Monthly Archives: June 2018

can the arts mitigate the harms of gentrification? A project in Boston’s Chinatown

I’m working with an interdisciplinary team* on a project that’s investigating whether an arts center in Boston’s Chinatown can mitigate the negative effects of gentrification in that neighborhood. This research is funded by the NEA and by Tufts (through a “Tufts Collaborates” grant). Here are some preliminary notes, with which my colleagues may not necessarily agree. We have much more data to collect, analyze, and discuss.

The setting is Boston’s Chinatown. The Asian population of the neighborhood has declined, the median income of Whites in the neighborhood has more than doubled, but the percentage of Asian households living in poverty has increased. These could be seen as signs of gentrification.

The Pao Arts Center is a new “multi-functional arts space with a performance theater, an art gallery, classrooms, an artist-in-residence studio, and other public meeting space[s].” It has been created within a very large, multipurpose new building that includes affordable housing along with expensive apartments (which have a separate entrance). The building reflects the shift toward more expensive, modernist, large-scale development in Chinatown. It also belongs to a community-based nonprofit, the BCNC [correction: the Asian Community Development Corp. was the community developer; BCNC leases the space for Pao] that offers programs to about 2,000 families and is committed to retaining the cultural heritage of the neighborhood and combating dislocation, isolation, and conflict.

You might begin thinking about this project with the following model in mind:

  1. Gentrification disrupts community connections, which causes harmful social outcomes (apart from any other outcomes that gentrication may have). But …
  2. The arts can strengthen community connections, thus mitigating the damage done by gentrification.

But the emerging data complicate this model.

The neighborhood is dynamic. People move in and out as both a cause and a consequence of economic change. It’s possible for an individual to remain in Chinatown and move on a trajectory of upward (or downward) mobility, while assimilating (or not assimilating) to the dominant culture. It’s also possible for an individual to leave in order to take advantage of a desired opportunity–or as a matter of necessity, due to rising rents.

The whole neighborhood could be characterized as historically Chinese-American. It was never like a traditional community in China; it was an enclave of Victorian tenement buildings, manufacturing plants, and restaurants catering to outsiders in an East Coast US city. One evident change is that it’s becoming much more pan-Asian. Does that preserve its heritage as an ethnic enclave or spell the end of “Chinatown” per se?

By no means everyone in Chinatown embraces the concept of “gentrification.” I think that word is almost always defined as a negative trend, a process of disruption or displacement caused by outside forces and suffered by residents of a neighborhood. In We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates calls gentrification “a more pleasing name for white supremacy.” (But see also his nuanced piece on the same topic from 2011). However, there is a different discourse that emphasizes economic growth and development and upward-mobility. Some people in Chinatown see rising rents and residents moving out to suburbs as signs of progress, attributable to their own success rather than outside forces.

The neighborhood is certainly changing its physical form. Even presuming that most tenants of the new BCNC high-rise are Chinese-American former residents of other Chinatown buildings, the sheer design and aesthetic of their home are new. There are similar buildings in modern Shanghai (and in modern Dubai and Mexico City), but not in a traditional Chinese-American neighborhood in a Northeastern city like Boston. Is this preservation? Development?

Likewise, the Pao Arts center is devoted to Asian arts, but its minimalist and functionalist architecture could be seen as modernist, cosmopolitan, placeless, or specifically “Western,” depending on your interpretive frame. Pao probably feels different to people of different backgrounds.

There may also be differences between groups that I will call (with some concerns about these labels) preservationists and integrationists. Preservationists see value in an historic Chinese urban enclave, whereas integrationists may celebrate the arrival of other Asians and non-Asians in Chinatown and the positive effects that occur when Chinatown residents move to suburbs.

These two distinctions produce four possible stances, but in real life, many more options are possible.

To further complicate the model, it’s not a simple case of “the arts” affecting a neighborhood. The Pao Arts Center hosts many events and exhibitions. Our team has been attending the events and conducting surveys, and it seems clear that various events draw different demographic groups and have different purposes and impact. Some performances raise consciousness of social injustice; some are sheer fun. Also, these are not exactly Pao Arts Center productions: Pao is a space that various artists and organizations use.

A series of events at Pao could reconnect people who have moved away from Chinatown to their former neighborhood, give local Chinese residents a reason to stay in Chinatown or mitigate the stress caused by changes in the area, connect people of different Asian backgrounds or of different races to one conversation and one affective community, or serve a diverse set of audiences from the Boston metro area without really having much to do with connections or the immediate vicinity. Pao could contribute to neighborhood economic development, thus accelerating gentrification, or it could consolidate Chinatown’s function as an ethnic enclave. It could do more than one of these things for different people at different times.

We have survey data from audiences, interviews with artists and other key stakeholders, pending surveys of community-members, and expert analysis of the events. We still have to put it all together.

*Cynthia Woo (Pao Arts Center), Ginny Chomitz (Tufts Department of Public Health and Community Medicine), Carolyn Rubin (Public Health and Community Medicine), Susan Koch-Weser (Public Health and Community Medicine), Annie Chin-Louie (Tufts Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute), Noe Montez (Tufts Department of Drama & Dance), Yizhou Huang (Drama and Dance), Yang He (Tufts Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning), and Joyce Chen and Kaiyan Jew (community researchers).

See also changes in how we talk about cities; against methodological individualism or why neighborhoods are not like broccoli; why the Jews left Boston, why the Catholics stayed, and what that teaches us about organizing.

starting the 10th annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies

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Today begins the 10th annual Summer Institute of Civic Studies at Tufts’ Tisch College of Civic Life. The draft syllabus–which will be slightly modified in reality–is here. We spend four hours each day discussing the readings and two hours with a daily visitor. Participants come this year from Chile, Ethiopia, Mexico, Pakistan, Spain, the US and Ukraine (not counting US participants of immigrant origin). They include professors, organizers, graduate students, artists, and educators. Their disciplines range from design and English to economics and philosophy, to name just a few–everyone has a unique background. The sister institute in Eastern Europe begins in early July, and I’ll also be there to kick it off. The 20 people coming to Tufts today for the Institute join an alumni body of about 240 people, many of whom are making careers in academia or civil society in about 20 countries.

And here are some of the topics we’re interested in  …

why didn’t the internet save democracy?

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I don’t always like this format, but Dylan Matthews’ short interviews with Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, David Weinberger, and Alec Ross add up to a useful overview of the question that Matthews poses to all four: “The internet was supposed to save democracy. … What went wrong”?

The only interviewee who really objects to the framing is Ross, who asserts that his predictions were always value-neutral. He didn’t predict that the good guys would win, only that the weak would chasten the strong. So when Putin’s Russia took Obama’s America down a peg, that fulfilled his prophesy (Russian being weaker).

Some highlights, for me:

Clay Shirky:

I underestimated two things, and both of them make pessimism more warranted. The first is the near-total victory of the “social graph” as the ideal organizational form for social media, to the point that we now use “social media” to mean “media that links you to your friends’ friends,” rather than the broader 2000s use of “media that supports group interaction.”

The second thing I underestimated was the explosive improvement in the effectiveness of behavioral economics and its real-world consequences of making advertising work as advertised.

Taken together, these forces have marginalized the earlier model of the public sphere characterized by voluntary association (which is to say a public sphere that followed [Jürgen] Habermas’s conception), rather than as a more loosely knit fabric for viral ideas to flow through.

Shirky adds that he wrote (in 2008) much more about Meetup than Facebook, when both were still startups. Facebook rules the world and Meetup is marginal. Meetup would better embody a Habermasian theory of the public sphere. (See my post Habermas and critical theory: a primer but also saving Habermas from the deliberative democrats.)

Jarvis:

I was rather a dogmatist about the value of openness. I still value openness. But as Twitter, Blogger, and Medium co-founder Ev Williams said at [South by Southwest] recently, he and we did not account for the extent of the bad behavior that would follow. These companies accounted and compensated for dark-hat SEO, spam, and other economically motivated behavior. They did not see the extent of the actions of political bad actors and trolls who would destroy for the sake of destruction.

Weinberger:

It’s a tragedy that while the web connects pages via an open protocol, the connections among people are managed by closed, for-profit corporations. A lot of our political problems come from that: The interests of those corporations and of its users and citizens are not always aligned.

Weinberger wants to emphasize the positive, as well, and to remind us that “applications can be adjusted so that they serve us better.”

See also the online world looks dark (2107) and democracy in the digital age.

social justice from the citizen’s perspective

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I believe that each of us is responsible for forming a view–even if it’s tentative and evolving–of social justice. This is our theory of how rights, goods, and powers should be distributed in our society and who should be able to change that distribution in various ways. Any decent theory must address much more than equity, because liberty, community, harmony, diversity, sustainability, efficiency, and democracy are also values worthy of consideration.

Classical liberals offer reasons not to ask the question of social justice. I ultimately disagree but believe that their concerns should influence us. We should make sure to ask the question of social justice in the right way. It is interesting, too, that Gandhi anticipated several of the main concerns raised by such classical liberals as Friedrich von Hayek. (As is often the case, the libertarian right and the highly participatory left share some common concerns.)

Here are the objections:

  1. Adding the word “social” to a personal belief is pretentious and arrogant. To say that your view represents social justice–instead of talking about what you think is “‘moral’ or simply good”–means substituting your “individual judgment” for what the society has come to believe collectively. Talk of social justice is “ultimately the result of a contempt for what really is a social phenomenon and of a belief in the superior powers of individual human reason” (Hayek, The Constitution of Justice, p. 65).
  2. We don’t know enough to define social justice. We are too cognitively limited, too biased. We cannot see moral advances that may arise in the future. We should respect local norms and diverse cultural heritages. As Gandhi said in opposition to a specific plan for Indian independence, “the only universal definition to give [the word “independence” or swaraj] is ‘that status of India which her people desire at a given moment.’” They will desire something in 10 years that we cannot imagine now.
  3. By asserting a view of social justice, we implicitly adopt the perspective of the state and imply that the state is responsible for achieving justice. “Seeing like a state” may not be an inevitable result of discussing social justice, but authors as diverse as Martha Nussbaum, Philip Pettit, and John Rawls exemplify this move: they argue that if social justice demands something, then the state is responsible for it. That means that they talk like state-builders or advisers to states.
  4. People differ in interests and values. Consensus is neither likely nor desirable. No conception of social justice imposed by a state on a whole society is really compatible with our fundamental plurality. For example, since we disagree about the value of toleration, state-imposed toleration will not satisfy everyone (even if it’s better than state-imposed censorship and oppression).
  5. “The state” is an abstraction. Actual states (even dictatorships) are always complex amalgams of people, rules, and physical assets–such as guns and filing systems–with multiple power centers. And the people who work for or within a state also belong to other social institutions, including markets and families. So no state acts simply according to its official doctrines and policies.
  6. Even if we know what a state should do, it’s hard to see how we can make an actual state do it. To imagine an ideal state is like assuming a can opener on a desert island. The practical question of how to found, reform, or revolutionize the actual state is unavoidable.
  7. It’s not clear that what makes some states work better than others is the degree to which they embrace abstract theories of social justice. If you’re a libertarian or a social democrat, you have good reasons to consider Denmark one of the best societies in the world. It optimizes liberty and equality pretty well. That’s because its institutions are more capable and less corrupt than most other nations’. Much depends on basic efficiency and integrity.
  8. Steps toward social justice can be dead ends. Motion in another direction sometimes leads to greater social justice. For instance, if you lived in 19th century Scandinavia, you might have assumed that equity required curtailing the power of capital. Instead, a social system that made capital very comfortable seems to have created the comity that then allowed labor and capital to negotiate a more equitable distribution. The road that led to equity did not start off in that direction.

One conclusion–Hayek’s, for example–would be to discourage talk of “social justice.” You should say what you like, or what you believe is good, not what is “socially just,” because that is just a sign that you are seeing like a state.

I draw a different conclusion. We should not evade the question with which I began this post: What is social justice? It’s our obligation to reason about who deserves what across the whole society and even the globe. In all likelihood, reality will not meet our respective standards of social justice, and then we should try to change things.

But the point of the question is to guide our own behavior. We don’t (and shouldn’t) have the opportunity to pick a perfect social democracy, a pure free market, or a theocracy. Institutions are (and ought to be) plural, evolutionary, overlapping, impure, and internally inconsistent.  It’s a pitfall to imagine ourselves as the designers of brand-new societies or as voters able to choose among different systems. We are people embedded in complex systems who have limited reasoning capacity, limited empathy, limited imagination, limited resources, and limited leverage. In engaging the institutions we have, we should consider opportunities to advance social justice. When we talk about social justice, we are saying, in effect, “My fellow members of this specific community, this is how I think that the whole system should be organized, and that has the following implications for what we should do next.”

See also against state-centric political theory; Gandhi on the primacy of means over ends; polycentricity: the case for a (very) mixed economy; The truth in Hayek; we are for social justice, but what is it?

the second annual Paul and Joyce Aicher Leadership in Democracy Award

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(Washington, DC) I was in Albuquerque over the weekend for an Everyday Democracy board meeting and to see Generation Justice, a fantastic New Mexico youth media organization, receive the first Paul and Joyce Aicher Leadership in Democracy Award. Thanks to the award event, my understanding of Chicanismo and indigenous cultural politics got a little less superficial.

Nominations are now open for the second annual prize, which will honor “an individual and/or organization that demonstrates the values on which Everyday Democracy was founded – voice, connection, racial equity, and community change.” Nominees should show excellence in some of the following ways:

  • Creating welcoming opportunities for meaningful civic participation for all people  
  • Actively including people in civic life who have often been marginalized, and providing ways for them to develop their leadership capacities
  • Building the capacity of existing community leaders to include others in community life
  • Practicing the art of talking to each other and listening to each other
  • Taking action that is grounded in crossing divides, and aimed at meaningful transformation in people, institutions, community culture, and governance
  • Creating opportunities for empowered voice that is truly heard 
  • Addressing racial inequities through dialogue and collective action
  • Showing the power of bridging all kinds of divides
  • Making dialogue a regular part of how a community works and, ultimately, of how our democracy works

For more information, or to nominate someone, click here.