Earlier this week, the online street art community was abuzz about an article by Rafael Schacter for The Conversation, From dissident to decorative: why street art sold out and gentrified our cities. [...]

Basically, Schacter argues that street art isn’t rebellious anymore. Rather, that it’s most notable form is as a tool used by corporations to spur gentrification. Agree or disagree, the article is a must-read. — Vandalog

Rather than watching passively as non-local or private developers consume neighborhood public spaces, we can use Placemaking to enable citizens to create their own public spaces, to highlight the unique strengths of their neighborhoods, and to address its specific challenges. While gentrification can divide communities and build upon exclusivity, Placemaking is about inclusion and shared community ownership. It is about increasing “quality of life,” not removing public life. — pps.org

“There's absolutely nothing wrong with a development that primarily aims to bring new people into the neighborhood, including people who don’t have the same profile as the people who already live there,” [...]

Couldn’t the restaurant’s cheerleaders see how it was a little sad that in a place where mostly black students had once learned about carpentry and the culinary arts, mostly white people were now drinking rosé? — phillymag.com

Cities can’t win. When they do well, people resent them as citadels of inequality; when they do badly, they are cesspools of hopelessness. In the seventies and eighties, the seemingly permanent urban crisis became the verdict that American civilization had passed on itself. Forty years later, cities mostly thrive, crime has been in vertiginous decline, the young cluster together in old neighborhoods [...] —and so big cities turn into hateful centers of self-absorbed privilege. — newyorker.com

“I helped change one neighbourhood into a hipster place, and then we got priced out of there.” Artist Jim Walker is describing the shift in fortunes of the Fountain Square district of Indianapolis, where his Big Car arts collective was born a decade ago – and of the artists and residents who have been forced to move on by the neighbourhood’s gentrification. [...]

Is there a more equitable way? That’s just what Walker is trying to find out with his latest arts-led Indianapolis project. — theguardian.com

Slapped in the face is exactly how many Venetians are feeling by the tidal wave of new money. And the local tech boom, prompting 'Silicon Beach' references around town, is just one source of it — The Washington Post

Herzog & de Meuron, the Basel-based architecture studio that designed London’s Tate Modern, is due to redevelop Berlin’s famous art squat Tacheles. The massive warehouse, in the now fashionable Mitte district, was occupied by artists after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A symbol of the city’s subculture, Tacheles became a major tourist attraction. In 2012, the authorities closed the art centre amid widespread protests by artists and anti-gentrification campaigners. — theartnewspaper.com

Often, at least in America, we think of regular people as the agents of change—the artist, the boutique coffee shop owner, the tech startup. But as much as gentrification is an organic process, fueled by opportunity seekers and bargain hunters, it’s developers and financiers who have become the savvy midwives of change. Once they detect the early signs of gentrification, they bring on the serious money. — Quartz

Berlin has become the first city in Germany in which rent-control legislation has come into force in a bid to put the breaks on some of the fastest rising rents in Europe.

From Monday, landlords in the capital will be barred from increasing rents by more than 10% above the local average. Such controls were already in place for existing tenants but have now been extended to new contracts.

“[...] the difference between the rent paid in existing contracts and new contracts is so high [...]” — theguardian.com

The High Line is...a perfect example of “environmental gentrification” – the growing phenomenon of rising property values in the wake of a large-scale urban greening project... While intended to serve existing residents, in reality it tends to increase land values to the point that those who live there are forced to leave. This exodus in turn transforms the sociological contours of the area and, by extension, the spatial segregation of the entire city. — the Guardian

Amanda Burden often said that, thanks to Bloomberg, "we are building and rezoning today once again like Moses on an unprecedented scale, but with Jane Jacobs in mind." That's oxymoronic. You can't do both. As for who's winning the future of New York, it's clearly the followers of Moses. The preservationists are the underdogs here. — nymag.com

When you have every neighborhood looking the same, you know the city is at a danger point. And why should anybody want to live here, why should anybody want to visit here? A metropolis like New York or London or Shanghai is built on a strong sense of individual neighborhoods, and we are destroying that. — GUERNICA