The scene repeats in many cities and is almost always recounted in the same manner, as a piece of good news: a degraded neighbourhood with vacant premises and low rents begins to fill with artists' studios, small galleries, a festival, and a café with character. The neighbourhood revives. Cultural supplements celebrate it. A few years later, the artists who revived it can no longer afford the rent they themselves helped to increase.
This is neither a paradox nor misfortune: it is a mechanism that has been well-documented for decades. Sharon Zukin described this pattern while studying New York lofts; David Ley analysed Canadian cities; Richard Lloyd followed the same process in Chicago. Artists and culture produce symbolic value, rendering a place interesting, authentic, and desirable. Real estate capital translates that value into rent. The neighbourhood is rebranded and revalued. Those who produced that aura of authenticity—artists, small businesses, long-term residents—end up displaced by the prices their presence triggered.
In the two-thousands, an urban policy was built upon this mechanism: the creative city. The premise was that attracting the creative class constituted the path to development. Critics soon demonstrated the neoliberal agenda of competition between cities and the fragility of its causal logic. Yet the formula took hold, and with it a more cynical version: artwashing. The use of art and artists—sometimes without their knowledge—to make a place more appealing to capital or to sanitise the image of a developer, a speculative operation, or an eviction with favourable press. Culture as a soft layer that cushions what follows.
Culturally activating territories is part of what a foundation such as the one I direct does. It leads to an uncomfortable question: when we bring a cultural project to a neighbourhood, are we benefiting it or paving the way for its rising costs and the displacement of those who live there? There is no automatic answer. One must ask the question every time.
The boundary does not lie in whether or not to bring art. It would be absurd to conclude that culture must remain distant from neighbourhoods to avoid harming them. The boundary lies in other questions: who controls the process, who captures the value generated, who remains and who is displaced, and what instruments—regarding housing, permanence, and governance—protect the local community. A cultural activation benefits a territory when it redistributes capacity to those who were already there: access, ownership, decision-making, and roots. It tends towards artwashing when it converts local culture into a mere market lure without securing any of those elements. The difference between one and the other is not artistic: it is political.
Acknowledging this does not paralyse; it provides order. A responsible cultural activation project cannot measure its success solely by how many people attended or how much it was discussed, but by what happened to the neighbourhood afterwards: whether its residents remain there, and whether the value generated stayed within the community or was extracted as rent. One must ask before entering whom our actions truly serve, and be prepared for the answer to be uncomfortable.
A luminous path exists; it is not one of abstention. Cultural cooperatives, usage agreements, projects under community control, and alliances with those who already inhabit the place. Art arrives in a neighbourhood not as the vanguard of its displacement, but as a tool for its people. There, culture does what it does best: it does not revalue land, but expands what a community can imagine and achieve with what it possesses. That art does not raise the rent. It raises something else.
On the open conversation
This text is part of my sub-series Art and Society, which examines with honesty, and from within, the real conditions of cultural work; here, how vocation is used to cheapen the work of those who possess it, and whom it leaves out. If anyone wishes to intervene from the sociology of work, the economics of culture, or the labour organisation of the sector, the notebook remains open.
Sources
Zukin, Sharon. Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Zukin, Sharon. Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Ley, David. “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification”. Urban Studies 40, no. 12 (2003): 2527-2544.
Lloyd, Richard. Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. Routledge, 2006.
Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class. Basic Books, 2002. (With critiques by Jamie Peck, 2005, and Ann Markusen, 2006.)
Pritchard, Stephen. “The Artwashing of Gentrification and Social Cleansing”. 2020.