THE 510 AND THE 93: THE INTERSECTION OF ARTISTS, URBAN EVOLUTION, AND PRESERVATION IN OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA AND SAINT-DENIS, FRANCE
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2022-05
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MA in Historic Preservation
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Abstract
Urban areas need artists and cultural assets to thrive, and through adaptive reuse of
historic buildings for artists, cities can both retain the histories and cultures of their people and
provide solutions to gentrification, displacement, blight, and inequities in how cities develop.
While arts and culture cannot mitigate all these issues, they can help to create a connective tissue
among people, a connection that can make communities stronger and more inclusive. I found that
it is imperative to meet the arts sector’s needs for safe, functional, affordable and stable spaces to
live and work. Historic building stock (industrial, commercial, residential) can be adapted to
meet those needs in an equitable way, while also helping to redevelop underutilized urban
neighborhoods.
This treatise examined the intersection of these components in two similar cities on the
margins, Saint-Denis, France and Oakland, California, which provided a cross-cultural
opportunity to consider new approaches and perspectives to the challenges both countries face at
a time of particularly polarizing global unrest. The COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis, and social justice issues are affecting how we live and how we relate to each other
in a civil society, underlining the need to strengthen the places that people gather, a role that arts
and culture fulfills. Progress in both countries requires joining financial resources, decision-
making power, and the built environment in a sustainable way in partnership with artists and
residents. A top-down, bureaucratic approach needs to be replaced by community collaboration.
I made recommendations that address this critical urban need in a variety of ways through
real estate and urban development models, funding models, historic preservation policies, and
methods to better value the arts in public spaces. For example, cities can provide financial
incentives to convert unused office space into artist studios, apartments, galleries, or performing
arts venues. They can embed artists in municipal preservation offices so that local preservation
policies can account for the needs of the cultural sector. Cities can create cultural/preservation
zones to provide equitable capital and operating support for hyper-local arts engagements that
revitalize marginalized communities through the built environment. By forging new links with
each other while imagining in tandem new ways of equitable and creative city-building, both the
French banlieues and diverse American cities will thrive.