ABSTRACT
The US policy platform of creative placemaking (Gadwa Nicodemus, 2013, p.214) is becoming a dominant global vehicle for the implementation of neoliberal ideologies (Wilbur, 2015, pp.96-7) like the Creative City (Landry and Bianchini, 1995) and Creative Class (Florida, 2002). This chapter explores how activist art within the context of housing protests can offer potentially generative approaches to place guarding capable of resisting appropriation by policy platforms like creative placemaking.
This chapter argues that creative placemaking is a state- and local-authority inspired policy that is wedded, via corporate partnerships, to neoliberalism: an approach that merges art with community and economic development at every level of society, from the global to the hyper-local. It suggests that creative placemaking thereby utilises Creative City and Creative Class models alongside New Urbanist principles and social capital theory to become an effective means of gentrification. Yet the chapter also argues that art and artists can use their creativity as part of broader social movements to resist and oppose gentrification. This process can be described as a form of ‘place guarding’, collective acts of protecting existing people and places from the ravages of neoliberalism and policies and practices such as creative placemaking and ‘artwashing’, the use of art as a veneer or mask for corporate or state agendas (O’Sullivan, 2014).
