B'more Creative: Street Art, Neoliberalism, and Gentrification in East Baltimore
Open AccessArt is a quintessential socio-cultural form of expression and communication. In former industrial and port cities, such as Baltimore, MD, art has become a new lifeline for urban development. Street art has become undeniably connected to gentrification, urban (re)development, and urban re-imaging/ branding. How do place-identities, street art, identity politics, and neoliberalism interact with one another through processes of gentrification and cultural commodification? The paper explores art as a proxy for an ongoing struggle over the identity of East Baltimore through an ethnography of Baltimore's street art cultures and geographies. Observations of spaces, and interviews with actors involved in the production/consumption of street art throughout 8 East Baltimore Neighborhoods are coupled with other comparative spatial analyses of the economic and socio-demographic geographies of East Baltimore. The paper discusses the dynamic interplay among processes of development, identity, and street art. Not only is street art both a representation and referent of multiple place identities; It also acts as discourses of greater networks of identity politics, neoliberal socio-economic principles, processes of cultural and economic gentrification, and racial and economic geographies that are structured by various forms of inequity and marginalization.
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