It’s a truism that people generally don’t like change. And sometimes change is not good for some people in our city, even though it may be positive in other ways.
Here’s a view of the 2016 Vancouver Mural Festival, from those who worry about its effect on marginalized people who live in the festival’s ‘hood.
With thanks to Zachary Hyde in The Mainlander (October 5, 2016)
“So what’s the problem?”, asks Hyde.
With the tech industry comes a young, educated, and highly mobile “creative class,” which local governments have sought to attract and maintain in hopes of boosting growth.[1] In a short amount of time large scale street art murals, alongside food trucks and craft breweries, have become the prototypal cultural imprints of this emerging class. When viewed against the backdrop of the economic and cultural forces transforming the neighbourhoods north of Main Street and Broadway, the Vancouver Mural Festival fits comfortably within a pattern of municipally-led gentrification and tech redevelopment.
Zachary Hyde is a PhD candidate in the department of sociology at UBC. He grew up in Vancouver and now studies issues of housing and gentrification in Canadian cities.
Content
The Mainlander is a publication that aims to:
- provide historical context for breaking news and events as they unfold
- unpack politicians’ spin, and provide background information needed to hold them accountable
- present facts that may help social movements and others involved in progressive politics
- translate complex, and often misleading, municipal documents and policies into language that layfolks will appreciate
Independence
The Mainlander operates through the Mainlander Writing Society, which is a registered non-profit society. We do not accept funding or seek reinforcement from real estate developers or political parties, allowing us to speak more truthfully about developers, ruling interests and political parties.
oh come on- the Mainlander is such a downer. No good deed…
The Mainlander piece is a bit annoying, first and foremost for its misrepresentation of mural and similar public art programs as symbols of gentrification, a term that was not well-defined by the PhD-holding author.
Basically, any development anywhere that increases the land value, rents or leases by even one dollar can termed “gentrification” no matter what the zoning may be. By that definition the counterpoint would be to disavow the fact that cities are constantly in flux. The implication in that narrative also means that slumlords running housing unfit for human habitation for the poor and disadvantaged should have their properties preserved as “affordable housing” forever.
The FOI request by the Straight for information on the CSIS / Hootsuite site in Mount Pleasant yielded results that were – wait for it – absolutely normal. Any negotiation involving private matters (financial or otherwise) is rightfully not subject to FOI, whether that involves a large tech company, families living on a block negotiating the assembly and sale of their properties for public affordable rental and social housing (I know, like that will happen between all three levels of government), or a private office negotiating the price of a slice of their front yard being consumed by a road expansion.
If the author had perused Ken’s exemplary photo documentation he would have seen many murals – perhaps the majority — being painted on one-storey facades in non-development sites. To use the example of the Rize development temporarily moving a Kingsway bus stop was disingenuous because it ignored the fact this is the site of a high-capacity, universally-accessible station on the forthcoming Broadway Subway.
The author also confuses graffiti art with tagging. Banksy did not tag. He created art and social commentary with spray paint. There are books on Banksy. Ordinary tagging is plain old, run of the mill vandalism using scrawled, poorly executed signatures with no purpose other than to mark territory. The author does state the obvious and correctly identifies the typical issues of the day: Development pressure; affordable housing crisis, and so forth. But that does not add up to a Deep State-conservative corporate developer conspiracy. It’s laughable that murals are used as evidence of that.