Arts-Led Gentrification and the Curated Image of Contemporary Mediterranean Cities: Destruction and (Re)Construction in Marseille and Tel Aviv

Abstract

This dual case study of Marseille and Tel Aviv utilizes practice-based methods, digital ethnography and archival research to interrogate contemporary institutional, material, architectural and atmospheric/embodied conditions in the Belle de Mai and Joliette (Marseille) and Neve Tzedek and Florentin (Tel Aviv) neighborhoods. While these cities are largely lauded for their touristic draw, connection with the Mediterranean Sea, and increasing artistic production, they are seldom critiqued for the ways in which cultural hegemony is reproduced through such creative practices and how the ongoing redevelopment of the urban landscape is undergirded by neocolonial impetus. I emphasize understanding the curated image of the city – whereby art and cultural spaces are integral to the city’s transformation and presentation; hyper-stylized, whitewashed branding campaigns and artscapes that elide the suffering and silences produced by destruction and (re)construction of these neighborhoods. These changes signify violence through the continual disfiguration of the landscape and built environment as regimes of historic preservation are coupled with new construction; aesthetics of occupation that underlie the cultural infrastructures of the city. The project is guided by examining how sociospatial segregation is evidenced in the production and maintenance of these cities’ images, and how historic preservation and concurrent arts-led gentrification contribute to processes of dispossession in these rapidly changing areas. As I develop these lines of inquiry about the contemporary ideological and aesthetic specificities of place, I focus on how culture-driven development is used propagandistically and how the proliferation of these cities’ cultural spaces as sites for tourist and foreign consumption become tools of exclusionary placemaking. The original artworks that scaffold this dissertation serve as data/objects of analysis and are my contribution to new knowledge in related fields; their creation is an effort to critically question the present moment in these two cities and stakeholders’ efforts of erasing tumultuous recent histories of occupation, destruction and dispossession. Finally, in an effort to disrupt the charge of gentrification and cultural and spatial erasures in Tel Aviv and Marseille, I look at how artistic interventions in these cities assert counter-representations of historical memory and reclaim urban space for those marginalized by forces of redevelopment. Pushing back against anaesthetization by these curated images of the city, the co-option of culture as commodity, and against the material manipulation of occupied space is a necessary disobedience to disrupt and dismantle the hegemonic systems inscribed onto/into these neighborhoods.