Week 12: Roanoke Revitalization

         Tuesdays presentation, by Scott Tate, had to do with Art based community revitalization. The question he answered was "what does it mean to construct and promote a city as a place for arts and culture?" Specifically, what does this mean for this city of Roanoke… who’s included and excluded in this process. Art has two values in Roanoke's society: an intrinsic and an instrumental value. The instrumental value has to do with growing their economy, whereas the intrinsic value implies that art is important for its own benefits: "it is important because it's important." The article beside this sentence talks about the art revitalization of the city of Edmonton, specifically Alberta Avenue http://www.gigcity.ca/2011/08/13/arts-based-revitalization-in-jeopardy-say-alberta-avenue-residents/. In this scenario, the revitalization is failing because the city pulled it's funding too quickly, and did not include the residents in the planning process. Edmonton policy makers got too impatient and did not wait to see results. They needed to create an adaptable plan that could conform to economic and time constraints. It also seemed like in Roanoke's revitalization, the residents of the city played an incredibly large role.   

              Also, Tate lectured us on the rhetoric around creative cities, citing the positives and negatives of creative revitalization. The positives included a revitalized downtown centers, economic impacts, urban amenities, alongside contributions to quality of life and sense of place. However, the negative parts of the economic impacts are more mixed than the rhetoric. The inequalities are increased, and so is social distancing. This also threatens cultural health of neighborhoods because people are not involved as much with each other in the revitalization process.

Roanoke had an arts commission which was charged with incorporating arts into various aspects of the city and fighting off the problem of social distancing. Tate made sure to note that there are not too many cities who have gone through a comprehensive arts plan and figured out their guiding values by holding public meeting and surveys. Roanoke truly valued the public opinion by creating draft plans that could be commented on, then they would have a meeting to discuss these draft plans. The guiding mottos of Roanoke’s revitalization were “Collaboration,” “ celebration,” “ advocacy,” “ inclusion,” “innovation,” “vision,” and “education.”

Another big part of the revitalization was moving their focus from straight downtown to the neighborhoods, which sort of threatened the people downtown. Some tension did arise from this plan. By doing this, Roanoke expanded/ is expanding the boundaries of what an “art city” is. They are coming up with innovative ideas and working with other areas and places to make things more interesting. They are aligning with the idea of creative cities by making it hip and fun. Then, Tate moved to talk about a more conflicted city, by the name of Belfast, Ireland. This city is described as one of the most segregated cities in the world. Thus, a wall was constructed with an upkeep cost of approximately 1.5 billion dollars per year. Graffiti is drawn on each side of the walls, respectively, which is some kind of art form? I am unsure of the point Tate was trying to make with Belfast, but I am assuming he was suggesting an art-based revitalization in that city as well? I don’t think this would work because http://libwiki.mcmaster.ca/geog3ur3/index.php/Belfast/ConsequencesOfSegregation this article cites the fear’s involved with a violent segregated city such as Belfast. 50% of residents claim they would feel incredibly unsafe if they ventured over to the other side of the wall, into another religious faith’s territory. Am I the only one who is reminded of the movie “Gangs of New York?” The religious violence coming from Ireland was probably the basis for the movie; after all, because the Irish settlers got in fights with the American’s who had conflicting religious views  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_of_New_York.