Taking Up Space: Youth Culture and Creative Resistance in a Gentrifying City

Abstract

Deepening inequalities and existential uncertainty in communities across the globe have coincided with calls to enact a more culturally sustaining vision of education. These calls are increasingly pressing in urban communities, where gentrification—a process critical geographers refer to as “colonialism at the neighborhood scale” (Clark, 2005, p. 27)—has become a pre-eminent community redevelopment strategy. Approximately 83% of people in the United States live in urban areas and 34.6 million of these urban residents are adolescents (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019e). As urban environments are being transformed through gentrification, experiences of home—the places where young people encounter powerful ideas about community, belonging, and ultimately of self—are being upended.

My dissertation research offers a window into these precarious circumstances, as well as the ways that young artists work together to “take up space” as they seek to sustain the culture of their community while imagining a more just future for their city. Using ethnographic methods, I investigate how youth in a gentrifying city engage with public artmaking practices as a mode of creative resistance and I examine how a community arts organization shaped their creative work. I demonstrate how two powerful narratives—a tale of urban decline and a tale of urban renewal—work together to repackage gentrification as a more positive process of community development. Yet in contrast with these outside tales of the city, I explore how youths’ engagement with the practice of public art provides the means by which urban youth can learn to interrogate and interrupt the discourses that have fueled gentrification. I argue that in the current era of widespread urban gentrification, youths’ creative practices can provide a crucial outlet for affirming and sustaining their political imaginaries. Through an in-depth analysis of community-based arts education, a context that has been “continuously ignored” (Hardy, 2018, p. 120) in educational research, practice, and policy, this dissertation looks beyond the traditional horizons of formal schooling to understand an important incubator of urban youth culture and collective creative action.