We will start class by discussing the three part Bushwick Daily article “Are “White Bodies” Gentrifying Bushwick? A Look at Census Data” in order to take a closer look at the issues related to the use of data in making sense of trends within urban environments.

We will come back to this analysis of Bushwick later on in the course as it pertains to my dissertation work, but first we will continue our look at Williamsburg’s transformation. We watched part of Diego Echeverria’s Los Sures and will Juxtapose it to Su Friedrich’s Gut Renovation. Apart from animating various themes that Sharon Zukin discusses in Loft Living, the later film takes the artist’s perspective of seeking space in the urban sphere in order to live and pursue a creative career. The film shows in particularly good detail what Alanna Siegfried describes as “sweat equity” in her book Soho: A Guide from 1979, where artists, through their own efforts and that of friends, create viable housing and community out of abandoned commercial warehouses and dilapidated industrial era factories. In the process, artists like Friedrich created a community in Williamsburg much as artists did in Soho half a century earlier.

Oddly though, and in the lamenting the ensuing gentrification that occurs in Williamsburg forcing artists like Friedrich to leave the neighborhood altogether, the film largely ignores the version of the neighborhood intimately depicted in Los Sures, even though it takes place in the very same neighborhood and just before era Friedrich depicts in Gut Renovation. Why is that? And what is the relationship between artists and the communities they cluster in? How do artists factor into the “revitalization” or “renewal” of those neighborhoods?