As San Francisco, and cities in general, became geared toward more high-­‐tech businesses, developers shifted away from the traditional, production-­‐focused models for urban planning, and sought out means of catering to the new “economy of ideas.”

Culture as a driving force If the sign of a modern economy is an emphasis on cognitive, rather than physical production, theorist Richard Florida has pinpointed this economy’s currency. Florida describes how human creativity has replaced raw material as the new capital and driving force of production. He identifies a new sector of the population: those engaged in what he deems to be creative work — which can include everyone from artists to engineers. Whereas the blue-­‐collar working class provided most of the labor force for the American-­‐city-­‐as-­‐industrial-­‐center, it is this creative class that is employed in the new technological economy of cities today. These highly innovative workers, Florida proposes, come to cities because of a ‘bohemian effect,’ by which entrepreneurs and creative professionals follow in the wake of a more eccentric creative core. By rating economically thriving and culturally diverse American cities like San Francisco and New York on a series of scales such as the ‘Gay Index’ and the ‘Bohemian Index,’ Florida demonstrates the link between marginal or ‘organic’ culture, and information-­‐age economic success. “All of these places were open, diverse, and culturally creative first. Then they became technologically creative and subsequently

© Emily Appelbaum 2007 • emily.appelbaum@yale.edu

Urban Landscapes in America • Winter Round Table • November 16, 2007 gave rise to new high-­‐tech firms and industries.” 4 Florida thus seeks to provide everyone from politicians to developers with the perfect formula for progress in the face of the changing American city.

As the idea of a culture-­‐driven urban renaissance gains momentum, investment into the arts is adopted as the new dogma of development. Armed with a new strategy for transforming ‘empty’ urban space into valuable real estate, which will in turn generate new business for the city, Florida and his proponents need only look for viable property to transform – low-­‐value land home to low-­‐income, often-­‐minority populations who do not have the resources or political will to resist invasion. Often, developers of such vulnerable neighborhoods have the raw materials needed to peddle their cultural revolution immediately at their disposal, because many decaying neighborhoods in ‘need’ of revitalization already provide the unique ecosystem of low rent and adaptable space that artists seek. While such an ecosystem may allow for the stable co-­‐existence of low-­‐income minorities and artists (who are often described as low-­‐income-­‐by-­‐choice), the balance is instantly upset by the prospect of development, the raw materials of which now include not just the land, but the artistic ambiance as well.

For the urban conquistadors who stand benefit to from colonizing the landscape in this manner, economic success may seem like a sure thing — new units are built, rents paid, jobs created. But if the profit-­‐driven call to manifest destiny, not only in America but around the globe, serves as an reminder, the impulse to colonize and profit does not always yield the intended result. The externalized costs of dominating, extracting, and commodifying are slowly revealed: costs to the environment, to the continued productivity of the region, and, of course, to the exploited population indigenous to the area. In the same way, the push for high-­‐end redevelopment can spin out, squandering resources before their importance is realized, and destroying delicate systems whose full value may never be known.

Where’s the Beef?

In this culture-­‐driven model of redevelopment, artists and bohemians take on a unique role: they can be seen as the inadvertent catalysts of gentrification, but are usually its victims, as well. While gentrification can play out in many forms and have a variety of causes, one scenario relevant to the “creative city” discourse occurs when artists flock to decaying low-­‐ income areas in search of cheap rents as well as the freedom to pursue alternative lifestyles. The area may previously have been seen as undesirable and its socio-­‐ economically disadvantaged inhabitants ignored, but the cultural influx draws attention to the district, with artists acting as a mitigating presence. Redevelopment ensues, real-­‐estate prices shoot up, and suddenly, not only can’t the working-­‐class residents afford their rent, the artists can’t either. Shepherded by driving economic forces, they are forced to resettle — but that’s not a bad thing, for they must choose another low-­‐income area where, lucky for developers, they will begin this profitable and efficient process anew.

4 Richard Florida. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002. 207.

© Emily Appelbaum 2007 • emily.appelbaum@yale.edu

Urban Landscapes in America • Winter Round Table • November 16, 2007 They have become more than the avant-­‐garde (pun intended); they have become more than even a selling point. The have become, like ore or timber, the raw resources needed to produce a material good. And while those who embrace the bohemian lifestyle might be unaware of their role in the process, with its often-­‐disastrous impacts on the surrounding neighborhood, there is nothing unintentional or involuntary about the participation of the speculators seeking to corral their value.

One only need turn on the TV or venture into a Big Box Store to see the marketability of counter-­‐culture. Skateboarders, for decades, were considered the scourge of a city — no-­‐ good hoodlums synonymous with crime and destruction of public property, who were rude and dreadful to behold, to boot. Now, they are endorsed and paid to endorse — everything from Mountain Dew to athletic apparel. Once banned from Philadelphia’s LOVE Park, they are now treasured as a defining feature of the city.5 Likewise, graffiti and guerilla muraling now enjoy the status of celebrated art form. Beat-­‐boxing, break-­‐dancing, low-­‐riding and rap are all the legacy of urban bohemian counter-­‐culture, all of which now carry huge market potential. Every trendy, bankable New-­‐Urbanist mixed-­‐use development is promoted through some combination of vibrant streetscapes, live-­‐work studios, lofts, boutiques, and artsy little cafes – all good things in their own right. The catch is, these projects are so often constructed by mega-­‐developers courting monolithic chain corporations posing as their idiosyncratic predecessors. And they don’t always function in the same way. The very idea of Starbucks is modeled after the small, mom-­‐and-­‐pop neighborhood café, and yet, it is the largest coffeehouse company in the world.

The organic street culture provided by artists is prized by developers looking to locate projects near unique assets, or simply to copy these forms entirely and distribute them to a wider market. In this process, artists and other bohemians become domesticated, like herds of buffalo or cattle, followed by man across the great American plains. So here is the crucial question: will it be buffalo, utilized in a sustainable loop for generations by the indigenous people of America? Or will it be the cattle, who followed after the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo and destruction of the delicate ecosystems they helped maintain, who can no longer graze the plains, but rather, eat the corn grown artificially on that same soil from endless concrete boxes perched above manure swamps, underneath the buzzing glare of fluorescent lights?

The analogy may seem dramatic, but it’s an appropriate reminder. The process of co-­‐opting and marketing bohemian culture is more than simply unfair to those who produce it, and from whom it is requisitioned. Rather than building healthy urban ecosystems that will continue to enrich and reinvent themselves indefinitely (by allowing the forces of creativity to stay integrated in the landscape), this “instant culture” method of development is like clear-­‐cutting a forest or hunting a population to extinction. It is superficial and unsustainable, as it undermines those it depends on. Furthermore, driven by money and 5 Ocean Howell. “The Creative Class and the Gentrifying City: Skateboarding in Philadelphia’s Love Park.” Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 55, No. 2, 2005. 32-42.

© Emily Appelbaum 2007 • emily.appelbaum@yale.edu

Urban Landscapes in America • Winter Round Table • November 16, 2007 market to its logical ends, this cultural consumption contributes to the very same placelessness, lack of authenticity, and stagnation that it seeks to remedy.

Better than a Clean Slate?

For Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito, there is only so much time before they, and many other artists, are buffed out of Hunters Point leaving a shiny, new slate. Not clean. No — better. Reclaimed. That’s right. Old is the new New. For now, it’s alright: there is still the warehouse in West Oakland. But Oakland is for Hunters Point what Hunters Point used to be for the rest of San Francisco: the Wild, Wild, West. Now, even East Bay real estate prices are jumping, and Headless Point East, as Das Mann calls it, along with a number of other revamped industrial spaces, is in danger. Where artists dare to create beauty, there is a consumer, surely, eager to buy. Developers are eager to use artists as the engines to repaint entire cities as their canvas. Indeed, were are long past the stage where entire cities can be commodified. San Francisco, with its Haight-­‐Ashbury district, has been billed as the hip place to be since the ‘60s. The same is true of Berkeley to the east and Santa Cruz to the south. Even a nerdy Ivy-­‐league East Coaster like me can gain a degree of street cred, a cool seal of approval from people I meet, when I tell them I’ve lived in those areas. I get asked if I surf, if I skateboard, if I sell pot, and if I want to hang out from people I don’t even know.

I get asked a lot what it’s like to have lived in a place as happening as San Francisco. And when I tell them — I’ve been a resident of both Headless Point and the Box Shop — about Hunters Point, I also get this: “You live in Hunters Point? The HP? Man, aren’t you scared? Isn’t that, like, the hood?” And sadly, the truth is, it’s not.

Not that I’ve ever been particularly afraid, even in the neighborhood’s poorest district. The characteristics that contribute to Hunters Point’s reputation – loud cars, homelessness, high numbers of unemployed people – are some of the same ones that contribute to what Jane Jacobs calls “eyes on the street”: people having barbeques, playing music, throwing dice.

But soon, none of that will matter, because new condos and luxury lofts are on the way.

The Loft. And idea actually invented by artists and those other members of the creative class who needed a creative way to live, so they didn’t have to choose between food and rent. The Loft. Now synonymous with Hip City Living, and often with a monetary and, increasingly, environmental (as buildings are rebuilt rather than retrofitted) price tag to match. But the real cost? Right now, that remains to be seen. The economy can be equalized, and building practices can be improved. But what of the city’s artists, writers, musicians, playwrights, dancers, inventors and dreamers? Will they simply be buffed away, along with all those delicious nooks and crannies, scratches and dents, in the city’s urban fabric? Or will they remain, like the American Bison, that crucial, life-­‐sustaining link, necessary for existence on the Last Frontier. At least I know that, for now, when I visit Dan and Karen, I sleep on a bona fide, honest-­‐to-­‐goodness loft, built of plywood and pallet racking, in the burnt-­‐out shell of a restaurant-­‐cum-­‐workshop.

© Emily Appelbaum 2007 • emily.appelbaum@yale.edu