Capitalising Antigentrification
<p>City planners across the planet have recently adopted gentrification led by creatives as a development strategy for increasing the wealth of cities while also promoting inclusiveness, diversity and social integration, all of which are important to these cities’ engagement in global networks, as well as increasing capital with minimum political objection. An all-round win. However, faced with growing socioeconomic inequalities within major cities over the same period— and between global urban hotspots, or what are called ‘superstar cities’, such as New York, London, Shanghai, Dubai and the rest—even Richard Florida, proselytiser-in-chief for creative gentrification as the path to urban ‘renewal’, has recanted his earlier prescriptions:</p> <blockquote><p>our geography is splintering into small areas of affluence and concentrated advantage, and much larger areas of poverty and concentrated disadvantage. It became increasingly clear to me that the same clustering of talent and economic assets generates a lopsided, unequal urbanism in which a relative handful of superstar cities, and</p></blockquote> <p>a few elite neighborhoods within them, benefit while many other places stagnate or fall behind. Ultimately, the very same force that drives the growth of our cities and economy broadly also generates the divides that separate us and the contradictions that hold us back…</p>
Authors: Suhail Malik
Curator: Tirdad Zolghadr
KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Sommerakademie Paul Klee
Part of: REALTY