The murals capture the after-fade of light on the retina. Their artwork itself is ephemeral, fading either from the city painting over their illegal murals within a few days or weeks of their execution, or through the process of sun and rain, peeling after a few years. They are beautifying precisely not to gentrify but to assert ownership claims to territory, so in a larger sense it is tagging – our community, our population, our space. This is also in part about self aggrandizement. Desi W.O.M.E has in a sense, incorporated himself into the Community Rejuvenation Project – he is its embodiment. Therefore he can move from the illegal tagging of his own name, to the legal tagging of his name writ large, now CRP. This manifests in highly stylized forms of writing: murals often include large-scale letters done wild style, which to the untrained eye are illegible, a complex tangle of lines, corners, shadows. This writing is tagging taken to the level of an art form, and aerosol artists engage in a constant competition to push stylistic boundaries further. They see the blank, gray walls of the City’s abatement team and want to superimpose color – a literal way to assert the presence of communities of color – and reflect the vibrancy of the cultures living in the neighborhood surrounding the mural, and the histories of the spaces.
While the city does sometimes sanction murals, they have ideal content requirements. One that overlaps with the city’s imaginary is memorial images of people who have recently died in the area, plastic pot plant containers often youth caught in the crossfire of drug and gang conflicts. CRP tries to include “archetypical images” of people representing different cultures, and often searches the internet for cultural images to convey their message, which they then bring to the mural painting, squinting as they compare blurry printouts to the scaled up versions half-finished on the wall. Aerosol writers seek out big walls in blighted spots, places with clearly absent landlords, that correspond with areas of high visual impact. Spots viewed by many people are prized: those visible from a freeway, or at the intersection of busy streets. They see the city as a canvas, one not bounded by flat square walls, but extending through doorways and around corners. The visual imaginary for the urban farmers is an urban oasis with orderly rows of deep green, nutrient-dense vegetables, cute borders with flowers . In theory, people are included in this urban oasis but they are not fore-fronted. This point is highlighted by the fact that it took so long to put tables in at Union Plaza & Fitzgerald Parks after seating areas were removed during park construction; it was something that was not central to City Slicker Farms’ mission, yet it affected the experience of the park users tremendously. In practice, all City Slickers gardens are locked and people are only allowed inside during specific days and times and under supervision.
The nonprofit understandably has a need for control, because they measure their production, weighing their harvest and recording the stats. As a nonprofit, they must constantly prove their effectiveness in reports to their donors. Blueberry bushes outside the fence are the concession: their weight goes unrecorded, because they are put in place for anyone who might need a snack and the cupboard is unlocked. As Anna Tsing asserts, “Biological and social diversity huddle defensively in neglected margins. In urban jungles as well as rural backwaters, the jumble of diversity that imperial planners tend to consider excessive still teems.” Other groups huddle in the margins with strikingly different imaginaries. Scavengers congregate in Fitzgerald Park and earn money by collecting bottles and cans from recycling and trash bins and bringing them to the scrap metal dealer, Alliance Recycling, located across the street. Their visual imaginaries are centered on maximizing resource acquisition while still staying under the radar of vigilant homeowners or police who may object to this technically not-fully-legal activity. Their day starts long before dawn, with most scavengers working on foot, slinging a bag over their shoulder, or using shopping carts or bicycles, which allows roaming slightly farther from the recycling plant to find treasure. Use of a car increases capacity and distance exponentially, but not many have them. Scavengers have clear routes they’ve worked out based on their home base, transportation constraints, and power dynamics.
They finish their routes for the day and then socialize in the park across from Alliance Recycling, adjacent to the urban farm, in patterns similar to those noted by Gowan in her ethnography of San Francisco homeless scavengers . Not all scavengers are homeless, but many of the homeless are scavengers. The visual imaginary for the homeless shares an appreciation of weedy edges. Their imagined landscape prioritizes invisibility, seeking it out. It is marked by places they can rest where they won’t be harassed and can escape notice, places where they find temporary safety: seating areas, dry places to sleep under highway bridges, almost invisible paths leading to secret canopies under bushes. They look for wild spaces. The homeless embody the wildness in our cities, which is one reason why the forces of order – the police, the homeowners, the Condo Associations, the developers – are scared of them. They look for the black holes in the urban landscape, the places where rules are bent. Anything can happen there . For a long time, Union Plaza & Fitzgerald Parks were one of these places – a place where rules were suspended, outcasts congregated, possibilities multiplied. Proximity to wildness makes a lot of people nervous; those who were unnerved turned to the ultimate civilizing influence: agriculture. They sought a cultivated, orderly space. The visual imaginary for the condo owners who live around the urban farm is in stark contrast with the scavengers. Condos project an aura of newness and hipness; people who buy them generally care about design and have more money than time. They can expect to have fewer repairs on new construction, and their monthly condo association dues pay for landscaping and external maintenance. They therefore have professionally landscaped yards, containing only ornamentals, no edibles. By design, newly built condos provide no encouragement of scavengers or foragers, and because the sites were generally bulldozed and newly built to the edges of the lots, the lots don’t tend to include mature trees – the buildings often erase the botanical history of anyone who has lived there before them. The designs are modern and sleek, ranging in quality from Architectural Digest to strip mall design. Everything is legal, orderly, and there are no people. None of the condos in the neighborhood have lawns, front gardens containing space to socialize, or stoops to sit on; all social life happens in individual units or individual backyards. Condo owners generally have defined trajectories in space. They exit their houses, get in cars: car to house, house to car. They walk their small dogs around the same blocks. It is an orderly existence, large plastic gardening pots designed to be so. Video cameras and home security measures are prominent. When surveyed about their use of the only park in their neighborhood, many of the condo owners didn’t feel that they could say they had actually been to the park, and when asked would reply, “Well, I’ve driven by the park,” or “I’ve walked my dog past the park. Does that count?” The last visual imaginary is that of the long-term resident, often but not always African-American, who looms large for each of the organizations we have discussed . Each is uniquely attuned to them as a key part of their mission – the long-term resident is who each seeks to assist, appease and ultimately, discipline. Residents are to be respected for their long-term status in the community, yet as a group they inspire anxiety – over whether they’re eating enough vegetables, whether they’re politically empowered, how they earn a living.
All three groups hope their projects result in behavioral changes and new discipline, new subjectivities . Clearly these imaginaries are in conflict, in some cases at war: over landscape and visual markers indicating race, class, gentrification; war with visual markers of territory, over who gets to inscribe space ; a war of categories ; a war of habitus . New collaborations between city government and non-profits do not appear on the surface to be driven by a central profit motive and seem outside the main current of the capitalist model, if perhaps still caught in a side eddy. Painting murals? Giving away low-cost vegetables? However, the idea of cities turning over portions of their functions and services to outside organizations has a long-standing precedent within a neoliberal push towards smaller city governments. The city-nonprofit collaborations are conceived of by the politicians involved as creative, progressive solutions, and they are presented as such to their constituents. The City Council voted unanimously to turn a city park into an urban farm by giving control of it to City Slicker Farms. But from another angle it could be viewed as turning public property and public space into private property, thereby changing who has access and rights to that space . This is a deeply capitalist mode of thinking. In terms of a mural, although some might object to its content, most feel that the addition of art to a neighborhood is an improvement. However, does the presence of a mural mean an abdication of city function – is it no longer the city’s job to pick up trash, remove gang symbols, keep the city beautiful? There is a direct correlation between murals being funded and cuts in Public Works, especially a reduction in city staff assigned to abatement. So while on one hand it seems progressive for a city to support more art, from another it is a deeper entanglement in a more neoliberal model of government. In this war, food and art, space and signs are tools. Condo owners have the tools of power and law on their side: police, property developers, and Council members support them. Condo owners are tax payers, they are the people who show up to community meetings, they are the squeaky wheels. The tools of the scavengers and homeless are their ability to be inconspicuous, by moving around in early morning hours or late at night. When their bodies become visible, they are targets.They have their feet and their mobility as tools. When a space becomes problematic, they move on and find a new one. The aerosol writers have their imagery and spray cans as tools, and their ingenuity in choosing locations. They have their political savviness as a tool. When they are painted over by city abatement employees, someone goes out at night and scrawls up phone numbers of city officials to call in protest. The urban farmers have literal tools: trowels, hoses, wheelbarrows. The garden produce itself is a tool, both in the way they intend it – as a tool to fight food insecurity in the neighborhood – but it is also a tool that serves to justify their control of the space. They argue that they grow food for the community good, so their use trumps other possible park uses. Other tools are their nonprofit status, their innocuousness, their aura of goodness. They inscribe the space, cultivate it, erect fences, signs, plant perennials, put down roots. They are disciplining the space and by extension the people who use it simply by their presence. Their race and middle class markers tame the space and make it acceptable for capitalist investment to rush in. The visual imaginaries of the aerosol writers and City Slickers are aligned in their bid to bring color and life to areas they see as deserts, but they diverge in important ways. Both are clearly in conflict with the imaginaries of the city government and condo owners, who use language such as “cleaning up” a space, “bringing it back” or maintaining order, to talk about their ideals for urban spaces. Blight is a key catchphrase in all of the imaginaries, used in different ways and to enact different purposes. Certainly ideas of neoliberalism and colonization engage here with local questions of poverty, food insecurity, and gentrification in a sticky local encounter. Every mural site and urban farm exemplifies “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” .