Placemaking or placekeeping? The dual role of the arts in the gentrification of Manhattan’s Chinatown

Abstract

This paper was originally written for Dr. Eugene McCann’s GEOG 362W, Gentrification & Urban Change. The assignment asked students to research and critically analyze an example of gentrification and urban change. The paper uses APA citation style.

Artists have a reputation as harbingers of gentrification. However, the arts are not monolithic, and many artist-activists use cultural production as a method of creative resistance to gentrification in their neighbourhoods. This paper investigates the dual role of the arts in the gentrification of Manhattan’s Chinatown. The arts facilitate the neighbourhood’s gentrification through high-end art galleries that physically displace lower-income residents by driving up rents and pricing them out of Chinatown. Galleries also culturally displace residents through creating feelings of alienation and non-belonging. Businesses and planners have exacerbated these effects through ‘creative placemaking’ principles that co-opt the arts to support profit-making. On the other hand, the arts are a powerful tool of resistance. Through an analysis of the work of the Chinatown Arts Brigade, a longstanding arts-activist group in Manhattan’s Chinatown, I demonstrate the potential of the arts to empower tenant voices, contest ‘creative placemaking’, and hold other artists accountable for their role in gentrification. I conclude with a discussion of the ambivalence of the arts, demonstrating that the binary between ‘gentrifier’ and ‘non-gentrifier’ is, in fact, quite blurry.