Art, Crime, and the Image of the City The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Kaliner, Matthew Erik. 2014. Art, Crime, and the Image of the City. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11744462 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Art, Crime and the Image of the City A dissertation presented by Matthew Kaliner to The Department of Sociology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Sociology Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts October, 2013 © 2014 Matthew Kaliner All rights reserved Dissertation Advisor: Robert J. Sampson Matthew Kaliner Art, Crime, and the Image of the City Abstract This dissertation explores the symbolic structure of the metropolis, probing how neutral spaces may be imbued with meaning to become places, and tracing the processes through which the image of the city can come to be – and carry real consequences. The centrality of the image of the city to a broad array of urban research is established by injecting the question of image into two different research areas: crime and real estate in Washington, DC and the spatial structure of grassroots visual art production in Boston, Massachusetts. By pursuing such widely diverging areas of research, I seek to show the essential linkage between art and crime as they related to the image of the city and general urban processes of definition, distinction, and change. And yet, the research pursued here offers a mixed appraisal of strategies that pin urban prospects to image and image manipulation, from the great crime decline of the past two decades to the rise of the creative economy and application of urban branding campaigns. Across the analyses, I highlight tension between expectations of change and the essentially conservative forces of image. Far from rebranding the city, culture is shown to play a key role in locking in inequalities, undermining revitalization efforts, and generally explaining the reproduction and persistence of place over time, following the logic of the “looking glass neighborhood.” Thus, culture is not nearly the tool to revalorize, relabel, and transform place so well depicted in studies nor do the buzz of cultural events shape markets and communities as effectively in “offcenter” cities. Place is not fixed for good, and can be “re-accomplished,” albeit through decades-long demographic, cultural, and political processes. iii Art, Crime, and the Image of the City Table of Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................... v Introduction: Iconic Places ............................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: The Conceptual and Spatial Structure of Reputation ..................................................... 8 The Cultural Ecology of the City ............................................................................................... 10 Understanding Neighborhood Reputation ................................................................................. 12 The Geography of Washington, DC .......................................................................................... 20 The Media as Carriers of Neighborhood Reputation ................................................................. 24 Data Retrieval and Variable Construction ................................................................................. 28 Additional Data and Procedures................................................................................................. 31 Validity Tests ............................................................................................................................. 34 Exploratory Analysis: Reputation, Race, and Crime ................................................................. 38 Chapter 2: Crime, Reputation, and Housing Prices in Washington, DC ....................................... 42 Environmental Analogies and the Social Amplification of Risk ............................................... 43 Crime and Real Estate ................................................................................................................ 44 Modeling Strategy and Data Sources ......................................................................................... 47 Findings ...................................................................................................................................... 53 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 59 Chapter 3: What Do We Mean By An Artistic Neighborhood? .................................................... 63 The Three Geographies of Cultural Production ......................................................................... 65 Chapter 4: Image in Action: Artists, Audiences, and the Rebranding of SoWa ............................ 76 Overview .................................................................................................................................... 76 Introduction: Fiction Producing Reality..................................................................................... 78 Branding Campaigns and the Arts ............................................................................................. 80 Observational Methods .............................................................................................................. 85 The Creation of SoWa ................................................................................................................ 86 SoWa Today ............................................................................................................................... 90 Conclusion: Branding and the Changing Audience at SoWa .................................................... 94 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 97 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 100 iv Acknowledgements At the end of the long road of graduate study, I owe my greatest debt to the undergraduate students and advisees I have had the honor to work with. At critical junctures and in daily routines alike, students’ sheer excitement with new ideas, their challenges and questions, even their essays and emails, reminded and renewed the fascination with intellectual exploration, open discussion, and ongoing research that is at the heart of academic life. I especially want to thank the three cohorts of participants in my junior tutorial, Arts, Culture, and Urban Neighborhoods, and my thesis advisees, who helped me work though ideas and methods that show up in the pages that come, often unbeknown to all parties. I am grateful to my dissertation committee – Robert Sampson (chair), and Christopher Winship and William Julius Wilson – for serving as the ultimate models of academic research, and for providing me with the room and structure to develop the projects that came together into this dissertation. I also benefited from earlier committees and faculty, especially Jason Kaufman, Anthony Braga, Frank Dobbin, Mary Brinton, and Nicholas Christakis. The last three years of research and especially writing would not have been the same if I had not been invited by Alison Denton Jones to join her writing group. Alison’s wise and supportive comments have only been matched by the community that we have sustained on Friday afternoon sessions, including Kyoko Saito, Jennifer Darrah, Barry Cohen, Lisa Stampnitzky, Hsin-Chao Wu, Shawna Vican, and Nathan Fosse. Aurora Sanfeliz of the Bureau of Study Council was instrumental to keeping me on track through the final push. Charles Loeffler provided key advice and inspiration for nearly all the following projects, and I learned tremendously from the years of conversation with Josh Wakeham, Simone Ispa-Landa, Chana Teeger, Ethan Fosse, and many other members of the graduate program. v To make this research possible, I am grateful for assistance and data resources from Brenda Eich and Sarah Fuentes from the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, DC and, Jessica Cigna from the Urban Institute, and the staff of the District’s Office of Taxation and Real Estate. In Boston, Tom Blake and John Devine of the Boston Public Library provided excellent access to city documents. Matt Carrano, Peter Belford, Rachel Mello, and Emily Garfield helped me to understand Somerville Open Studios, and Paul Pedulla and Audrina Warren were instrumental in opening up the world of SoWa and vast artistic underworld of Boston. I am grateful to Stephen Matthews and his team at Penn State for developing my GIS skills, and for Ben Lewis at Harvard for providing continued training and advice. I could fill a page with thanks to friendly critics and commentators from conferences and presentations, but I would like to single out David Cunningham and Sara Shostak at Brandeis who provided the best motivation and encouragement