Letting Go of Nostalgia Urbanism
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Of course my interests are not neutral here. I'm from a place like this, and after a decade of urban living I decided to move back. It's not trendy or sexy, but I encourage people to give it a try.
Not Ohio, but most of my serious bo-ho hipster friends went to Pittsburg or Detroit. Aging and rust-belty, but with enough actual city to also satisfy.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEjBDKfrqQI4TgzT9YLNT8g
The idea is quite appealing, but I think I prefer to experience Brent's journey vicariously through his Cerro Gordo videos!
Artists (of any kind) don't make any money, and don't want to waste time making money when they could be making art. So they need cheap places to live. Cheap places are cheap for a reason: there's no heating, or the roof leaks, or the kitchen isn't really a kitchen, or it's miles from anywhere you'd want to go. That doesn't matter if what you really want to do is spend every waking moment creatively and around likeminded people.
Apparently Leipzig is where the artists from Berlin are moving now, because it's cheap. But who wants to live in Leipzig? It's a nothing place.
Until 20 years from now, when it'll be a cultural centre because of all the artists there... and they'll have to move on because the rents will be rising.
As a side note, Leipzig is also an extremely livable city with a ton of history. Definitely not a nothing place.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/fwkfot/but_why_leip...
I've been to Leipzig for a festival. It had history, culture, and art for certain value of "art". It didn't seem like a nothing place.
Artists aren't somehow totally oblivious or too high-minded to take this into consideration. It's a weird narrative that paints artists as totally separate from the system, which just isn't true
> don't want to waste time making money when they could be making art.
You would be making money precisely because you are spending your time making art.
My mother was a professional artist. She was contacted by a property developers who had noticed this effect and wanted to bring artists to their development so it would become gentrified. Mum explained that to do that, they would need to provide cheap (very cheap!) studio space for the artists to use. The developer did the maths and decided to just make apartments for yuppies as it was more profitable.
To make money off this, the artists would need to own the buildings they occupy, and then sell them to the incoming gentrified yuppies. After having spent the money upgrading the building, of course, because the yuppies need all the mod cons. That would involve spending attention, money and time on making money instead of art. To do this, they would need to stop being artists and become property developers.
The economic benefits to the city of having a thriving art community might be diffuse enough across many people that there's no one person or group willing to pay individual artists to provide the benefit. That is, it's mostly a positive externality / public good.
You could ask the municipal government for pay for it, the way they pay for roads and other services, but then you'd have the problem of establishing some sort of worthiness standard to ensure the system isn't just being taken advantage of. The determination of such a standard, besides being possibly unrealizable, would probably undermine the creative spirit it's designed to foster.
It's hard to describe but my anecdotal first hand experience includes plenty of rich tourists hanging around the emerging cultural hubs. I sincerely think the money goes into feeling cool rather than fueling the art economy, it's the surrounding bars, restaurants and cafes (and property developers) that end up making the big money. As mentioned elsewhere - the artists end up gone, the soul of the place eventually goes, and they end up with those weird soulless expensive places that used to be poor and full of artists.
The returns go to property owners, not workers.
Please pause for a second before saying "why don't they just buy property" and come up with possible answers to that yourself.
So artists that have this kind of pull would probably have a hard time just buying a cheap warehouse and opening shop.)
There is a very clear divide between creatives (artist, musician, videographer, photographer, etc.) who are at the beginning of their career, and those that have achieved some success. The beginners are still trying to make their money in Berlin. The somewhat established creatives make their money outside Berlin, but use Berlin as their home base because of the cultural connections and creativity it generates.
How would they do that?
Money devalues art.
I recommend an old anthology for similar stories to this one called On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled.
For example, the reader that asked the article’s author:
>A reader reached out to me with a query. He and his wife and three daughters are in search of “a slower, more nature and community bound life, but without leaving behind people who read books, et cetera. I'm forever looking for where Henry Miller's Big Sur is today, or Provincetown, or even the Upper West Side of 1960, or the San Francisco of the early 90s. We have some money, but we don't want to be around people who are money driven.”
Everyone else is looking for that too. And since it’s easier to find those places (or was) they get bid up as all things do with lots of demand and relatively low supply.
These people want the benefits of insanity with none of the drawbacks. If they were to meet any of the great artists they think were great they would try and cancel them for being *ist. This is first hand experience, I ran an artists commune after I dropped out from my phd for about a year.
Real Bohemianism means hanging out with drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, alcoholics and junkies, people with mental health issues, gallery owners, critics, and other undesirables.
Some of them may happen to make art. But if you want "safe" - a bit of culture but not too much - Bohemia is not for you.
As an aside, there are probably classist elements to what they're asking for but it's not just a class thing. Since taking a fully remote job I've seriously considered moving back to my hometown, where I could get a 3BR detached house for <$150k within a couple blocks of an intact downtown, but I keep remembering that this [0] (recorded 3 miles away) is representative of the people who would be my neighbors there. "Classist" is adjacent to the right term for my attitude here but it's not quite right.
"Walkable" is an incredibly loaded term. It has evolved to mean "convenient" rather than "has sidewalks".
Struggling creatives don't usually live in neighborhoods that are safe or "walkable", though they may be urban and have sidewalks.
In the US you tend to find this in places that were built before cars but with sufficiently high property values that rearranging the buildings to widen the streets doesn't make sense. See parts of Boston for example. The places that are both old and wealthy tend to have streets that are pretty much local access only through size alone.
In montreal there is an extensive system of back lanes, and I did a lot of my walking there, no sidewalks. The lanes were shared by cars but they were slow and infrequent.
Nonsense. Interstate Highway 90 is quite unwalkable due to its lack of sidewalks.
You clearly have not seen some of the highway interchanges in Olympia, WA.
They aren't just neighborhoods, they're whole towns. Of tents. Walkable, but surely not safe.
;)
Conflict of belief systems or maybe anomie?
Gentrification is not so bad, but hypergentrification is.
There is a new form of 'Globalist/Consumerist' gentrification and suburban building that is straight up 'bad' - there is no local anything, just miles of materially 'ok' people working for large corps, driving the same cars.
There are no accents, cuisine, no weird characters, no un-PC opinions, and there's nowhere to walk.
There is a huge missing ingredient in 'urban planning' that we have not put our finger on, and it's related to commodification of culture, particularly in North America.
The Europeans (and others) haven't so much 'figured it out' so much as 'already had it' and are careful to adapt new-tech, even tossing it in retrospect (dumping cars downtown).
Finally: Montreal. It's fairly affordable (super cheap in USD), authentic, cool, there is more going on here in the summer than any American city except NY (even LA) and that's saying a lot. Quebec speaks French and is protected from a lot of the US culture wars as there's no hyper-scrutiny of some things here.
There are many interesting places in the US as well, but probably not so many big ones.
- Some part of $City is a dirty, smelly, claustrophobic place, no one wants to live there so rents are low.
-> Low wage service workers, underserved/oppressed communities, and other "undesirables" move there because they have no where else to go, and form their own community.
-> Artists, actors, students, and others with no money move there because of low rents, and the area become "quirky" and "authentic" (ignoring, of course, the community culture that already lives there.)
-> Patrons of artists and actors like to live among artists and actors so also move to the area (or adjacent surroundings.)
-> Some of those patrons start up businesses to serve the low-rent community (the ubiquitous "coffee shop", bookstore, or gallery.)
-> The area becomes a center for art and creativity, and new amenities draw more people.
-> Middle income people start to move in, bringing demand for services and more amenities, but specifically the ones they are used to from elsewhere, not the unique "quirky" ones that made the area interesting to begin with. (Right around here is the part of the cycle where the city council and police start receiving more complaints than in the past, and usually complaints directed at the community which was there first.)
-> Developers start to take notice, buying land and increasing property values, building cheaply constructed luxury "slums" but charging sky high prices due to desirable location and access to amenities.
-> As property values go up, so does rent, forcing out first the low wage service workers, underserved/oppressed communities, and other "undesirables", and then the artists/actors/students/etc.
-> The area starts to lose what made it "quirky" and "authentic" to begin with, as the coffee shops are replaced with Starbucks, ethnic restaurants are replaced with chain restaurants, and little theaters and galleries can't afford rent anymore. It become sterile and Disney-fied.
And while all this is happening, newcomer residents are demanding that the city & police do something about all the growing homeless and addiction problems brought on by the people who can no longer afford to live there being forced out of their homes.
They were interstitial spaces true to the Gibsonian form, small ethnic enclaves, industrial wastelands bereft of industry from the 70s onward, that afforded a isolated née desolated place to live. The areas attracted artistic types, ravers, communes and the sense of existing, living in luminal states where structures of power, churches, local government, economic development were strangely absent from the population of oddballs and irregular who could rent a 4,000 square foot loft in a former printing plant for $1,000 a month. No social services, grocery stores, schools or other symbolic anchors of traditional communities were present. The artists were a community but bereft and ignored by social services, forcing them to create their own. A kind of anti-commune abandoned by late-stage capitalism where individual expression, art and music could take root and fester.
A Bohemia in a sense of those young and old, who fell outside most normative rules of life in order to pursue their own ideal for living.
It existed than and as I drive the Chicago streets of those areas today I sadly realize that happenstance of time and place is gone. Replaced mostly by money. The eviction of the first wave of, let’s not call them gentrifiers, by the commercial gentrifiers seeking to exploit underpriced buildings by boutiques and the final corporate invasion of the Starbucks and potbelly sandwich shop who out performed the local indigenous businesses.
It was money and class, not race or anti-bohemian forces which decimated those areas. The neighborhood micro cultures could not compete with $300,000 condo lofts and so it was no more.
Places like this have been eradicated nationwide by the flow of money in lieu of culture and money wins.
“We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel rat can be at home in this environment...”
I think the discussion is missing something though. It is hard to form an artistic community in the middle of nowhere, since many artists work best in a community of collaborators. Is it realistic to move somewhere and expect others to follow? I still think what is required is a cheap urban center. Unfortunately, these are getting increasingly hard to find in the developed world.
- gentrified and unaffordable
- derelict post industrial with leaky roofs
- middle of nowhere
That may be the case but it makes me curious why this is so.
I think because real estate investors have enough capital to take over cool areas.
A stark counterexample is Japan where you can own a freestanding house in a dense urban environment near public transit for $300k -- what would that cost you in London, NYC, Berlin? It seems like Japan is one of the few major cities where you could have a large family (or large studio) and live an urban life -- everywhere else you are stuck with a 2BR or 3BR apt (if your rich).
How an Average Family in Tokyo Can Buy a New Home https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGbC5j4pG9w
My own experience living in a pre-renovation light industrial warehouse: damp, mildew with a side of asbestos roofing, constantly leaking and flooding when there was a storm, illegal heavy metal dumping and illegally wired off the three phase substation, water someone had forgotten to turn off and an electric boiler that would heat water faster than you could use it. The most interesting night was scaring off some skinheads with a crow bar that had a rag set on fire on the end, and a lot of screaming.
It was Victorian brick that sold for $1.3m 15 years later.