Caron Atlas
“We fought poverty, violence and blight, and we made the Southside a better place to live. We are now strangers in our own neighborhood, and it’s painful.”
These words from longtime Brooklyn resident and community leader Evelyn Cruz at a forum about gentrification in Williamsburg have stuck with me for years. I thought of them as we created Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts New York (NOCD-NY), a citywide alliance of artists, cultural organizations, and community leaders coming together to revitalize New York City from the neighborhood up. And I’m thinking about them now as I write this blog about cultural districts and communities as catalysts of change. How can we make sure that our work does not make people strangers in their own neighborhoods?
Naturally occurring cultural districts are an organic part of their communities, self-organized, and with local leadership. They are networks of civic engagement, hubs of resourcefulness and creativity, and support systems in hard times.
Roberto Bedoya of the Tucson Pima Arts Council writes about “placemaking and the politics of belonging and dis-belonging”. Our NOCD-NY alliance addresses these politics, strengthening community self-determination and agency. We support cross-sector work, sustained partnerships, and the innovative practices born out of grassroots ingenuity and creative problem solving. Our policy recommendations, rooted in values of equity and inclusion, include increased access to public spaces such as parks and libraries; greater inter-agency collaboration; and recognition and support for diverse communities and cultures through grant making, capital allocations, definitions of excellence, design aesthetics, composition of commissions and peer panels, as well as choices of where and how to site cultural resources and amenities.
Cultural districts can both benefit and hurt existing communities in rapidly changing cities. On the positive side is Fourth Arts Block on NYC’s Lower East Side, where small cultural organizations, neighborhood businesses, and affordable housing organizations established the East 4th Street Cultural District to help low-income residents and community organizations stay in the neighborhood. On Williamsburg’s Southside, El Puente’s Green Light District offers a holistic approach strengthening cultural identity, health, environment, and education while engaging a growing influx of newcomers in this historically Latino neighborhood. These efforts include artists in their leadership.
When cultural districts are created from outside of the community, without local input or participation, they can devalue the people who live there and their cultures. Local artists experience this when big name companies are brought in as anchors, or when the district draws resources away from indigenous cultural groups. Race and class often are parts of this dynamic. However, despite the importance of these issues, race, cultural equity, poverty, and displacement are still the elephants in many of our rooms.
Cultural districts can represent an intervention – something is lacking and the arts can help make it better. This is not to say that interventionist approaches aren’t effective at making change. We just need to ask what is being intervened on, by whom, and for whose benefit. Change is not always positive, especially if you have no control over it.
Cultural districts can also be purposeful in engaging local artists, cultural organizations, and community residents. This means going beyond focus groups or advisors to decision-making and leadership. Districts can be a place where long time residents can come together with newcomers to work for the wellbeing of their neighborhood. They can both animate, and be animated by their communities.
I’m ambivalent about the concept of a cultural district. We included it in NOCD-NY’s name in part to reframe it, and to raise the visibility of diverse community-based clusters. We are interested in the benefits that district designation might bring and want to ensure that community-based districts can access them. But districts have boundaries that raise the questions of who is included and who is not. We need to address this question and others like it:
- Who benefits from the cultural district?
- Who makes the decisions?
- Who is the leadership?
- Whose capacity and agency does it strengthen?
- Is the cultural district part of the fabric of the overall community?
- How does the district address issues of equity right from the start?
- Who defines success, and based on what set of values?
At a roundtable about naturally occurring cultural districts in Saint Paul MN, we discussed the critical question of what makes the work thrive. The answer was a mix of conditions, some related to culture, and some not. They included access to affordable space and housing, sustained youth programs that developed local leadership, strong community cultural centers that functioned as hubs of creativity and engagement, and vital social networks. Running through all of this was an inclusive vision for community change.
