The scene repeats itself in many cities and is almost always recounted in the same way, framed as positive news. A degraded neighbourhood, with vacant premises and low rents, begins to fill with artists' studios, small galleries, a festival, a café with character. The neighbourhood is 'revived'. Cultural supplements celebrate it. Yet 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 a stroke of bad luck: it is a mechanism, and one that has been well-documented for decades. Sharon Zukin described it while studying New York lofts; David Ley analysed it in Canadian cities; Richard Lloyd tracked it in Chicago. The pattern is always similar. Artists and culture produce symbolic value—they make a place interesting, authentic, and desirable. Real estate capital translates that symbolic value into rent. The neighbourhood is rebranded and revalued. And those who produced that aura of authenticity—artists, small businesses, long-term residents—end up displaced by the prices their own presence triggered.
In the two thousands, an entire urban policy was built upon this mechanism: the creative city, the notion that attracting the 'creative class' was the path to development. Its critics soon highlighted its nature as a neoliberal agenda of competition between cities, and the fragility of its causal logic. However, 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 launder the image of a property developer, a speculative operation, or an eviction with positive press. Culture as a soft layer that smooths over what lies beneath.
This concerns me directly, as culturally activating territories is part of the work of a foundation such as the one I direct. It necessitates an uncomfortable question: when we bring a cultural project to a neighbourhood, are we benefiting it, or are we paving the way for its rising costs and the displacement of those who live there? There is no automatic answer, and precisely for that reason, the question must be asked every time.
The boundary, and this is what matters, does not lie in 'bringing art' or 'not bringing it'. It would be absurd to conclude that culture must be kept away from neighbourhoods to avoid harming them. The boundary lies in other questions: who controls the process, who captures the value that is 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.
Recognising this does not paralyse; it provides order. It means that a responsible cultural activation project cannot measure its success solely by how many people attended or how much it was discussed, but rather by what happened to the neighbourhood afterwards: whether its residents are still there, and whether the value generated remained within the community or was absorbed by rent. It means asking, before entering, whom our actions truly serve, and being prepared for the answer to make us uncomfortable.
And there is a luminous path forward, which is not to abstain. Models exist—cultural cooperatives, usage agreements, projects with community control, alliances with those who already inhabit the place—where art arrives in a neighbourhood without being the vanguard of its displacement, but rather a tool for its people. There, culture does what it does best: not revaluing land, but expanding what a community can imagine and achieve with what it has. That art does not raise the rent. It raises something else.
On 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.