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

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.