Tourism, art and urban neighborhoods

              © PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural. ISSN 1695-7121
Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural
PAS S
www.pasosonline.org
Vol. 11 Nº 3. Special Issue. págs. 7-15. 2013
Tourism, art and urban neighborhoods
Geoffrey Skoll*
Department of Criminal Justice Buffalo State College, USA
Abstract: One of the most troubling aspects of cultural studies, is the lack of comparative cases to expand
the horizons of micro-sociology. Based on this, the present paper explores the effects of gentrification in
one neighborhood, Riverwest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA. This essay-review explores the role of arts,
not only as creating an image of neighborhoods, but as a mechanism to prevent the commoditization of
spaces. Riverwest has never been commoditized as a tourist-product like many other tourist-sites. The
concept of patrimony and heritage are placed under the lens of scrutiny in this investigation. To some
extent, some cities are produced to be consumed while others do not, is one of the intriguing points this
research explores.
Key Words: Art, Modernity, Capitalism, Commoditization, Tourism.
1. Introduction
Tourists come to the neighborhood of
Riverwest for several events that serve as tou-rists
attractions. The first of these arranged
events started in 1979. Named ‘Artwalk,’ it
takes place annually in the second weekend
of October. Originally meant to support local
artists by attracting people who live in the
neighborhood and close by surrounding neigh-borhoods,
it now attracts tourists from a several
hundred mile radius, including Chicago which
is 90 miles (145 Km) to the south. Somewhat
similar, subsequent tourist events are two block
parties, a pub crawl, and a 24 hour bicycle race.
Artwalk was not only first, but reveals a fun-damental
characteristic of the neighborhood.
Moreover, Artwalk is unusual, if not unique, in
that it did not come from external interests and
forces, but was and continues to serve indige-nous
interests and ends.
2. The Neighborhood
Riverwest is fairly centrally located in
an upper Midwest former industrial city,
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The city comfortably
fits the ‘rustbelt’ name. The city reached its
population apex in the early 1960s, topping
three quarters of a million. It has declined to
slightly more than 600,000 in 2010. Before the
post-WWII in-immigration of African Ameri-cans,
Milwaukee’s ethnic composition reflected
extraction from middle Europe--German, Polish,
Italians mainly, who came in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. By the mid-twentieth
century, the economy was mainly
manufacturing, favoring heavy industry along
with beer and dairy. The manufacturing base
employed a relatively highly skilled workforce.
Politically, the city was exceptional, having
socialist mayors through 1960.
Riverwest is former industrial and residen-tial
neighborhood. Today the heavy industry
* E-mail: skoll@buffalostate.edu
PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 11 Nº 3. Special Issue. Julio 2013 ISSN 1695-7121
8 Tourism, art and urban neighborhoods
that once interspersed housing, mainly duplexes
and small tenements, has largely, although not
entirely, disappeared. The neighborhood, like
the city, and the entire upper Midwest went
through deindustrialization since the 1970s. For
most such neighborhoods, deindustrialization
resulted in deterioration in the quality of life
for their denizens. With the loss of the indus-trial
economic base came a host of urban pro-blems:
a shrinking tax base, flight by long term
residents to suburbs, depopulation, racial and
ethnic segregation, concentrated poverty, incre-ased
interpersonal predatory crime, and so on.
Riverwest did not experience these ills. Moreo-ver,
today it shows vigor and vitality without
gentrification. It has remained a working class
neighborhood, now more racially and ethnically
integrated than ever. It has a thriving artistic
community, and has attracted new migrants
from around the world because of its character.
3. Situating Riverwest
Milwaukee fits with the other industrial cities
in virtually every respect, with some slight varia-tion
on the timing of socioeconomic shifts. In late
modernity, beginning in the 1970s, it ranked
among the most residentially segregated by race
(Massey and Denton 1993). More diversified than
Detroit or Pittsburgh, its industrial base rested
on various ferrous metal products: machine tools
and dies, castings, forgings, and heavy equip-ment,
most notably. Its workforce reflected a rela-tively
high degree of skill, in part a heritage of
the ‘Forty-eighters,’ German democrats who fled
the failure of the 1848 rebellion. Unlike the con-temporary
wave of Irish immigrants fleeing the
potato famine, Milwaukee German immigrants
tended toward what today would be called middle
class, at least in the United States. Literate, skil-led
in various technical occupations, they formed
a template that would persist in Milwaukee and
its central institutions, especially education and
government (Ortlepp 2009).
Riverwest has reflected the ethnic makeup
of Milwaukee, which by the 1920s had a Ger-man-
Italian-Polish character. By the 1940s,
a small Puerto Rican contingent along with a
smattering of other ethnic heritages made the
neighborhood one of the more diverse in the
city. It remained ethnically stable until the
1970s, when Black residents began to populate
its northwestern quadrant. The workforce also
reflected Milwaukee’s traditional composition:
about one-third skilled workers, one-third semi-skilled,
and the remainder clerical-sales, mana-gerial,
and a few professionals. Among working
class neighborhoods, Riverwest also boasted of
relatively high levels of educational attainment.
About 20 percent were high school graduates
in 1950 rising to 25 percent in 1960 and about
one-third by 1970. Demographic characteristics
began to change in the 1970s with more Black
residents, out-migration of long term residents
with an influx of households with more diverse
backgrounds. Although losing population since
1940 when it had about 40 thousand residents
to the present with approximately 30 thousand,
the housing stock remained much the same.
Riverwest is a walkable neighborhood. It is
about 20 blocks on its north-south axis and 12
to 15 blocks on its east-west axis. It has three
parks, schools, churches, small stores, restau-rants,
and many taverns. Several bus and trol-ley
buses have run through it, and some still do.
Riverwest is the western part of the northeast
quadrant of the city. Topographically, the neigh-borhood
slopes downward toward the river. The
Milwaukee River forms its eastern boundary
and partially its southern boundary as the river
makes a southwesterly bend. Its northern boun-dary
is less physical than social, as the site had
heavy industry in the earlier years and retail
outlets since about 1980. The western boundary
has shifted through time and has always been
less well defined. The southwestern boundary
has been problematic, as that part of Riverwest
bordered the traditional Black neighborhood,
Milwaukee’s so-called Bronzeville (Greenen
2006, Trotter 1988). By the later 1960s Bronze-ville
ghettoized (O’Reilly et al. 1965). Since 1990
the area gentrified and became what today is
called Brewer’s Hill. The southwestern part of
Riverwest has had disputable boundaries. The
area has shifted back and forth over the years
according to social changes, especially regarding
race and the political economy. These changes
and the reasons for them constitute one of the
focuses of this study.
Other defining sites in and about Riverwest
include industry, parks, schools, and churches.
Heavy industry concentrated in the north and
south parts of the neighborhood with medium
and light industries such as dry cleaning plants,
lumber yards, and food packing scattered throu-ghout.
Light and heavy industry has largely
given way to retail space with a concomitant
decrease in capital concentration and wage
decline. Three municipal parks modestly sized
but with attractive recreational facilities, are
situated in the north east corner, the central
eastern area along the river, and the central
southern part of Riverwest. In the past, there
PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 11 Nº 3. Special Issue. Julio 2013 ISSN 1695-7121
Geoffrey Skoll 9
was a public indoor swimming pool, but that site
is now a non-school educational center. Three
public grade schools still operate. In the early
part of the period four Roman Catholic and one
Lutheran school served the neighborhood, but
by 2010 that had diminished to one Catholic and
one private non-denominational school. All the
schools were associated with churches that still
serve the neighborhood. Since the 1970s small
Pentecostal churches have appeared in addition
to a Society of Friends meeting house. Signifi-cantly,
the pattern of industry, recreational faci-lities,
schools, and churches does not differ from
most neighborhoods in Milwaukee.
4. Social Change
Beginning in 1940, just before the United
States entered the Second World War, Riverwest
was dotted with machine shops along with a few
large metal and electrical fabricators and assem-bly
plants. The neighborhood economy began
to thrive with the looming war’s armament
demand. It became a center of specialty machi-ning
and tool and die manufacture during and
after the war. The post war period well into the
1960s was what Michael Johns (2003) called “a
moment of grace.” Many residents of the neigh-borhood
walked to work at nearby factories and
shops. After work, they repaired to neighborhood
taverns, often accompanied by children, for lei-sure
and recreation. They could shop at neigh-borhood
groceries, bakeries, butcher shops, get
their clothes and shoes repaired, buy hardware
items, and so on, all within the neighborhood
and through commerce with their neighbors.
Neighborhoods to the west and northwest
of Riverwest had similar configurations of geo-graphy
and demographics until the 1970s. The
exception was the neighborhood to the sou-thwest,
Bronzeville, which contained most of
Milwaukee’s Black residents. The Black popu-lation
expanded beginning after the Second
World War but tended to remain geographically
cohesive. It was an expanding circle. Due to
deindustrialization and persistent discrimina-tion,
that Black core experienced ghettoization.
The neighborhood to the southwest ghettoized,
then gentrified; those to the west and nor-thwest
ghettoized. In a microcosm, the area of
Milwaukee’s central city north went through
what Sugrue and others described for industrial
cities (O’Reilly1963, O’Reilly et al. 1965, Palay
1981). Nonetheless, with no physical boundary
to the west, Riverwest defied the pattern: no
ghettoization and no gentrification.
Thomas J. Sugrue’s 1996 The Origins of the
Urban Crisis offered a pivotal if not definitive
account of urban decline in the United States.
In his preface to the 2005 reissue of the book,
he summarized his historical argument. Using
Detroit as a model case study, Sugrue attribu-ted
the decline to three forces: deindustrializa-tion,
workplace racial and ethnic discrimination,
and residential racial segregation. He argued
that grassroots conservatism, especially regar-ding
race, had been built into the “New Deal’s
‘rights revolution’” (Sugrue 2005: xix). His case
for Detroit as exemplary rests on similar studies
of Detroit (Farley et al. 2000) along with those
of Baltimore, Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles,
Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, to name
a few (Bauman et al. 2000, Bluestone and Ste-venson
2002, Bobo 2002, Diamond 2009, Durr
2003, Jones 2009, Meyer 2000, Pritchett 2002,
Rieder 1985, and Wolfinger 2007). Sugrue traced
the origins of decline to several turning points.
Capital mobility especially beginning in the
1970s made possible and potentiated deindustria-lization
of the centers of capital. The developing
world became the global workshop. Urban devas-tation
followed (Harvey 1973, 2005). Demogra-phic
changes exacerbated shifts in the political
economy. Suburbanization reflected the obverse
of urban depopulation. Sugrue also pointed to
gentrification as an attempted solution to urban
decline, but argued that it did not trickle down
to older, industry dependent neighborhoods. The
result for most working class neighborhoods,
especially in the rust belt cities, but also in pla-ces
like Los Angeles and Oakland, revealed a
now familiar story of crumbling infrastructure,
housing dilapidation and abandonment, rising
street crime, racial segregation, concentrated
poverty—in sum, ghettoization (Orfield 1985).
While generally cogent, the argument by
Sugrue and similar arguments by other scho-lars
have some cracks. It is in those cracks that
the present research focuses. Cultural anthro-pology
has an old saw about the Bongo tribe.
For any generalization about the human condi-tion
at least one exception, the Bongoes, calls it
into question. By doing so, the Bongoes render
an important service to the science. They show
the faults in an explanation and call forth more
exacting thought and revealing research. The
neighborhood of Riverwest in Milwaukee is the
Bongo tribe of contemporary critical urban the-ory.
One of the most important of those lacunae
appeared as early as 1970 in Henri Lefebvre’s
The Urban Revolution. In Neil Smith’s forward
to the translation, he summarized one of
Lefebvre’s main points: “For Lefebvre, by con-
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10 Tourism, art and urban neighborhoods
trast, space holds the promise of liberation…
Space is radically open for Lefebvre” (Lefeb-vre
1970:xiii). Lefebvre implies the liberating
potential of space comes from the power and
promise of social force among people in their
interactions. In the 1930s and 1940s the site
for creative social change was on the shop floor,
but late modern capitalism with its changing
nature of work militated against that space.
Neighborhoods, in contradistinction, might still
resist and offer a site for resistance against the
interpenetration of capital into social relations.
5. Frameworks and Explanations
Bongoism, however fascinating as a case
study in exceptionalism, still cries out for expla-nation.
Bongoes may be unique, but the student
of society still must explain their way of life,
even if it turns out to be sui generis. Several
explanations follow. Drawing heavily on the
Chicago School tradition of urban studies leads
to an appreciation of Riverwests’s exceptiona-lism.
That tradition stretches from Jane Adams
and Albion Small in the late nineteenth century,
through Park, Burgess, and Louis Wirth ([1925]
1964) to the recent work of Robert J. Samp-son,
his collaborators and students (Sampson
2008a, b, Sampson and Wilson 1995, Sampson
et al. 2005, Sampson 2011). Another explana-tory
framework derives from perspectives that
link urbanism, culture, and developments of
late capitalism such as Mark Gottdiener (1985),
David Harvey (1985, 1989, 2005), Henri Lefeb-vre
([1970] 2003, [1974] 1991), Saskia Sassen
(1994), Edward Soja (1989), and Sharon Zukin
(1995). The third trajectory of the research
explores the transformative potential for crea-tive
work among working class people. It builds
on historical studies by, for example, George
Lipsitz (1994) and Michael Denning (1996). As
Karl Marx famously observed in his Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Man makes his
history, but he does not make it out of the whole
cloth; he does not make it out of conditions cho-sen
by himself, but out of such things as he finds
close at hand” (Marx [1885] 1963:5). The present
research examines how people used their neigh-borhood
and its close to hand materials to make
a sustainable and resistant culture.
6. Enter Art
Art entered, and like the Dude in the movie,
The Big Lebowski, the neighborhood abided. For
a while it looked shaky: declining population,
declining home ownership, a shift in racial com-position
from Euroamerican to various minori-ties,
closing small businesses. This was most
noticeable in the 1980s into the early 1990s.
But it stopped declining. Now there are a few
new businesses: a large hardware store adjacent
to an older lumber yard, a furniture manufactu-rer,
a coffee roaster and café, and several new
restaurants and bars. Population has not soa-red,
but it stabilized. True, there are a few con-dominium
units made from remodeled factories,
but they fail to dominate the neighborhood. Art
entails artists, of course, and there are many
different kinds of them. There are painters and
poets, sculptors, musicians, ceramicists, wood
workers, and so on. Riverwest has them. In fact,
Riverwest has always had them—working class
artists, at least since 1940. They are artists who
made and did their art in addition to their day
jobs, or night jobs in the days when factories
ran three shifts. They are not the Hemingways
and Fitzgeralds, the Dalis and Picassos, the
Josephine Bakers, and the like. Riverwest is not
Paris in the 1920s, or Greenwich Village in the
1940s and 1950s, or Harlem in the 1920s, Chi-cago
in the 1930s, or Weimar Berlin. Riverwest
does not have the world famous artists, writers,
and musicians. Like it always has, and along
with the non-artists, it has the worker artists:
the school secretary artists, the tofu factory
poets, the house cleaning photographers, and so
on.
The art and the artists are not important
for Riverwest because of their renown, because
they have very little of that. What they have is
social form, to borrow an idea from Georg Sim-mel
and applied to art by Howard Becker. Their
effectiveness lies in making and sustaining the
neighborhood for three or four generations, at
least, depending on how one counts generations.
It comes from an old Chicago School disco-very—
cultural transmission. Cultural transmis-sion
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, workers’ art. It
is the art of people creating; something unique
to our species, even in the face of humanity-robbing
political and economic systems.
7. Work, Creativity, and Species Being
Karl Marx famously analyzed the nature of
capitalism and described the capitalist system.
In his early writings on the subject in his Eco-
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Geoffrey Skoll 11
nomic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
(EPM) He distinguished work under capital to
work before capitalism. He also distinguished
human work from the labor of all other crea-tures.
According to him, work under capital
is estranged, alienated from the workers: “the
worker is related to the product of his labor as
to an alien object [sic]” (Marx 1844 EPM XXII ).
He argued that it is alienated because it is for-ced
and forced by someone other than nature.
In simple, non-capitalist societies, people have
to work to sustain themselves—subsistence acti-vities—
but no one else forces them to work. In
slave-based economies masters do the forcing.
In capitalism the social system does it—name-less
and faceless it appears as a natural condi-tion,
although it is anything but natural. Com-pared
to other creatures, human labor is always
mediated through culture, of which the time
and place bound political economy is a part.
For other creatures, work is not mediated. “The
animal is immediately one with its life activity”
(Marx 1844 EPM XXIV). Humans’ life activity
consists not only of subsistence but also the
production of consciousness and human culture,
both unique to the species. That is what Marx
meant by his reference to species-being. “Man is
a species-being, not only because in practice and
in theory he adopts the species… as his object,
but… also because he treats himself as the
actual, living species; because he treats himself
as a universal and therefore free being” (ibid).
That is, humans create; they create human
culture—languages, political systems, economic
systems, reproductive systems, and so on—and
as each individual contributes to these crea-tions,
they create universal humanity.
“In creating a world of objects by his perso-nal
activity, in his work upon inorganic nature,
man proves himself a conscious species-being,
i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own
essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being…”
(ibid). It could not be otherwise. Basic
human productions are things like language;
essentially human; essentially social; therefore
essential to humanity and humanness. In con-trast,
“An animal produces only itself, whilst
man produces all of nature” (ibid.). Another
way of saying this is to say that the ecological
niche in which people live is culture—their own
production. Marx goes on to argue that animals
produce only in accordance with their animal
needs, whereas humans produce according to
social standards, which they themselves have
set and continually re-invent. One of those stan-dards
is a Kantian judgment, a value, which by
definition is a cultural product: “Man therefore
also forms objects in accordance with the laws
of beauty” (ibid)—that is, people as species-beings
produce art, defined according to their
own standards of art and beauty.
Art shields against capital’s penetration by
resisting commodification. It offers an imperfect
shield. A moment’s reflection reveals its lacu-nae
and aporias. Paintings and sculptures have
become investments, for instance. Technologies
allow mass production of artistic products from
illuminated manuscripts to Gutenberg’s Bible,
streamed music and videos, plastic replicas of
the Venus de Milo. Walter Benjamin (1936)
began his “The Work of Art in an Age of Mecha-nical
Reproduction’ by quoting Paul Valéry.
Our fine arts were developed, their types and
uses were established, in times very different
from the present, by men whose power of action
upon things was insignificant in comparison
with ours. But the amazing growth of our tech-niques,
the adaptability and precision they have
attained, the ideas and habits they are creating,
make it a certainty that profound changes are
impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful.
In all the arts there is a physical component
which can no longer be considered or treated as
it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected
by our modern knowledge and power. For the
last twenty years neither matter nor space nor
time has been what it was from time immemo-rial.
We must expect great innovations to trans-form
the entire technique of the arts, thereby
affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps
even bringing about an amazing change in our
very notion of art.” Paul Valéry, Pièces sur
L’Art, 1931 Le Conquete de l’ubiquite.
Benjamin goes on to lay the foundation for
Theodore Adorno’s invidious distinction between
high and low art, the art of the connoisseurs
versus that of the masses (1970). In popular
art, according to Benjamin, the masses uncri-tically
enjoy the conventional (11). Inevitably
the popularization of art leads to fascism and
war (Benjamin 1936:15). While Benjamin and
later Adorno see popular art as a vehicle for
fascism, they neglect the truly social aspect of
art—art as social action and relation. Moreover,
Adorno especially fails to see art works as texts
in which each painting, song, performance, and
so has its own integrity (Gendron 1986, 2002;
Lefbvre 1974:70). Adorno’s, and his epigones’
vituperative comparison overlooks the point by
Paul Magritte in his painting La Trahison des
Images (The Treachery of Images) (1928-9) or
Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe), or
in a another way by Marcel Duchamps noto-riously
signing urinals and similar common
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12 Tourism, art and urban neighborhoods
objects, or painting a mustache on a reproduc-tion
of the Mona Lisa.. What makes a work of
art is always already and thoroughly social.
One finds a singular work of art no more than
an idiosyncratic language. Neither can exist.
Moreover, there is no art without technology, as
the earliest examples of art, the cave paintings
from the dawn of humanity, required and relied
on the latest technology of 40 thousand years
ago. Where Benjamin ascribes the artistic aura
to the singular and original, its real origin is
the socialization of what David Lewis-Williams
(2002) calls the autistic end of the spectrum of
consciousness.
Lewis-Williams argues that the cave pain-tings
of the Upper Paleolithic found in France,
Spain, and several other locations in western
Europe represent images of altered states of
consciousness, which when inscribed on the rock
walls, became a socially circumscribed cultural
product. He further argues that the emergence
of higher level consciousness, the reflective and
reflexive kind that relies on symbols, co-emer-ged
with anatomically modern humans, social
stratification, and symbolic representation. The
latter most relevantly realized as art and lan-guage.
Art’s aura, to use Benjamin’s trope, is
that of the sacred, the socially sacred as oppo-sed
to the socially profane in Emile Durkheim’s
(1912) formulation. Lewis-Williams also propo-ses
that the cave art objectified a basic if not
defining characteristic of humanity: the conflict
between the individual and the group. Such a
conflict presupposes reflective consciousness, an
awareness of the self as a distinct and autono-mous
entity.
8. Why Here and Not There?
Some of the explanations are simple and
apparent with knowledge of social fundamen-tals
in this city. The region of the city on the
other side of Riverwest’s eastern boundary, the
Milwaukee River, known as the East Side, see-mingly
would offer more genial conditions for
an artistic neighborhood. With its major univer-sity,
and relatively upper bourgeois character,
it had a historical claim to a bohemian, avant-garde
pedigree, somewhat on the order of Paris’
Montmartre. Several factors militated against
it. 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 Milwaukee partakes strongly of its German
heritage, which remains culturally conserva-tive,
even when, as in its history of socialist city
government, promises a more left leaning and
liberal atmosphere. Also, the bourgeois charac-ter
might encourage the consumption of art, but
fails to permit much in the way of conditions for
production. This is where it stops resembling
Montmartre. The critical period of Riverwest’s
differentiation emerges from its period of crisis
in the 1980s, most visibly with its deindustria-lization.
The other, surrounding neighborhoods
largely succumbed to the expectable urban
decline and decay; Riverwest did not. In its cri-sis
years a number of civic organizations, with
varying degrees of formality, fought against the
decline in a variety of ways, ranging from politi-cal
movements and pressure groups to attempts
at cultural renaissance.
Some of these efforts promoted art. Signi-ficantly,
the kind of art promoting movement
that anticipates gentrification fell flat and its
entrepreneurs gave up after a few years. The
alderman who represented both the East Side
and Riverwest, tried to convert a space formerly
occupied by a co-op grocery and a co-op natural
foods store—two separate establishments next
to each other. On the contrary, some of what
became institutions—the Riverwest Artists
Association, Woodland Pattern Bookstore,
most prominently—had no such gentrifying
goals. Moreover and more importantly, they
were indigenous efforts, not primarily aimed at
enhancing real estate values. These and simi-lar
efforts earn the ‘grass roots’ sobriquet. They
were indigenous, working class, and oriented
toward production rather than consumption of
art.
Identity and judgment emerge from art, but
so does social space, a creation of social actors
from whom it is concealed by a double illusion.
“These two aspects are the illusion of transpa-rency
on the one hand and the illusion of opa-city
on the other” (Lefebvre [1974] 1991:27). The
quotidian is the ordinary physical, social, and
cultural surround within which neighbors live,
work, play, and so on. The opaque presumes
the barrier between as noted above, between
those who think and those who work with
their hands, because “the producers of space
[thinkers] have always acted in accordance with
a representation , while the ‘users’ passively
experienced whatever was imposed upon them”
(43). By creating symbolic representations
through whatever medium—writings, music,
paintings, sculptures, and so on—the ‘users’
become the producers. They then transcend
the master servant dichotomy first articulated
by Hegel, which forever separates a real view
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Geoffrey Skoll 13
of nature into a class perspective (Hegel [1807]
1977). Art works provide observation platforms
by which we humans know ourselves as species-beings
who create the world in which we live.
Our primary ecological niche, after all, is cul-ture.
Also, it is through art that people produce
space, including and especially neighborhoods.
The answer is: through the production of
space, whereby living labour can produce some-thing
that is no longer a thing, nor simply a set
of tools, nor simply a commodity. In space needs
and desires can appear as such, informing both
the act of producing and its producers.... In and
by means of space, the work may shine through
the product. (Lefebvre [1974] 1991:348)
And so it is that Riverwest became a crea-ted
space by those who live and work in it. By
their own productions, by their institutionali-zation
of transcendent visions, they broke the
barrier that sequesters users from producers.
They broke out of the prison of the class barrier.
They refused to allow ghettoization of their own
space, their own creations. Because they were
no longer passive users and recognized themsel-ves
and each other as creators.
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PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 11 Nº 3. Special Issue. Julio 2013 ISSN 1695-7121
Geoffrey Skoll 15
Recibido: 01/02/2013
Reenviado: 31/04/2013
Aceptado: 01/07/2013
Sometido a evaluación por pares anónimos
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