Daily Archives: June 28, 2013


City, Arts and Public Spaces: Gavin Kroeber, Part 2

In an attempt to attend to the particular urban and cultural ecosystem of the Bay Area I’d like to contribute a second term – innovation – and loosely suggest its relevance to the discussion.

As the national discourse around innovation expands, we see hundreds of thousands of square feet of urban space mobilized and repurposed under the term: municipal innovation districts, public and private innovation incubators for entrepreneurial ventures, etc.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Gavin Kroeber

The arts and the city are mutually recomposing one another – conceptually, physically, operationally.

It is often noted that capitalism in the west has turned from the production of goods as a towards more ephemeral products. This turn – a turn in which municipalities have abandoned outdated ‘smokestack chasing’ strategies for economic growth and, spurred on by lobbyists and promotional campaigns, have instead engaged in an inter-urban competition to attract the mobile audiences of both tourism and business – has in forty years produced a corresponding landscape: what we might call the event landscape.

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City, Arts and Public Spaces: Irene Chien

In mainstream US media, “urban” is a pervasive euphemism for black, a way to register but not directly point at African-American culture within the post-racial political paradigm of colorblindness. “Urban music,” “urban fiction,” “urban comedy,” and “urban entertainment” are all ways to identify media made by, featuring, and marketed primarily to African-Americans without directly naming them. “Urban” in this sense gives value to at the same time it disavows the authenticity of black bodies, voices, and “street” experiences that now circulate globally in the form of hip-hop identity and aesthetics.

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