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Urban heritage, gentrification, and
tourism in Riverwest and El Abasto
Geof f rey R. Skolla & Maximiliano Korst anj eba
Depart ment of Criminal Just ice, Buf f alo St at e College, Buf f alo, NY, USA
b
Depart ment of Economics, Palermo Universit y, Buenos Aires, Argent ina
Published online: 15 Apr 2014.
To cite this article: Geof f rey R. Skoll & Maximiliano Korst anj e (2014): Urban herit age, gent rif icat ion, and t ourism in Riverwest and El Abast o, Journal of Herit age Tourism, DOI: 10. 1080/ 1743873X. 2014. 890624
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RESEARCH NOTE
Urban heritage, gentrification, and tourism in Riverwest and El Abasto
Geoffrey R. Skollaand Maximiliano Korstanjeb∗
aDepartment of Criminal Justice, Buffalo State College, Buffalo, NY, USA;bDepartment of Economics, Palermo University, Buenos Aires, Argentina
(Received 1 June 2013; accepted 20 January 2014)
Heritage has played a pivotal role in configuring the sustainable economies of many communities. However, if the process is not duly planned, serious problems may surface. Although the adoption of a new heritage and heritage tourism has been broadly examined by tourism-related scholars, less attention has been given to the notion of gentrification as formulated in social geography. What would be interesting to debate here, beyond the Marxist logic, is to what extent heritage is not only an invented construction, but also how it regulates conflicts or subordinates other more reactionary social movements as art. Comparing two neighbourhoods, Riverwest and Abasto, shows two alternative effects of heritage construction. One refers to the fact that art does not always preserve the structure of economic forces; the other conceptualizes patrimony and heritage as justifying material asymmetries.
Keywords: gentrification; urban heritage; tourism; public art; Tango; politics;
Riverwest; El Abasto; Argentina
Introduction
One of the most troubling aspects of cultural studies is the lack of comparative cases to expand the horizons of micro-sociology. The process of gentrification has been studied in terms of the urban decline based on the legacy of the Chicago School of sociology. Art plays a pervasive role in gentrification, usually as a wedge to introduce it, but under some conditions configuring symbolic resistance to the alienation of market. The Chicago School tended to neglect art in its studies, and instead focused on demographic variables such as race, age, and income. An interesting point of discussion is to what extent art is conducive to gentrification?
Chicago’s studies were done in Chicago as an urban exemplar. Other cultural environ-ments not only were ignored but also the adoptions of their premises were applied out of context in other cities and countries than the USA. Based on this gap, the present paper explores the effects of gentrification in two neighbourhoods: Riverwest in Milwaukee, Wis-consin, USA, and Abasto in the borough of Almagro, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Each neigh-bourhood had diverse dynamics and experienced substantial changes in its urban design. While in Riverwest arts played a crucial role in configuring an instrument of resistance, in Buenos Aires, the expansion of capital pushed some ethnic minorities to abandon their
#2014 Taylor & Francis
∗Corresponding author. Emails:maxikorstanje@fibertel.com.ar,maxikorstanje@hotmail.com
homes. The main thesis here is that tourism, as a cultural industry, commoditized Abasto to be consumed by an international clientele. In contrast, Riverwest not only exerted considerable resistance to incorporating tourism as a main industry, but maintained many associations of artists, which led to a neighbourhood with high social solidarity and resistance against com-moditization. Abasto employed the biography of Carlos Gardel to sell to an international market. The observations made here consist of two anthropological ethnographies conducted in Riverwest and Abasto over two-year spans. The method was participant observation in both cases. Ethics standards preclude further details about interviewees.
Conceptual discussion
Marsha Meskimmon questions the influence of globalization on arts. She accepts the repli-cation of capital with serious ramifirepli-cations for individuals, but she also sees positive aspects of globalization such as tolerance, and open dialogue with otherness. Arts are of paramount importance to forge a cosmopolitan view of culture, “a cosmopolitan imagination”:
Imagining ourselves at home in the world, where our homes are not fixed objects but processed of material and conceptual engagement with other people and different places, is the first step toward becoming cosmopolitan. Art is specially able to convey the intimate relation between the material and the conceptual that this requires, invoking the contingency of home by posi-tioning us at the nexus of the real and the imaginary, while using the sensory force of object, image, and spaces to engage memory, desire, and cognition. (Meskimmon,2011, p. 8)
Art plays a pervasive role in modernity, because it articulates the cosmopolitan imagination so that people gain further understanding. At the same time, it is replicated to anesthetize the critical consciousness. The philosopher Benjamin believed that art was subject to a mechan-ical reproduction where the technique of copying replaced authenticity. More interested in deciphering the ideological power of arts, Benjamin argued that modern knowledge affects art in many ways. Art may be used to mobilize the masses for fascism and to anesthetize the critical gaze (Arendt,1969). From the Frankfurt School onwards, social scientists ana-lyzed the relationship between art and economy. Arts not only represent economics, but also economic results. This means that the role of arts in a society will depend on previous forms of production. In capitalist societies, art would be copied on a large scale to create a one-sided ideology. But in artisan communities, art would serve as a dialogue among people. Timothy and Ron (2013) claim that tourism fosters identity and ethnic pride for national symbols. People seek credible and authentic experiences that reside in interpretation by tourists. This opens a complex linkage between heritage, tourism, and identity. Preliminary studies suggest that forced migration, such as diasporas, shows the construction of strong liaisons between homeland and their respective destinations. Keeping a double connection to their present and ancestral destination, migrants weave new negotiations into the meaning of places. Intergenerational disconnection from original cultures is evolving at time the migrant’s children are assimilated by the hosting culture (Kaftanoglu & Timothy,2013). For some specialists, travelling is a form of art making.
were designed according to the forces of economics. In times of Fordist mass production, cities followed patterns of centralization; populations settled around central financial and manufacturing placements. With the advent of postmodernism and radical defragmentation, there ensued an ongoing dynamic of decentralization. Segmentation invaded the minds of architects and painters. Quite aside from this, Harvey’s account sheds light on the connec-tion among arts, the status quo, capital, and economies. Harvey provides an insightful and all-encompassing model to understand the real effects of economies in social relations over centuries.
The literature on heritage tourism recognizes the importance of sustainable develop-ment to respect the interests of all involved stakeholders. The problem, as in the Abasto case, is that in practice this does not happen. Heritage is a political invention, and as a fab-ricated construction, it is conducive to protecting some interests and negatively affecting others (Aguirre, 2007; du Cros & Jolliffe, 2011; Guidotti-Hernandez, 2011; Korstanje,
2012a; Olsen,2003; Olsen & Timothy,2002). The notion of gentrification, less developed in tourism fields, has explained the dangers of stimulating tourism and real-estate specu-lations, but gentrification does not work without an attraction, a sign to exploit. These studies demonstrate that real estate supported by law exerts violence against minorities. Heritage paves the pathway to creating a new more subtle discourse to reduce the conflict. Unless amortized, investments can backfire because of local attacks. Many of the studies in this field also focused on the benefits of adopting heritage, but the problem of gentrification, and it effects on the already existent inhabitants remain unstudied. It seems gentrification theory is well used by geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists interested in cultural studies, but few tourism-related studies have utilized it.
The semiotics of tourism
The concept of staged authenticity, originally coined by MacCannell (2003), exhibits in part a concern for the change in sites according to market-driven interests. Capitalism has mono-polized the meaning of what we see on television, or in packaged tours. Subject to a life of alienation and depersonalization, the urban consumer looks not only for real experiences but also for new sensations. The combination of novelty and authenticity is a key factor that determines mass tourism. Unless otherwise resolved, tourism leads travellers to an encounter in nowhere. The history and heritage of sites are selectively designed according to the logic of capital, highlighting what may be sold at one time while other aspects or negative points are made invisible. Hedonism based on the trends of consuming environ-ments is a way of counterbalancing the alienation and frustration human beings suffer in their daily lives (Korstanje,2012b; MacCannell,2003).
Wise (2012) sheds light on how the image of a tourist destination is portrayed by the media according to invented conceptualizations to impose stereotypes, identities, and a pol-itical discourse. If a site has a history of conflict, or any interesting tale to tell, it gets recycled according to a current political discourse, fixed by the state or private business interests. This discourse would be the official narrative of the site. Discourse construction uses three clear tactics: landscape remembrance, fading memory, and replacement memory. Through these, the site becomes a tourist destination whose attractiveness suffices to attract additional investments. Since tourism is globally a mechanism to change sites or economies that are facing problems, landscape remembrance refers to a broader process of integration where the discourse is socialized and internalized by tourists. To some extent, tourists are educated by giving them certain reflections based on fabricated facts. Fading memory is characterized by the recognition of facts, while the discussion is put in terms of remember-ing and forgettremember-ing history. The facts are presented not as they really occurred, but as they should be remembered. At this stage, the media plays a crucial role in creating a re-signification of destinations. In doing so, replacing memory involves eliminating negative aspects of historical protagonists so as to draw a new image of place to be attractive for consumers.
Heritage and gentrification
As a multifaceted phenomenon, gentrification presents a diagnosis of our times, or a con-nection between social pathologies, economy, and demography. The demographical eco-logical formula, proposed by Palen and London (1984), argues that when housing prices rise, demand goes up too. Depending on household compositions, and if the couples are child-free, a more affluent white-collar population would displace blue-collar workers. Additionally, since a skilled workforce would need a more urban-centric style of housing than low-skilled workers, a conflict about common resources arises. In some cases, a popu-lation is moved and pushed to other, peripheral zones by the intervention of states, or by the market. Other, additional explanations of this issue were provided by Marxism, which argues that political and economic factors influence the revitalization of the city and its spaces. Also, gentrification should be defined as a process which may come from other mechanisms of social control such as discrimination or exclusion. Basically, it occurs through a combination of private and state policies such as urban refurbishment, tax regu-lation, real-estate specuregu-lation, private investment, and tourism that encourages the heritagi-zation of spaces
urban heritage, heavy investment moves in. As a result, the undesired populations which contributed to the depreciation of lands, sometimes ethnic minorities or migrants, are deported from their homes so that more attractive neighbourhoods can be developed.
Rodrı´guez, Ban˜uelos, and Mera (2008) validate Herzer’s viewpoint by saying that Buenos Aires’ reinvention was accompanied by the exploitation of a fabricated cultural imaginary where patrimonial restoration was very important. There is a clear link between capital, consumption, heritage, and conflict. Today, built patrimony is globally accepted as a social asset, but first of all it seems to be a positive aspect of social life in the community. The argument of patrimony is that communities are more resilient if they embrace their past and traditions. The problem is how and under what interests that heritage is recognized and recreated. Similar conclusions are made by Redondo and Singh (2008), who explore the historic changes of La Boca, San Telmo, and Barracas in Buenos Aires South. Witnessing a mass migration from 1880 to 1930, Buenos Aires embraced a signifi-cant influx of migrants from Europe (desired migration) who originally settled in the south of the city. Urban growth and recycled structures (conventillos) provided housing for these immigrant workers. Although this type of migration was planned and encouraged by the state, there were some other migrations in subsequent years from neighbouring Latin Amer-ican countries to the same locales. In the last 40 years, since the 1970s, La Boca and San Telmo suffered decline, partly a product of years of a combination of government interven-tion and inacinterven-tion. They now have become areas housing migrants from Bolivia, Paraguay, and Chile. Unlike the mass migration from Europe encouraged by the state in the early twentieth century, more recent migration is often deemed undesired. The concept of cultural patrimony is based on selective characteristics of history. It highlights only part of desirable migration. Other ethnicities are often silenced or disciplined by coactive policies (Di Virgilio,2008; Go´mez-Schettini & Menazzi2011; Guidotti-Hernandez,2011).
migration of the nineteen century, while silencing other, neighbouring migrants. One question in this debate is what the role of tourism is in this process.
Methodological discussion
Positivism is based on a glaring error, that asking people is the only way to learn the truth. As anthropology has shown, there are many methods and means to get part of what epis-temologists call “the truth”. Seeing, hearing, and writing are some of them. The information discussed in the next sections is part of two major ethnographies in the neighbourhoods of Riverwest in Milwaukee and Abasto in Buenos Aires. In both cases, the observers garnered more evidence than the summaries presented here. The authors are unable to give further details on the names of informants, or the verbatim of interviews. Professional anthropol-ogists recognize that serious conflicts of interest may surface whenever the interviewees see their statements published. Since the security of interviewees was never put at risk, their privacy was not violated. We have articulated two clear diagnoses of the problem based on some 20 interviews and visual fieldwork.
Riverwest
Riverwest is fairly centrally located in an upper Midwest former industrial city: Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The city comfortably fits the “rustbelt” reputation. The city reached its popu-lation apex in the early 1960s, topping three quarters of a million. It had declined to slightly more than 600,000 in 2010. Riverwest is a former industrial and residential neighbourhood. Today the heavy industry that once interspersed housing, mainly duplexes and small tene-ments, has largely, although not entirely, disappeared. The neighbourhood, like the city, and the entire upper Midwest went through deindustrialization following the 1970s. For most such neighbourhoods, deindustrialization resulted in deterioration in the quality of life of their denizens. With the loss of the industrial economic base came a host of urban problems: a shrinking tax base, flight by long-term residents to suburbs, depopulation, racial and ethnic segregation, concentrated poverty, and increased interpersonal predatory crime. Riv-erwest did not experience these ills.
Riverwest has reflected the ethnic makeup of Milwaukee, which by the 1920s had a German-Italian-Polish character. By the 1940s, a small Puerto Rican contingent along with a smattering of other ethnic heritages made the neighbourhood one of the more diverse in the city. It remained ethnically stable until the 1970s, when African-American residents began to populate its northwestern quadrant. The workforce also reflected Mil-waukee’s traditional composition: about one-third skilled workers, one-third semi-skilled, and the remainder clerical-sales, managerial, and a few professionals. Among working-class neighbourhoods, Riverwest also boasted relatively high levels of education.
Art entered, and the neighbourhood abided. For a while it looked shaky with a declining population, declining home ownership, a shift in racial composition from white Americans to various minorities, and the closing of small businesses. This was most noticeable in the 1980s and into the early 1990s, but eventually it stopped declining. Now there are a few new businesses: a large hardware store adjacent to an older lumber yard, a furniture man-ufacturer, a coffee roaster and cafe´, and several new restaurants and bars. The population has not soared, but it has stabilized. There are a few condominium units made from remo-deled factories, but they fail to dominate the neighbourhood.
fact, Riverwest has always had them – working-class artists, at least since 1940. They did their art in addition to their day jobs, or night jobs in the days when factories ran three shifts. Riverwest was not the gilded Paris of the 1920s, or Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s, Harlem in the 1920s, Chicago in the 1930s, or Weimar Berlin. Riverwest is not home to world famous artists, writers, or musicians. It always has been working artists: school secretary artists, tofu factory poets, and the housekeeping photographers.
The art and the artists are not important for Riverwest because of their renown, because they have very little of that. The effectiveness of arts to take social forms lies in making and sustaining the neighbourhood for three or four generations, at least, depending on how one counts generations. It comes from an old Chicago School discovery – cultural transmission. Cultural transmission operates despite changes in populations, because the artistic cultural tradition is passed from one generation of residents to the next. The secret to Riverwest is art, vernacular or workers’ art. It is the art of everyday people creating something unique in times of economic and political difficulties.
A certain homology can be seen at different levels of abstraction – the mental, the inter-actional, and the social structural levels. Consequently, artists’ imaginaries, their creation of art works, and their social interactions come to be reflected in social structures – that is, urban social formations. There followed particular institutionalizations in Riverwest, and these homologies only form sensible and analyzable patterns when viewed from the correct theoretical perspective. Art institutions are visible in Riverwest: an artists’ associ-ation with a gallery, a small press bookstore that stages writers’ public presentassoci-ations, avant-garde galleries, artists’ workshops and studios, or cafes and taverns that display art works and hold public readings. In addition, there are informal, often ephemeral, writers’ and artists’ group meetings. The neighbourhood boasts a history of regular publications, including a neighbourhood newspaper published since 2001, and many short-lived publi-cations representing literary and artistic works or focusing on the arts. The neighbourhood contains probably the highest concentration of such institutions in the metropolitan area. Moreover, its members and influence suffuse the neighbourhood, its residents and visitors. Another aspect of Riverwest’s salience as an art centre is how it differs from surround-ing neighbourhoods. From about 1940 to about 1980, Riverwest had few artistic institutions and establishments such as studios, book and writers’ centre, and the like. It had working-class artists, but so did many other neighbourhoods in Milwaukee. The critical period of Riverwest’s differentiation emerged from its period of de-industrialization in the 1980s. The other surrounding neighbourhoods largely succumbed to the expectable urban decline and decay; Riverwest did not. In its crisis years a number of civic organizations, with varying degrees of formality, fought against decline in a variety of ways, ranging from political movements and pressure groups to attempts at a cultural renaissance. Some of these efforts promoted art.
Last but not least, the region of the city on the other side of Riverwest’s eastern bound-ary, the Milwaukee River, known as the East Side, seemingly would offer more genial con-ditions for an artistic neighbourhood. With its major university, and relatively upper bourgeois character, it had a historical claim to a bohemian, avant-garde pedigree, some-what on the order of Paris’ Montmartre. There are many reasons why this happens. First, it is and has been a high rent district which most artists and their studios could ill afford. Second, its bourgeois character had two consequences. The bourgeois subculture of Mil-waukee exploits strongly its German heritage, which remains culturally conservative, even when, as in its history of socialist city government, promises a more left leaning and liberal atmosphere. Also, the bourgeois character might encourage the consumption of art but fail to permit much in the way of conditions for production. This is where it stops resembling Montmartre.
El Abasto
Unlike Riverwest, El Abasto, in Buenos Aires, suffered the most blatant kind of gentrifica-tion. Built around a shopping mall, it was founded in the 1880s in the borough of Almagro, situated in the core of the city. Originally, the name was linked to the old market that served as the central wholesaler of vegetables, meat, and fruits. This market was associated with Tango dancing, but also directly to Carlos Gardel, one of the most famous singers of Argen-tina. The Abasto Shopping mall adjoined a new underground station to the subway and con-tained many other financial projects from banks to small, medium, and full-size tourist establishments. In almost one decade, this borough was completely refurbished, changing from a blue-collar working-class borough fraught with street crime to a growing attraction that created a strong tourist demand. The Abasto case may be typified as a clear example of how the unintentional gentrification process works. In the next section, we examine and describe how terms such as tourism, patrimony, and safety are conducive to the capital expansion. At the same time, the old dwellers were obliged to move to other, less central boroughs by the imposition of new higher taxes or by the coercive forces of the state and its police.
At first glance, business and real estate played a vital role in investing considerable money in Almagro. Its architecture was altered over several years; the houses were sold by the original owners at the cheapest prices, thanks to the climate of conflict and crime which affected the image of this borough. Soon thereafter, many buildings were renovated and re-built according to new styles and patterns. Office buildings, skyscrapers, and other structures of more than 20 floors were accompanied by shops, tourist establishments, hotels, and so forth. Of course, the rates of crime and robbery did not decline, but neighbours to some extent seemed to feel safer than in the immediate past. This begs a more than troubling question: to what extent are our perceptions of risk real? How is the social imaginary about a place formed? What is the role of art in such a process?
gentrification, many companies that invested in the project bought extensive land holdings at low prices, pressuring the old inhabitants to sell. Once the infrastructure was developed, the buildings were sold to the highest bidders. The state aided the process by imposing high taxes on those who did not want to sell their homes and move. The sort of art there did the same by appealing to a social imaginary of Tango, a romantic pastime ofporten˜os(the citi-zens of Buenos Aires). The pervasive nature of claims to patrimony and the tourism it entails showed a dark side with respect to the former, poor inhabitants, especially the many undocumented immigrants from Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru. They did not have enough money to own property, and many of them occupied the area illegally, squatting in houses, known asconventillos. Although the financial pressures and proactive measures by the state, such as intensified policing, were largely sufficient to push these immigrants to peripheral areas, some remained. First through police harassment and second by the requirement of a fee of ARS 1500, they were driven from Almagro. What is important to discuss here, in contrast with the Riverwest case, is the role of art as a commonly shared past, to promote an image that is conducive to the interests of the market. Patrimony as a social construct not only refers to an invented self-image created according to capitalist logic, but also it is inextricably linked to the state and its promotion of the arts.
In Buenos Aires, the borough of Almagro is fourth in size of residential concentrations with 4.6%, only superseded by Palermo at 13.6%, Caballito (10.10%), and Villa Urquiza (8.1%). This concentration of population and buildings contrasts with other districts such as La Boca (0.3%), Villa Soldati (0.1%), and Villa Lugano (0.6%). This gap exhibits not only a difference of opportunities in one side of the city with respect to the other, but it also shows how tourism contributes to gentrification. Almagro is the most densely popu-lated place of Buenos Aires.1
If in other situations the arts critique the status quo, Almagro is the exception. The con-flicts between immigrants and property owners with real-estate businesses are covered over in favour of a broader imaginary of Tango, more polished and made for export according to European tastes. It is important to remember that Argentine Tango was originally a musical genre that originated at the riverside, south of the city, at the end of the nineteenth century. As noted above, Carlos Gardel and others were among the principal figures in its inception, but basically the genre was danced by the lower classes and/or criminals – much like southern French Apache dancing or the Spanish flamenco. Over the decades, Tango was not only exported to Europe, but it also captivated the elite. It was transformed into a tourist attraction that characterized, but did not determine, the life of Argentines, since Tango is only one rhythm among many others in the country. Nonetheless, thousands of tour agencies promoted Argentina on the basis of this Tango stereotype. These conceptual-izations correspond with a biased, fabricated, and romanitzed image of past which has nothing to do with reality. Since immigrants from other Latin American countries did not fit these stereotypes, they were silenced and subordinated to the imaginary racial order. This means porten˜os, inhabitants of Buenos Aires, ethnically reflected only European immigration in the nineteenth century.
devote considerable effort and time to painting some walls along the streets, but these art works do not reflect the experiences of immigrants. Rather, other icons and figures are emphasized, such as Carlos Gardel, European mass migration, and Tango. All these stereo-types are associated with a much broader discourse, stated and designed by the state to promote some parts of Buenos Aires to the world, where strangers (like the African-Amer-ican and Latino/a ghettos in some AmerAfrican-Amer-ican cities) are excluded. This does not mean immi-grants do not exist in Abasto. They represent almost 9% of local residents. Most important here is that their culture is not significant for nourishing the tourist discourse of the moment. Five art galleries were inspected and 15 places of popular painting and graffiti. Tango and the face of Gardel were the most common artistic expression in all of these places. Was Carlos Gardel an immigrant? Yes at some level, although his birthplace is still disputed between Argentina and Uruguay, there is agreement that he had French origins. Abasto reveals the negative effects of manipulating the discourse, to boost a borough for commer-cial purposes only. In this process, art was conducive to the exploitation of people instead of representing an act of resistance. The invention of fabricated heritage in El Abasto is con-ducive to commercial exploitation by real-estate agents. The biographies and stories of thousands of immigrants are buried under the imposition of an ideologue where a European Argentina prevails over other minorities.
Conclusion
Two neighbourhoods present two different responses to urban decline and two different ways people have used art. In Riverwest, public art is an organic and continuous creation of its inhabitants. By making art, they resisted urban decayandresisted imposed gentrifica-tion. In Abasto, elite forces, property owners, and controllers of capital used their influence together with the power of the state. In Abasto, Tango was transformed from an organic art form of the commoners into a tool of the elite. With this tool they re-made the neighbour-hood of Abasto and removed those they deemed undesirable. Like all inventions of human-kind, art can be a tool for manipulating power or resistance to power, the force of capital, and the might of the state. To paraphrase Marx, people make history, but only within the confines of the forces and powers mostly outside their control. Elites never targeted River-west to be a profit-led commercial zone as the elites did with respect to Abasto. Conse-quently, the inhabitants of Riverwest had the geographic, social, and political space and wherewithal to resist gentrification and conduct urban life in their own way, so that urban renewal could occur organically. The inhabitants of Abasto, however, were not as lucky. Theirs was a story of commodified and alienated art being thrust upon them for the commercial gain of the upper classes.
Note
1. Source 2001 – 2011. The Construction in Buenos Aires City. Secretary of Infraestructure and Planning of Buenos Aires. Retrieved from http://www.ssplan.buenosaires.gov.ar/news/ construcci%C3%B3n_10anios.pdf.
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