The Wall Street Journal calls this "Fighting Urban Blight With Art". Liz Thomas, the curator of the project, calls it "an experience that asks people to think about this space that they hurtle through every day".
The project is not actually fighting blight, of course - only the ability of Amtrak customers to see it.
— Al Jazeera
Reminds me of NYC in the 1980's when the city put large vinyl decals depicting shutters, potted plants, Venetian blinds and window shades over the yawning windows of abandoned city-owned buildings that face the Cross Bronx Expressway.
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After reading countless articles that make broad characterizations about so-called hipsters based on tight jeans, irony and whiteness, I've decided that the word is primarily used for its value as click-bait. Articles that use the vague pejorative "hipster" usually avoid profiling a specific person. Its not surprising that the author also doesn't give us much specific background information on the artist or even an image of the artwork itself. After looking up images of the artwork, I don't see how it can be described as "blocking poverty". The paintings/installations are applied to railroad track-facing building surfaces, rubble, plants and debris. As a person who has travelled on Amtrak many times, these conditions are common along railroad tracks throughout the country including wealthy urban neighborhoods, suburbs and rural places.
Gentrification and racism are indeed huge problems in American cities but this author doesn't dig deeply enough into the more important issues of political clout and the even distribution of city services. Instead she conflates racism with Grosse's public art.
Some pics:
Its always easier to blame the hipsters. just remember that gentrification is a result of neo-liberal capitalism. (and...post-recession information economy, student debt, greedy real estate developers, rent speculation etc...)
Hipsters are simply the yuppies of the 2010's. As the latest gentrifying class they are the target of the campaign. As noted, neighborhoods are "cleaned up" and improved when more upscale people move in, while lower classes are forced out.
This is very much related to anti-homeless architecture.
I've decided that the word is primarily used for its value as click-bait
agreed - it's a lot easier to place blame on groups of people instead of exploring the past 5 decades of auto-centric development and policies (and systemic racism) that has led to vast spaces of blight and a dearth of walkable places that increasingly more people want to live in.
everyone keeps skirting around the issue - but we've got a major mobility crisis in this country.
Agreed with toasteroven. If some kid want's to move into a run-down but beautiful older neighborhood and bike around looking for artisinal sausages, more power to him. When I was an unhip young biker, I had to settle for the local supermarkets.
but thayer - this is part of the problem - more and more people who have the economic means to live in car-centric places are choosing not to (or, people are making economic decisions to move to walkable neighborhoods for access to social capital and/or as part of their retirement plans), which is displacing people who can't really afford to live in the low-density drive-only sprawl that is being left over (even with low property values there will still be high taxes, and high cost of transportation)
and rust belt cities aren't in a good position unless they start removing highways and building better public transit - but even then I don't think it'll be enough.
I agree toasteroven, but I think the solution is to build or retrofit more areas into transit and pedestrian oriented communities. As a country, we are way behind on this and we can't entirely rely on the private sector to come around. As for rust belt cities, if that's not enough, then they are truly doomed. I think they will stand a chance if we free up as much of the regulations for smaller sized business ventures to allow more folks to service their own local communities, much like immigrant communities moved into desolate urban neighborhoods and brought them to life.
Me thinks you kids are quacking in your Chukka boots. Sure, the hipster meme is click-bait, but the author bemoans the same unequal distribution of resources mentioned in several of the posts. I don't think she "blamed" hipsters - they are just the latest shock troops in continual melting of anything solid into air and the eternal churning of real estate marketing.
It's the false consciousness - indeed blithe and clueless ignorance of some purveyors of urban hip that really set my teeth on edge. Portlandia without the getting the joke.
Urban renewal has been privatized and is driven by market forces, specifically developers catering to social climbers. It's all driven by profit, and there isn't any (in the narrowly defined financial sense) in improving the lot of the poor. Thus urban renewal is luxury condos and shopping on cheap real estate, the remainder of which must be masked as cheaply as possible to assure the marketability of the newly developed part.
hipsters = shock troops. Who knew?
Pork pie hats instead of brown shirts.
but the author bemoans the same unequal distribution of resources mentioned in several of the posts.
sure - it's misallocation of public funds, but it's basically another variant of "plop art."
the solution is simple. build a wall around Brooklyn and cut off all food and utilities. Lets see how long before these self righteous complicated coffee drinking brats take to resort to cannibalism :)
as long as it's grass fed.
It would be interesting to see a map that illustrates average commuting time per zip code. Anyone know if this has been done? Id wager that the lowest income and highest income areas probably have the smallest commuting times.
Urban renewal has been privatized and is driven by market forces, specifically developers catering to social climbers.
what do you think has always driven development? Even the "urban renewal" projects of the last century were largely about lining pockets - the west end destruction in Boston not only created government center, but also courthouses, high-end commercial space, and luxury residential towers. The difference today is that we aren't using the government to bulldoze entire neighborhoods anymore - and we've now reached the tipping point where most people don't want to live in car-centric suburbs. When we were mostly developing cheap land out on the fringes, the number of people being displaced were minimal, but we lost a lot of green space and farmland in the process. The problem is that poor people are increasingly being pushed into car-only mobility deserts.
What is odd about this article is that the author fails to notice that we now see public transit users (and bicyclists) as "hipsters" or "upwardly mobile" - when not so long ago we saw people who got around this way as largely poor (although the reality is that poor people still rely more heavily on these modes). What I think is far more insidious is that the author is attempting to marginalize the very people who are now making non-car modes of transportation socially acceptable - yes, this is an overly expensive art project that instead of being plopped into a windswept office plaza, it's plopped into a transit corridor, yes there are issues with displacement through gentrification, but does the author really want to fight a proxy war for the car and oil industry? This is the wrong battle.
@jla-x - I know that in Boston and NYC, lower income = long commute times, because people in lower income neighborhoods largely use the bus - which are often on congested routes filled with suburbanites commuting into the city. The only poor people who live on subway lines in Boston are those lucky enough to get into public housing - but even then their job might be at one end of another subway line and require a couple transfers.
http://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/embed.html#5.00/42.000/-89.500
There was a time when urban renewal included affordable housing projects and public parks. But by the 1950's the Fed was underwriting private development in a variety of ways including FHA mortgages used to buy private development.
@curtkram that is a very cool dataviz/mapping. It confirms for me that even in cities with bad commutes it is all about where you choose to live in relation to work.
maybe i just work to much but that is probably # 1 concern, when i think of relocating.
What is so bad about hipsters? They were actually quite nice, the sincere ones, before Wall Street, Madison Ave and Silicon Valley started co opting its ethos.
If you look closely, hipsters aren't even hipsters anymore--they are the yuppies. But the brand seems unchanged....
I think there was a moment, around 2009, where branding replaced criticism. Perhaps it is when Ouroussoff stopped writing for the Times. Instead of looking at individuals, everything was a buzzword. Brutalism, yuppies, BIG. Lost are the individual things.
Perhaps the term today should be techsters
Cool map curtkram
Whats interesting is if you look at ny it goes (roughly) from darker to lighter from Brooklyn towards Suffolk county. That's counter intuitive.
Also what's really strange is that sprawl cities that lack a real downtown like Phoenix seem to be acting more like cities with the commute time lowest at center gradually becoming greater as you move out. Lower manhattan seems like what one would expect but Brooklyn appears to be operating like a suburb where people live there out of desire but work elsewhere. If the jobs in Brooklyn don't pay enough for you to live in Brooklyn then...I guess what I'm getting at is that gentrification leads to the "sun-urbanization" of once truly urban areas. High end neighborhoods, yuppies, service jobs like small shops...sold as a life style as suburbia once was.
Meant to say (sub-urbanization) not sun.
jla-x - not all of brooklyn is gentrified. - the high commute times are in the poorer neighborhoods.
Toasteroven, That's true, but in the big picture "urban" is being reduced to a lifestyle. Cities did not evolve from a desire for urban lifestyle. The forces that created cities were economic for the most part and deeply integral to the urban form. Now cities are being sold as commodity, amenity, lifestyle...This imo cheapens the dynamic and complex ecology of the "real city." The lifestyle offered by urban areas was historically consequential to deeper driving forces. The problem with gentrification is that lifestyle becomes the main function sustaining the value of the place. value becomes abstract. Because of this, the gritty yet integral components of urban areas become "undesirable" and get swept away, hidden, or sanitized and exploited.
They want to live on the farm without the smell of the cows...well once you remove the cows, the plows, and the other undesirable things that invade the idealized picturesque vision of "farm life" eventually you no longer have a farm but rather a community stylized in the image of a farm. It becomes Disneyesque. This is essentially the myth of suburbia...a house in the country without the inconveniences of country living....
Having lived in Brooklyn in the 1980's, I can say it was many people who wanted to see the northern neighborhoods fixed. That didn't mean white washed, but safe and pleasant to walk around. Race and gentrification are unfortunatly intertwined in America becasue minorities tend to be at the bottom economic rung, which I think is the real problem. I'm not sure who is "selling" this urban lifestyle, but it's no mystery why so many suburban kids want it. The other challange imo, is to expand this pedestrian oriented life style. In Brooklyn, they are talking about re-building the streetcar system as with many other cities. As for how to create such beautiful and characterfull neighborhoods, that's the easiest part, if archtiecture schools would just take their head's out of their asses.
Now cities are being sold as commodity, amenity, lifestyle...
Just like everything else, with the same result. Isn't capitalism great?
(don't forget tourism)
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