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Avoiding middle-class planning 2.0: media arts and the future of urban planning

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Avoiding middle-class planning 2.0: media arts and the future of urban planning

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AVOIDING MIDDLE-CLASS PLANNING 2.0:
MEDIA ARTS AND THE FUTURE OF URBAN PLANNING

by

Brettany Kane Shannon

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
URBAN PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT

Degree Conferral Date ~ May 13, 2016

ii

Copyright 2016

by

Brettany Kane Shannon

All rights reserved.

iii

For
Colin and Auden

You are the A and the C to my B.
Everywhere is made better with you in my life. So let’s go everywhere together.

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ABSTRACT

This dissertation chronicles the role of media arts in urban planning as an essential part of
contemporary economic development, real estate branding, and participatory socially engaged arts
projects. Through three case studies runs the conceptual through-line, “Middle-Class Planning 2.0,”
the digital age’s extension of the last century’s class-based planning and urban development regime
that has consistently favored elite interests over socially just, inclusionary practices. The introduction
presents the historical and cultural contexts that lead to the larger research question: What are
“media arts”? What can they offer urban planners? Assuming that planning does have an elitist
middle-class agenda, how do digital technologies relate to it, and what can planners do to avoid a
Middle-Class Planning 2.0?
The first case study constitutes an examination of media arts organizations (MAOs) in the
United States. Do MAOs share a relationship with neighborhood change? Results suggest that media
arts organizations as a sector do not correlate with gentrification, but may locate within already
changing communities, those already undergoing redevelopment. Further and critically,
organizational mission, or institutional agenda, successfully predicts a media arts organization’s
relationship to neighborhood change. This finding emphasizes institutional intent’s relevance, as well
as asserts the need to study just more than art sectors in order to understand culture’s intersection
with neighborhood change.
The second analysis examines how real estate developers use online marketing campaigns to
promote their projects. Despite this growing trend, planning scholarship does not yet evaluate how
developers use media, or the implications for developer-driven community development in the
digital age. Through a bimonthly content analysis of two major adaptive reuse projects’ emergent
and social media campaigns, I find online real estate development marketing is different than its pre-
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digital predecessor, possibly hearkening a “neo-growth machine.” Multi-media coalesce both to
create a new media-rich rhetoric of representation that supports innovative marketing initiatives, as
well as reveal critical exposure. All processes disclose the same goal: exclusive, twenty-first century
spectacle- and disparity-driven development. I argue planners should study developers’ mediated
messaging to (1) recognize their manipulations and (2) invert their savvy but cynical practices into
pro-participatory planning ones.
The final case study represents just that kind of participatory planning program. In 2011, Out
the Window collaborators presented videos by youth and local artists on Los Angeles buses, engaging
riders in SMS-enabled dialogues. Findings from the surveyed and interviewed riders are presented as
part of a conceptual analysis of the project as an example of de Certeauian practice in the digital age.
Though hindered by institutional obstacles, Out the Window demonstrates a positive role for media
arts in planning communications and participation, specifically the possible creation of “active
consumers,” citizens who can effectuate change from the bottom-up through media-based
storytelling.
The dissertation concludes: institution matters, power endures, and while media provide a
valuable and qualitatively rich venue for engaging with marginalized urban populations, the first and
second conditions persist. Therefore, if we hope to achieve a “Democratic Planning 1.0,” planning
should: teach critical visual and media literacies, use art and technology for participation’s sake,
demand public uses from public screens, devise culturally sensitive outreach campaigns, focus on
mission, and embrace paradox.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract iv

List of Figures viii

List of Tables ix

Acknowledgements x

Chapter 1 Introduction: Middle-Class Planning 2.0 1

/1 Media Arts and Media Arts for Planning 5

/2 Middle-Class Planning 1.0 and its Supportive Technologies 9

/3 Technology Today: Everywhere and Everyware 20

/4 Liquid Modernity and Middle-Class Confusion 28

Chapter 2 Your Neighborhood Media Arts Organization: 34
The Intersection of Media Arts, Organizational
Mission, and Community Development in the
United States

/1 Art, Media Arts, and Neighborhood Change 36

/2 Methods 38

/3 Findings 42

/4 Conclusions and Implications 53

Chapter 3 Selling the Plan: Development in the Age of Social 56
Media: How the Growth Machine Engages with
Emergent and Social Media in the Symbolic Economy

/1 Urban Development 2.0 in the Symbolic Economy 58

/2 About the Developments 61

/3 Methods 66

/4 Mediating Participation in the Symbolic Economy 69

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/5 Public Contradictions and Contrivances 81

/6 The Implications of a Socially-Networked Neo-Growth Machine 86

Chapter 4 Videos on the Bus: An Exploratory Los Angeles Case 89
Study of Applying Media Arts to Community
Participatory Storytelling

/1 Intervention Context 90

/2 About Out the Window 92

/3 Methods 94

/4 The L.A. Metro Ridership and Out the Window 96

/5 The Convergence of Art, Storytelling, and New Media 99

/6 De Certeau and Out the Window 103

/7 Discussion 109

/8 Epilogue 111

Chapter 5 Conclusion: Moving to Democratic Planning 1.0 113

/1 Recommendations 114

/2 Limitations and Future Research 119

Bibliography 122
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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1-1: Lalo Alcaraz, Traditional Superhighway and Information Superhighway (1994) 23

Figure 3-1: Millennium Hollywood, pre-construction 62

Figure 3-2: Rendering of the completed Millennium Hollywood project 63

Figure 3-3: Downtown Project properties as of 2014 64

Figure 3-4: DTP’s prize property, the Container Park 66

Figure 3-5: Millennium Hollywood’s homepage featuring Lou Naidorf 71

Figure 3-6: Downtown Project homepage 74

Figure 3-7: “Community” reframed via removal 75

Figure 3-8: The Downtown Denizen 77

Figure 3-9: A typical “7 Nights in Hollywood” 78

Figure 3-10: Downtown Project’s club goods 84

Figure 3-11: Millennium Hollywood’s proposed interactive space 86

Figure 4-1: Out the Window’s marketing postcard (reverse) 93

Figure 4-2: ELARA, “Have You Noticed How Much Junk Food We Eat?” (2011) 94

Figure 4-3: Out the Window Metro bus rider survey locations 96

Figure 4-4: “¿Que Es Tu Temor Mas Grande?” [“What Is Your Biggest Fear?”] 101

Figure 4-5: Walter Vargas, “Mis Manos” (2011) 106

Figure 5-1: Duany and Koolhaas sketching styles compared 114

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 2-1: NAMAC Mapping the Field Organizational Indicators 39

Table 2-2: Univariate Descriptive Statistics – Mapping the Field Survey 43

Table 2-3: Summary Statistics by Organizational Mission, Selected Measures 45

Table 2-4: MAO AC (N=112) and Referent (N=24) Groups Compared 48

Table 2-5: Demographic Measures by MAO Tenure 49

Table 2-6: Demographic Measures by MAO Age 50

Table 2-7: Demographic Measures by Type of Media 51

Table 2-8: Demographic Measures by MAO Organizational Mission 52

Table 2-9: Educational Attainment by MAO Town Type 53

Table 3-1: Millennium Hollywood and Downtown Project Emergent Media Inventory 67

Table 3-2: Millennium Hollywood and Downtown Project Codes, Selected 69

Table 3-3: The Projects’ Video Inventories Compared 80

Table 3-4: Facebook and Twitter Engagement Figures Compared 82

Table 3-5: The Developments’ and ACS Demographics Compared 83

Table 4-1: Demographics of Metro Ridership and L.A. County Residents Compared, 2010 91

Table 4-2: Out the Window’s Collaborating Partners 92

Table 4-3: The Jagged Nature of the Digital Divide on L.A. Metro Buses 96

Table 4-4: Out the Window Cell Phone Usage by Language and Age 98

x
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I arrived on the University of Southern California campus and entered what was then the
School of Policy, Planning, and Development in the fall of 2008, a full eight academic years ago. In
that time, I have been blessed with the greatest mentors, colleagues, and friends imaginable – a
community in the truest sense of the word. I am grateful to them all, but David C. Sloane is
doubtless the person most responsible for bringing me to this place. He was my first professor (of
two incomparable classes) and the first person I consulted in the spring of 2009, when I finally
mustered the courage to tell someone I wanted to get a PhD in urban planning, and study it, its
promise, and its contradictions for the rest of my life. He was then the way he has been in all our
subsequent conversations: honest, warm, pragmatic, funny, and, as my dear friend Jessica Payne calls
him, “a mental giant.” Having him assigned as my advisor was the first of the next six years’ many
gifts. Namely, through his wife, the incomparable, inimitable, and indefatigable media artist, Anne
Bray, I have learned more about art and what it can really do for people, how we can use to share
experiences, question our environments, and demand more of our institutions. David and Anne
dedicate their lives to making our cities places of community, health, engagement, justice, and beauty.
They are the best kind of brilliant – they share it with everyone they meet. I know I am a better
scholar, teacher, and person for my time with them.
I am also grateful to my dissertation committee’s two other members, Elizabeth Currid-
Halkett and Anikó Imre. In addition to their generous and insightful support throughout the
dissertation, they introduced me to the cultural economy and critical media studies fields,
respectively, both of which inform this dissertation and my scholarship. Elizabeth and Anikó share a
preternatural knack for asking the hard questions and seeing the deep truths in things. I only hope I
impress and inspire my students half as much as these two have me. I want also to thank my
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qualifying exam committee members, Tridib Banerjee, Margaret Crawford, and Juliet Musso. In
particular, Tridib has shared his public space and urban design expertise, and I have so enjoyed
writing a manuscript with him. And Margaret has been more generous with her time with someone
in another city (sometimes continent) than anyone has the right to expect. Finally, I want to thank
Lisa Schweitzer. She has spent countless hours with me and on my work – someone not officially
her student – and I am always smarter following an encounter with her. Whenever I talk with
prospective students about USC, I regale them with much longer, hyper-parenthetical, stories about
each of the academics listed above. When I close my eyes and think of scholars working for the
greater good, I see their faces.
I see more faces, those of my academic pals and confidants. To my PhD elder-pals, Vivian
Wang, Bryce Lowery, and Stephanie Frank, my gratitude for your giving me practical advice and lots
of laughs. I am grateful to my cohort, Sandip Chakrabarti and Mi Young Kim. (When is our next
lunch?!) And to Jovanna Rosen and Sarah Mawhorter, I am very glad my dissertation took a year
longer so I could spend more time with you. I want to thank Liz Falletta for being a great friend and
exactly the kind of teacher I would like to be. I cherish all these people. Thank goodness for
conferences, is all I can say.
I owe thanks for the specific contents of this dissertation, as well. Chapter 2 was funded by
the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) [grant number 13-3800-7007]. I thank the National
Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) for its 2010 Mapping the Field survey, particularly
former Executive Director Jack Walsh for his stewardship. Thanks also to Sarah Mawhorter for her
methodological guidance, and Zhi Li and Jihye Lee for their research assistance. The Out the Window
art project of Chapter 4 was supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation. A thousand thanks and praise to the Out the Window team: Anne Bray of Freewaves,
Paolo Davanzo and Lisa Marr of Echo Park Film Center, Mike Blockstein and Reanne Estrada of
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Public Matters, and Fabian Wagmister and Jeff Burke of UCLA REMAP. Lisa Schweitzer helped
formulate the bus rider survey questions, and the following team helped administer them: Xochitl
Morales, Maria Paredes, Walter Vargas, and Heidi Zeller. Clare Boersch conducted all on-bus
passenger interviews.
Lastly, I want to thank my family. My mother and father have done nothing but support me
my whole life. If I have one regret, it is that my father will not see “Dr. Shannon,” the exact thing he
shouted when I told them I wanted to get a PhD. I am happy, though, that he met Colin, the love of
my life. I received my acceptance letter just days before our second date, and in the intervening years
we fell in love, moved in together, got pregnant (on purpose), went to Europe, got married (yes, in
that order), had a baby, and did a dissertation. I say “we” did a dissertation because Colin cannot
hear something without having a tremendous insight about it, and he has sacrificed nearly every
weekend since Auden’s birth to babysit so I could work. I share this achievement with him and our
son. They are my everything, so that is the very least I can share with them.

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chapter 1

INTRODUCTION
Middle-Class Planning 2.0

Planning always involves tradeoffs and unintended
consequences. Even well-intentioned award…program[s] reflect the
intractable nature of structural inequalities in American society.
Shame on us as a profession if we neglect these self-critical
discussions.
Paulsen, 2015, p. 233

Contemporary planners struggle to resolve the inequities set in motion by well-meaning
twentieth century planners. Compelled by the potent tonic of modernism’s promise to comprehend,
organize, and control everything (Scott, 1998), and the apparently bucolic convenience of an
automobile-encouraged (though not determined) suburban existence (Longstreth, 1997), planners
and policymakers established policies to effectuate, perpetuate, and in some cases reify significant
environmental (Blanco et al., 2009), economic (Boyer, 1986; Conley, 2000), public health (Sloane,
2006; Wilson et al., 2008), public space (Kohn, 2004; Caldeira, 1996), and social (Gans, 1982; Wilson,
1987) injustices. We now understand planners, like those responsible for Los Angeles’ widely-
maligned built landscape, operated not out of ignorance but an uncritical eagerness to apply the new
social structure’s tools to city making (Gish, 2012). Compelled by pure theory and tidy essentialism,
planners perceived technological innovations of modern industrialism as at least salutary, sometimes
salvational for decades. I have named this ideological and functional tendency “Middle-Class
Planning 1.0.” Indeed, many planners still uphold technology as at least benign and usually beneficial,
despite the mounting evidence that, on balance, breakthroughs in technology and design underwrote
more unjust planning programs in the twentieth century than just.

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Since the late 1960s, humanity has experienced yet another transformation of social structure.
The network society (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998) embodies simultaneous, independent, and
coincidental shifts of technology, organization, and culture. First, whereas the industrial era’s
primary breakthrough was humankind’s mastery of energy for manufacturing goods, the new
technological advance was informational. Rather than producing things, we produce knowledge,
specifically the ability to process more information. Second, we moved from a centralized,
hierarchical model to the networked system. The network organizational model is not new to the
late twentieth century, but it was rarely used historically because how could localized cells coordinate
over large distances? Without the proper technologies to connect spatially differentiated interests,
the network’s capacities went underutilized. At the same time, third, our culture became more
interested in the issue of freedom and individuation (Giddens, 2006). The sense of self-
empowerment and emancipation has roots in earlier urban social movements (Castells, 1983), and
thrives in a communications-enabled, networked organizational model. The outcomes of the
network or “information” society are technological, economic, occupation, spatial, and cultural
(Webster, 2006).
Therefore, when we talk about a digital culture, we reasonably mean more than its
constitutive information and communication technologies (ICTs). We mean more than internet
protocols, the world wide web interface, cellular telephony, satellite mapping technology, or even the
internet of things, the vast array of our physical objects embedded with wireless network
communication capacities. We are referring to these technologies’ and things’ total cultural
transformation. This transformation warrants examination, therefore, as the digital revolution has
progressed, scores of scholars of architecture (Varnelis, 2008), communications (Jenkins, 2006),
computer science (Dourish, 2001), media education (Buckingham, 2003), media studies (Couldry &
McCarthy, 2004), sociology (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998), and media arts (Grau, 2007; Lovejoy, Paul

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& Vesna, 2011; Tribe, Jana & Grosenick, 2006) have all examined how ICTs might change our
disciplinary frameworks, social relations, and capacities for engagement.
Planning scholars have also started considering ICTs for participatory planning. Some see
hopeful opportunity (Apostol, Antoniadis, & Banerjee, 2013; Sandercock & Attili, 2010), some see
significant limitations (Mandarano, Meenar, & Steins, 2011), and some find mixed results (Evans-
Cowley, 2010a, 2010b; Evans-Cowley & Hollander, 2010). But this literature is small relative to
digital communications’ cultural significance. Planning still mostly uses digital technologies for their
methodological functionality as in data gathering, logistics modeling, and GIS mapping. All of this is
incredibly useful and enlightening. But Big Data has its limits, too, establishing broad trends and
universalities at the sake of vital social, economic, and geographic difference (González, Hidalgo, &
Barabásil, 2008).
In general, planning’s modern faith in technology as a tool for improvement is unchanged.
The Atlantic Monthly’s online urban publication, CityLab underscores popular culture planning’s
technophilia. On February 5, 2016, fifteen of the nineteen most recent Tech articles linked to from
site’s header menu portray technology in a categorically positive light, contributing to urban quality
of life (n=11), as well as economic, environmental, infrastructural, and social justice causes. Two
pieces mourn light technology’s misuse, regretting its part in the billboard-ification of skyscrapers
(Lafrance, 2016) and, as in the case of GE’s shuttered CFL light bulb division, the “dangers of
hanging too much environmental advocacy on the back of a particular technology or consumer
product” (Spector, 2016). The negative tech articles are about drones (Poon, 2016) and Uber (Jaffe,
2016). Easy pickings, really, but even that coverage tends to be the exception. For example, in 2015,
CityLab published eighteen articles featuring drones. For example, twelve of 2015’s eighteen drone
articles feature stunning urban flyovers intimating the publication’s fascination with the technology.

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The remaining six do raise questions, but neither about drones’ legality nor threats to civil liberties.
Rather, what regulations will work for the technology’s integration?
Twentieth century planning technophilia had deleterious effects. How will it affect twenty-
first century planning in our socially mediated, pervasive (pun intended) digital culture? Are we
headed for a Middle-Class Planning 2.0 (MCP 2.0), where contemporary planners and policymakers
approach society’s social ambiguities, inequalities, and paradoxes with the same faith in ICTs as their
predecessors had in modern advances? Will policymakers adopt digital technologies and media arts
for the implementation of a twenty-first century middle-class ideology the way a cursory CityLab
content analysis suggests? Will they use technology the way some fear, to reassert the neo-traditional
status quo (Bratton, 2013), possibly doing further damage to the democratic project (Feenberg,
1999)? Or can they achieve something altogether different, possibly using creative digital
technologies, media arts, for socially just participatory planning processes and outcomes?
This dissertation is not a technophobic critique, a Luddite’s futile protest against the network
society. Quite the opposite. I owned, and loved dearly, my first Palm Pilot in 1999. Friends would
laugh at the plastic planner and I would rejoin, “Just wait. Someday this [my Palm Pilot] will have
this [my phone] in it. And then we will all be happy.” (My husband will tell you I have a tendency for
hyperbole.) Obviously we are not all happy. But our lives are all different. Our mobile technologies
are mobile infrastructures (Dourish & Bell, 2007) that have forever shifted how we experience and
document our cities. With them, we generate new, good and bad, cultural artifacts (Caron & Caronia,
2007; Tuters & Varnelis, 2006) and urban forms (Dourish & Bell, 2007; Graham & Marvin, 2001).
But as we know, context is all. Therefore, we can neither predict the usefulness nor assume the
goodness of the new interventions. What we must do is examine specific instances to learn the
various ways creativity, technology, and place intersect in the city.

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This dissertation reflects my attempt to understand better how media arts interact with
urban planning and urban development. I knew I could not find a comprehensive answer with just
three research projects, and I do not present one here. Beginning with this introduction, however, I
present the historical and cultural contexts leading me to my larger research question. What are
“media arts”? What can they offer urban planners? And what justification do I have for leveling a
“middle-class planning agenda” charge? Assuming it is true, how does planning’s middle-class bias
relate to art and technological innovation, specifically, and contemporary culture, generally? Why
worry about a Middle-Class 2.0?
1/1 Media Arts and Media Arts for Planning
Within the visual arts, media arts are the newest and remain among the least codified, more
esoteric artistic practices. They emerged with and at the start of the communications revolution, and
have kept apace for the duration. Theirs is a large stable of intellectual and practical forebears,
poststructuralism, feminism, the happening, Duchampian conceptualism, Situationism, performance
art, to name a few (Grau, 2007; Lovejoy, Paul & Vesna, 2011; Rush, 2005; Tribe, Jana, & Grosenick,
2006). Since Nam June Paik’s 1965 “discovery” of the consumer-grade Sony Portapak (Rush, 2005),
media arts have been among the more “democratic” art forms, frequently used to champion the
causes of underserved people and places. Given media arts’ relative ease of production and
circulation, art theorists like Suzanne Lacy (1994) have held them up as credible tools for political
causes. Lacy names media artists as among the “vanguard groups… [with] a common interest in
leftist politics, social activism, redefined audiences, relevance for communities (particularly the
marginalized ones), and collaborative methodology” (p. 25).
Their ideological origins are utopian, but media arts prevail for they articulate and propel
advances in ICTs, sharing a close relationship with informationalism and informational development
(Castells, 1989). At the same time that digital technologies support film/video, photography, radio,

6
digital, internet, and projection artworks, individual and collective creative expression, they also
support corporate enterprise. Creative social media applications such as Afterlight, Flickr, Instagram,
Pinterest, Vimeo, Vine, YouTube have placed photography, filmmaking, sound editing, graphic
design, and curating, once the purview of trained creative professionals, into the hands of a legion of
amateurs, and serve as economic engines in the process.
Yet despite their pervasiveness in our lives, the term “media arts” often confounds people. It
is at once too avant-garde and overly broad. Media artists themselves struggle to define “media art”
precisely because new creative opportunities and questions issue from media arts’ collective culture-
space-technology relationship. For example, a host of terms suffice to denote media arts: “creative
digital technologies,” “digital media,” “new media,” “new media art,” “creative media,” “interactive
art,” and “interactive media.” Some of these terms have technically discrete meanings, but the
distinctions are fuzzy and the technologies change so quickly that people often use the umbrella
term “emergent media” to cover creative digital technologies as they develop. In this dissertation, I
will tend to use emergent media to evoke the use of augmented reality technologies (AKA
“ubicomp”) that “dynamically deliver data to, or extract from, physical space” (Manovich, 2007, p.
251). This accounts for everything from cell phones, laptops, video surveillance, to publicly located
video displays. I use “creative digital technologies,” “digital media,” “emergent media,” “multimedia,
new media,” and “media arts” effectively interchangeably, and “online platforms,” “social media,”
and “social networks” to indicate when media arts technologies are used for sociability. I think of
historian’s Michael Rush’s (2005) characterization of media arts to explain the surfeit of terms (and
perhaps planning’s limited scholarship, too). “While the use of new media in art does have a history,
[but] this history has yet to be written, largely because it is always developing” (p. 9).
Granted, something’s history is always either developing or declining, so Rush’s assertion is
jejune. But in practical terms, media arts’ history is developing in myriad places at once. In the public

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realm, they lie at the nexus of investigations into informational capitalism (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998,
2012); socially engaged art for community engagement (Bishop, 2012; Hayden, 1995; Helguera,
2011); debates over public space and the emergence of social movements (Castells, 2012; Crawford,
1995; Deutsche, 1998; Kohn, 2004) and our daily embodied interactions with them (Caron &
Caronia, 2007; Dourish, 2001; Dourish & Bell, 2007), the cultural and symbolic economies’ impact
on urban development (Currid, 2009, 2010; Lloyd, 2005; Zukin, 1989, 1995, 2010); the call for
enhanced media literacy (Buckingham, 2003; Jenkins et al., 2009); and the social justice implications
of a jagged and shifting digital divide (Norris, 2001; Russell, Ito, Richmond, & Tuters, 2008).
Given media arts’ literal and figurative pervasiveness, I advocate for media arts and a media
literacy agenda in urban planning. I perceive two ways media arts can serve planning. First, digital
media are technically useful. They provide multiple new methods for data collection, as well as offer
flexible opportunities for community engagement (Sandercock & Attili, 2010). Second and more
important, media literacy supports the exploration of four intersecting phenomena essential to
planning: context, identity, participation, and process.
First, context is all. Responsible planners study a place’s history, its social, political, and
economic shifts over time, and their mutually dependent relationship with the built environment.
But modern planners have struggled with this, succumbing to a utopian nostalgia (Holston, 1996)
that strategizes “on a theory of decontextualization” based on predetermined “absent causes” (p. 55).
Instead planners can use digital technologies to document “the present city…[as] the starting point”
(Kaliski, 2008, p. 108). With video, photography, and sound recordings, planners capture a more
complete, spatiotemporal experience of a place’s “flux” (p. 108). Untethered from the staid, two-
dimensional plan, they can make suitable, ideally equitable, planning intervention recommendations
(Kim, 2015).

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In planning, second, identity refers to identity of person and place. In the modern world, we
perform different selves (Goffman, 1959), genders (Lofland, 1985), and races (Anderson, 2011) in
public, imbuing places with specific identities, “character” (Davenport, 2005). Consequently, we
conceive of a “who” when we think of a “where” (Lofland, 1985), which has far-reaching policy
implications (Florida, 2002; Gans, 1982; Zukin, 1995). Planners can use digital technologies to
register the overlapping identities of the built environment and its users, and critically analyze how
different populations engage with locations differently. Does a place have a particular race or gender
bias? For example, women may never go to a public place after dark because of poor lighting.
Media-enhanced analysis can advise ways to make such places safer and more democratic.
Democracy through participation, third, is also a central tenet of media arts. “Interactivity” is
paramount (Davenport, 2005; Grau, 2007; Lovejoy, Paul & Vesna, 2011; Tribe, Jana, Grosenick,
2006), and the best projects are those that share authorship without either glossing over difference
or ceding control. When we are our best, I believe planners and Pablo Helguera-styled (2011)
socially engage art practitioners are very much alike, seeking community-created
community/artwork development. Only many planners desire a Habermasian consensus-based
outcome. Media artists, by contrast, tend to accept a more realistic view, understanding that
interactive projects can be difficult and problematic (Stiles & Shanken, 2011). Moreover, media
literacy itself involves an education in collective participatory skill acquisition (Buckingham, 2003;
Jenkins et al., 2009). For planning, then, media arts are useful because along with media production
knowhow, they encourage such things as collaboration, collective intelligence, and negotiation
(Jenkins et al., 2009) in and for multicultural communities.
Finally, fourth, media arts explore context, identity, and participation through process, a
hallmark of planning. Of course media arts function, literally, on technological processes, but like
planning, the success of media artworks depends largely on sustained discourse (Grau, 2007;

9
Helguera, 2011). Art historian Andreas Broeckmann (2007) offers three aesthetic categories that
describe media arts and work well for discussing and evaluating participatory planning. First,
“execution” projects are simply the scripts of existing software programs. Technical only, they evoke
bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all templates that characterize many ill-fated modern planning
developments (Scott, 1998), and get no further than the non-participation rungs, manipulation and
therapy, in Arnstein’s (1969) formative ladder of participation. Second, “performance” projects are
the live, but non-interactive, outcomes of the execution projects. Critics of planning accuse some
community outreach programs as doing just that, performing outreach while arriving at the same,
preordained outcomes. Performance projects constitute degrees of tokenism for Arnstein, moving
upward from informing, to consultation, to placation. Finally, however, Broeckmann’s “process”
aesthetic surpasses the execution and performance modes by issuing from, “not yet fully
programmed sequences of events that build on one another in a non-teleological manner” (p. 201).
In media arts, the process aesthetic projects are the most “successful.” In planning, they are the only
ones we can reasonably call “legitimate,” finally achieving Arnstein’s crucial degrees of citizen
power: partnership, delegated power, and citizen control.
And yet. As I mentioned before, the digital divide is real. Cyberspace, like built space, is a
social production (Lefebvre, 1974/2000). As long as actually existing, on-the-ground, social
inequality exists, inequality at the digital level will also persist. So I advocate for a critical integration
of media arts and media literacy’s integration into planning. As I will explain in the coming sections,
planning descends from a long-standing bourgeois middle-class agenda, one that has consistently
and unquestioningly championed technological and technocratic means for achieving it. This
attitude is not without its problems and we must interrogate it.

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1/2 Middle-Class Planning 1.0 and its Supportive Technologies
What do I mean by “middle class”? Is the American middle class not now shrinking, under
siege by contemporary economic and political trends? The socioeconomic demographic category is,
yes, along with expectations about social mobility. But the bourgeois American aspirational lifestyle
remains intact. That concept emerged with modern industrialization, a time marked by rapid and
permanent economic, social, and physical change. Historian Mary Ryan (1981) names the economy
preceding industrialism the “corporate home economy.” Then the home was the locus of social and
material production. All family members worked on the extended family’s behalf, subordinating any
inklings of individualism to the larger familial project. However, with the introduction of the factory
and the attendant “white collar” clerking positions, the family consolidated to the nuclear unit at the
same time that it splintered physically. Sons, whose fathers a generation earlier might have placed
bounties on their heads for leaving the family farm, were now ushered out into the world to make
their mark. They left their hometowns, boarding with other families, whose own sons might be
doing the same thing in other far-flung, growing towns and cities. To adapt to the new economy and
in support of the young men’s adventures, mothers administered the boarding operations in their
own homes and sisters took on domestic positions in other homes, often for little or no money. The
push of men out into the world and withdrawal of women into the home (even other people’s
homes), and the consequent public/private spheres, had immediate cultural repercussions.
Historian Karen Halttunen (1982) illustrates the social anxieties arising from the home’s loss
of primacy in social and material production. Now that people, the country’s young men and some
women, were newly mobile, engaging in a “fluid social world” (p. xv) and “world of strangers”
(Lofland, 1985), American Victorians assumed an acute fear of “hypocrites.” Unmoored from a
familiar social structure, they feared louche “confidence men and painted women” might trick and
lure the naïve and impressionable into abandoning their chaste lives for promiscuous ones.

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The problem of hypocrisy symbolized by the confidence and the painted woman
arose out of a crisis of social identity faced by these men and women who were on
the move both socially and geographically. In what was believed to be a fluid social
world where no one occupied a fixed social position, the question, “Who am I?”
loomed large; and in an urban social world where many of the people who met face-
to-face each day were strangers, the question, “Who are you really?” assumed even
greater significance (p. xv).
Theirs was a peculiar mindset. American Victorians fretted about identity and social meaning,
and feared their “post-heroic age” (Forgie as cited in Halttunen, 1982, p.10) was squandering the
honor and great gifts bestowed by the sons and daughters of the American Revolution. In response,
they took to the popular press to write conduct manuals codifying social norms to reassure
themselves of their place in the new society. Quite paradoxically, they were also optimistic about
their upward social mobility, even if they were statistically as likely to descend as ascend. They also
adapted quickly to their new normal, designing purpose-built domestic spaces to accommodate and
reflect the culture’s liminal nature. Specifically, only after a person was introduced and vetted
formally in society would they later visit a family in the home’s parlor. This new “middle social
sphere” (p. 59) served as a safe third space between the untamed public and sanctified, wholesome
private spheres. The home, now protected by a prettily appointed social antechamber, was no longer
an economic center. It was a domestic refuge and the quintessential middle-class construction.
Elite, Middle-Class Tastes
We can trace America’s predilection for the single-family home-embodied middle-class
lifestyle as far back as Elizabethan London (Baer, 2007). Fearful of more plague and social unrest, a
desperate Elizabeth I and her successors attempted to stem the city’s inevitable population
development through strict growth restrictions, among them limiting new construction to single-

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family dwellings and barring further subdivision of current housing. After a time, “good” families
lived only in single-family houses, perceiving the Parisian and Viennese flat-based culture as
undignified, a beyond-the-pale existence (Olsen, 1986).
Three hundred years later, the planning and public health professions emerged from
similarly founded concerns regarding disease and social chaos (Sloane, 2006). The new professions
bore with them a distinctly normative agenda, as well. The progressive-cum-middle-class agenda
movement was a socializing, moralizing, disciplining process (Boyer, 1986) undergirded by
technological advance, and planning policy within it a widespread place-shaping initiative, subsuming
everything about the American landscape: its urban form (Boyer, 1986; Jacobs, 1961; Shanken, 2009)
the single-family suburban home (Jackson, 1987), comprehensive community design (Hise, 1996;
Weiss, 1987), even children’s spaces (Adams & Van Slyck, 2004).
Of course the middle-class policy did not come from any middle social group, but from elite
interests and their self-identified sense of civility (Jackson, 1987; Mills, 1956). Faced with living in
the increasingly crowded and messy industrial city, its richest determined to relocate to the city’s
growing periphery, thus pioneering a new, too-stylish suburban lifestyle (Jackson, 1987). As a built
environment analog to the Victorian American conduct manuals, writers in popular press extolled
the virtues of the suburban, single-family home as a “counterweight to the rootlessness of an urban
population” (Jackson, 1987, p. 51). Acclaimed landscape designer, horticulturist, and writer Andrew
Jackson Downing heralded the “honest workingmen” (as cited in Jackson, 1987, p. 117) who used
the newly-invented commuter rail to travel from work to their suburban homes, “cottages that
would promote family stability, peace of mind, patriotism, and moral character” (as cited in Jackson,
1987, p. 117). His famous book, The Architecture of Country Houses (published in 1850 and reprinted
nine times by 1886), comprises a rich narrative idealizing the American cottage home lifestyle. The
writings praise the nuclear family and individual home as having the greatest values for society. His

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house drawings are best understood as 19
th
century Thomas Kincaide: mawkish and nostalgic for a
time that never happened. Of course nostalgia is powerful; the house quickly became a status
symbol. The lawn in particular became decoration, a badge of Veblenian (1899) conspicuous
consumption to front the paradigmatic marker of American middle-class living, the single family
home.
The Pro-Homeownership Project
Critically, several of the most extensive and persistent pro-middle-class policies were
instituted precisely when the American project was in crisis and in need of shoring up. Within these
policies we glean related American phenomena: liberalism, pro-commercialism, entrepreneurship as
sign of good character, the conservative tendency to privilege desert over right, and occasional anti-
urban sentiment. Depression Era pro-homeownership policies encompass all these phenomena. In
1931, the Hoover Administration Department of Labor’s National Association of Real Estate
Board’s “Own Your Own Home Week” housing campaign convened 400 specialists to the
president’s National Conference on Home Building Ownership to “support homeownership for
men ‘of sound character and industrious habits’” (Jackson, 1987, p. 193). Hoover told the group: “I
am confident that the sentiment for homeownership is so embedded in the American heart that
millions of people who dwell in tenements, apartments, and rented rooms [city-type places]… have
aspiration for wider opportunity in ownership of their homes” (as cited on pp. 193-194).
FDR’s Home Owners Loan Corporation and Emergency Farm Mortgage Act reflected the
president’s particular disaffection for the urban. Where the former protected homeownership and
the latter reduced rural foreclosure, no programs existed to safeguard city housing (Jackson, 1987).
The greatest reintegration program in American history, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944
(the “GI Bill”) housed 16 million veterans and their families overnight. Yet neither the Federal
Housing Administration (FHA) nor the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) gave direct

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support to returning soldiers. Rather than grant loans or construct developments, the departments
induced lenders. After a time, it became cheaper to buy than rent. FHA programs continued to reify
FDR’s urban ambivalence. Home improvement loans were small, short-term, and difficult to secure,
whereas money for single-family suburban homes seemed to flow freely (Jackson, 1987). These pro-
suburbanization policies reified “the psychic value of privacy or castlehood” (Jackson, 1987, p. 216),
a core and cherished tenet of John Stuart Mill-inspired liberal America. Just as important, they
supported government policy and the burgeoning consumer economy. The mammoth infrastructure
Interstate Highway Act of 1956 project, for example, spurred additional suburban housing
construction (Jacobs, 2010); provided a nation-wide, anti-Soviet road infrastructure; and facilitated
the birth of the regional mall (Longstreth, 1997), the icon for late twentieth century consumption
and knowable, “repeatable experience” (Boorstin, 1974, p. 290).
Public/Private Partnerships for Progress
Of course, the government could not produce and promote these programs alone. It needed
support from the private sector, particularly its investments in construction innovation. Driving and
effectuating the middle-class policies was the symbiotic relationship of landowners, speculative
developers, private lenders, banks, builders, and buyers (Boyer, 1986; Hise, 1996; Jackson, 1987;
Weiss, 1987). “Public” and “private” rhetoric couches the two interests as diametrically opposed, but
the truth is public policy and private enterprise have long worked in tandem, particularly with regard
to urban development. The Federal Highway Act of 1916’s commuter railways partially underwrote
proto-developers’ intraurban expansion efforts (Hickman & Berk, 2010). Early “community builders”
work represented “private innovation preceding public action” (Weiss, 1987, p. 3), where private
builders themselves effectively developed the practice of comprehensive community planning to
maximize their profit (Hise, 1996; Weiss, 1987).

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From 1900 to 1950, considerable changes occurred in the construction industry, largely from
public and private agencies’ shared efforts. Starting in the mid-1920s, the building industry set up a
consortium of private and public research groups to determine the most efficient way to build – and
live in – a single family home. The Pierce Foundation hired designers and sociologists for their
“space-and-motion” studies, John Hancock Callender partnered with the American Public Health
Association’s Sub-Committee on Occupancy Standards to collect field data about how people
interact with their homes. Embracing technology and empiricism, the project operated on the belief
that a “detailed list [of] scientifically verified” (as cited in Hise, 1996, p. 63) findings could instruct
designers on home design. Over time, the collected partnerships and works of such agencies as the
Pierce Foundation, JH Callender, the United States Housing Authority Technical Division,
American Public Health Association, Bureau of Standards, and American Standards Association,
conceived of the “minimum house,” the small, efficient single-family home that became the basis for
Levittowns across the country (Hise, 1996). In addition, the public/private collaborations
standardized a host of previously inconsistent construction products and techniques. Standardized
products, such as two-by-four lumber, doors, window frames, etc. (Hise, 1996) and streamlined
construction processes, namely balloon framing (Jackson, 1987) and horizontal building (Hise, 1996),
revolutionized real estate development. All of these “[t]echnological and institutional changes,
government and industry policies, were consciously created and shaped with the purpose of
achieving the goal of community building” (Weiss, 1987, p. 160), of single-family homeownership
and suburbanization.
In the end, while cultural demand contributed to its adoption, modern suburbanization was
less a geographic, technological, or even cultural inevitability than a concerted government policy
(Hise, 1996; Jackson, 1987) of elite actors seeking to reinforce their social and economic standing,
probable social disparity notwithstanding (Boyer, 1986; Jackson, 1987). Capitalism provides

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“incentives to land speculators, subdivision developers, building contractors, realtors, and lending
institutions” (Jackson, 1987, p. 298), with no apparent concern for the aggravated division between
the rich and poor. The capitalistic urge came early and often.
Planning as Capitalism’s Handmaiden
Historian Christine Boyer (1986) levels perhaps the most damning critique of Middle-Class
Planning 1.0: planning’s main focus has never been fostering healthy communities but cultivating
capital in moral order’s name. Amidst the consolidation of monopolies from 1897 to 1904 (Boyer,
1986, p. 119), small urban businesses responded with righteous antitrust campaigns. Petitioners
claimed sanctioning trusts was sinful because it gave power to the powerful companies to destroy
their smaller competitors. What followed was a movement where middle-class interest groups set
urban policy, speaking on behalf of local business and adjudicating public concerns. Taking a
Foucauldian view, Boyer sees the consequent policies as “disciplinary orders” (1986, p. 120) that
sparked the organization of middle-class professionals, as well as the installation of the,
“businessman’s point of view with respect to governmental affairs in the city” (p. 120).
At the same time, progressive reformers fell in two camps. Some wanted to sustain laissez-
faire competition familiar to the ruralities, while others thrilled at the notion of applying
technological rationality toward general welfare. The latter group won, with some adjustment. That
is, planning became a disciplinary ideology that advocated for an ideal (they believed “ideal” was
possible) comprehensive plan. Yet rather than operating on behalf of general welfare, plans
controlled and preferably removed, obstacles to capitalist production. Central to this new “social
consciousness” (p. 134) was expanding the role of the technical expert. The more apparently rational,
specifically scientific and technical, the processes, the more legitimate planning would be. Except the
rational city is a “myth” (Boyer, 1986). The technical expert in planning and other city
administrations has “produc[ed] a depoliticized public, shut off from understanding the technical

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and organizational necessities of an urban society” (p. 127). For over a hundred years, planning has
shaped and carved the city for capital, not its citizens.
Planning and Institutional Racism
A depoliticized public and corporatist culture have been just two pernicious outcomes of
planning’s middle-class ideology. Institutional racism in planning has devastated communities.
Namely, the racially restrictive covenant developed almost concurrently with the first suburban
developments. Personal politics notwithstanding, developers before World War I (Hickman & Berk,
2010), during the interwar period (Hise, 1996; Weiss, 1987), and after WWII sold homes with
restrictive covenants, in-deed stipulations that owners would never – could never – sell their
properties to “the wrong kind of people” (as cited in U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1973, p. 4).
Typical language read:
…hereafter no part of said property or any portion thereof shall be … occupied by
any person not of the Caucasian race, it being intended hereby to restrict the use of
said property … against the occupancy as owners or tenants of any portion of said
property for resident or other purpose by people of the Negro or Mongolian race
(U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1973, p. 4).
Court decisions upheld the private agreements for decades. So popular were they that some estimate
nearly 80% of Chicago and Los Angeles homes bore restrictive covenants against African Americans.
In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court Shelley v. Kraemer decision outlawed restrictive covenants. No longer
would the FHA insure mortgages on property with covenants (Jackson, 1987), but many homes still
informally carried the unenforceable clauses for decades (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1973).
The federal government was directly involved, too. By way of “protecting” homeownership,
the 1933 Home Owners Loan Corporation program systematized a discriminatory appraisal method
called “red lining.” Numbers with corresponding benign-sounding grades and colors like First (A,

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green), Second, (B, blue), Third (C, yellow), and Fourth (D, red) precipitated white flight and
eventual urban isolation of African Americans (Jackson, 1987). “A” neighborhoods were new and
homogeneous, home to “[Protestant] American business and professional men” (as cited in Jackson,
1987, p. 197). The best a neighborhood of the same quality with a Jewish “infiltration” (as cited in
Jackson, 1987, p. 197) could hope for was a “B,” a “still desirable,” if not best, designation. “C”
neighborhoods were “definitely declining” (as cited in Jackson, 1987, p. 197). “D” areas were those
“in which the things taking place in C areas have already happened” (as cited in Jackson, 1987, p.
197) – and/or had African Americans. Any racially diverse neighborhood, even those with higher
household incomes and solid housing stock, received D grades. “Red lining” gets its name because
technocrats drew up color-coded maps, infographic representations, that banks used in their grant
application review process. Regrettably, banks never gave loans to C or D grade neighborhoods,
encouraging white families’ escapes to suburban homes only they could never live in. Bureaucratic
red lines assured African American communities’ decline.
Middle-Class Solipsism Revealed
Racist policies and gross social injustices notwithstanding, there was another problem with
middle-class planning. In 1962, sociologist Herbert J. Gans dismantled planning’s paternalism his
groundbreaking Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans. In a time when the
government regularly applied the right of eminent domain to dislocate entire communities for
modern housing projects and efficient roadways (Boyer, 1986; Gans, 1982; Jackson, 1987; Jacobs,
1961), Gans lived in Boston’s “blighted” West End pre-demolition to determine if it actually
warranted its scheduled razing. His conclusion, no. Yes, it was disorderly. Yes, the residents
struggled with low educational attainment, low incomes, and the attendant issues, but the West End
was still “a good place to live” (Gans, 1982, p. 16). What is more, the West Enders, “were not
frustrated seekers of middle-class values” (p. xiv, emphasis mine), but members of a working class

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subculture with its own social norms separate from middle-class values. The greatest difference for
this discussion regards the role of family. The working class subculture privileges the family unit,
thus measures everything beyond it in terms of its ability to sustain or impair it. Meanwhile, as we
have learned, the new Victorian American middle-class family contracted to the nuclear model to
encourage independences and self-sufficiency. From that point to now, the middle-class family has
moved through and up society thanks to the breadwinner’s career status and income. In
demonstrating West Enders’ active rejection of the middle-class’s existential path, Gans’
ethnography gave modern planners the (apparently necessary) empirical proof for the aphorism, “to
each his own.”
The Democratization of Things and Class Division
Gans notes the successful middle-class breadwinners uplift their families “through increases
in status and in the standard of living” (1982, p. 259). Indeed, technological innovation has been
central in fortifying the American taste for the middle-class existence. Recall the first suburbs. While
people such as Andrew Jackson Downing romanticized the suburb as a retreat from the city’s
unrelenting commercialism, noise, and technology, the truth is technology made that escape possible
(Jackson, 1987). The wealthy could secret themselves to the outskirts of the city in their expensive
and fancy automobiles. But in the phenomenon Daniel Boorstin (1974) calls the “democratization of
luxury,” exclusive goods remain “luxury” for a limited time. In 1862, the Pullman Company railroad
car company built the first-ever luxury sleeping car. Richly appointed and staffed, Pullman sleeping
cars were to be without equal. Pullman believed the competition would respond with lower rates and
simpler accommodations. What happened instead was a cascade of democratized luxuries in train
travel – Monday’s extravagance became Friday’s staple.
Boorstin identifies two other democratization phenomena precipitated by technological
innovation, the “democratization of things” and the “democratization of art.” London’s 1851 Great

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Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations unveiled the world’s first modern building, the
Crystal Palace. Many attribute its modernity to its cast-iron latticework’s ability to support the
“crystal” glass plates. In truth, those plate-glass windows were as much, if not more, modern. In the
pre-modern era, glass was such a fragile luxury that it was rarely used, in thick, blurry, and small
pieces. Modern technological production enabled us to create huge, thin-but-sturdy, clear panes.
Over time, the picture window became standard in finer modern homes.
Finally – and very important to our discussion about media arts – the invention of
photography epitomizes the “democratization of the arts.” The new technology was at the center of
the shift of bringing creative production and repeatable experience into the hands of the previously
untrained and illiterate. That is, anyone could create and relive experiences, regardless of training.
Cameras made people artists, phonographs made people musicians, and so emerged a new condition,
popular culture.
Yet at the same time that technology empowered new amateur artists, it also created a class-
based hierarchy of art appreciation. Where most early nineteenth century Americans stood an equal
chance of reciting Shakespearean verse, one hundred years later, highbrow and lowbrow (or mass
culture) tastes separated the high- from the low-born. Historian Lawrence Levine (1988) traces this
cultural shift to contemporaneous existential social anxieties and prejudice, and credits technology
with ushering the change. The democratization of things, luxury, and the arts sponsored the middle
class, and in so doing, clarified class difference.
1/3 Technology Today: Everywhere and Everyware
Still, Boorstin’s modes of democratization are well taken in current American culture,
particular our smartphones. When the iPhone came out, other software companies scurried to
produce equally capable, attractive, intuitive – luxury – phones. A market for the disposable, no-frills
“burners” still exists, but the money is in the global smartphone market. Second, smartphones

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contain increasingly powerful silicon (glass) processors and conductors that push our expectations
for them and the concomitant features-based arms race. And third, these powerful personal
computer smartphones are chock-full of art-making and art-sharing applications. Phone makers
advertise their high-resolution, advanced pixel cameras; each new phone model has another
remarkable photograph- or filmmaking-feature; and operating system upgrades connect photo/film
applications with social networks more readily for sharing.
More critically, we take our smartphones everywhere. They are part of us, illustrating our
contemporary “augmented reality,” the shift in the materiality and use of technological devices that
supports our accessing ICTs anywhere in physical spaces. “Cellspace technologies” (Manovich, 2007,
p. 251) like smartphones are just one aspect. Augmented reality subsumes our laptops, video
surveillance, wearable technologies, locative media, and so on. For technophiles like Adam
Greenfield (2006), the ubiquitous computing technologies undergirding augmented realities are
terrific. He sees an “everyware” world where your clothes give you access to your home and your
office, where the “powerful informatics underlying the apparent simplicity of the experience…never
breach the surface: things Just Work” (p. 1). I am not so sanguine. I see a world where a person’s
clothes keep them out of buildings and away from important services just as easily. Technologies do
not necessarily protect the wearers from social barriers.
Greenfield ignores that as much as technologies contribute to and provide sites for cultural
production, existing culture has already shaped those technologies. There exists a recursive
relationship between user, technology, and place, which is shaped by both social and physical
context. Computer scientist Paul Dourish (2001) recognizes this as “embodied interaction,” our
“interaction with computer systems that occupy our world, a world of physical and social reality, and
that exploit this fact in how they interact with us” (p. 3). Given these occupations and exploitations,
Dourish sees two types of computing. The tangible kind concerns the occupation, and strives to

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make solid, ideally seamless, connections between the computer and physical world. The social kind
relates to exploitations, thus employs behavioral methods to optimize interface context. Context
amounts to everything from the system tasks being performed, to the reasons for those takes, to the
actual setting in which the tasks are conducted. Context “is at much social as it is technical” (p. 57).
This is relevant for planning because we cannot design places, we can only design for them.
They are already contextually sited, existing “communit[ies] of practice” (p. 91). With cultural
anthropologist Genevieve Bell, Dourish explores how a city’s infrastructure – hard, soft, and cyber –
conveys its deep social, economic, and political functions (Dourish & Bell, 2007). The
“infrastructure of experience” describes how the practices and structure in specific settings
determine our relationships with everyday objects. “Experience of infrastructure” refers to how
infrastructures appear and disappear depending on our need for them. They have an interdependent
relationship: infrastructure gives meaning to experience, and vice versa.
Dourish and Bell conclude that no matter, “the revolutionary and transformational rhetorics”
about new networked infrastructures, they, “are as likely to reinforce as to destabilize existing
institutional arrangements…[because] information on the internet tends to be centralized in largely
the same hands” (p. 416). In 2001, urban scholars Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin showed
convincingly that the network society’s (Castells, 1996) infrastructures have hastened “splintering
urbanism,” the fragmentation of urban spaces and social segregation. Los Angeles political
cartoonist, Lalo Alcaraz’s (AKA La Cucaracha), 1994 single-panel comic perfectly conveys Middle-
Class Planning 1.0 and 2.0’s later splintering urbanism. Figure 1-1 shows two points in history. On
the left side of the comic, under the words, “Traditional Superhighway,” is a drawing of a highway
bisecting two rows of four blocks from one another. Communities destroyed in the name of
progress, such is Middle-Class Planning 1.0. On the right is a similar drawing. Only this time the

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“Information Superhighway” has swung wide of an intact, twelve-block “Barrio.” Communities left
aside – will that be Middle-Class Planning 2.0?

Figure 1-1: Lalo Alcaraz, Traditional Superhighway and Information Superhighway (1994)
(Author’s photograph from art exhibit, first published in LA Weekly)
Based on what we have seen, Greenfield’s (2006) everyware world could be even worse,
since then inter-class barriers will “never breach the surface” (p. 1). Instead, the technologies
available to and associated with different groups would predetermine their rights to public spaces,
public safety, and public services. If we think that the worst of institutional racism is behind us, let
us remember New York City’s Stop-and-Frisk policy, the steadily growing number of unarmed

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African Americans murdered by the police, and the gubernatorially sanctioned lead poisoning of
Flint, Michigan.
Technology’s Ambivalence and the Democratic Project
Greenfield’s uncritical view of technology in the city has woeful implications for the future
of our cities. Political scientist Margaret Kohn (2004) believes spatial segregation is bad for
democracy because it keeps the fortunate from seeing the difficulties poor populations experience.
Technology philosopher Andrew Feenberg (1999) argues democracy also suffers from the historic
tendency to separate technology from social context. From modern technology’s beginnings, he
notes, Heideggerian technophobes and futurist technophiles all believed technology existed beyond
society, that, “technology’s essence – rational control, efficiency – ruled modern life” (location 75).
Prefiguring Dourish, Feenberg contends we must analyze technology not in isolation but in terms of
our current experiences, or embodied interactions, of and with those devices. As it is, we have a,
“subordinate position in the technical systems that enrolls us” (location 184), when we should
instead, “intervene in the design process in the defense of the conditions of a meaningful life and
livable environment” (location 184).
Why do we subordinate ourselves? And how do technophobes and technophiles have the
same belief in technology? Though one believes technological innovation is our demise and the
other sees it as our salvation, they both perceive its neutrality. The technophobes and technophiles
alike uncouple means and ends, blind to the human interventions that created the technical
processes in the first place. As in planning, means and ends in technology are inextricably linked.
Designers identify problems; choose from a limited menu of solutions according to capacity, cost,
etc.; and select specific languages (interventions) they believe will produce the most optimal
outcomes. And behind this purported rational decision-making are specific social confederacies.

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Very much like planning, technology is ambivalent, with implications reverberating in the social,
economic, and political spheres. Technology’s use is political. But we still struggle to see it that way.
Technology in American Culture
Despite such scholarship dedicated to repairing the technology-sociology divide, American
culture still believes technological innovation, “ground[s] humanity’s advance toward freedom and
happiness” (Feenberg, 1999, location 393). I wonder if these two hardwired tendencies are not to
blame: (1) Americans’ paradoxical optimism for middle-class living when confronted with social
uncertainty and (2) our unyielding faith in technology’s ability to improve humanity, generally, and
ourselves, specifically. For evidence of this, look no further than HBO’s Silicon Valley.
A close-to-the-bone satire of the suburban tech capital’s underbelly, the show’s first season
culminates at the annual TechCrunch Disrupt competition (Tarver et al., 2014). Our hero, his
friends, and everyone in the tech world are there to present their apps and algorithms in hope of
securing prize winnings and, better, the interest of deep-pocketed venture capitalists. Only they are
all equally clueless. In the following (all male) presenters’ montage, we perceive the tech culture’s
faith in technology, commerce, and corporate logoed sweatshirts.
Presenter One: “Hello. My name is Saeed Jobrani. I am the CEO of ImmediBug.
And we’re here to revolutionize the way you report bugs on your mobile platform.”
Presenter Two: “Happenin! will revolutionize location-based mobile news
aggregation as you know it.”
Presenter Three: “We’re making the world a better place, through paxos algorithms
for consensus protocols.”
Presenter Four: “…And we’re making the world a better place through software
defined data centers for cloud computing.”

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Presenter Five: “…a better place through canonical data models to communicate
between endpoints.”
Presenter Six: “…a better place through scalable, fault-tolerant distributed databases
with asset transactions.”
Presenter Seven: “…And we truly are local-mobile-social.”
Presenter Eight: “…And we’re completely So-Mo-Lo.”
Presenter Nine: “…And we’re Mo-Lo-So.”
Presenter Ten: “We’re Lo-Mo-So, bro.”
Presenter Eleven: “We were So-Lo-Mo, but now we’re Mo-Lo-So. No, Mo-So-Lo.”
This montage is not just parody. It highlights the tech industry’s conviction that people want
stability, and that technology can “make the world a better place,” absent any sense of what is
actually wrong with it. The presenters’ means and ends are the same: tech for tech.
The TED Talks series conveys the same messages, only without the intentional comedy.
Since its launch in 1984, TED has presented technology, entertainment, and design “ideas worth
spreading” (TED Conferences, LLC, n.d.) in its Talks, on its weekly radio show, and at independent
TEDx campus events. TED is a popular culture darling: “a cultural phenomenon, bringing together
thought leaders around the globe to give short, 18-minute talks about ideas that could change the
world” (Goudreau, 2014). By 2014, over 1,800 TED Talks had been viewed about 2.5 billion times
across multiple platforms.
For sociologist, and architecture and design theorist Benjamin Bratton, TED is a problem.
In his own act of “disruption,” Bratton presented “New Perspectives – What’s Wrong with TED
Talks” at the 2013 University of San Diego TEDx event. Bratton makes Silicon Valley appear like a
subtle meditation on technology. For him, the TED brand and pro-Silicon Valley culture cater in
shallow promises. Producers and participants oversimplify incredibly complex problems and offer

27
equally facile solutions. More importantly, no one demands we advance ourselves with the
technologies. Feenberg worries we subordinate ourselves to technology unwittingly. Bratton thinks
we do so unabashedly. Instead of grappling with culture and technology’s “entanglements,”
specifically how design can annihilate as easily as create, we consume TED Talks, “middlebrow
megachurch infotainment.” By perceiving technology, entertainment, and design as neutral and as
independent from culture, we embrace the capital-first status quo. We continue and reinforce early
planning’s process of depoliticization.
Technology in American Politics
I do not think public officials advocating for more technology in planning and public
administration want to depoliticize Americans. I do think they uphold their Saint-Simonian legacy
(Friedmann, 1987) and subordinate themselves a la Feenberg to the belief in the liberating power of
industrialization and science to alleviate social ills. I also think they fall prey to TED’s seductive
oversimplifications. Consider current California Lieutenant Governor and erstwhile beloved Mayor
of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom’s 2014 Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent
Government. His thesis is simple: apps can make democracy stronger. Make data open for people and
they will create apps for the public good. Devise feedback loops so the public can participate in all
aspects of governing.
Yet as Raphael Bostic, Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, and David Sloane (2015) conclude, Newsom’s
claims crumple under scrutiny. There remain critical concerns despite Newsom’s perfectly agreeable
thesis that mobile applications can help us better interact with local government and its services.
First, government transparency comes with considerable, sometimes prohibitive, social and public
relations costs. Second, while apps’ connectivity can enable and empower, representative democracy
does not necessarily emerge from a mobile application. Recalling Bratton, ISIS successfully peddles
its brand of horror via social networks. The desire for democracy comes only from us, not our apps.

28
Third, Newsom’s call for contracting out and privatizing government services to technology startups
betrays the conservative view that things are best left to experts, not to the democratic masses.
Finally, they note that Newsom’s Silicon Valley heroes, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, mind very
little about the class, ethnicity, and gender gaps between technology’s producers and later users.
Newsom subordinates himself almost gleefully to technology, refusing to critically examine
the social contexts driving technological innovations in the first place. If we believe the book’s praise
blurbs, then we can surmise Newsom has a large, pro-subordination cohort. Michael R. Bloomberg,
1

Bill Clinton, U.S. Senator Cory Booker, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Craiglist.com founder Craig
Newmark, Singularity University executive chairman Peter H. Diamandis, The Huffington Post founder
and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington, SalesForce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and Whole Earth Catalog
creator Stewart Brand all rally around the notion that technology can only help the democratic
project.
1/4 Liquid Modernity and Middle-Class Confusion
Newsom and his supporters’ thesis compared with Bostic, Jeffe, and Sloane’s critique depicts
the chasm between our still-modern desire to essentialize problems and solve them categorically, and
our entropic social, economic, and political realities. Their cognitive dissonance elucidates Zygmunt
Bauman’s (2000) “liquid modernity.” In contradistinction with “solid” modernity, which exhibited
the belief that there exists an achievable endpoint, liquid modernity exemplifies “an infinity of
improvement” (location 181). We are not post-modern. We are more modern. We operate
compulsively in the pursuit of creative destruction, only without the illusion of any “final state of
perfection” (location 181). “[C]hange is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty”
(location 178).

1
Names are listed in blurb order.

29
We observe our technology’s incongruously reinforcing and destabilizing effects in liquid
modernity. Technological innovations created the network society and consequent global capital
flows (Castells, 1996) that demand more deregulation, more privatization, more neoliberal policies.
These programs maximize profits, which underwrite our unquenchable thirst for luxury and
adventure. Apparently space travel is not priceless. Facebook accounts serve as our new,
individualized “front parlors,” where we assure the world of our “authenticity” through equal parts
sincere and strategic self-branding campaigns (Banet-Weiser, 2012). We may want stability and a
better sense of how to survive and sustain a global society, but the only tools at our disposal are
themselves unstable, shifting.
We are so adrift we have lost a common consensus about what constitutes “middle class.”
Our solid and liquid modern needs for luxury have gone nowhere – the bourgeois lifestyle carries
the day – but economically we have come undone. We are hazy about to what extent the American
dream of social mobility and middle-class existence endures. These days, depending on the news
source, social mobility is either the same (“Mobility, measured,” 2014) or worse (Pinsker, 2015). In
terms of the middle class, the 2012 Pew Research Center report, The Lost Decade of the Middle Class:
Fewer, Poorer, Gloomier, provides dire Great Recession findings. From 2000 to 2010, the middle class’s
median household income shrank about 5%, from about $73,000 to $69,500, and net worth
plummeted 28%, from $130,000 to $93,000 (p. 2). In addition, the report found near-universal
despair: 85% of middle-class respondents reported it is “more difficult” to maintain the standard of
living from just ten years prior (p. 1). Regrettably, wealth inequality along ethnic lines has widened
gaps since the Great Recession (Kochhar & Fry, 2014). And yet Americans still harbor an improbable
faith in social mobility (Kraus & Tan, 2015). We are certain in our uncertainty, at least.
We can also be certain in the persistent middle-class bias in planning. In “What is a ‘Great
Neighborhood’? An Analysis of APA’s [American Planning Association] Top-Rated Places” (Talen,

30
Menozzi, & Schaefer, 2015), the authors find the country’s best places may be attractive and
successful, but they also lack social and economic diversity. Further, the APA’s great neighborhood
metrics include neither social diversity nor affordability measures. Within months, The Journal of
American Planning Association published several scholars’ comments, as well as one from the APA’s
executive director, James M. Drinan (2015), who welcomes suggestions for improving the APA’s
current conception. Elizabeth Mueller (2015) notes the APA’s measures of success reflect a
century’s-worth of policy and planning interventions, and submits a host of great neighborhood
characteristics that address social diversity directly. Kurt Paulsen provides the introduction’s block
quote: “Shame on us as a profession if we neglect these self-critical discussions” (Paulsen, 2015).
Agreed. Planning’s historical middle-class bias is no secret. Boyer’s and Jackson’s books are famous
and nearly thirty years old, but we still need to have conversations about having conversations about
planning’s middle-class tastes. I argue that, given the uncritical atmosphere regarding technology in
policy, as well as tech culture’s own stripe of neo-traditionalism, the need for analysis is all the more
acute.
As I said earlier, this dissertation is not a critique of technology’s effect on our place in our
culture and city, but a reminder that, for better and for worse, cyberspace is a social production, too
(Benkler, 2002, 2006; Castells, 1989, 1996; Jenkins, 2006; Norris, 2008; Varnelis, 2008). It is also a
reminder that planners are not using creative media arts to their fullest capacity in participatory
processes. Bratton maintains, “If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard
stuff, the history, the economics, philosophy, art, the ambiguities and contradictions, because
focusing just on technology or just on innovation actually prevents transformation” (2013). Media
arts in community engagement can be the artistic mode for us track and register “the hard
stuff…the ambiguities and contradictions.” We owe it to our communities to explore all possibilities,
to embrace the uncertainty.

31
Because at this point, we still seek simple solutions for our problems, ignoring other issues in
the process. Bauman says we lack a clear sense of what we need to do to survive and thrive in the
twenty-first century. “Instead, we react to the latest trouble, experimenting, groping in the dark”
(location 161). I would add: “praising demagogic clowns.” We are experiencing a similar crisis of
identity that drove Victorian Americans to agonize over modernity and their self-perceived disloyalty
the Revolutionary generation. Our “Greatest Generation” (Brokaw, 1998) is dying. Meanwhile, we
are swept into an undertow of yawning polarization of wealth, persistent institutional racism, endless
wars, and global terror and infectious disease, all on a too-warm planet. So in our desperation the
Donald Trumps of the world ascend, promising to “make America great again.” Whatever that
means.
We come from and live in uncertain times. A sense of certainty around technology – around
anything – is ill advised. Social and institutional context matter. So I present a dissertation that
underscores how media arts in the city is neither totally liberating nor wholly problematic, and can
mean a very many different things, Each of the researches takes a close look at particular
institutional, economic, and sociological contexts in which media arts and the city converge.
In Chapter Two, “Your Neighborhood Media Arts Organization: The Intersection of Media
Arts, Organizational Mission and Community Development in the United States, I look at the
relation media arts organizations (MAOs) have with their local communities. Cultural organizations’
relation with neighborhood change is an important policy issue given gentrification concerns. Most
research uses sectors to analyze the relationship. I explore an understudied sector, media arts
organizations (MAOs) to see if institutional intent, or organizational mission, factors in MAOs’
relationship with change. Using the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture’s 2010 survey and
census data, I ask: can one create a typology of MAOs based on their institutional intent? Do MAOs
initiate neighborhood change? And if so, does that influence vary according to organizational type?

32
Results suggest that media arts organizations do not contribute to gentrification as a sector, but may
have a second order role, sustaining existing redevelopment processes. Further and critically,
organizational mission does successfully predict relationship to change, highlighting intent’s
relevance, as well as the need for research to consider dimensions beyond sector in arts and
gentrification analysis.
In Chapter 3, “Selling The Plan: Development in the Age of Social Media: How the Growth
Machine Engages with Emergent and Social Media in the Symbolic Economy,” I move my attention
from the arts sector to real estate development and look at how developers use online marking
campaigns to promote their projects. Despite this growing trend, planning scholarship has not yet
evaluated how developers use media or their significance for developer-driven community
development. Through a bimonthly content analysis of two major adaptive reuse projects’ emergent
and social media campaigns, I find online real estate development marketing is different, possibly
hearkening a “neo-growth machine.” Media’s novel intersections show a new, media-rich rhetoric of
representation supporting innovative marketing initiatives, and reveal critical exposure. All processes
disclose the same goal: exclusive, twenty-first century spectacle- and disparity-driven development. I
argue planners should study developers’ mediated messaging and apply best practices toward just
participatory planning.
Chapter 4, “Videos on the Bus: An Exploratory Los Angeles Case Study of Applying Media
Arts to Community Participatory Storytelling,” represents just that kind of participatory planning
program. If the previous chapter diagnoses the illness, this one elucidates the cure. Most examples
of media arts in planning are primarily informational, reflecting planning’s tendency to seek out
technocratic uses over artistic and exploratory ones. As a result, few engage communities in
storytelling. In 2011, Out the Window collaborators presented videos by youth and local artists on Los
Angeles buses, engaging riders in SMS-enabled dialogues. I present the findings from surveyed and

33
interviewed riders as part of a conceptual analysis of the project as an example of de Certeauian
practice in the digital age. Out the Window demonstrates a role for media arts in planning
communications, albeit limited by the durability of the digital divide, and the development of “active
consumers” with the potential to invigorate participatory practice.
In different ways, these projects demonstrate that if we want to understand and recognize the
sometimes inequitable, paternalistic, racist, and pernicious effects of planning’s middle-class agenda,
we need to learn about them first. Only then can we potentially forefend the middle-class agenda
from infiltrating our current liquid modern culture. A question larger than the scope of this project,
but inspiring it: how can we avoid Middle-Class Planning 2.0?

34
chapter 2

YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD MEDIA ARTS ORGANIZATION:
The Intersection of Media Arts, Organizational Mission, and
Community Development in the United States
2

Many [artists’] centers have contributed to neighborhood and
community development by raising cultural awareness and helping
community use art to solve problems, connect residents with each
other, and express identity and pride. Many have contributed to the
commercial vitality of their immediate surroundings by investing in
historic or new buildings, bringing artists and audiences to the
neighborhood day and night, encouraging restaurant and service
start-ups and façade improvements.
Markusen & Johnson, 2006, p. 10

In the 1990s scholars came to understand art and culture can change neighborhoods
(Deutsche, 1998; Smith, 1996; Zukin, 1995), but often viewed artists and their cultural organizations
as a unified whole. Hoping to contain neoliberalism’s cooptation of art, artist/theorist Suzanne Lacy
suggested media artists, practitioners working with technologies like film/video, photography, radio
and digital art, as among the “vanguard groups” (1994, p. 25) who could reclaim art for progressive
political action.
A generation later, media arts are embedded in the network society (Castells, 1996, 1997,
1998). Remarkably though, few studies have considered media art’s direct relationship with urban
development. Are Lacy’s “vanguard” media artists now “shock troops of gentrification” (Deutsche,
1998), “urban pioneers” (Smith, 1996) “perfecting the ‘fine art of gentrification’” (Deutsche and
Ryan, 1984)? Or do they stem the consumption-driven, symbolic economy urban development tide
(Zukin, 1995), contributing to positive neighborhood dynamics (Markusen & Johnson, 2006; Stern
& Seifert, 2010)?

2
I am co-authoring a version of this chapter with David C. Sloane for publication.

35
While Media Arts Organizations (MAOs) are a defined sector within the cultural economy,
they are diverse in their missions and local-ness. MAOs undertake everything from media
production and distribution to cultural policy advocacy, reach their audiences through airwaves,
cyberspace and the built environment, and can be for- or non-profit. While some explicitly self-
embed in neighborhoods, others define their constituency without spatial dimensions.
In this article, I use a unique resource, the United States’ media arts advocacy group,
National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture’s (NAMAC), 2010 “Mapping the Field” survey.
NAMAC members reflect media arts’ organizational diversity, comprising: “community-based media
production centers and facilities, university-based programs, museums, media presenters and
exhibitors, film festivals, distributors, film archives, youth media programs, community access
television, digital arts and online groups, and policy-related centers” (NAMAC, 2009).
Utilizing the results from the NAMAC’s survey, I propose the following research questions,
hypotheses, and findings:
Research question 1
Is the media arts sector an umbrella covering organizations of varied institutional intents?
Can we use their mission statements, to create a useful, defensible MAO typology? Hypothesis: Yes,
the sector is not a unitary whole, but divisible. The hypothesis is confirmed, as MAOs are
distinguishable by organizational mission, preferred location, and intended audience. Three types
emerge:
• Art MAOs’ “community” comprises the art world-at-large.
• Local Art Community MAOs privilege art, but locate regionally.
• Community Building MAOs use media to empower local constituencies, artist status
notwithstanding.

36
Research question 2
Does the media arts sector effect neighborhood change? Hypothesis: Yes, MAOs reflect
the cultural sector’s tendency to initiate neighborhood change. I examine whether the MAO
sector’s organizations initiate, support, or follow neighborhood change by measuring changes
between the five years before and five years after their move-in dates. If MAOs initiate
gentrification, localities should change more after their move-in. However, the results do not
confirm the hypothesis. The MAO sector does not directly initiate neighborhood change, but
MAOs do reinforce development activities underway.
Research question 3
Do the three MAO categories relate to neighborhood change differently? Hypothesis: Yes,
Community Building MAOs will protect their neighborhoods against gentrifying forces, while Art and
Local Art Community MAOs will follow the sector and initiate change. I partially confirm this
hypothesis that the three MAO types do have distinctive relations with their neighborhoods,
reminding us of institutional agenda’s relevance to urban development. Where Community Building
and Local Art Community MAOs follow the sector’s sustaining mode, Art MAOs assume a more
initiating role.
2/1 Art, Media Arts, and Neighborhood Change
Despite operational concerns (Pratt, 2008; Markusen, 2006) regarding Richard Florida’s
“creative class” (2002), the concept still informs “creative city” redevelopment schemes because
scholars agree culture does affect neighborhood change. Cultural producers alter locations when they
join production with consumption (Pratt, 2008), especially in sociable and consumption places
(Currid, 2009; Currid and Williams, 2010). Working while socializing, artists contribute to their
neighborhoods’ overall valorization in the symbolic economy (Zukin, 1989, 1995, 2010).

37
Scholars debate whether art has negative or positive local effects. One group views the
symbolic economy’s “artistic mode of production” (Zukin, 1989) as wreaking late capitalism havoc
on localities (Deutsche & Ryan, 1984; Ley, 2003; Lloyd, 2005; Mommaas, 2004; Smith, 1996; Zukin,
1989, 1995, 2010). Other scholars appreciate the artistic dividend (Markusen & Schrock, 2006),
noting arts boost local economies (Markusen & Schrock, 2006; Stern & Seifert, 2010), assist
outreach and networking (Grodach, 2011; Stern & Seifert, 2010), and provide skill-building venues
(Grodach, 2011; Markusen & Johnson, 2006).
Recent research has focused on specific sectors within the cultural economy. Grodach,
Foster, and Murdoch (2014), for example, find fine arts (non-profits) achieve positive revitalization,
while commercial arts (for-profits) promote gentrification. However, Chapple and Jackson (2010)
adapt performance studies’ view of social instrumentalization to suggest intent as another analytic
approach. A project to elicit pedestrians’ smiles becomes less benign when the piece’s intent serves
to privilege exchange over use value. Intent shapes process and outcome as much as genre or sector.
This distinction seems especially relevant to media arts since the sector emerged from the
incongruous unification of two worlds, community-interested art and informationalism.
Philosophically, early media arts reflected the utopian inclinations of conceptualism, feminism, the
happening, Situationism, and performance art (Grau, 2007; Lovejoy et al., 2011; Rush, 2005). More
recently, articulating and impelling technological advances (Grau, 2007; Lovejoy et al., 2011), media
arts share a close relationship with informational development (Castells, 1989). Easy to produce and
circulate, new media provide the architecture for global networks (Galperin, 2007), and our daily
participatory (Jenkins, 2006) and phenomenological (Manovich, 2007) practices. But just as media
arts have been key in bringing awareness to marginalized groups and places since the 1960s (Grau,
2007; Rush, 2005), today they are implicated in cultural producers’ (“hipsters”) embodiment and
aggravation of gentrification (Currid, 2009; Florida, 2002; Lloyd, 2005), not social action.

38
Media arts’ paradoxical social functions underscore that the same digital technologies serve
commercial purposes equally well as social movements (Castells, 2009), showing intent matters, as
does agency (Markusen & Schrock, 2006; Zukin, 1989) and sector (Grodach et al., 2014). MAOs
share artist and sector types, yet institutional agendas and consequent operations vary widely.
This paradox jibes with neoinstitutionalism’s perspective where institutions are not fixed
superstructures, but shifting social constructions (Jepperson, 1991), “symbolically grounded,
organizationally structured, politically defended and technically and materially constrained”
(Friedland & Alford, 1991, pp. 248-249). We should expect galaxies within the MAO universe
expressing peculiar organizational missions and neighborhood effects. This project repairs the
omission that no scholarship has addressed intent’s role, construing mission’s relation with MAOs’
neighborhood relations.
2/2 Methods
Data
In June 2010, NAMAC posted 424 membership and snowball sample responses (36%
return) to its Survey Monkey survey of 1,170 MAOs. The Center for Survey Statistics and
Methodology at Iowa State University helped develop the survey, and NAMAC beta tested it with
five organizations to ensure validity. The dataset does contain possible bias since it comes from a
membership and snowball sample.
Most survey respondents reported holding positions of high organizational knowledge.
NAMAC produced a report detailing primary media output, workforce demographics, budgets, etc.
The organization did not analyze MAO-community relations (Table 2-1).

39
Table 2-1: NAMAC Mapping the Field Organizational Indicators
1

Variable Details
Age
New (15 years and younger)
Middle-aged (16-30 years)
Mature (31-47 years)
Tenure
Short (10 years and under)
Medium (11-22 years)
Long (23-34 years)
Type of Media
TV
Radio and sound audio
Film and video
Multimedia
Digital and new media
Audience age emphasis
Youth and young adult
Adult and senior
Youth and senior
No age focus
Audience race / ethnicity emphasis
Asian / Pacific Islander
Black / African American
Latino
Black and Latino
Multicultural groups
No specific racial / ethnic
emphasis
Audience location
Rural
Urban
Suburban
Urban / Suburban
No targeted audience location
Scope of area
Neighborhood
City to county
Regional: multicity to multistate
National to international
No specific area emphasis
Targeted marginalized groups Yes No
1
Organizations were asked to select all that apply; I collapsed select indicators for analysis. E.g. marginalized groups
include women, low-income individuals, people with disabilities, immigrants, and LGBT populations.

Identifying Artists Centers
While over a thousand independent MAOs operate in the United States, only some engage
directly with their neighborhoods, providing production facilities, workshops, trainings and feedback,
human and information resources, rental equipment, meeting spaces, screenings, competitions, and
exhibition opportunities. These MAOs typify Markusen and Johnson’s (2006) “artists’ centers”
(ACs), whose two essential criteria are: (1) a free walk-in “space dedicated for an artistic medium or
a geographical or affinity community” (p. 11) and (2) an affordable membership rate with minimal
screening requirements.

40
The 114 Artist’ Centers were identified by removing MAOs located on campuses or
managed by civic/government entities because they experience location effects that would skew
research findings. I also eliminated in-list duplicates, virtual addresses, defunct organizations and
those too old or too new for census analysis. Finally, I disqualified organizations falling outside
Markusen and Johnson’s (2006) “artists’ center” definition.
Qualitative methods: Finding organizational mission
As the survey’s design hampered useful cluster analysis
3
I conducted a grounded theory
methodology-driven (Strauss & Corbin, 1994) content analysis for RQ1. Conveniently, all MAOs
have websites featuring mission statements and founding dates. Websites include tenure less
frequently so when necessary I contacted MAOs directly.
Quantitative methods: GIS and census data for MAO analysis
To measure neighborhood change, U.S. Census data was employed to estimate an AC’s
social and spatial characteristics at five years before move-in, at move-in, and five years after. I used
move-in year because Census years unrelated to move-in date (i.e. 1990 and 2000 data for a 1978
move-in date) reveal correlative, potentially spurious, relationships.
4
I gathered dependent variable
information from the 1970-2000 Censuses and the 2008-2012 American Community Survey (ACS),
5

and chose the quarter-mile radial catchment for unit of analysis due to the planning axiom that is
how far people will walk from an initial location. Final calculations included only 112 ACs because
two MAOs’ move-in dates predate available census tract information.
Using U.S. Census TIGER/Line Shapefiles and GIS, I gathered all quarter-mile catchment
census tract numbers (2010 boundaries) and all tracts’ area ratio. Next, I retrieved the four Census

3
Two questions list the same missions, one inclusive and the other exclusive. Cluster analysis resulted coherent arts and
community building categories, and a third capturing everything else.
4
Some ACs moved to their current locations after 2010; I use these 21 ACs’ previous address and tenure information
for comparison.
5
Diminution of the 2010 Census variable offerings necessitated using the American Community Survey.

41
years’ data from the Neighborhood Change Database, and ran them through the Longitudinal Tract
Database crosswalk interpolation formula to calculate 2010 boundary values. Social Explorer
provided the 2008-2012 ACS variables. I multiplied those values by the quarter-mile catchment area
ratios and applied this formula for move-in, five years before, and five years after estimates:
Year Value Estimate Formula
6
(example move-in year 1993):
Move-in 1993 value = 1990 value + [(2000 value - 1990 value)/10*3]
5 years prior 1988 value = 1980 value + [(1990 value - 1980 value)/10*8]
5 years after 1998 value = 1990 value + [(2000 value - 1990 value)/10*8]
Lastly, I tabulated single values for each MAO by adding area ratio estimates.
Previous literature (Freeman 2005; Grodach et al., 2014; Ley, 1986; Sands & Reese, 2013)
guided dependent variable selection. I studied consistent available measures across the study period:
average household income, educational attainment, ethnicity (particularly white population),
unemployment rate, occupancy, owner-occupancy, and mode of transit to work.
Project-specific variables were also devised. Based on each AC’s home city’s 2010 Census
population, I created “town type” categories:
7
ruralities (<10,000), Core-Based Statistical Area
(CBSA, 10,000-50,000) and Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA, >50,000). I collapsed the numeric
age and tenure variables into thirds to identify MAOs as having Mature/Middle-aged/New ages, and
Long/Medium/Short tenures. Finally, I collapsed some of the original survey variables for cleaner
analysis.
For organizational mission effect, I split the list into goal typologies and looked for
relationships with the groups and geographies ACs reported targeting. I also tested for relationships
between organizational mission and relevant census variables, and conducted the same analytical
steps by organizational mission after splitting up the town type categories.

6
This formula works less perfectly for ACS data, but the estimates are usable since ACS values are already estimates and
the formula assumes amortized changes.
7
These definitions are from the Federal Register Office of Management and Budget’s 2010 Standards for Delineating
Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas.

42
I also performed a reliability study of differences between the 247 Responding and 280 Non-
Responding MAOs. I gathered the 424 Respondents’ and 746 Non-Respondents’ organizational
missions and ages, and each AC's location tenure to test neighborhood change. Using 2008-2012
ACS values for contemporary comparison, I ran chi-square analyses tests to determine whether
Respondents and Non-Respondents differ statistically. Among organizational mission, MAO age,
ethnicity, educational attainment, unemployment, vacancy, owner occupancy, and mode of transit to
work shows significant variation only in organizational mission and educational attainment. The
Non-Respondent group has more Community Building MAOs and a lower Some High School
mean. I believe these reflect Community Building MAOs’ large share of television stations and
tendency toward highest educational attainment. Otherwise, the two groups are similar, sharing even
average age (Respondent=26 years, Non-Respondent=27 years).
Finally, I randomly selected 24 ACs to serve as a referent group, and the basis for a pilot test.
I used GIS to select census tracts beyond each AC’s half-mile catchment and calculated move-in
estimates for categories frequently associated with gentrification (Grodach et al., 2014): white
population, bachelor’s degree or higher, unemployment, and occupancy rate. I selected census tracts
whose values came within 5% of at least three of these variables – town type, tenure, age, and
organizational mission – for a final difference-in-difference analysis. Such analysis confirms whether
observed change is attributable to a treatment group, here the MAO ACs.
2/3 Findings
Refining the Media Arts Organization Sector
The AC group illustrates MAOs’ diversity (Table 2-2). Over three-quarters of the MAO
sector is Middle-aged or Mature, with an average age of 24.5 years. Yet those MAOs relocate; the
same proportion has Short or Medium tenures. Nearly half claim Television as their primary media,
followed by Film and Video (29%).

43
ACs are overwhelmingly urban, with over half locating in MSAs. City/County and No Area
Emphasis tie (37%) for targeted geographies. While half do not link their audiences with location,
almost a third perceive their audiences as Urban. Over half have no targeted Race/Ethnicity group,
but a quarter seeks Multicultural audiences. Under half target Marginalized groups. Most target no
particular age group.
Table 2-2: Univariate Descriptive Statistics – Mapping the Field Survey (N=114)
Mean(SD) Range
Age of MAO 24.5(10.6) 4, 51

Tenure 15.5(8.1) 3, 37

2010 Population 948,628.3 (2,115,514) 1351, 8,175,133

Frequency / Proportion
Age New Middle-aged Mature
26 / 23% 60 / 53% 28 / 25%
Tenure Short Medium Long

40 / 35% 53 / 47% 21 / 18%

Type of Town MSA CBSA Rurality

74 / 65% 22 / 19% 21 / 16%

Organizational
Mission
Art
Community
Building
Local Art
Community

16 / 14% 74 / 65% 24 / 21%

Age of Audience
Youth –
Young Adult
Adult - Senior Youth - Senior No Age Focus

14 / 12% 5 / 4% 3 / 3% 92 / 81%

Type of Media Television
Radio - Sound
Audio
Film - Video Multimedia
Digital –
New Media

53 / 47% 8 / 7% 33 / 29% 13 / 11% 7 / 6%
Race of Audience
Asian - Pac.
Islander
Black Latino Multicultural No Race Focus

3 / 3% 3 / 3% 4 / 4% 29 / 26% 75 / 66%
Audience Location Rural Urban Suburban
Urban and
Suburban
No Location
Focus

10 / 9% 32 / 28% 9 / 8% 5 / 4% 58 / 51%
Scope of Area Neighborhood City to County Regional
National to
International
No Area Focus

11 / 10% 42 / 37% 18 / 16% 1 / 1% 42 / 37%

44
I created the types using AC’s mission statements. MAOs state plainly their notions of
“community,” perceived responsibility to their localities, and connections to the larger art world.
Most MAOs were Community Building, although Art and Local Art Community represented
important portions of the sector.
Type % Community Geography
Art 14% Artists None (“art world”)
Community Building 65% Community Local/regional
Local Art Community 21% Artists Local/regional

The survey results largely confirmed my qualitative hypothesis. Aside from targeted audience age,
which showed no effect, row percentage analysis provides deeper insight into the MAO typology.
Community Building MAOs
Community Building MAOs have the most internal variation, yet embrace uniting
geographic communities through media’s critical (Buckingham, 2000) and participatory (Jenkins,
2006; Jenkins et al., 2009) literacies. Some specify constituencies, like Chicago’s Street-Level Youth
Media (SLYM), which teaches local, “urban youth in media arts and emerging technologies for use
in self-expression, communication and social change” (2014). Others focus on broader community
development. Greater Grand Rapids’ Community Media Center (CMC) “use[s] technology and
media” to share stories and understand difference “in pursuit of a better community” (2015).
Many CB MAOs are community television stations. Only CB MAOs selected Television
(70%), thus significantly
8
outweighing Art and LAC MAOs (Table 2-3). Perhaps this focus explains
the finding that while most CB MAOs locate in MSAs, they also are in CBSAs more than Art and
LAC MAOs.
A large number of stations were established after the Cable Communications Act of 1984,
when Congress decreed the newly liberalized corporations could (not must) give municipalities up to
5% of their profits to establish autonomous public, education, and governmental (PEG) channels

8
All differences between types are significant at or below the p<.05 level.

45
(Geller, Ciamporcero, & Lampert, 1987). Ohio’s Waycross presides over 10 PEG channels that
bring together residents and organizations to “enhance Community” (2015). Waycross frames
community in Aristotelian terms: “the ideal of public life where residents respect and encourage one
another to grow and develop as individuals, actively participating in their democratic government
and share the sense of responsibility for the common good” (2015). CB MAOs generally use media
for local empowerment and engagement.
CB MAOs met expectations by targeting marginalized groups more than LAC MAOs.
However, they sought out minority groups less often than Art or LAC MAOs, though this
difference is not statistically significant.
Table 2-3: Summary Statistics by Organizational Mission, Selected Measures (N=114)

Art
Community
Building
Local Art
Community

Frequency / Proportion

MSA 15 / 94% 39 / 53% 20 / 83%
Town Type
CBSA 0 / 0% 21 / 28% 1 / 4%

Rurality 1 / 6% 14 / 19% 3 / 13%

TV 0 / 0% 52 / 70% 0 / 0%
Type of Media
Film / Video 9 / 56% 11 / 15% 13 / 54%

Multimedia 3 / 19% 4 / 5% 6 / 25%

Digital / New Media 4 / 25% 1 / 1% 2 / 8%
Target Marginalized Groups
10 / 63% 48 / 65% 6 / 25%
No Race/Ethnicity Target
9 / 56% 53 / 72% 13 / 54%

Urban 5 / 31% 14 / 19% 13 / 54%
Audience Location
Suburban 0 / 0% 9 / 12% 0 / 0%

No Audience Location 7 / 44% 43 / 58% 8 / 33%
Scope of Area
City / County 1 / 6% 33 / 45% 8 / 33%

No Scope 11 / 69% 24 / 32% 7 / 29%

46
Local Art Community MAOs
Local Art Community organizations situate themselves geographically, linking Bourdieu’s
(1993) restricted production with place (Markusen, 2006). Similar to Art MAOs, LAC MAOs mostly
locate in MSAs. LAC MAOs have strong location-based affiliations with over half reporting Urban
and No Audience location emphases more and less often than CB MAOs, respectively. Though arts-
centric organizations lack significant Urban audiences connections, their distance from the Suburban
– particularly LAC MAOs’ tendency to specify – suggest an urban pull.
LAC MAO’s privilege art, comprising higher percentages of Film & Video and Multimedia
ACs than CB MAOs. For instance, Houston’s Southwest Alternate Media Project (SWAMP)
commits, “to the film and video art of this region” (2014). Jack Straw Cultural Center considers itself,
“[a] community-based resource… for local artists” (2014). LAC MAOs share a multivalent notion of
“community,” placing themselves within the larger arts world (Thornton, 2009) and crediting their
geographies for inspiring their artwork (Lloyd, 2005).
Art MAOs
New York City’s Eyebeam typifies the Art MAO. Its mission mentions only art, not location,
and distinguishes its community of practitioners from the non-art “public”: “[A]n art and technology
center…. Eyebeam freely offers its contribution to the community, and invites the public to share in
a spirit of openness” (n.d.). Eyebeam symbolizes Art MAOs preference for art-making: over half are
Film & Video ACs, significantly more than CB MAOs. They also outpace CB MAOs in
Digital/New Media operations. Other Art MAOs self-identify as “leading national media arts
organization[s]” (Facets, 2015), “dedicated to expanding the cinematic experience and promoting the
… appreciation of moving image art” (Aurora Picture Show, 2015). Art MAOs prioritize art for art’s
sake (Bourdieu, 1993) within an art world-based community (Thornton, 2009).
Both Art and LAC MAOs prefer MSAs more often than CB MAOs, and Art MAOs

47
overwhelmingly locate in urban centers. Yet their concern is the “art world,” not their
neighborhoods. Over half identify No Scope significantly more often than LAC and CB MAOs.
Especially telling: very few Art MAOs seek City/County areas, while a third of LAC and nearly half
of CB MAOs do.
Art MAOs surprised by targeting marginalized groups more than LAC MAOs. This finding
may be tied to institutional arts donors requiring underserved community programming, or the rise
of socially engaged art (Helguera, 2011).
Overall, the hypotheses mostly predict the types’ relationships with NAMAC’s survey’s
questions. Art MAOs do seek marginalized audiences, but otherwise meet expectations by claiming
art-based communities. Local Art Community MAOs emphasize art in urban settings, likely locating
where their cultural producers live and work. Community Building MAOs favor conventional media
and smaller/suburban cities, potentially reflecting the category’s PEG presence. Conceptions remain
consistent – “art” upholds media’s creative potential beyond conventional communication and
“community” affirms geography’s significance.
Do MAOs Initiate Neighborhood Change?
After categorizing MAOs, I analyzed whether the sector initiates neighborhood change,
contributing to gentrification. Sectoral analysis indicates no MAO-neighborhood change relation.
Table 2-4 shows census variable percentages within the ACs’ quarter-mile catchments five years
prior to move-in (Minus 5), move-in (Move-In), and five years after move-in (Plus 5). The
Bachelor’s degree or higher and household income variables increase, but uniformly over ten years,
thereby obscuring neighborhood change effect.
The referent group also indicates little MAO-neighborhood change relationship. Most
corresponding variables stay within five percentage points over ten years, with three exceptions.
Both white percentages decline, but the referent group’s drops faster, the groups’ educational

48
attainment gap widens, and AC incomes rise as the referents’ fluctuate. Still, difference-in-difference
tests deny significant variations. Thus, the first level of analysis concludes the MAO sector does not
initiate neighborhood change.
Table 2-4: MAO AC (N=112) and Referent (N=24) Groups Compared
MAO Artists’ Centers Referent Census Tracks
Minus 5 Move-In Plus 5 Minus 5 Move-In Plus 5
Total Population 1673.5 1691.0 1711.1 4349.9 4495.1 4512.6
Age
15-17 14% 13% 12% 15% 14% 13%
18-24 16% 14% 14% 11% 11% 10%
25-64 54% 56% 57% 55% 57% 58%
65+ 13% 13% 13% 13% 13% 13%
Race / Ethnicity
African American 11% 10% 10% 11% 11% 10%
Latino 9% 10% 10% 13% 15% 15%
White 68% 67% 66% 62% 61% 58%
American Indian 1% 1% 1% 0.2% 0.1% 0.2%
Asian / Pacific Islander 6% 6% 7% 10% 10% 11%
Other / Multiracial 6% 6% 7% 3% 3% 6%
Education
Some High School 13% 12% 12% 15% 13% 14%
High School Diploma 25% 23% 22% 24% 24% 23%
Some College 18% 19% 21% 18% 19% 21%
Bachelor’s or Higher 2% 33% 37% 24% 27% 31%
Average HHI ($2013) $68,722 $73,687 $76,797 $64,310 $69,508 $67,179

Specific Variable Analysis
Initial results prompted additional analysis to discern whether MAOs sustain neighborhood
change. Since top-level analysis can hide meaningful relationships, I examined variables associated
with gentrification – white population, educational attainment, unemployment, household income
and owner occupancy – vis-à-vis tenure, age, and media type. I then performed analyses of variance
(ANOVA)
9
to determine which variables
⁠ register statistically significant change.
Tenure
Tenure findings suggest that instead of triggering change, most MAOs (re)locate mid-

9
I used Stata for statistical analyses.

49
transformation. A Bonferroni post-hoc test narrows the significantly different white population
between the Move-In and Plus 5 years in the Long- and Short-tenured MAOs (Table 2-5). I also
find significantly different white population rate changes between Long and Short, and Medium and
Short tenure MAOs in all timeframes. Additionally, there are significant household incomes
differences between only the Medium and Short tenure MAOs in the Minus 5 to Move-In
timeframes.
Table 2-5: Demographic Measures by MAO Tenure (N=112)

Long
(>23 yrs.)
Medium
(11-22 yrs.)
Short
(<10 yrs.)
Frequency(SD) /
Proportion
White
Population
Minus 5
2055.3(3058.5) /
76%
945.2(1240.8) /
69%
774.6(921.4) /
63%

Move-in
2091.9(3092.5) /
74%
962.4(1298.3) /
66%
850.8(1076.2) /
63%

Plus 5
2005.3(3179.7) /
70%
972.4(1352.2) /
65%
939.0(1271.0) /
64%
Education
Minus 5
244.9(433.6) /
15%
163.2(207.8) /
18%
141.9(150.7) /
20%
Some College
Move-in
259.9(447.3) /
17%
169.3(209.5) /
18%
170.9(187.2) /
22%

Plus 5
264.2(429.0) /
17%
181.8(223.5) /
19%
209.4(256.5) /
25%

Minus 5
631.8(1402.8) /
24%
309.7(655.1) /
28%
244.3(361.4) /
31%
Bachelor's
Move-in
746.9(1659.6) /
28%
371.0(788.1) /
31%
323.3(458.3) /
31%

Plus 5
864.2(1898.0) /
32%
436.3(909.9) /
35%
418.2(601.7) /
43%
Household
Income
Mean(SD)
Minus 5 $49,500(21,713) $72,238(50,290) $73,194(39,681)

Move-in $51,749(20,954) $80,462(55,970) $75,129(39,600)

Plus 5 $57,406(20,785) $84,075(49,750) $76,364(41,109)

For educational attainment, Some College and Bachelor’s or Higher have significant
differences in all timeframes and most tenure comparisons. Medium- and Short- tenured Some
College populations differ in the Minus 5 to Move-In, and Minus 5 to Plus 5 periods. Rates of
change for Bachelor’s or Higher remain significant, specifically at the Minus 5 to Move-In, and

50
Minus 5 to Plus 5 periods, and only between the Long and Short, and Medium and Short tenures.
Taken together, the tenure data indicate MAOs (re)locate mid-transformation.
Age
MAO age shares significant relationships with white population and educational attainment.
White population rate changes differ between Middle-aged and New MAOs in the Move-In to Plus
5 and Minus 5 to Plus 5 timeframes. Table 2-6 shows a 5% white population decrease in Middle-
aged MAOs, while New MAOs increase just 1% in 10 years.
Some College and Bachelor’s or Higher proportions increase consistently over a decade,
with most significant differences between the Mature and other age groups. For example, where
Mature MAOs experience a flat increase in Some College, New MAOs gain 6% over 10 years. At the
same time, Mature MAOs’ Bachelor’s or Higher rates increase faster than Middle-aged MAOs’.
Again, since changes occur over ten years, I propose MAOs sustain, not initiate, redevelopment.
Table 2-6: Demographic Measures by MAO Age (N=112)

Mature
(>31 yrs.)
Middle-aged
(16-30 yrs.)
New
(<15 yrs.)
Frequency(SD) / Proportion
White Population Minus 5 1690.0(2105.0) / 63% 936.0(1596.0) / 72% 770.4(1092.6) / 66%
Move-in 1710.3(2250.1) / 61% 972.0(1581.8) / 70% 846.0(1274.5) / 65%
Plus 5 1719.4(2257.7) / 61% 971.4(1661.0) / 67% 931.3(1491.6) / 67%
Education Minus 5 252.5(273.4) / 17% 149.8(252.1) / 18% 131.7(178.4) / 18%
Some College Move-in 257.5(272.7) / 18% 165.1(259.8) / 20% 159.4(233.2) / 21%
Plus 5 261.4(266.4) / 18% 183.1(259.7) / 21% 201.8(329.1) / 24%
Minus 5 551.3(1026.4) / 29% 286.7(742.6) / 27% 255.9(423.1) / 32%
Bachelor's or Higher Move-in 664.0(1202.4) / 35% 353.5(898.3) / 30% 319.5(520.3) / 37%
Plus 5 798.3(1382.5) / 41% 420.4(1039.2) / 34% 395.7(649.6) / 42%

Type of media
Finally, I find significant differences between the TV and Film & Video types in the white
and Bachelor’s or Higher populations (Table 2-7). White population rate of change is significant
from Move-In to Plus 5, and educational attainment differs significantly different over 10 years,

51
both for population and rate of change. As TV and Film & Video are proxies for the CB and art-
leaning MAOs, respectively, I interpret TV MAO areas’ white population decrease as contemporary
demographic change, and Film & Video MAO neighborhoods’ educational attainment as MAOs’
reinforcing transformation.
Table 2-7: Demographic Measures by Type of Media (N=112)

TV
Radio &
Sound Audio
Film & Video Multimedia
Digital & New
Media
Frequency(SD) /
Proportion
White
Population
Minus 5
613.1(951.0) /
76%
783.1(963.0) /
75%
1519.7(2129.8) /
56%
1356.9(898.5) /
59%
2245.3(3479.8) /
71%

Move-in
654.7(1068.3) /
74%
831.0(998.8) /
74%
1583.5(2084.6) /
56%
1280.1(826.1) /
57%
2397.3(3840.2) /
69%

Plus 5
634.5(1093.2) /
71%
906.1(1123.7) /
74%
1688.1(2257.8) /
57%
1251.2(801.0) /
57%
2381.3(3821.0) /
66%
Education
Minus 5
175.9(559.1) /
28%
150.9(243.1) /
25%
533.5(868.1) /
29%
231.4(171.5) /
20%
1107.8(1714.4) /
46%
Bachelor's or
Higher
Move-in
212.6(682.6) /
31%
179.5(265.5) /
29%
671.8(1032.2) /
35%
299.3(244.4) /
25%
1272.2(2024.5) /
50%

Plus 5
250.2(790.6) /
35%
217.0(294.0) /
33%
823.6(1207.0) /
41%
395.2(353.8) /
31%
1433.2(2323.7) /
53%

This secondary analysis reveals critical nuances in MAO-neighborhood relations. MAOs may
not change localities, but they do sustain neighborhood change, which indicates the sector’s
organizational diversity may provide additional sector-locality relationship insights.
Organizational Typology’s Influence
Evaluating typology affirms institutional intent’s relevance (Table 2-8). For instance, CB
MAOs locate not in at-risk neighborhoods but in educated, wealthy, white communities with high
owner occupancy rates. Statistical differences exist in educational attainment and owner occupancy.
All types experience significant Bachelor’s and Higher population and rate increases over 10 years.
But Art and CB MAOs show the greatest differences in that time between population and rate
increase. These data reinforce how MAOs maintain existing social infrastructures and indicate Art’s
uniquely strong role.

52
Table 2-8: Demographic Measures by MAO Organizational Mission (N=112)
Art Community Building Local Art Community

Frequency(SD) / Proportion
White
Population
Minus 5 2479.7(3402.0) /66% 710.2(930.5) / 73% 1243.9(1095.9) /53%

Move-in 2493.2(3412.0) /66% 757.5(1035.1) / 71% 1286.8(1260.6) / 52%

Plus 5 2542.0(3471.3) /66% 757.4(1086.0) / 73% 1358.3(1484.8) / 53%
Education
Minus 5 1031.6(1572.6) /34% 196.2(492.0) / 28% 320.0(230.5) / 25%
Bachelor’s or
Higher
Move-in 1234.8(1835.2) / 41% 244.9(609.7) / 32% 397.8(333.3) / 30%

Plus 5 1434.7(2074.1) / 47% 299.7(731.3) / 36% 497.4(480.1) / 35%
Owner
Occupancy
Minus 5 265.5(262.7) / 33% 129.8(140.9) / 48% 161.3(96.3) / 25%

Move-in 330.7(350.8) / 31% 140.8(164.9) / 48% 165.6(100.8) / 24%

Plus 5 391.5(421.8) / 31% 153.3(191.9) / 48% 180.1(119.5) / 25%
Household
Income
Mean(SD)
Minus 5 $71,034(19,041) $73,178(50,408) $52,970(25,455)

Move-in $76,688(20,000) $78,646(54,270) $55,857(27,226)

Plus 5 $84,749(25,188) $80,755(49,141) $58,702(29,599)

Owner Occupancy population changes are also generally statistically significant by
organizational mission. Population shifts appear in the Move-In to Plus 5, and Minus 5 to Plus 5
timeframes, but post-hoc tests narrow the significance to between Art and CB MAOs between
Move-In to Plus 5. Table 2-8 shows Art MAO Owner Occupancy losing 2% as CB MAO holds.
From this I infer Art and CB MAOs’ respective urban and suburban (i.e. home-owning) tendencies.

53
Table 2-9: Educational Attainment by MAO Town Type (N=112)
MSA CBSA Rurality

Frequency(SD) / Proportion
Education
Minus 5 475.1(910.0) /27% 105.0(130.9) / 32% 45.3(80.9) / 30%

Bachelor’s or
Higher
Move-in 585.7(1084.3) / 32% 118.6(148.8) / 35% 52.1(86.6) / 33%

Plus 5 707.8(1255.4) / 37% 135.0(168.0) / 37% 57.8(91.0) / 37%

Table 2-9 shows town type’s significance in Bachelor’s or Higher populations in all
timeframes. Rates of change are also significant, between Move-In to Plus 5, and Minus 5 to Plus 5.
Post-hoc tests show these differences occur between MSAs and CBSAs, in both rate and population
change in the Minus 5 to Plus 5 period. These findings uphold the Art-MSA and CB-CBSA links,
and echo the earlier findings that Art/MSA-based MAOs become better educated, faster, than the
other types.
2/4 Conclusions and Implications
I proposed three research questions exploring the role of Media Arts Organizations (MAOs)
in neighborhood change. Using NAMAC’s survey, I set out to demonstrate: (1) the MAOs sector is
divisible by organizational mission, (2) MAOs play an initiating role in neighborhood change, and (3)
institutional mission influences MAO-local community relations.
First, by evaluating stated missions, I created a defensible MAO typology. Mission
statements elucidate roles within their home communities and connections to the larger art world.
The proposed types – Art, Local Art Community and Community Building – effectively group the
MAO landscape.
I found that organizational mission drives much, even in the niche category, “nonprofit
media arts organization.” Art and LAC MAOs are both more urban and likely to engage in avant-
garde media practices. Art MAOs locate in higher wealth and lower unemployment areas, including

54
ruralities, and seek out marginalized communities more often than Local Art Community MAOs. I
wonder: Do the latter have other, non-art reasons for choosing a given neighborhood than the
place-less Art MAOs? Can creative placemaking grants reasonably assume non-mandated LAC
community outreach?
Contrary to expectations, Community Building MAOs do not privilege underserved
communities. Rather, they mostly comprise well-educated, home-owning suburbanites. So CB
MAOs use media for empowerment, sure, but for their largely suburban, white, upper-middle-class
constituencies. If this category constitutes politically viable groups capable of extracting at-will
benefits from corporations, we see how an initiating agency might inform daily operations as much as
organizational mission.
I speculate we would learn more from further research that parses out exactly what or who
founded an MAO. Did it emerge from independent efforts or a state-supported urban development
campaign? If organizational mission predicts MAO-neighborhood relations, what can a founding
agency’s configurations and motivations tell us? This institutional question and MAOs’ apparent
second order of redevelopment role recommend an expanded arts and development research agenda,
one including how organizational difference relates to urban redevelopment’s what, when, and why, as
well.
Second, I believed MAOs would match other arts sectors and initiate neighborhood change,
but the null is true. Further analysis did show a tendency for MAOs to reinforce existing
neighborhood forces, suggesting they may play some role in change dynamics.
Third, however, though the MAO sector does not directly effect neighborhood change,
organizational mission has unexpected predictive power. My findings suggest Art MAOs participate
in gentrification as sustainers of neighborhood change. The Local Art Community and Community
Building MAOs, whom I expected to protect against gentrification, were not connected to such

55
actions by robust findings.
Limitations
This study shares a common limitation with other scholarship in this area. Hwang and
Sampson (2014) argue inconsistent gentrification findings derive from still-imperfect methods.
While qualitative single neighborhood analyses remain un-generalizable, “big data” research misses
exogenous on-the-ground acts of “reinvestment, neighborhood upgrading, and hence renewal” (p.
6), often confusing gentrification with other kinds of neighborhood change. This study upholds their
methodological misgiving. For example, while we doubt the same AC resident groups got better
educated over ten years, we cannot know without residential tenure information.
Still, I have shown that Media Arts Organizations constitute a multivalent sector with
discrete missions and consequent organizational behaviors. My findings also demonstrate
institutional mission can affect their neighborhood relations, and possibly neighborhood change.
This research suggests that scholars and policymakers need to look beyond just sector toward
institutional agenda when considering art’s role in neighborhood change. In the next chapter, I pivot
to consider how for-profit real estate developers use emergent media and social networks to engage
communities and promote their urban development projects. Not surprisingly, institutional agenda
remains just as important. Furthermore, their media campaigns elucidate what changes have – and
have not occurred – since real estate developers got online.

56
chapter 3

SELLING THE PLAN: DEVELOPMENT IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA:
How the Growth Machine Engages with Emergent and
Social Media in the Symbolic Economy

An authentic experience of local character becomes a
local brand.
Zukin, 2010, p. 121

Developers use imagery and storytelling to mitigate project-related tension. Planners study
these processes to learn and glean best practices. Though developers have online marketing
initiatives, planning scholarship has not considered specific media or their implications for
developer-driven community development. A case study comparison of two major adaptive reuse
projects’ emergent and social media campaigns follows. Through a bimonthly content analysis of
projects’ webpages, social networks, and project-related press, I find online real estate development
marketing is different, possibly hearkening a “neo-growth machine.” Media’s intersections both
show a new, media-rich rhetoric of representation supporting innovative marketing campaigns, and
reveal critical exposure. Online, developers secure traditional auxiliary agent support in small
business owners and recruit new agents, local nonprofits. All processes disclose the same goal:
exclusive, twenty-first century spectacle- and disparity-driven development. Planners should examine
and unpack developers’ mediated messages and use their best practices for just community
development.
To sell his Plan of Chicago, Daniel Burnham employed artist Jules Guérin to paint evocative
renderings of a clean, modern, world-class city, and public relations maverick Walter Moody to
deliver those images to every Chicagoan possible. He produced advertisements, presentations, and
exhibitions, sent leather-bound copies to city leaders, and even got shortened versions into eighth

57
graders’ civics classes (Smith, 2006). Guérin’s imagery and Moody’s savvy worked because they
supported Burnham’s ambitious vision. Sparking the imagination and articulating the City Beautiful
brand, the Plan reshaped a generation of American cities.
In many ways, last century’s development followed Burnham. Like him, developers and
planners illustrated their proposals as achievable model communities and launched public campaigns
to garner support. Contemporary developers, though, must both entice urban elites and conduct
democratic participatory processes. From the 1960s scholars have upheld participatory planning,
proposing advocacy (Davidoff, 1965; Peattie, 1968), deliberative practice (Forester, 1982, 2006),
consensus building (Innes, 1996), and storytelling (Sandercock, 2003) approaches to move up Sherry
Arnstein’s (1969) influential “ladder of participation.”
At the same time, we observed the entrenchment of John Logan and Harvey Molotch’s
(2007) growth machine. Informally led by developers, growth machine coalition members
coordinate cities’ private and public agencies’ pro-growth agendas. Major players include politicians,
local media, and local utilities, and “auxiliary players” comprise universities, cultural institutions,
professional sports teams, organized labor, small business owners, and corporate capitalists. Online,
growth machine agents undertake place-marketing campaigns at urban (Holcomb, 2001; Grodach,
2009), regional (Ketter & Avraham, 2012), even national (Han & Mills, 2006) scales, to sell places’
distinctive (Markusen, 2004) symbolic economies (Zukin, 1995).
But are growth machine online activities new? How do developers use new digital
technologies and social networks, “emergent media,” to win audience favor and initiate genuine
participatory processes? Does online participation augment its offline predecessor? What can
developers’ digital practices teach planning?
I conduct a case study comparison of two major adaptive reuse development projects: Los
Angeles’ proposed Millennium Hollywood and Las Vegas’ in-progress Downtown Project. I connect

58
digital culture, online marketing and the symbolic economy, explaining how emergent media provide
an unprecedented intersection of rhetorical modes. I then provide background on the developments,
my research methodology, and the consequent data. I conclude by recommending planners acquire
media literacy toward equitable participatory processes.
3/1 Urban Development 2.0 in the Symbolic Economy
As information and communication technologies (ICTs) develop, academia explores how
technology changes participation – “being there” now means different things. For many, Henry
Jenkins’ (2006) “convergence culture” best describes ICTs’ participatory power. Where once
corporations produced media unilaterally for audience consumption, now amateur producers,
“prosumers” (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010), engage emergent media, creating change from the bottom-
up.
Still, even Jenkins admits his convergence culture constitutes the least marginalized group:
educated, middle-class, white men. As such, planning scholarship expresses ambivalence regarding
online participation. Some herald the use of mobile technologies for documenting cities as “locative
flânerie” (Apostol, Antoniadis & Banerjee, 2013). Others advise caution regarding outcomes. Jennifer
Evans-Cowley (2010b) finds people use Facebook to consolidate against loathed development
schemes, but such endeavors rarely halt construction. Evans-Cowley and Justin Hollander (2010)
observe while Facebook and the online game Second Life showcase social structures unobserved in
the real world, they still demonstrate pervasive conventional power asymmetries. Simply, even if
everyone everywhere had equal access to the internet and comparable digital literacies, emergent
media fail at mitigating digital divide issues (Norris, 2001). Mandarano, Meenar, and Steins (2011)
encapsulate emergent media’s shortcomings for social capital and participation: (1) online
interactions can never match face-to-face ones, (2) not all online information is trustworthy, (3)

59
internet-assisted anonymity impedes, and (4) online discourse in fact reinforces ideological digital
divides.
Public planning agency social media research is scarce but persuasive. Upholding
communications scholarship’s assertion that media influences attitudes and behaviors (Ball-Rokeach
& DeFleur, 1976; Gunther, 1999), Lisa Schweitzer (2014) offers a hopeful lesson. Perhaps agencies
cannot remove transit and ridership stigma, engagement in direct Twitter-based dialogue with riders
elevates the nature of the discourse. She proposes direct, discrete agency-rider discourse for fact
dissemination, marketing, and “signaling civility” (p. 230).
As for the real estate development sector, we suffer from an academic blind spot regarding
its use of emergent and social media. Marketing scholars consider Web 2.0 marketing as strategically
and operationally different from its predecessor. Eran Ketter and Eli Avraham (2012, p. 287)
identify four novel social media marketing principles: (1) encouraging user-generated content, (2)
cultivating ongoing dialogue from initial online interactions, (2) developing an online community
from that dialogue, and (4) collecting users’ feedback for market research.
The evolution from the early twentieth century’s unsophisticated, undifferentiated
advertising to strategic campaigning coincides with the transition to our poststructural society and
postindustrial consumer economy. As planning scholars argued for pluralism in participation,
marketers likewise course-corrected to serve discrete market segments. Today, marketing scholars
see marketing as a consumer-oriented social process towards satisfying consumers’ needs and desires
(Brunswick, 2014).
Sharon Zukin’s symbolic economy (1995, 2010, 2011) contains the place-based elements of
those needs and desires. It illustrates how our tastes transcend the material to include cultural
symbols and experiences we associate with particular locations, and how culture itself drives urban
development. Cultural products once verified one’s wealth (Veblen, 1899). Now we communicate

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wealth via place-based lifestyles – the city is the site for cultural branding, par excellence. But when
people visit and consume Brooklyn’s Williamsburg “hipster” lifestyle and purchase its (self-
consciously) artisanal products, they rarely know about its previous residents (Zukin, 2010). This
sociohistorical tone-deafness underscores the symbolic economy’s perniciousness (Zukin, 1995):
because a newcomer culture’s lifestyle possesses a higher exchange value, it ascends at the
incumbent community’s expense.
Zukin names the symbolic economy’s contemporary marketing strategy: authenticity,” “the
look and the feel of a place as well as the social connectedness that place inspires” (2010, p. 220). We
value “authentic” neighborhoods like Williamsburg because their distinct urban form and social
milieus mitigate our fears about change and reaffirm our uniqueness in a homogenized society. Yet,
as Zukin explains, “[a]uthenticity is nearly always used as a lever of cultural power for a group to
claim space and take it away from others without direct confrontation” (2010, p. 246). Perhaps
developers comprehend authenticity’s existential origins – they know its value, and exploit it,
insinuating particular landscape-meets-lifestyle narratives.
Of course developers sell more than authenticity. In 1994, Tridib Banerjee (1994) argued
developers used formal representational tools to depict proposed projects and mediate contention.
Through a “rhetoric of representation,” illustrations, models, and even sales office performances
helped convert the undecided. Banerjee aligns the psychology classic, A Study of Thinking’s (Bruner,
Goodnow, & Austin, 1956) enactive, iconic, and symbolic cognitive developmental modes of
representation with development trade practices. Developing in toddlerhood, the enactive mode
connects actions with subsequent events. Participatory charrettes’, sales office theatrics’, and on-site
events’ performative processes typify the enactive mode. The iconic mode correlates imagery with
abstract concepts: sketches, photographs, and mock-ups relay project culture. The symbolic mode,

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the strongest, uses language for narrative construction. “Smart growth,” “adaptive reuse,” “transit-
oriented development” and “authenticity,” suggest project agenda, process, and outcome.
Pre-digital age representative modes compelled, with limitations. Single brochures served
entire campaigns, 3D models remained in showrooms, and participatory events hosted relatively few.
Today, emergent media provide developers with a convergence of rhetorical modes for continuous,
interactive public campaigns. Custom websites constitute symbolic messages, iconic imagery, and
enactive/interactive links to engage with developments and their social networks. This convergence
has geometric effects – the most remedial online platform allows developers to market in real time,
situating their projects in the all-important symbolic economy. Planning can learn much from these
new practices.
3/2 About the Developments
This research examines two major American adaptive reuse projects’ new media-enriched
platforms: Los Angeles, California’s Millennium Hollywood (MH) and Las Vegas, Nevada’s
Downtown Project (DTP). First, each garnered immediate media attention, allowing me to assess
the press as a growth machine agent. Second and more important, they are suitably different without
undermining comparison. Seasoned developer-led and in the approvals process, Millennium
Hollywood is the paradigmatic mixed-use luxury development. The in-progress Downtown Project
is a charismatic tech leader’s pet project, the reified determination to abandon conventional practices
for twenty-first century innovations.
Millennium Hollywood
New York City’s Millennium Partners’ (MP) Millennium Hollywood is an estimated $664
million (Gittelsohn, 2013) adaptive reuse proposal to transform Hollywood’s iconic Capitol Records
Tower and its adjacent empty parking lots into a three-tower, two-skyscraper, mixed-used
condominium development (Figures 3-1 and 3-2).

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Figure 3-1: Millennium Hollywood, pre-construction. Developers propose building two thirty-plus-floor
skyscrapers on adjacent parking lots. The Hollywood Hills and 101 Freeway are behind, north of the site. (Courtesy of
Google Earth)

Millennium Partners asserts its first Los Angeles development, “will be a dynamic mixed-
used project…a new Hollywood spectacular for the twenty-first century, upholding the tradition of
magnificent and innovative architecture” (MH, n.d.a) of the Capitol Records Tower.

A leader in late
capitalism’s urban renaissance, MP has developed, “2,900 luxury condominiums, eight five-star
hotels, [and] two extended-stay hotels” (Millennium Partners, 2014) over twenty years. It has a
particular knack for capitalizing on cultural production sites. Its Lincoln Center Park Millennium
was considered the Upper West Side’s most important post-war mixed-use development for the
decade after its construction (City Realty, 2015). More recently, MP partnered with San Francisco’s
Mexican Museum to become the ground floor tenant of a new high-rise development, in support of
which the developer ran a strategic new media campaign. Nearby luxury condo owners opposed,

63
fearing for their viewshed, but otherwise the project enjoyed unqualified political and community
support (van Romburgh, 2015).

Figure 3-2: Rendering of the completed Millennium Hollywood project. Hollywood Hills and other community
groups object to the project's scale, potential traffic impacts, and location on the Hollywood fault. (Courtesy of
Millennium Partners, Google Earth)

Millennium Hollywood likewise enjoys local political support: Los Angeles’ current mayor
and his opponent both promoted it during the mayoral campaign (Smith, 2013). It also has an
organized, moneyed opposition. But only after initial approvals did the opposition coalesce around
the real concern that the site straddles an earthquake fault. Since 2013, the six neighborhood council
and forty affluent neighborhood association-strong Stop the Millennium Hollywood Project
(SMHP) has led a web- and Facebook-based campaign (SMHP, 2013) and hired “every developer’s
worst nightmare” (Aron, 2015) attorney Robert P. Silverstein to stop the project. And once
developer-hired geologists started trenching the site in mid-2014 (Barragan, 2014), SMHP’s blog has
detailed the project’s flaws and solicited campaign funds (SMHP, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b).

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Figure 3-3: Downtown Project properties as of 2014. By late 2014, DTP had rights to over 20 acres of DTLV.
Owned or leased properties are in red; flagship endeavors are labeled. Find Zappos' headquarters at top in white.
(Courtesy of Google Earth, http://recode.net/2014/09/29/downtown-las-vegas-is-the-great-american-techtopia/)
Downtown Project
Downtown Project’s homepage heralds its five-year goal: to make Downtown Las Vegas
(DTLV) “the most community-focused large city in the world” (DTP, 2013). Money and dogma fuel
the ambitious project. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh personally allocated $350 million of his billion-
dollar fortune (Pratt, 2012) for local “aid” (DTP, 2014a): $200 million bankrolled development ($40
million funded the old city hall’s transformation into Zappos’ headquarters (Walker, 2014b)), and
$50 million each underwrites tech startups, small businesses, and DTP’s entrepreneurship-focused
preschool (Bowles, 2014; Figure 3-3).
DTP paid $115 million (Walker, 2014a) for about twenty-six acres around Fremont Street,
but insists “passion” (DTP, 2014a) drives investment. Contra most urban renewal programs, DTP
prioritizes human capital for economic development. Mandated owner occupation both boosts new

65
jobs numbers and reinforces DTP’s philosophies. Hsieh’s own doctrine, “delivering happiness”
(Delivering Happiness, 2014), holds seeking happiness in work has multiplier effects in a person’s
life, community, even the world. “ROC” – return on “collisions,” “co-learning,” and
“connectedness” (DTP, 2014b) maintains the more that happiness-delivering people intermingle, the
greater DTP’s success. DTP’s community is downright “evangelical” (Walker, 2014d). Early guests
staying in DTP “crash pads” (Walker, 2014d) encountered DTP’s Gideon’s bibles, Hsieh’s Delivering
Happiness and urban economist Ed Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City (Walker, 2014a), which informs
DTP’s school investment and “collisionable hours”

(Stewart, 2012) directive. DTP coheres – self-
selecting residents agree on goals and standards for community achievement.
For its part, DTP has no vocal resistance. “Evangelical” ribbing aside, December 2013 to
August 2014 media coverage was impartial to sympathetic. And given Hsieh’s direct investment in
the long-struggling Fremont Street area (Schwartz, 2012), City Council councilmembers eulogize
DTP at meetings (City of Las Vegas, 2012). Only one municipal arm resisted DTP’s charms.
Planning department staff argued the proposed shipping container-made Container Park (Figure 3-
4) was incompatible with the area’s urban design, but was summarily overruled (City of Las Vegas,
2012).

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Figure 3-4: DTP's prize property, the Container Park. The mall incubates several small DTP businesses. The
praying mantis sculpture (foreground left) is an after-dark, flame-throwing attraction. (Source:
http://photos.cntraveler.com/2014/07/31/53da9046dcd5888e145bcf3f_3-container-park-shopping.jpg)

Critically, both projects seek financial success. DTP spokesperson Kim Schaefer explained,
“[we have a] socially important mission, ultimately we’re a company that needs to make money”
(personal communication, May 28, 2014). Through sociohistorical contextualization (Zukin, 2010)
and personal celebrity (Currid-Halkett & Scott, 2013), both projects leverage authenticity to assert
their value within the symbolic economy, underscoring authenticity’s relevance in the current
rhetoric of growth.
3/3 Methods
This is a first-ever analysis of real estate developers’ online and social media campaigns. On a
bimonthly basis from December 2013 through August 2014, I inventoried the content and

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organization of the dedicated websites, social media platforms, photos and videos, mobile
applications, and, for DTP, external sites linked to from downtownproject.com’s header.
10
I tracked
changes from previous collections, exporting webpages as PDFs and downloading videos for later
coding. (Table 3-1 shows units of analysis.)
Table 3-1: Millennium Hollywood and Downtown Project Emergent Media Inventory (Dec 2013-Aug 2014)

Millennium Hollywood Downtown Project
Website
Main site 106 pages 164 pages
Blog 78 posts 115 posts
Container Park site n/a 28 pages
Downtown Speaker Series n/a 5 pages
Family Series n/a 8 pages (removed after June)
Vegas Tech Fund n/a 18 pages
Work in Progress n/a 1 (removed after December)
9
th
Bridge School n/a 61 pages
Turntable Health n/a 13 pages
Social Media
Facebook 58 pages (dedicated pages) 21 pages (timeline, user stats only)
Instagram 2 collections (one update) 5 collections
Pinterest 1 album 5 times (no updates) 14 albums 5 times (no updates)
Twitter 5 feeds 4 feeds
Mobile applications 1 (launched 2012) 1 (launched 2014)
Media
Images 648 (coded, not always unique) 2689 (coded, not always unique)
Videos 46 (unique) 210 (unique)
Brochure / PPT deck 1 2 (one update)
Press coverage / stories 22 204
Interviews 2 2

Using Strauss and Corbin’s (1998) inductive constant comparative method, I coded the
projects as distinct populations in the qualitative methods program ATLAS.ti. This allowed me to:
(1) register each development’s idiosyncrasies; (2) organize webpages and media together into

10
They include: Container Park, 9
th
Bridge School, Speaker Series, Family Series, VegasTechFund, and Turntable Health,
but not the independently-produced Downtown Podcast.

68
various categories (e.g. “1
st
collection,” “Facebook,” etc.) for longitudinal comparison; (3) code
images and videos; and (4) run code-based reports.
Per Strauss and Corbin, I free-coded concepts first and continued coding iteratively since
starting with preset codes risked missing project-specific themes (Table 3-2). Symbolic economy
evidence, like the culture-based sites local theaters and restaurants, emerged immediately. I coded
broadly for planning issues (e.g. economic development, social planning, transportation, public space,
etc.), and specifically for local businesses, community benefit organizations (CBOs), and
revitalization mentions. I coded images for content and screen prominence, and categorized videos
using a video-specific marketing typology (Barone, 2013; Park, 2013). When a developer remediated
a feature within its website or social networks, I coded whether it was project- or non-project
produced content. I coded people in images and videos for project role and demographics. Most
cases had at least names and often full biographical data to derive ethnicity. I used wide age brackets,
too, so while I report results cautiously, I believe they provide a reasonable snapshot.
Further, I conducted semi-structured interviews with two key agents from each development.
To learn attitudes about emergent media’s usefulness, intended audiences, and long-term goals, I
spoke with Millennium Partners’ head of social media and local consultant, and DTP’s official
spokesperson and the independent, but adamantly pro-DTP, Downtown Podcast’s producer. I
transcribed these interviews, free coded them, and recoded them post-online content analysis.
11

Finally, I used Google Alerts to capture and assess press coverage. Media content analysis
allowed me to gauge each project’s “temperature,” especially how much local press, one of Logan
and Molotch’s major growth machine players, supports each project.

11
I did not share my coding scheme with my informants.

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Table 3-2: Millennium Hollywood and Downtown Project Codes, Selected
12

Code Category /
Medium

Code Name

Description

Text + Image
Authenticity (image only) Images showing unique neighborhood “look and feel”
Symbolic economy Cultural producers/sites
Artists, musicians, etc. and corresponding exhibition
locations
Events Local events, project-produced or otherwise
Food/drink Places of food consumption
Growth machine
coalition members
Local business
MH highlights small local business; DTP features the
project properties and investments
Local CBO Local community benefit organization
Urban planning issues
Community / economic
development
E.g. local business, local CBO, local cultural activity
(NB: both projects equate community and economic
development)
Transportation E.g. bicycle culture, public transit, etc.
Public space E.g. public parks, urban design, etc.
Project specific features 7 Nights in Hollywood MH: Community popular cultural calendar blog feature
Downtown Denizen DTP: Community member blog feature
Video Interview
Video of people answering questions about their
property, the project
Presentation Video of live presentation
Event Video recap of a project-produced event
Links + Remediation
Participant type
Developer Project representative
Authority
Individual invited by project to speak about self or
organization
Participant
Individual participating in project (e.g. photo contest
entrant)
Demographics
Social Media
Media Coverage

3/4 Mediating Participation in the Symbolic Economy
Millennium Hollywood and Downtown Project use digital communications to assert their
merit and desire to engage people. The following section shows the projects’ online engagement
styles and narratives, and how their representational modes serve them.

12
Please note: Neither are all categories nor codes listed above since this research’s findings emerge from the free
coding-based constant-comparative method.

70
Website Organization: Framing the Narrative
Website content analysis reveals developer agenda, perceived obstacles, and rhetorical
response. For example, before the SMPH opposition seized on the earthquake fault as anti-MH
ammunition, we know its hostility derived from concerns about traffic, infrastructure, and political
economy (SMHP, n.d.). In response, millenniumhollywood.net and its internal organization present
MH as just the “responsible, transit-oriented…and jobs[-making]” (MH, n.d.a) project to reclaim
Capitol Records’ architectural significance. Developer Zach Aarons describes the site as, “a
neighborhood-focused content platform…highlight[ing] the neighborhood and…our prospective
development as a future integral piece” (personal communication, January 24, 2014). To that end,
the blog’s “Introduction” post promises two things: (1) transparency: “[information] about
the…project and its goals. All…information should be [here]” (MH, 2012); and (2) authenticity: “an
online hub for Hollywood[’s] history, culture, and local businesses…(minus the celebrity culture; we
think you can find that elsewhere)” (MH, 2012). This framing upends planning historian Stephanie
Frank’s identification of “Hollywood” as “a synecdoche” (2012, p. 73), subsuming the
neighborhood, the movie business, the city, and the Southland. By showcasing Hollywood-the-
neighborhood instead, MP presents an honest, responsible, socially vested, and authentic
development.

71
Figure 3-5: Millennium Hollywood’s homepage featuring Lou Naidorf. Naidorf explains the history of the
Capitol Records Tower and Hollywood to Roschen. Above Naidorf is MH’s urban planning-concerned “project
background” header menu. The map to the right of the Naidorf video situates MH in the Hollywood neighborhood.
Visitors are invited to engage through its “social feed” and via the “support our project” links. (Courtesy of Millennium
Partners, February 3, 2016
13
)

The “MH as good neighbor” rhetoric saturates its homepage (see Figure 3-5). The page’s
“hero,” a video interview of Capitol Records Tower architect Lou Naidorf by former City Planning
Commission president Bill Roschen, transmits MH’s strongest authenticity messaging. The web
design term, “hero,” specifies a page’s largest, most important feature, and like “icon,” it has
metaphorical significance. A young Naidorf designed Capitol Records while at Southern California’s
International Style architecture firm Welton Becket & Associates (Haynes, 2000; Frank, 2013), so his

13
I provide dates for website screenshots because they are time sensitive. Downtown Project, for example, changed its
entire site in 2015 and plans to launch “v.3.0” in 2016 (M. Phelan, personal communication, February 29, 2016).

72
mere presence here imbues MH with legitimacy. In the video, he laments the area’s failure to launch
and asserts the Tower will remain underused without the project. Leading with the Naidorf video is
rhetorically canny as the enactive, iconic, and symbolic modes of representation converge in it, as
they do in all of this research project’s videos. Archival imagery and Naidorf’s venerable presence
coalesce in a compelling narrative about the Tower, its untapped potential, and Millennium Partners’
promising vision.
Above the video, MH’s header menu items symbolically communicate MP’s commitment to
Hollywood. The “project background” and blog sections insinuate the MH-as-authentic narrative,
but the “community resources” portion is more direct. For example, the Millennium Hollywood Fact &
Fiction Brochure (MH, n.d.b) addresses local groups’ claims and concerns. Selection bias issues aside,
MP characterizes unsympathetic claims as “non factual,” and presents “factual” claims as evidence
of its competent, praiseworthy participation practices. The brochure’s existence and placement
among community resources signal MP as the arbiter of genuine – authentic – information and
participation.
The community resources page also lists the names and links for all official and unofficial
local community and government partners. Sharing CBO links in an otherwise inwardly-focused site
both implies their shared, positive relations and, I argue, suggests their deepening involvement
within the growth machine coalition. For decades, “nonprofits for hire” (Smith & Lipsky, 1993)
have provided erstwhile state services with minimal public support. In our increasingly neoliberal
climate (Harvey, 2005), CBOs need private funds to operate, thus understandably seek to reinforce
local economies. Highlighting CBOs aggrandizes MH as Hollywood’s newest good neighbor,
manifesting Aarons’ “integral” neighborhood component agenda.
Where MH leverages authenticity of place, Downtown Project runs on authenticity of self,
specifically star power, and not just Tony Hsieh’s. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett and Allen Scott (2013)

73
argue celebrity pays dividends for stars and their cities: “[it] functions in the symbolic order
as…fetish, and in the economic order as a type of brand” (p. 3). The Naidorf video epitomizes this,
so one might expect a Hsieh-heavy DTP campaign. Yet where the media named or featured him in
61% of the eight month’s 204 stories, DTP platforms name him just a handful of times in small
editorials. To wit, his name is notably absent from downtownproject.com’s homepage manifesto.
Instead, a collective “we” announces DTP’s unconventional development goals to: “bring together
communities of passion” (a profoundly authentic emotion), “add density of ground level activities,”
“create the coworking capital of the world,” and “create the shipping container capital of the world”
(DTP, 2013).
DTP’s Kim Schaefer says this omission is intentional. Where millenniumhollywood.net
largely keeps visitors within itself, DTP’s header menu links visitors out to variously branded DTP
properties.
14
Schaefer explained the distinctive branding: “We don’t want to create Downtown
Project World.... [W]e don’t want everyone to come here and be the same. We want to help create a
neighborhood that feels and is driven by small businesses and entrepreneurs.” Therefore,
Downtown Project articulates celebrity for economic development as Currid-Halkett and Scott
suggest, only the project leaders extend the star power to the DTP participants themselves.

14 There is one link to the independent, pro-DTP Downtown Podcast, “because we think it’s cool” (K. Schaefer,
personal communication, May 28, 2014).

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Figure 3-6: Downtown Project homepage. Blue boxes denote external websites; all but the ebulliently pro-DTP
Downtown Podcast are DTP properties and investments. Header links and text changed over the course of the
research, but imagery stayed consistent. (Courtesy of Downtown Project, June 10, 2014)

Schaefer described downtowntproject.com as a, “website with a blog with stories about
small businesses and nonprofits and artists…. not just Tony Hsieh or the people that work for DTP,
but a “larger community in which people of all types could feel at home.”
“Home” has a fluid definition. Leadership functionally and rhetorically changed the (oddly
text-heavy considering its tech provenance) homepage in February, June, and August. The same four
images remained, evoking DTP’s tech cult culture, arts district, street life, and Fremont Street
address (Figure 3-6), but the symbolic message shifted. Header menu links changed, along with five
strategies for realizing DTP’s goals: “arts, music, and culture,” “community and coworking,”
“education,” “entrepreneurship,” “tech,” and (Ed Glaeser-inspired) “urban development.” By
February, the “urban development” section was gone, as was the “community” in “community and

75
coworking” (Figure 3-7), because, the site explained, people expected a neighborhood charity rather
than, “a startup entrepreneurial venture that happens to have good intentions”(DTP, 2014b).
Schaefer stressed DTP as a real estate development. “[A]s much as we are a company that has a…
socially important mission, ultimately we’re a company that needs to make money.” We find this
joint raison d'être of idealism and the economic imperative on the homepage: DTP’s “jobs created”
tally sits just right of the utopic “Our Mission.”

Figure 3-7: “Community” reframed via removal. That the supportive language remains the same illustrative the
powerful (and inconvenient to DTP) symbolic meaning of “community.” (Courtesy of Downtown Project, December 2, 2013
(left) and February 3, 2014 (right))

Rhetorical Modes in and Meaning Making through Content Production
As we are seeing, developers use rhetorical modes of representation to shape particular
narratives. Millennium Partners’ experience informs a consistent campaign, while the neophyte
Downtown Project falters over details. But its larger tension is negotiating its benefactor’s and own
potentially overwhelming celebrity.
Downplaying Hsieh’s DTP leadership seems impossible given the media blitz surrounding
his Oz-like (Walker, 2014c) presence. Yet as mentioned above, Hsieh hardly figures in project-
produced content. DTP features Hsieh just twice in the 115 blog posts, once on Facebook, and
three times on Twitter. I argue this calculated invisibility makes room for what Currid-Halkett and

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Scott term “the penumbra of the star system” (2013, p. 7). Non-stars can pay for star treatment or
even generate their own celebrity through digital communications. In DTP, DTLVers share a tacit
guarantee that everyone can be a star like Tony Hsieh.
This allure of accessible glamour coincides with an emphasis on stylish occupations in the
symbolic economy. The blog’s trademark Downtown Denizen (Figure 3-8) editorial applies all
modes of representation by featuring select DTLVers and their perfectly-in-sync work, life, and
dreams. DTP features Denizens in a full 55 of the 115 December to August blog posts. About half
(n=20) are DTP’s small business owners, but revealingly, technology represents a tiny share (16%,
n=16) compared with cultural production and consumption (62%, n=34). Denizens enactively
perform central DTP precepts, creativity, passion, inspiration, entrepreneurial energy, and happiness
(DTP, 2013), giving the editorial a twofold triumph. First, it shows DTP’s success philosophy
represents a union of preferable and entirely attainable tenets. Second, by juxtaposing smiling
Denizens with uplifting messages about self-actualization and DTP’s bright future, leadership
accentuates DTP’s goodness, personified in DTLV’s enviable, approachable, again authentic, minor
celebrities. DTP pulls Zukin’s “lever of cultural power” by embodying authenticity in DTLVers
themselves.

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Figure 3-8: The Downtown Denizen. This Denizen works at DTP small business Fremont East Studios. DTLVers
typically use authenticity-soaked terms such as “passion” and “inspire.” (Courtesy of Downtown Project, June 9, 2014)

Like Downtown Denizen, MH’s blog aligns MH with the “authentic” Hollywood. The blog
is symbolically, iconically, and enactively authenticity-laden, investing MH with local sovereignty and
reaffirming Zukin’s thesis that naming something authentic confers power to the namer. Main
categories include Hollywood History, Shared Spaces, Dining and Nightlife, Local Businesses and
Organizations, and the “7 Nights in Hollywood” gives readers a veritable weekly cultural
consumption hit list (Figure 3-9). From December through August, the 76 blog posts’ most frequent
codes were “cultural producers/sites” (n=166), “spotlight – local business” (n=156), “performance

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(live and screen)” (n=145), “food/drink” (n=124), and “event/s” (n=36). Critically, direct
involvement from local business is unnecessary – so long as names appear on the blog, MH benefits
from a positive association, enlisting them as new auxiliary growth machine agents into their ranks.

Figure 3-9: A typical “7 Nights in Hollywood.” The hyperlinks make literal and metaphorical connections
between Hollywood’s symbolic economy and Millennium Hollywood, and the featured behind-the-scenes
Hollywood sign image won the #IMHollywood photo contest. According with the four goals of online marketing,
MH has appropriated user-generated content for its marketing ends. (Courtesy of Millennium Partners)

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Earlier I argued that economic necessity drives nonprofits to join the growth machine,
sharing their moral value with proposed developments. If MH’s blog and “community resources”
pages subtly construct a neo-growth machine coalition, the 46-video Hollywood Community Project
(HCVP) is more overt. Seven videos promote Millennium Hollywood directly. The remaining 39,
two-plus-minute videos highlight Hollywood’s local businesses (n=15), CBOs (n=19), and nearby
open spaces (n=5). The HCVP serves two key functions. First, their participation makes local
businesses and CBOs de facto advocates for the project. Grauman’s Chinese Theater’s Old
Hollywood mythology, the Musician’s Institute College of Contemporary Music’s creative cred,
homeless service provider The Center’s integrity – MH subsumes all these qualities through the
videos. Interestingly, while eight of the 15 small business owners cheer Hollywood’s previous ten
years’ improvement, none mention the Millennium Hollywood project. By contrast, nine of the 19
nonprofits applaud development, five naming MH specifically as central to Hollywood’s
revitalization. Hollywood Community Housing Corporation’s executive director sees a symbiotic
relationship with the development: “Together, we really are working to improve the lives of the
people living in Hollywood and the community in general” (HCVP, 2013). Youth Policy Institute’s
director notes Hollywood’s recent federal Promise Zone designation will help, “keep the wealth in
the community as these new resources [i.e. Millennium Hollywood] come on board” (HCVP, 2014).
In other words, local businesses in the HCVP demonstrate pro-growth attitudes, but only nonprofits
explicitly hitch their wagons to Millennium Hollywood. From December through August, MP
remediated the 46 project-produced videos 51 times on Facebook (n=42) and Twitter (n=9). In
doing so, the developers assert MH’s good neighbor status and authenticity, and implicates CBOs in
MH’s pro-growth agenda.
Downtown Project has an event-based video series where, in true DTP fashion, everyone is
the star. Denizens show what positive, authentic-to-self outcomes look like. The various DTP

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speaker series are their how-to workshops: the Catalyst Speaker Series, Downtown Speaker Series,
and Stitch Factory Speaker Series all promise, “Downtown Vegas will make you smarter”
(Downtown Speaker Series, 2014). To make good on this promise, organizers invite guest
(quasi)stars from Richard Florida’s (2002) creative class, tech entrepreneurs and social marketing
experts, and such cultural economy workers as artists and musicians (Markusen, Wassall, DeNatale,
& Cohen, 2006) to share personal stories with and inspire DTLVers (Table 3-3). Modelled after
TED Talks, DTP presentations propose simplistic, uncritical, and technophilic solutions to the
world’s thornier problems. In all the 129 presentations and 73 presentation promos, Logan and
Molotch’s willing corporate capitalist guest speakers share personal anecdotes, assuring audience
members that setting one’s mind to something is tantamount to achieving it. Nowhere in these
videos do speakers recognize structural barriers between one’s intrinsic capacity and probable
outcomes. Rather, these videos and the Downtown Denizen blog posts herald Tony Hsieh’s
“delivering happiness” credo. Hsieh appears in none of these posts or presentations, but his
philosophy permeates.
Table 3-3: The Projects’ Video Inventories Compared
Number videos Millennium Hollywood Downtown Project
Type 46 210
15

Event (Bike-In Movie Night) 1 0
Interview (with local business or CBO) 34 4
Presentation 0 129
Promotion: local site / business 8 0
Promotion: presentation 0 73
Promotion: project 3 4

Millennium Hollywood’s and Downtown Project’s content production and curation
substantiate Zukin’s characterization of authenticity’s usefulness, built or personified, as a passive

15
210 represents a statistically reliable sample (95% confidence) of N=401.

81
“lever of cultural power” (2010, p. 246). Yet

these authenticity transmissions have static on the line.
Millenniumhollywood.net’s organization, its diametrically opposed bourgeois blog content and
socially-minded HCVP messaging, reveal savvy manipulations. DTP’s website and project-produced
content disclose a greenhorn’s naïveté. But are we surprised by developers’ manipulations? Do we
care about naïveté if the associated developments engage genuine public participation? Next I
consider how the projects interact with the virtual and built public sphere, and the public response.
3/5 Public Contradictions and Contrivances
If social media has expanded marketing to engage interactive dialogue with consumers and
capture user-generated content, how do Millennium Hollywood and Downtown Project use these
platforms for participation? How do the online and real worlds intersect? Both projects use
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and even have mobile applications, but Facebook and
Twitter engage users most (Z. Aarons, personal communication, January 24, 2014; K. Schaefer,
personal communication, May 28, 2014). I argue Facebook and Twitter support participatory
agendas best because they merge the enactive (posting, re/tweeting) with the iconic and symbolic.
Pinterest is a static image gallery, and though Instagram epitomizes an aesthetics-driven tastemaker
culture, image-based discourse is text-only. Even goliaths Twitter and Facebook serve participation
differently. Aarons and Schaefer like Twitter for quick calls to action, but use Facebook for direct
engagement and dialogue.
16

DTP outstrips MH’s actually existing online participation (Table 3-4). The latter has an at-
best passive Facebook and Twitter base. Two hundred un-liked MH on Facebook between
December and August, and the “talking about” figure shows few users did much beyond simply
liking it. Recalling Schweitzer’s (2014) analysis of the “blast” communication style as ineffective,

16
Facebook page administrators can block users so I cannot say whether SMHP supporters tried to use the MH
Facebook page against itself. However, Millennium Partners did not remove the six one-star and seven two-star reviews,
or this disdainful January 2014 comment: “Millennium Hollywood is a terrible idea is so many ways. Looks like it just got
flushed down the toilet with the recent earthquake fault report, thank God.”

82
MH’s tendency to tweet and never retweet gained it few followers over the research. Meanwhile,
twice the number of people liked DTP over the eight months, and a consistently higher number of
people used Facebook to like, comment on, and share posts. DTP boasts similarly robust Twitter
figures, regularly tweeting, retweeting, and being retweeted.
Table 3-4: Facebook and Twitter Engagement Figures Compared

Millennium Hollywood

Downtown Project
Facebook
Total Likes
Dec 2013 4.9K Dec 2013 6.2K
Aug 2014 4.7K Aug 2014 12.5K
Talking About
Dec 2013 12 Dec 2013 723
Aug 2014 11 Aug 2014 974
Posts Total 100 Total 256
Liked posts
1-15
39
115
85
1
1
1-30
31-60
60-120
121-350
359
127
58
25
5
1
Comments on posts
1-2
3-4
16
2
2
1
1-15
16-30
115
115
5
1
Shared posts
1-2
4
12
4
4
1
1-15
16-30
31-100
>100
131
22
3
2
Twitter
Followers
Dec 2013 343 Dec 2013 7.7K
Aug 2014 405 Aug 2014 12.4K
Tweets
Total 111 Total 413
Retweets 0 Retweets 413
MH affiliate 0 DTP affiliate 39
Non-MH affiliate 0 Non-DTP affiliate 103
Response tweets 0 Response tweets 28

Yet community demographics belie genuine democratic participation. Table 3-5, a
comparison of DTP’s and MH’s emergent media and 2008-2013 American Community Survey
demographics, shows the projects’ intended and tangible communities are disparate groups. The

83
numbers for the half-mile radii
17
around DTLV’s Ogden Condominium (150 N Las Vegas Blvd.)
18

and Hollywood’s Capitol Records Tower (1750 Vine St.) show how little the developments’ online
communities represent reality. Both privilege youth, despite their localities skewing older. Both show
an equal gender split, except Hollywood and DTLV are disproportionately male. Finally,
race/ethnicity reveals. Each over-represents whites by about 30%, and under-represents African
Americans (DTP by 17%) and Latinos (DTP by 9%; MH by 14%). In a society where race acts a
proxy for class, we perceive the developers’ indifference to inclusion.
Table 3-5: The Developments’ and American Community Survey Demographics Compared

Millennium Hollywood Downtown Project

Website and
Social Media
Capitol Records
(ACS 2008-13)
Website and
Social Media
The Ogden
(ACS 2008-13)
Age
< 18 years
18-34 years
> 35 years
5%
47%
45%
10%
41%
49%
3%
60%
36%
6%
38%
56%
Gender
Female
Male
39%
61%
49%
51%
24%
72%
50%
50%
Race / Ethnicity
White
African American
Latino
Asian
Multiracial / Other
71%
4%
14%
7%
4%
44%
4%
25%
8%
18 %
76%
6%
7%
7%
5%
42%
23%
21%
5%
9%
Median HHI
(2014 dollars) n/a $40,239 n/a $21,726

Taking DTP’s demographics with its February revision of ROC from “return on community”
to the corporate-speak “return on collisions, co-learning, and connectedness,” we register DTP as
the apotheosis of a self-selecting, libertarian, tech startup club community. Nowhere in Downtown
Project is there any real public space. The Hydrant Club dog park is a business and Container Park is
an outdoor mall with private security. Estimated living expenses also confound. In 2014, a DTLV

17
I used 0.5 miles because though both seek regional and national audiences, they tout their capacity to transform local
street life.
18
I chose The Ogden because while not owned by DTP, it houses many DTLVers. Hsieh lived there until recently, and
when DTP received visitors, they stayed there.

84
family could pay $75/month for daily access to the Hydrant Club (2015), $199/month for a
Turntable Health (2015) membership; and $12,500 a semester for 9
th
Bridge’s (2014) kindergarten
tuition. All before standard living expenses and the going-out funds necessary for DTP’s
collisionable hours mandate (Figure 3-10).

Figure 3-10: Downtown Project’s club goods. Clockwise from top left: Hydrant Park, 9
th
Bridge School,
Turntable Health, and Gold Spike club. (Sources, clockwise: http://studiobunnyfish.com/electra_portfolio/hydrant-club,
http://9thbridgeschool.com/, http://www.turntablehealth.com/, http://goldspike.com/backyard/)
Las Vegas press appeared not to mind DTP’s exclusivity. From December to August, only
7% (n=15) of 204 stories were critical in tone, 82% (n=168) were sympathetic to enthusiastic, and
10% (n=21) were a mix. This ratio remained consistent from December through August. Meanwhile,
the Hollywood fault controversy vanquished MH’s hopes for local media support, with 19 of 22
stories centering on the site’s seismological issues. Just two of MH’s 73 blog posts discussed the
fault, in predictably favorable terms. With the blog and the Fact & Fiction Brochure, MP has spun a
damning issue into a good neighbor narrative. At the same time, stopthemillenniumhollywood.org

85
published eight oppositional blog posts. Six expressed earthquake concerns and the rest decried the
City’s “neighborhood unfriendly development” (SMHP, 2014a) development agenda. Still, neither
MH’s blog nor its social networks responded directly or indirectly to SMHP’s eight posts. By the
timeline, MP engaged with community grievance before millenniumhollywood.net’s official launch,
and never again.
Experience informs MP’s tack. As with all publicity campaigns, its objective is to maintain
the base and convert the undecided. To sway the latter, MP proposes a network of smartphone-
enabled interactive open spaces as a public space amenity (Figure 3-11). MP has a dual purpose for
experimenting with interactive technology. Aarons explained his long-term plan is to use mobile
applications to create pre-construction resident communities. He hopes buyers will contact sales offices
directly, saying, “‘I want to buy into this community,’ [rather than] ‘I just want to buy a condo in
Hollywood’” (personal communication, January 24, 2014). MP’s ideal community member owns, “a
condo in all of our cities, in all of our properties.” MH’s actually existing community has nothing to
do with Hollywood, then, but instead manifests Castells’, “increasingly homogeneous lifestyle among
the information elite that transcends the borders of all societies” (1996, p. 417). In the end, little
about the project feels authentic, save Millennium Partners’ desire to grow its luxury development
empire.

86

Figure 3-11: Millennium Hollywood’s proposed interactive public space. The developer looks forward to
creating a smartphone app so Millennium Partners’ property owners can pre-select kitchen appliances, flooring,
and each other. (Courtesy of Millennium Partners, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aQQhig_bVo)

3/6 The Implications of a Socially Networked Neo-Growth Machine
Planners still study Burnham for his commission’s trailblazing marketing efforts. His tools of
persuasion – exhibitions, evocative imagery, and ambitious narrative – are as powerful now as they
were then. Yet emergent media constitute a new, expanded generation within the rhetoric of
representation. To borrow from Zukin, Millennium Hollywood’s and Downtown Project’s online
platforms look and feel different because they are. Their constitutive technology and media bring
together potent rhetorical modes, elevating their projects’ associations with authenticity, a major
economic driver in the symbolic economy and, thus, urban development.
What real estate developments’ online platforms do not achieve is genuine democratic
participation. Rather, evidence suggests, first, that developers use websites and social networks to
reinforce and update Logan and Molotch’s growth machine. They portray themselves as good
neighbors to the traditional auxiliary agent, small business, by producing and remediating original

87
promotional content. With the same emergent media, they subsume the increasingly vital nonprofit
sector into a “neo-growth machine.” Nonprofits’ vitality is twofold. Generally, since neoliberal
policies have expelled critical welfare services from the public sector into the private, they matter
more since Logan and Molotch’s writing nearly thirty years ago. Specifically, they imbue developers
with their social goodness. No longer unscrupulous speculators interested only in generating rents,
real estate developers have become pillars of the community.
Next, we see real estate developer-driven online participation actually uncovering an anti-
democratic reality behind by the internet’s egalitarian façade. Expectations of moving up Arnstein’s
(1969) ladder might be unrealistic, but these case studies show no movement whatever. The only
evidence of an empowered community in the developer-community dyad is the Stop the Millennium
Hollywood Project, but that coalition’s power stems from its collective wealth, period, not the
wealth of networks.
Falling short of any democratic ideal, the campaigns neither reflect nor support offline
participation. Millennium Hollywood applies conventional (if not impenetrable) growth machine
manipulation; Downtown Project espouses an obliviously libertarian policy of exclusion. They share
the same goal of exclusive, luxury-obsessed, twenty-first century, disparity-driven development.
Therefore, planners should study developers’ online outreach for the same reason we study
Burnham: best practices. By critically examining developers’ online marketing, planners can take
these media-rich rhetorical modes and employ them for just city making. MH and DTP might use
their community video projects, public presentations, and locals’ features toward manipulative,
exclusionary ends, but the constituent media’s application need not be so cynical. Starting with the
requisite research, education, and outreach, planners can articulate emergent media for genuine
participation. A visual/media literacy and media production curriculum will help planners both
identify developers’ using online platforms for self-serving narratives, and invert those narratives by

88
eliciting community-generated media instead. This way, community members can create their own
digital neighborhood stories – the ones they experience today and the ones they want tomorrow.
Through emergent media, residents are the authorities on and authors of their communities. This
research suggests digital communications can support inclusive participatory planning in the twenty-
first century. The following chapter illuminates the possibilities of such a proposal. If Millennium
Hollywood and Downtown Project epitomize the sickness that is contemporary political and
economic inequality, the Out the Window project provides a kind of antidote.

89
chapter 4

VIDEOS ON THE BUS:
An Exploratory Los Angeles Case Study of Applying Media Arts to
Community Participatory Storytelling
19

If I could make a film, it would be about how things work
out for people in their day-to-day lives, about consequences and how
things are interconnected.
Los Angeles Metro Bus Rider
Latina female in her 20s, October 2011

In his masterpiece The Practice of Everyday Life, French philosopher Michel de Certeau (1984)
explains, “to plan a city is both to think the very plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking
the plural effective; it is to know how to articulate and be able to do it” (p. 94). In 2011, Out the Window
(OTW), the first in-bus video arts intervention and mobile communications-enabled participatory
learning experience, highlighted the possibilities and limitations involved in articulating the plurality
of the real. In doing so, the project illuminates a growing awareness of critical urban planning trends.
First, socially engaged art offers a potentially positive role in improving marginalized groups’
participation through strategic and tactical infiltrations of public and private spaces. Second,
communities can and should use storytelling practices, the “story turn,” to share “local knowledge”
and shape their own community narratives (Sandercock, 2010). Third, creative digital technologies,
or media arts, offer flexible and quasi-democratic modes for storytelling and general dialogue – thus
community development – as public media outlets suffer an overall decline. Finally, and despite all
these benefits, there remain institutional and practical obstacles to using digital media for engaging
underserved urban minority communities.
Out the Window’s art intervention and analysis of the L.A. Metro bus riders’

19
I am co-authoring a version of this chapter with David C. Sloane for publication.

90
telecommunications habits, art preferences, and demographics underscore what community
development practitioners already know well: community development is paradoxical. It involves
multiple, sometimes incompatible objectives, processes, and conditions (Kenny, 2010). Yet paradox
can be a source of creative tension (Shaw, 2011). OTW shows us that a video art intervention can
inform contemporary planning theory and practice, and directly help improve at least three of the
aforementioned trends. Planners can use art to engage marginalized communities in unexpected
ways and places. Media arts, in particular, can provide the creative and functional tools for self-
expression and thoughtful dialogue.
In this article, I set out to analyze Out the Window as a project symbolizing concerns about
urbanity, public space, and participation. Relying on the media arts, participation, and information
and communication technologies (ICTs) literatures as context, and recalling de Certeau’s
admonishment that we must register the plurality of the real’s prospects and problems, I aim to
apply the literature and project’s findings toward a conceptual exegesis of Out the Window as a case
study of de Certeauian practice in the digital age. First, I describe Out the Window’s context,
development, and implementation. Second, I report findings from the bus rider surveys and
interviews. Finally, I link OTW with relevant literature to consider the project through a de
Certeauian lens.
4/1 Intervention Context
Out the Window is set in Los Angeles, a place many planners still resist considering a transit
city. Yet Angelenos’ habits have changed in the forty years since Reyner Banham (1999) proclaimed
the automobile’s ascendancy, “[t]he private car and public freeway together provide an ideal – not to
say idealized – version of democratic urban transportation” (p. 199). Not counting the growing rail
and light rail networks, the estimated October 2011 weekday ridership of directly operated Los
Angeles Metro (Metro, n.d.) public buses totaled 1,119,721 passengers. That October, 25,514,141,

91
rode the bus, almost two million more than the previous October (Metro, n.d.). These figures do not
count other Southern California rider or bus system data.
Why do these figures surprise? One possible reason for the near invisibility of L.A.’s bus
service is its ridership profile. Bus riders in Los Angeles tend to be poor and Latino (Soja, 2010). In
2010, when Latinos accounted for 43% of the county’s population, they constituted nearly 70% of
Metro’s ridership (Scarborough Research, 2010). In general, Latinos are less likely to own an
automobile than other ethnicities, but the rate of ownership declines and dependency on the bus
increases even more as household income declines. In 2010, roughly 40% of the million-plus weekly
riders lived in households making $25,000 or less per year – 70% of those households have three or
more people. These people are the Metro system’s heaviest users. On average, they spend over an
hour and a half on the bus daily, generally split in two 45-minute commutes (Williams, 2006).
Table 4-1: Demographics of Metro Ridership and L.A. County Residents Compared, 2010
(Sources: Scarborough Research, U.S. Census)
Demographic Category L.A. Metro L.A. County
Race/Ethnicity Latino 69% 43%

African American, African 6% 7%

White, non-Hispanic 18% 39%

Asian 4% 8%

Other 2% 3%
Age 18-34 40% 33%

35-54 39% 39%

55+ 22% 28%
Education Grade school (8th grade or less) 24% 11%

Some high school 8% 7%

High school graduate or GED 30% 29%

Some college (1-3 years) 25% 29%

College grad+ 13% 25%
Employment Status Employed full-time (>35 hrs) 31% 41%

Employed part-time (<35 hrs) 24% 20%

Not employed 45% 39%
Among Latinos: Spanish Yes 52% 27%
Language Dominant No 17% 16%
Household Income HHI <$35K 57% 31%

HHI $35-75K 30% 33%

HHI $75K+ 13% 37%

Table 4-1 compares Metro riders’ and L.A. County residents’ demographics from 2010. The
bus ridership does skew younger than County residents, but that age gap does not account for

92
differences in educational attainment. In addition, while the Metro group includes only adults over
18 years, a full 24% of riders did not progress beyond grade school, compared with 11% of County
residents. Similarly, where 41% of County residents enjoyed full-time employment, only 31% of the
riders did. Ironically, a greater proportion of bus riders work than L.A. County residents,
underscoring immigrant reliance on public transit (Blumenberg & Evans, 2007) and their labor
market vulnerabilities (Kossoudji & Cobb-Clark, 2000). Out the Window was conceived as a possible
way to connect and initiate dialogue with this underrepresented, marginalized bus ridership.
Table 4-2: Out the Window’s Collaborating Partners
Freewaves
Since 1989, community-based art organization Freewaves has presented media exhibitions in
spaces ranging from world-renowned museums to public streets. Freewaves acted as the
coordinating lead on this project.
Echo Park Film
Center
Established in 2002, EPFC facilitates free neighborhood and community-based film/video
workshops for teens and young adults. For OTW, EPFC conducted three video-making
workshops on the topics of “city symphony,” “origins,” and “City of Angels.”
Public Matters
Founded in 2010, Public Matters is a social enterprise comprising artists, media professionals
and educators who produce new media education and civic engagement projects. Public
Matters worked with students at East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy and in Historic
Filipinotown to produce videos about food justice, health, and other community issues.
UCLA REMAP
Starting in 1997, The University of California, Los Angeles’ Center for Research in Engineering,
Media and Performance interweaves engineering, the arts, and community development in
research, production, and civic engagement projects. REMAP provided conceptual and
technical direction.
4/2 About Out the Window
Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, Out the Window was accomplished as a collaboration
of four Los Angeles community-based media arts organizations (Table 4-2). In the first phase, Echo
Park Film Center and Public Matters taught 75 students from East Los Angeles, and Los Angeles’
Echo Park and Historic Filipinotown neighborhoods how to produce short, two- to six-minute
videos exploring their city. Resultant videos screened five minutes a day one week in June 2011. In
the second portion, curated works by 60 L.A. artists joined the youth videos for two minutes a day

93
in October and November 2011 (Figure 4-1).

The video portraits, shown in a public space used primarily by the region’s low-income and
most transit-dependent population, veered sharply from the regularly scheduled programming.
Instead of seeing local news, mini-telenovas, quizzes, and game shows, riders watched stories about
Los Angeles, its communities, neighborhood life, and accompanying social issues. Some featured
proud ethnic neighborhoods such as Historic Filipinotown and East Los Angeles (East L.A.).
Others showed the experiences of young immigrants or children of immigrants, as in the East L.A.
high school class video evocatively portraying poor local food systems’ negative public health
impacts (Figure 4-2). Still others proposed alternative visions for transit and social mobility. The
videos vary in form and tone, but all are rich texts about life in Los Angeles. (See http://www.out-
the-window.org for examples of the videos.)
The partners imagined OTW as a mobile public art exhibit to transform riders’ daily trips
into thought-provoking journeys where the now private, co-opted public bus television screens
might better serve the public good. They believed, “getting on a bus in Los Angeles could be an
educational experience that exposed you to new art, relevant health information, and connected you
Figure 4-1: Out the Window’s marketing postcard (reverse). The bilingual text conveys the project’s details and
collaborators’ public ambitions. (Courtesy of Freewaves)

94
to other riders,” and hoped to reshape riders’ long commutes into, “spaces where unexpected artistic,
educational, playful, and empowering audience engagement can occur” (Freewaves, 2011). The
OTW team correctly anticipated the participatory processes the young filmmakers and selected
artists would undertake throughout the video-making process. What they were less certain about –
albeit incredibly hopeful – was how the videos and questions encourage bus rider engagement. Their
hopes proved overly optimistic, yet the project did have successes.

Figure 4-2: ELARA, “Have You Noticed How Much Junk Food We Eat?” (2011) East Los Angeles Renaissance
Academy in collaboration with Public Matters. Gas mask- and HAZMAT suit-wearing students collect junk food
from school grounds and analyze their ingredients in the school’s chemistry lab. In slow motion, the students draw
twenty teaspoons of lard fat from pixilated bags of “Spicy Cheesy Chips.” They next pour fifty-nice teaspoons of
sugar from a two-liter soda bottle. This tongue-in cheek process, contrasted with an ominous xylophone and harp
score, teaches as it entertains. Halfway through, the video shifts to normal speed. Outside the “lab,” the erstwhile
technicians unmask themselves, and one by one, hold up signs explaining their family members’ diet-based
chronic diseases: “My mom has high cholesterol,” “My grandpa has diabetes,” “My 16 year-old sister has high
cholesterol.” Then the students turn their signs over to show the same message: “And so will I.” Finally, Spicy
Cheetos are arranged inside a trashcan to ask: “Why throw away your future?” (Courtesy of Freewaves,
https://vimeo.com/24544037)
4/3 Methods
In June, October, and November, OTW broadcast 133 videos on 4,000 privately
administered televisions in 2,000 L.A. Metro buses. Following every video, a question (in English
and Spanish) invited bus riders to reflect and perhaps respond via text, thus engaging in SMS-

95
enabled dialogue. These texts were gathered by the lead agency, Freewaves, and unless inappropriate,
posted on the Out the Window website. From October 4
th
through November 26
th
, riders wrote 83
responses by turns straightforward, evocative, confessional, and even planning-related.
Out the Window was produced as a community art project, not an empirical research study.
The OTW team sought academic advice so they could conduct a basic evaluation of their efforts, but
ultimately lacked the funds necessary for a post-intervention survey sample. However, project data
did enlighten. Data collection was conducted in three parts from January 2010 through November
2011. First, prior to the OTW video installation, we
20
conducted short, three-minute surveys with
460 Metro riders to gauge their opinions about the bus’ existing programming, their attitudes toward
art and especially media art, and their ICT usage. During the OTW broadcast and to glean response
to the videos, we engaged 27 riders for short, post-video interviews, as well as analyzed the riders’
SMS-texts. Finally, I acted as participant-observer at all OTW meetings and special events. Taking
minutes and offering general assistance, I registered the team’s project development and
presentation processes.
The survey instrument consisted of 26-question multiple choice and short-answer questions.
Interviewers surveyed respondents primarily at Metro bus stops to gain a deeper understanding of
this understudied population. The resultant sample is representative of the bus television franchise’s
demographic data, which we used as a guide for generalizability. We also interviewed people in the
north, south, east, west, and central county supervisorial districts (Figure 4-3). All team members
offered either English or Spanish surveys, and recorded the respondent’s chosen language. In
addition to asking about bus television-watching habits, programming preferences, bus riding
frequency, demographics, and cellular phone and internet usage, the team asked bus riders about
their exposure to the arts and tastes. “Do you like art?” “Do you see art on the bus?” “What kind?”

20
Freewaves coordinated a team of research volunteers to conduct the survey. “We” refers to that group.

96

Figure 4-3: Out the Window Metro bus rider survey locations. The team conducted 460 surveys throughout Los
Angeles County. We chose to concentrate only in the areas where Metro was the primary transit provider because
only Metro buses (1) had televisions and (2) screened Out the Window videos. The shaded area identifies the City
of Los Angeles.
4/4 The L.A. Metro Ridership and Out the Window
Among our 460 surveyed riders, 59% self-identified as Latino. According to the United
States Census Los Angeles Quickfacts (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013), only 48% of the County’s
population was of Hispanic or Latino origin in 2011. Therefore, we observe a consistent, marked
overrepresentation of Latinos among Metro’s ridership. In addition, at 96%, virtually all surveyed
Spanish speakers self-identified as Latino, which hints at stark asymmetries regarding everything
from bus ridership to ICT usage between Spanish and English-speaking riders (Table 4-3).

97
Table 4-3: The Jagged Nature of the Digital Divide on L.A. Metro Buses

Cell phone ownership Internet Usage
Yes No Yes No

Language

English 86% 14% 83% 17%
Spanish 70% 30% 38% 62%

N=460. With |t| 3.3>2.58, the
difference of cell ownership between
English- and Spanish-speaking LA
Metro riders is statistically significant
at p<.01.

N=458. With |t| 8.58>3.30, the
difference of internet usage between
English- and Spanish-speaking LA
Metro riders is statistically significant at
p<.001.
Age

18-30 91% 9% 92% 8%
31-50 85% 15% 69% 31%
50 and older 62% 38% 38% 62%

N=460. With |t| 5.66>3.30, the
difference of cell ownership between
18-30 and 50+ year-old LA Metro
riders is statistically significant at
p<.001.

N=460. With |t| 10.76>3.30, the
difference of internet usage between
18-30 and 50+ year-old LA Metro
riders is statistically significant at
p<.001.
Ethnicity

Latino 80% 20% 66% 34%
White 82% 18% 82% 18%
African American 84% 16% 81% 19%
Asian 6% 94% 83% 17%
Other 19% 81% 90% 10%
All not Latino

83% 17%

N=460. With |t| 1.35<1.96, the
difference of cell phone between
Latino riders and all other ethnicities
on LA Metro buses is not statistically
significant.

N=460. With |t| 4.26>3.30, the
difference of internet usage between
Latino riders and all other ethnicities
on LA Metro buses is statistically
significant at p<.001.

While Latinos have a staggering 76% times greater odds of riding the bus 6-7 days a week
than all other ethnicities combined (t=2.92, p<.01), the most critical divide observed is the digital
one. Within the OTW survey population, 82% responded as having and using cellular phones. While
no relationship exists between gender or ethnicity and cellular phone ownership or usage,
relationships did appear between language, age, and cellular phone ownership and usage of all kinds

98
(i.e. texting, photography, internet access, videography, and game playing). Age emerges as the most
meaningful factor. Cell phone ownership in younger age groups in both languages was more or less
the same for the 18-30 and 31-50 year-olds. However, ownership dropped sharply for Spanish
speakers 50 years and older; while 71% of English speakers over 50 said they had a phone, only 46%
of Spanish speakers did. One Latina in her 50s explained, “I can’t text, I have no cell phone” (Table
4-4.)
Table 4-4: Out the Window Cell Phone Usage by Language and Age (N=460)

Likewise, the findings regarding internet usage were unequivocal: 62% of Spanish-speaking
respondents said they never use the internet. By contrast, only 17% of English speakers responded
the same (t-value of 8.58 > |t| 3.30 (p<.001)). Here again, age matters. English speakers in the 50
and older range accessed the internet with much less frequency than their younger counterparts, but
no Spanish-speaking respondents of that age reported using the internet with any regularity. And
while the younger, 18-30 year-old Spanish speakers did report using the internet, the figure was a
meager 15% compared with 67% of English speakers in their age cohort.
91%
85%
86%
84%
71%
46%
9%
15%
14%
16%
29%
54%
English Spanish English Spanish English Spanish
18-30 31-50 50+
Cell phone
No cell phone

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Understanding the aforementioned disparities, the OTW team still held SMS technology as a
promising mode of discourse with younger riders, and conducted in-person interviews on the bus in
hopes of capturing older riders’ responses. Anecdotal evidence, of course, but the texting and
interviewed riders’ responses were as varied as the videos themselves. Their impressions of, about,
and in reaction to the videos were contemplative, revealing gravitas and hope, as well as individuals’
keenly felt connections to their home city, be it Los Angeles, another faraway place, or a
combination of the two. In two of the text responses (transcribed in original SMS form), we
perceive Los Angeles’ now-typical transnationalism. To the question, “What is your escape from
L.A.?” one rider wrote, “my escape from l.a. is el salvador,” and another wrote, “Im home PROUD
TO BE AN ISLANDER GUAM USA.” Here we comprehend L.A.’s status as adoptive home, and
the strong sense of place-based identity people carry with them, geographical distance
notwithstanding.
Additionally, we observe the riders’ capacity for nuanced reflection. When asked, “Can ads
be art?” after a video challenging just that binary, one rider wrote, “Ads can be art….Los anuncios
tambien pueden ser arte….depende del contexto.”
21
In some texts we see also the passengers’
recognition of Los Angeles as an urban paradox, and finding a sort of sublime joy in it. In response
to, “What’s poetic about L.A.?” one rider answered, “Whats poetic about la is the paradox of being
the most beautiful disgusting place ive seen <3.” Metro’s riders are a complex and thoughtful group
whose connection to the city is deeply felt, even if their political voices remain unheard.
4/5 The Convergence of Art, Storytelling, and New Media
Out the Window illuminates how creative tension can be used for contemporary participatory
planning. Using art to reach out to a largely invisible group in a peculiarly invisible public space
through privatized televisions, OTW plays with and embraces, rather than rejects, the paradoxes

21
Translation: “Ads can also be art….depends on the context.”

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inherent in community development. Its emphasis on community especially marks it as a
paradigmatic example of participatory art, or socially engaged art (SEA), practice,
22
a field that has
steadily grown in stature
23
within the art world since the 1990s (Bishop, 2012; Helguera, 2011;
Jackson, 2011). In contrast to the modernist (“plop”) public art, derided for its ambiguous and often
propagandistic link to corporate interests (Deutsche, 1992, 1998; Miles, 1997), SEA places emphasis
on multiple authorship, collaboration, discourse, place, and social context. Art historian Shannon
Jackson (2011) reminds us that “social works” constitute “an increasingly complex field of
experimentation in art practice” (p. 2), and that, “one way of characterizing the ‘performative turn’
in art practice is to foreground its fundamental interest in the nature of sociality” (p. 2). Artist,
educator, and writer Pablo Helguera (2011) agrees, explaining that both community and “critically
self-reflexive dialogue” (p. 12) are central to SEA, often enacted in performative processes (Figure 4-
4).
Today’s SEA practices eschew two enduring theories about art in the public realm. Walter
Benjamin (1970) perceives a particular specialist-proletariat association. He extolls the socially
engaged “specialist” producer’s distinct, mediated relationship with his proletarian audience. For
Benjamin, the author is appropriately distinct from his audience and he venerates modern
communication for allowing the separation. Guy Debord (1983), meanwhile, abhors mass
communication. His is a pure loathing of what he terms the “spectacle,” the artificial “social relation
among people, mediated by images” (thesis # 4), “the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already
made in production and its corollary consumption (thesis # 6). Wildly different attitudes, but these
two thinkers have shaped how we think of mass communication and art: whether happy audience
member or a duped stooge, the audience consumes and never produces.

22
Socially engaged art goes by many names. Bishop (2012) proffers no fewer than ten: “socially engaged art, community-
based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, contextual art and (most recently) social practice” (p. 1).
23
One needs look no further than the international heavyweight, Creative Time, which commissioned and presented the
9/11 Tribute in Light (among other works) for proof of participatory art’s prestige (Creative Time, 2013).

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Figure 4-4: “¿Que Es Tu Temor Mas Grande?” [“What Is Your Biggest Fear?”] Following a video about fear, this
post-video prompt asks riders to share, via text, what scares them most. (Courtesy of Freewaves)
By contrast, Michel de Certeau (1984) and Jacques Rancière (2007) highlight interaction,
reciprocity, and the community as storyteller. De Certeau (1984) rejects distinctions between leader-
follower, asking, why are specialists the only producers when we all produce with our everyday acts
of consumption? His theory on consumer production prefigures today’s “prosumers” (Ritzer &
Jurgenson, 2010) or “productive consumers” (Couldry, 2004), who participate directly in Henry
Jenkins’ (2006) “convergence culture” and Yochai Benkler’s (2002) “peer production.” Rancière
recovers our wary relationship with the spectacle. Why, he wonders, do we associate watching and
hearing with passivity, when from this reflective position a viewer can, “contemplate ideas, foresee
the future, or take a global view of the world” (p. 277)? We do not simply receive the world, we
engage with it.

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Rancière concludes the same essay, “[a]n emancipated community is in fact a community of
storytellers and translators” (p. 280). Not coincidentally, to what extent marginalized groups can
engage in storytelling and discursive practices figures largely in philosophy, communication, and
planning theory literatures. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (2007) reminds us we are “storytelling
animals,” part of and contributing to a larger, unfolding conversation, which then informs our
understanding of society, meaning, and existence. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and
MacIntyre regard dialogical processes as constitutive of political community and democracy, a
relationship that communication scholars have tested vis-à-vis internet usage to generally positive
report (de Zuñiga & Valenzuela, 2011; Shah et al., 2005).
In Multimedia Explorations in Urban Policy and Planning: Beyond the Flatlands, Leonie Sandercock
and Giovanni Attili (2010) argue for a new media-enriched planning practice, holding multimedia’s
narrative and cinematic modalities as superior to conventional, numbers-driven, positivistic data.
They propose multimedia offer deeper insights into communities: “experiential, intuitive, and
somatic knowledge; local knowledge; knowledge based on the practices of talking and listening,
seeing, contemplating and sharing; and knowledge expressed in visual, symbolic, ritual, and other
artistic ways” (Sandercock, 2010, p. 18). Even the earliest filmmakers demonstrated film could both
record city scenes and manifest social spaces to disorient viewers, a la the Situationists, enough to
weaken prevailing beliefs about neighborhoods (Rubin, 2010). English scholar Barbara Eckstein
(2003) agrees that stories and storytelling have a destabilizing power for planning, though she
cautions against their unqualified acceptance. As we learned in the previous chapter, who are these
plans’ authors, what are their stories (read, agendas), and who are their audiences all underscore how
storytelling can go both ways, either toward citizen control or manipulation (Arnstein, 1969).
As I detailed in the introduction, scholars of all stripes have explored how ICTs alter our
capacity for engagement. Some see the internet (Shirky, 2010) and ubiquitous computing

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technologies (e.g. mobile telephony) (Greenfield, 2006) as near-perfect engagement instruments.
Manuel Castells, who finds the informational mode of development socially ruinous (1989, 1996,
1997, 1998, 2010), still sees great hope in the networked social movement, celebrating the speed and
organization of digital networks for their participatory promise: “the more interactive and self-
configurable communication is, the less hierarchical is the organization and the more participatory is
the movement” (2012, p. 15).
However, by now many researchers understand the digital divide refers to more than simple
access. Whereas access is mechanical, participation is sociopolitical. Of her three digital divide
categories, the global, social, and democratic, Pippa Norris (2001) views the first two as trenchant –
no advances in technology will quash prevailing social disparities – and the lattermost as ambiguous.
That is, ICTs are no more value neutral or prone to progressive democratic actions (Feenberg, 1999;
Haklay, 2013) than are the individuals and institutions developing them operating in apolitical,
acultural settings (Feenberg, 1999; Russell et al., 2008; Varnelis & Friedberg, 2008). Networked
infrastructures can as readily reinforce (not heal) social and cultural institutions (Dourish & Bell,
2007; Graham & Marvin, 2001), and in the cases of language, hinder participation (Cheong & Wilkin,
2003) and/or encourage path dependencies (Graham & Zook, 2013).
4/6 De Certeau and Out the Window
In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) Michel de Certeau proposes, among other things, two
central hypotheses. First, he dismisses the producer/consumer binary as antiquated. Second, he
names strategies and tactics as political acts, and famously prefers the latter. I maintain Out the
Window supports – even celebrates – de Certeau’s productive power of consumption, at the same
time demonstrates the usefulness of yoking of strategy with tactic.
Productive Consumption
De Certeau rejects the mutual exclusivity of the active producer and passive consumer. He

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asserts that the, “rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular, and clamorous production” (p.
31) epitomized by our network television advertising and urban landscape-pockmarking billboards,
“is confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called ‘consumption’” (p. 31). In his view,
we define consumers not by what magazines they read, clothes they wear, or modes of transit they
use, but how they use them. As in Rancière’s (2007) later conception, these goods are mediating
objects, which the consumer/spectator interprets for her own purpose. These, if you will, “active
consumers’” accumulated acts of use and re-use constitute a culture. De Certeau contends social
scientists and planners ignore these accumulated acts to society’s peril. He enjoins us to analyze how
these, “[u]nrecognized producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungles of
functionalist rationality” (p. 34), operate in and maneuver through the city. For de Certeau, ordinary
practices such as “reading, talking, walking, dwelling, cooking, etc.” (p. xvii) – and certainly ICT, the
basis of legion new ordinary practices – suggest distinct political meanings and capacities, and so
merit our attention.
Mobility is an especially significant ordinary practice. De Certeau discusses it as “walking,”
but it could encompass any type of urban mobility. Anticipating anthropologist James Scott (1998),
de Certeau decries city planners for their totalizing, orthogonal constructions, along with their
foolish belief that the city is at all comprehensible from the Corbusian bird’s eye view. In truth,
“‘down below’” is where “visibility begins” (p. 93). People move through the city and often off the
formal roadways, forging their own uniquely personal pathways, their own geographic narratives.
Their acts thus differentiate the “migrational, metaphorical” (p. 93) city from the planned one.
People’s circulation refers to two things, physicality and communication. As they move
through the city, going from place to place, they communicate their priorities, preferences,
ambitions, and anxieties. The subsequent pedestrian route embodies three qualities distinguishing it
from the Cartesian spatial system. First, it is present. A person’s journey through the city recalls a

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Lefebvrian (2003) centrality – any place can be the place at any given moment. This immediacy
manifests the second quality, discreteness. A place is particular because its context is particular.
Finally, mobility is phatic. Priorities, preferences, ambitions, and anxieties are always communicative,
but not always explicitly informational.
“Immediate,” “discrete,” and “phatic” describe Out the Window’s artists’ and riders’ actions.
To create their videos, the artists selected their routes, literally “walking” the city, consuming
cultures, cultural landscapes, images, sounds, and smells, which they then translated into the video
works of art. Evoking de Certeau, these artists created self-defining (Collins, 2000) reflexive
projections and even social spaces (Gurstein, 2010) to convey their passions for their idiosyncratic
place or places. For example, one video maker superimposes titles over grainy sequences to remind
her viewers that L.A. is a place where children smile and play, not just gang-bang and steal. Another
dances from sunrise to sunset, from the vibrant yet gritty streets of East L.A., by the glamorous
Disney Hall and Rodeo Drive, and finally to the Santa Monica Pier. Another still gazes into an
immigrant son’s loving relationship with his exhausted mother (Figure 4-5). These art videos show
the hope, whimsy, and hardship that constitute our everyday practices.

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Figure 4-5: Walter Vargas, “Mis Manos” (2011) In collaboration with Echo Park Film Center (2011). A young
undocumented artist interviews his reclining mother after her long day working several jobs. He begs her to share
how at seventeen she came from Mexico City to Los Angeles, then raise and support two children. Exhausted, she
can hardly tell her story, but he pushes, tenderly, firmly. She relents, detailing how L.A. is where, “I started
sewing, working in restaurants, and cleaning houses.” Now, “My hands are dark and calloused.” For the first half,
the director splits the screen in horizontal thirds: the top two switch between images of his mother as a young
woman in the new city and those of her today, working at her swap meet booth or resting in her dimly-lit
bedroom. An American flagpole waves on the bottom band, intimating the ambiguous promise of life in the
United States. Vargas devotes the video’s second half almost entirely to his mother in bed. She continues,
without resentment: “That’s my life. The life of Maria Antonia Hernandez. Who has no life because all she does is
work for her children.” The mother and son’s touching exchange conjures his desire for “la verdad [the truth]” and
her straightforward weariness. “How are my hands? My hands are black; now they’re wrinkled. They’re very
tired…. They work all of the days. Just like the rest of the world.” Vargas ends by filming his mother’s hands
massaging each other in the sunlight. “And that’s the story of my beautiful hands.” When the video screened on
the bus, neither Vargas nor his mother could bear to watch. (Courtesy of Freewaves, https://vimeo.com/24803932)
Riders’ commutes also comprise multiple ordinary practices. Within the constraints of the
transportation planner’s predetermined routes and technological parameters, riders compose
personal journeys and messages of their choosing. Likewise, the Out the Window videos and post-
video queries served as agency-affirming invitations to create their own art. Rather than simply
transmit the youths’ and artists’ own personal stories, the Out the Window team extended the
conversation by inquiring about the passengers’ lives, observations, and opinions through the post-

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video prompts. Question marks punctuated the video narratives, engaging Rancière’s emancipated
spectator bus riders in Freirean (1997) problem-posing dialogue. Asked to conceive of videos of
their own on the spot, in-bus interviewees offered quotidian narratives ranging from absurdist, to
aspirational, to the ardently socially just, but in all cases illuminating Freire’s point that dialogue, not
didacticism, inspires critical thinking. On the cheekier side, one passenger proclaimed, “I would
make a video about monsters. I am an artist.” Others resonated with emotion. Sometimes hopeful
and sometimes striking on larger structural concerns, they invariably feature our social
interdependencies. The optimistic, “I would make a video about what can happen and change when
you smile to a stranger on the street” joins with the recession-weary, “I would make a movie about
opening stores so that people could have jobs because people need jobs,” as if to say, per another
rider, “I would make a video about daily life struggles, about things that relate to people who take
the bus.” These responses demonstrate the implicit understanding that “daily life” is creative praxis.
Tactical Strategy
De Certeau’s preoccupation with ordinary practices lies squarely with his belief that these
“ways of operating” can, at their best, signify “victories of the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong’” (p. xix).
Remember: what matters is not the object of use. What matters is use and interaction. De Certeau
conceives of this as a “trajectory” of practices, emphasizing time and space’s relation, at the same
time critiquing their representative limitations. Our days and constitutive ordinary practices are
processional, sequential movements through space. Yet we chart them after the fact, into
unidimensional and impersonal simulacra. In our modern need to “make society legible” (Scott,
1998, p. 2), we trace trajectories inflexibly, and therefore we struggle with capturing the various
enacted practices.
The trajectory concept fits almost too well with the bus system. Nearly one million people
embark and disembark daily over the hundreds of miles of Metro bus routes, yet the best data

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visualization method for this diverse and dynamic population’s movements remains a compressed
and still convoluted map. Places are points and their linking neighborhoods, semi-discernible lines.
To remedy and fill in the colors and shapes of Los Angeles neighborhoods, the Out the Window team
conceived of the project’s videos and texts as media- and ICT-based interlocutors.
De Certeau recognized the trajectory category’s planar limitations. So he pushed and devised
the strategy/tactic spatiotemporal schema. A strategic act implies a space that can be isolated and
protected from outer threats. He characterizes strategies as Cartesian, rationalistic, even militaristic
in attitude. They reify the, “triumph of place over time” (p. 36), wherein the quartering of space upholds
measurement, control, and prediction, and assumes “a certain power is the precondition of…[the
power of] knowledge” (p. 36). Where the strategy has a spatial, often institutional locus, the tactic
does not. By contrast, the tactic is a, “calculated action determined by the absence of a proper
locus…. The space of a tactic is the space of the other” (p. 37). Conducted in enemy territory,
occupation is impossible, so it deploys moments of action within these territories, rather than the
strategic approach of engaging the territories themselves. “In short, a tactic is an art of the weak” (p.
36). It privileges time as a tool for resistance, whereas strategy venerates space. De Certeau
overwhelmingly prefers the tactic.
But looking at Out the Window, I wonder whether it is practically useful to view them as
diametric opposites. OTW does not distinguish between strategy and tactic, but epitomizes their
juncture. On the one hand, it is a tactical art project that uses personal ICTs and plays with place
and time equally, rather than prioritizing one over the other. Months-old videos were made new
again with each fresh viewing, interpreted and added to slightly with every text – and viewing, if you
agree with Rancière. But on the other hand, as much as OTW assumes the appearance of a tactical
practice by exploiting the buses’ mobility and, “the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the
surveillance of the proprietary powers” (p. 36), those bus televisions are explicitly privately owned

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and administered media realty ensconced in a public transit institution. The OTW team had no
alternative but to negotiate with the television franchisee for airtime. In addition, we must recognize
two things: (1) the necessary cellular tools of the tactic remain beyond the reach for many of these
underserved riders, and (2) finding a safe de Certeauian strategic position is challenge enough for
them. To what extent can we expect these individuals, particularly the undocumented among them,
safely to engage politically in de Certeau’s “space of the other”?
4/7 Discussion
Nonetheless, I hold this clash in no way diminishes either de Certeau’s or OTW’s relevance.
If anything, belaboring the in-project distinctions asserts the heuristic, not hermetic, benefits we find
in de Certeau’s conventions of praxis. Socially engaged and civically minded planners ought to
connect with these underserved communities over time to create new, hybrid spaces for
participation, neither wholly strategic nor tactical. The information age and its compatriot the
informational mode of development, occurring since de Certeau’s writing, have so altered the
relationship of space and time that we can and should privilege both. As we live in a world where
genuine, material, and place-specific public space recede like shorelines and Castells’ (1996) space of
flows accelerates and enlarges, we are wise to attend to both.
And so I propose Out the Window’s most salient lessons derive from its research-gleaned and
programmatic ambiguities. For the former, the surveys and rider interviews substantiate claims that,
while the digital divide may shift, it does not close. As Mizuko Ito (2008) explains, “[t]he digital divide
is resilient because the bar of technological sophistication continues to rise” (p. 7). Breakthroughs in
ICTs occur too rapidly for social, economic, and political disparities to keep apace, much less bridge
the gap. Thus, if we acknowledge that new media engagement practices bear a quantifiable risk of
omitting large sections of urban populations, then we must act accordingly. Planners cannot simply
re-sort or re-configure engagement menus. We must seek out new spaces and explore

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transdisciplinary frameworks to find novel, synthetic approaches. I worry that municipal application
informational technologies, such as the proliferation of 311 text numbers across municipalities
(which work quite well for many, but not all), bespeaks an administrative bent towards
“streamlining,” when multi-layered and synthetic agendas subsuming strategies and tactics represent
more legitimate attempts to reach all the city’s populations.
Further, the socially engaged art practices embedded in Out the Window can serve as a
theoretical and practical model for planning practice, theoretically and practically. Conceptually, the
OTW team determined to intervene into our notion of just who art is for in our cities, rejecting the
conventional practice of earmarking arts funding for the middle and upper classes and assigning
bourgeois evaluative metrics for recipient communities (Markusen, 2013). Sociologists of art have
long asserted the folly in removing the social relation from the creation or installation of art (de la
Fuente, 2007). Taking a wider view of the project, I observe the celebration of the aesthetic and
thoughtful implementation of technology for social connection, rather than technology in the city
for technology’s sake.
Finally, the project cautions us against the dangers of binaries in policy and project
formation. Superficially, OTW is a top-down project with participatory ambitions. However, I wish
to highlight what is actually a series of matryoshka doll-esque relations between agencies, individuals,
and spaces – a whole network of public-private partnerships of varying levels of formality. The team
coordinated amongst itself, with high school students, with Angeleno artists, with the bus television
franchisee (which coordinates with Metro), all toward engaging in discourse with the city’s
marginalized bus riders. Of course the power relations were skewed from the start, but even Freire
recognizes one cannot eliminate power dynamics. “Dialogue means a permanent tension between
authority and liberty. But, in this tension, authority continues to be because it has authority vis-à-vis
permitting student freedoms which emerge, which grow and mature precisely because authority and

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freedom learn self-discipline" (as cited in Shor, 1987, p. 102). In this sense, OTW offers a template
for a sound, genuine “top-down” practice.
Affective in a typically humdrum milieu, Out the Window illustrates architecture scholar
Richard Ingersoll’s (2006) aspiration for “true jump-cut urbanism.” Lamenting our forgotten
intimate, de Certeauian relationship with the pedestrian street, Ingersoll notes the driver’s
comprehension of the urban form now comprises no single perspective but a series of vanishing
points, a “montage of a cinematic jump cuts” (p. 75). The consequent fragmentary images can
alienate. But recalling Rubin (2010) and Eckstein (2003), we can use them critically to destabilize
prevailing attitudes and make room for others. Out the Window underscores the space-making
communicative power of the ordinary, as well as questions de Certeau’s assertion that, “Casual time
is what is narrated in the actual discourse of the city: an indeterminable fate, better articulated on the
metaphorical practices and stratified places than on the empire of the evident in functionalist
technocracy” (p. 203). If the “empire of the evident in [the] functionalist technocracy” happens to
be televisions on Metro buses, why not imbue them with de Certeau’s “metaphorical practices”?
Why not replace unidirectional information and entertainment with spaces for interaction and
conversation?
4/8 Epilogue
Out the Window ran through 2013. Throughout that time, the bus proved an increasingly
complex environment in which to screen videos. First, problems rose repeatedly with the aging
television infrastructure. If a television worked, its screen might be badly scratched, lost in the sun’s
glare, or suffer from sundry sound issues. To the extent that it could, the Out the Window team
compensated by screening primarily visual videos. Second, using a public communication system
(even if privately administered) automatically set censorship triggers. Freewaves accepted and
understood the television licensee’s restrictions against sex, nudity, bigotry, violence, alcohol,

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tobacco, and weapons, but did not anticipate its balking at unfounded music copyright concerns
(Aufderheide & Jaszi, 2011), or equating consensual, heterosexual kissing with gun violence. Third
and most existentially pressing, funding remained an issue. Both the MacArthur grant and
discounted broadcast fees were one-time-only. Freewaves might have garnered modest funds from
foundation and government underwriters, but still could not afford the licensee’s cost increase from
$10,000 for the entire project to $20,000 a month for thirty seconds an hour. And because neither
corporations nor advertisers viewed the bus constituency or videos as valuable resources, marketing
sponsorships were nil, a crippling blow given the project’s anticipated cost increases.
But all those worries wound up being moot once Metro unveiled its new fleet. New buses do
have televisions, but they are at the front of the bus, embedded in the wall just behind the driver’s
seat. The new televisions have dispensed with the niceties of silly quizzes, local news, fitness tips,
and mini-telenovelas. They are either blank or Bentham-on-the-bus, closed-circuit monitors showing
the passengers real-time imagery of themselves for the duration of their rides. These televisions do
not engage or even condescend. They surveil.

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chapter 5

CONCLUSION:
Moving to Democratic Planning 1.0

Art, of course, does not produce grand revolutions, but as an
event that opens up a new narrative about reality it provides the
conditions of possibility for a nascent political consciousness, one
borne from conviviality, a being-together as a coming-into-being of
community: the realization of shared existence.
Fisher, 2007, p. 119

For want of a better term, media literacy is a form of
critical literacy.
Buckingham, 2003, p. 38

We can take three central, ultimately connected, lessons from this dissertation. First,
institutions and institutional priorities matter. I find looking at organizational mission reveals a layer
of nuance about the relations between media arts organizations and with their local communities
than does the traditional sectoral analysis. This underscores what neoinstitutionalists have long
understood: institutions are shifting social constructions (Jepperson, 1991), where people interpret
and enact “institutional vocabularies of motive” (Binder, 2007, p.548). Second, power is still power.
ICTs do provide platforms for “organizing without organizations” (Shirky, 2008) and we do conduct
social movements in the digital age (Castells, 2012). But these capabilities are only sometimes used in
progressive campaigns towards pure democracy. After all, Millennium Partners and Tony Hsieh’s
compatriots’ aim their online media campaigns at particular, exclusive consumer groups to their
projects. Actually existing democracy lies well beyond their scope of interests. Finally, media do
provide a valuable and qualitatively rich venue for connecting with and learning from otherwise
underappreciated urban populations. But as we know from the first and second lessons, institutional

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agenda and power prevail, and can overwhelm. In the case of Out the Window, they did so at the same
time, thus long-term opportunities for engagement languished.
5/1 Recommendations
With these three related lessons in mind, I offer the following recommendations for
planning and planners. The recommendations cut across planning pedagogy, practice, and policy,
because broad institutional shifts are necessary if we hope to achieve a Democratic Planning 1.0 in
the twenty-first century.
Teach Critical Visual and Media Literacies
Despite planning’s ultimately physical manifestation in the built environment, many planning
programs still struggle to teach critical visual and media literacies. Of course there is a lot of interest
in GIS – the majority of current faculty searches name GIS as either a requirement or a plus, and
programs aggressively advertise their GIS certifications. But the literacy I advocate for is not about
Figure 5-1: Duany and Koolhaas Sketching Styles Compared. Planning and real estate students can say which
community they prefer, but they struggle to make the connection between the architects’ chosen rendering styles
and their responses. (Sources, L to R: www.dpz.com/Projects/1324, www.oma.eu/projects/2015/west-louisville-food-port/)

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production. I want planners to become De Certeau’s active consumers. I want them to look at an
image or watch media and understand the embedded messages. For example, I show Figure 5-1 as a
slide to my undergraduate History of Urban Planning and Development students. They come from a
mix of concentrations, but most are either planning or real estate development majors. Despite their
interests in the built environment, the students lack basic visual literacy. They know they like
Duany’s proposal better. But they do not see it is a digitally produced watercolor image, nor do they
realize how the image’s construction represents and fits with their preference for the
neotraditionalist town style. When looking at Duany and Koolhaas’ renderings, none of the students
ask: Who are the architects and what do they want us to think about them? Whom do they perceive
to be their audience? Why did they choose their particular rendering styles? What are the image’s
authors saying?
Anyone can learn Google SketchUp to 3D model, Squarespace or Wordpress to build a
website, Photoshop to edit an image, or Adobe Premium to make a movie. Much harder and more
important for planning is using those technologies for communication and engagement. Focusing
on production techniques as both means and ends has us deep in Feenberg’s critical waters. In order
to protect the democratic projects, we must use and interrogate creative digital technologies for their
underlying messages, and not the media themselves.
Use Art and Technology for Participation’s Sake
We should also do more with ICTs. We know planning’s historical preference for
technological efficiencies. Urban planning’s faith shows few signs of slowing today, despite the
evidence that its technophilic devotion has hurt as often as helped. Contemporary scholarship’s
treatment of technology tends to affirm its usefulness. This dwarfs the literature either questioning
this assumption or proposing other applications. Similarly, the proof of art and culture’s benefit for
postindustrial economic and community development is so robust (Currid, 2007, 2010; Grodach,

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2011; Markusen & Schrock, 2006; Stern & Seifert, 2010) that policymakers’ emphasis on the arts for
economic stimulus makes sense. Only as we know, well-meaning programs have unintended,
exclusionary consequences (Lloyd, 2005; Zukin 1989, 2010). Planning needs to rethink how and why
it uses technology and art, and especially how it uses them together.
If one of the key existential features of urban living is sharing space with others, we can use
art, particularly media art, in the public realm to share our communities’ stories with others.
Recalling Sandercock (2010), planners can and use media to engage communities and gather “local
knowledge” through the “story turn.” Planning should care about this – a lot. Even one of the
cultural economy’s leading scholars and advocates, Ann Markusen (2014) regrets the cultural
economic agenda’s narrowness. To its detriment, planning forgets the, “intrinsic values of arts and
culture…beauty, critique, innovation, emotional insights, cultural bridging, and bonding among
them” (p. 568). If we continue thinking of art in strictly economic development terms, we will
follow the same corrupt, pro-capital path Boyer (1986) identified so long ago.
Demand Public Uses from Public Screens
Regrettably, our current use of urban screens proves Boyer’s point. Urban screens light up
our night skies as digital billboards (Lopez Pumarejo & Bassell, 2009) commercialize media events
(Mcquire, 2010), greet us at our train (Moore, 2013) and subway stations (Harbord & Dillon, 2013),
in taxis (Tezo, 2013; Blue Line Media, 2014), and, until lately, our buses. But those screens are not
designated for the public good. Blue Line Media (2014), which controls much of the U.S. taxi
television market, does offer undisclosed discounts for government and nonprofit agencies.
However, in New York City, where virtually all of the 11,000 cabs have digital television screens,
showing half of one two-minute Out the Window video for one month on all taxis would cost
$770,000. A 95% discount would still sink the project.

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I propose planners enjoin agencies managing the publicly situated, but privately administered
(and effectively unregulated) urban screens to dedicate at least 5% of every hour to local public
goods and outreach efforts. Such screens already produce the necessary underwriting revenue to
support a community alternative. For example, just ten high-definition screens in select New York
subway stations fetched an unofficial $130 million in 2013 (Rivoli, 2013). New York’s Fulton Center
MTA station provides us with proof of concept. In partnership with Westfield Properties, the
MTA’s Digital Arts Program’s digital art installations screen every few minutes, “to offer temporary
art, to work with new digital artists, and to produce art that engages our customers in a more
immediate way” (MTA, 2014a).
This program suggests two things about the present status and possible future of media art
for participation in public spaces. First, the MTA’s characterization of transit riders as “customers”
needing “immediate” engagement asserts both the agency’s belief that media arts are efficient means
for distributing messages, and its acceptance of corporate creep into our public spaces. For some,
Fulton Center is “a mall, not a civic space” (Young, 2014). After all, when not showing media art
installations, Westfield uses the screens for advertising (MTA, 2014b). Which means, second, MTA
and Westfield both believe in the project’s sustainability. I doubt we can convince the Westfields of
the world to give back public screens entirely, but we know they can afford to share the space.
Devise Culturally Sensitive Outreach Campaigns
Planners can use newly-dedicated public screen time for mobile telephony-mediated
engagement processes. Out the Window’s promise could now be replicated elsewhere, in large part
because cellular phone ownership has increased so much since 2011. It is now similar across all
demographic groups, with the different ethnicities owning smartphones at basically the same rates,
too: white, 66%; African American 68%, and Latino, 64% (Anderson, 2015b).

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This does not mean the digital divide has somehow closed though. Cell and smartphone
ownership may be even, but reliance on different devices reveals. Nonwhites need their
smartphones more: 12% of African Americans and 13% of Latinos self-reported as smartphone
dependent (Smith, 2015), explaining they use them heavily for health information, educational
content, and job seeking (Anderson, 2015a). Critically, smartphones have their limits. Computers
remain the only convenient devices for many “standard” processes, and that ownership is greatly
contingent upon race, age group, education, and income. Where 79% of whites own a computer,
only 45% of African Americans and 63% of Latinos do, and only half of households making under
$30,000 have one, as compared with the 91% of households making more than $75,000 (Anderson,
2015b). Finally, nearly 56% of all web content in the world is in English, though English speakers
account for just 20% of the world population (Top languages of the internet, today and tomorrow,
2015).
The digital divide’s constant shifting and persistent asymmetry offers planners a challenge
and an opportunity. The challenge is obvious enough: planners must be diligent about knowing all
their urban populations’ media habits and device ownership. The opportunity stems from the
research challenge: the more we know about appropriate communication methods, the better we can
design our outreach methods.
Focus on Mission and Embrace Paradox
Media arts’ dual utopic and commercial provenances make them something of a paradox.
This is good – the paradox allows them to do a lot. They can support planners’ customized
participation programs on otherwise commercial urban screens. They can promote real estate
developers’ catalytic agenda projects, or they can engage marginalized groups through artistic
storytelling. As we learned from the NAMAC study, what matters is intent. Planners must critically
assess exactly what (or whose) outcomes they desire first and then consider innovative programs.

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I think of Public Matters, one of the Out the Window collaborators. An artist-educator team
and two-person social enterprise, Mike Blockstein and Reanne Estrada apply their training as studio
artists towards socially just “pedagogic projects … [where] art converges with the activities and goals
of education” (Bishop, 2012, p. 4). Their most recent initiative, the Urban Futures lab:
train[s] [young adult] Fellows as interdisciplinary creative community problem
solvers and future civic leaders as they work on projects that strengthen L.A.
neighborhoods. The Lab…reimagines Los Angeles’ civic and creative capital by
altering how young adults from under-resourced communities of color access
opportunities that employ their inventiveness and support their professional
aspirations (Public Matters, 2015).
Public Matters’ chosen modes of engagement and determined alliances bear out not insignificant
portions of my larger argument. For one, they tailor their use of media arts for the constituencies’
different generations. Students can write and produce videos (documentary, absurdist, and parodic)
to learn about nutrition, use their smartphone cameras to shoot photoessay assignments, and refer
regularly to online resources in and outside of class. But they devise “old media” outreach
techniques with their parents and grandparents in mind.
More important, though, is Public Matters’ concrete mission which allows them operate
successfully between two apparently contradictory logics, that of the market and social movement.
Urban Futures Fellows hope to achieve lasting social change, and they do so in terms of their own
professional advancement and marketability. Abiding its specific social justice raison d’être, Public
Matters can assume and embrace contradictions, which opens up new fundraising, partnership, and
project opportunities. I believe so long as planning remembers its egalitarian core, and does not lose
itself to technophilia and/or the economic imperative, then media arts will prove to be an important
part of twenty-first century democratic participatory planning practice.

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5/2 Limitations and Future Research
This dissertation has been described to me in terms of the parable of the three blind men
and the elephant. In that story, each man feels a different part of the animal – say, tusk, tail, and leg
– and makes decisions based on his limited experience. The men compare notes and devolve into an
argument, each becoming more certain his “part” is the right one, the truth. In some versions of the
story, the three stop fighting to listen to each other’s version and arrive at the full “picture” and
understanding that an elephant stands before them. I submit the parable illuminates this
dissertation’s core shortcoming and ultimate value.
For the former, I have analyzed just three parts of a massive topical element, media arts and
urban planning. As such, there are omissions, a veritable city’s worth of questions I neither asked
nor explored. For example, I stopped short of doing interviews to learn why MAOs locate in their
particular neighborhoods, what actions they take on behalf of their communities, and what, if any,
changes they perceive in recent years’ MAO-neighborhood relations. And I have not presented
research on how different municipalities or governmental agencies have used media arts and social
media to engage with citizens for participatory planning. Several cities’ planning departments have
social media presence and dedicated community portals on their websites, but I have not evaluated
to what extent they dialogue with citizens or just “blast” information out. I have not conducted a
broader research to learn how, when, and why real estate developers pick up emergent media to
promote their projects. I could also have done a content analysis of urban-concerned hashtags,
comparing how and what type of users employ them on different social networks, such as the
aesthetics-driven Instagram or blurb-friendly Twitter. And of course there are more socially engaged
art projects, but here I presented just the one.
I submit the research proposals highlight the merit of my larger research question. That is,
each question gets at essential Middle-Class Planning 2.0 concerns and can offer insights into

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institutional agenda, power, and art’s social or technocratic usefulness. We need a research agenda
dedicated to analyzing critically how individuals and their institutions use media arts for placemaking
and urban development. Because if we do not reconfigure how we operate as planning scholars and
practitioners, and if we do not advocate for media arts’ use in community engagement and
participatory planning, instead continuing to apply them in accordance with planning’s historical
middle-class bias, we will never achieve a Democratic Planning 1.0.

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation chronicles the role of media arts in urban planning as an essential part of contemporary economic development, real estate branding, and participatory socially engaged arts projects. Through three case studies runs the conceptual through-line, “Middle-Class Planning 2.0,” the digital age’s extension of the last century’s class-based planning and urban development regime that has consistently favored elite interests over socially just, inclusionary practices. The introduction presents the historical and cultural contexts that lead to the larger research question: What are “media arts”? What can they offer urban planners? Assuming that planning does have an elitist middle-class agenda, how do digital technologies relate to it, and what can planners do to avoid a Middle-Class Planning 2.0? ❧ The first case study constitutes an examination of media arts organizations (MAOs) in the United States. Do MAOs share a relationship with neighborhood change? Results suggest that media arts organizations as a sector do not correlate with gentrification, but may locate within already changing communities, those already undergoing redevelopment. Further and critically, organizational mission, or institutional agenda, successfully predicts a media arts organization’s relationship to neighborhood change. This finding emphasizes institutional intent’s relevance, as well as asserts the need to study just more than art sectors in order to understand culture’s intersection with neighborhood change. ❧ The second analysis examines how real estate developers use online marketing campaigns to promote their projects. Despite this growing trend, planning scholarship does not yet evaluate how developers use media, or the implications for developer-driven community development in the digital age. Through a bimonthly content analysis of two major adaptive reuse projects’ emergent and social media campaigns, I find online real estate development marketing is different than its pre-digital predecessor, possibly hearkening a “neo-growth machine.” Multi-media coalesce both to create a new media-rich rhetoric of representation that supports innovative marketing initiatives, as well as reveal critical exposure. All processes disclose the same goal: exclusive, twenty-first century spectacle- and disparity-driven development. I argue planners should study developers’ mediated messaging to (1) recognize their manipulations and (2) invert their savvy but cynical practices into pro-participatory planning ones. ❧ The final case study represents just that kind of participatory planning program. In 2011, Out the Window collaborators presented videos by youth and local artists on Los Angeles buses, engaging riders in SMS-enabled dialogues. Findings from the surveyed and interviewed riders are presented as part of a conceptual analysis of the project as an example of de Certeauian practice in the digital age. Though hindered by institutional obstacles, Out the Window demonstrates a positive role for media arts in planning communications and participation, specifically the possible creation of “active consumers,” citizens who can effectuate change from the bottom-up through media-based storytelling. ❧ The dissertation concludes: institution matters, power endures, and while media provide a valuable and qualitatively rich venue for engaging with marginalized urban populations, the first and second conditions persist. Therefore, if we hope to achieve a “Democratic Planning 1.0,” planning should: teach critical visual and media literacies, use art and technology for participation’s sake, demand public uses from public screens, devise culturally sensitive outreach campaigns, focus on mission, and embrace paradox.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Shannon, Brettany Kane (author)

Core Title Avoiding middle-class planning 2.0: media arts and the future of urban planning

School School of Policy, Planning and Development

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Urban Planning and Development

Publication Date 03/15/2016

Defense Date 03/01/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag democratic planning 1.0,digital communications,emergent media,media arts,media arts organizations,middle-class planning 2.0,neighborhood change,neo-growth machine,OAI-PMH Harvest,organizational mission,participatory planning,Real Estate Development,socially engaged art,Urban Planning

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Sloane, David C. (committee chair), Currid-Halkett, Elizabeth (committee member), Imre, Aniko (committee member)

Creator Email bkshanno@usc.edu,brettany@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-222606

Unique identifier UC11276823

Identifier etd-ShannonBre-4206.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-222606 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ShannonBre-4206.pdf

Dmrecord 222606

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Shannon, Brettany Kane

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA