Cities Don't Need to Regulate Arts and Culture

(Source: Unsplash/Cajeo Zhang.)

I’m not on Instagram much these days, but sometimes I open it to look at the last few photos I posted when I was more active. One photo that always gets me a tiny bit emotional is one of the last photos I posted from my kitchen in Brooklyn before I moved to Texas. I had just returned from the Chinatown markets in Manhattan, where I had purchased fresh produce: cherries, bokchoy, blueberries, and broccoli. Back home, I arranged my bounty into pretty bowls on the kitchen counter and snapped a shot. 

As a New Yorker, Chinatown was one of my favorite neighborhoods to visit. I once worked in a coffee shop not far from there, so I would often just stroll about after my shift. But sometimes, I’d make a Saturday adventure of it. Not only did I appreciate the more affordably priced groceries, but I never got tired of wandering up and down the crowded streets, staring at baskets full of herbs and medicines I couldn’t identify, buckets of pungent seafood, and windows displaying roasting chickens and ducks. 

I was fascinated by ordinary life happening all around me: old Chinese men playing board games, women bartering, vendors hustling back and forth, their faces glimmering with sweat, laundry flapping in the air above my head. And then of course, there were cheap dumplings and scallion pancakes at Vanessa’s. 

For a young woman who has a deep love of international cities, cultures, and languages, but a limited budget for globetrotting, this was always a delightful way to defy the constraints of space and budget. With a $2.75 swipe of my metro card and 20 or so minutes on the train, I could step into another world. I felt similarly when visiting the Korean restaurants in midtown or Sahadi’s, a Middle Eastern market in Brooklyn. 

Now, living in Texas, I still love a chance to explore international markets when I can. I recently wandered around the Asian grocery store inside Cali Saigon Mall, a Vietnamese mall in Garland Texas. The scent of various types of pho and sandwiches greeted me as I wandered around the food halls. In the grocery store, I moseyed up and down the aisles, amazed at the unique gastronomic options on display for sale, but even more so at how an entire shopping mall felt like a portal to another country. 

During a similar adventure just before Christmas, my husband and I mustered up the courage to drive to Houston for his nephew’s college graduation, rewarding ourselves for enduring the city’s infamous traffic with a trip to Hillcroft, a neighborhood known for its abundance of Indian shops and, most importantly, its restaurants. We had plans to get lunch at a highly rated Indian buffet before heading home. 

But first, we angled the car into a popular shopping center populated almost entirely with the kinds of shops relevant to members of the Indian community: several sari stores, jewelry shops, and halal groceries to name a few. Rob thought I might like a chance to explore the shops, but I shook my head.

Don’t get me wrong: It wasn’t the content of the stores that put me off. It was the design of the shopping center. We wanted to get an idea of what life was like in this unique cultural pocket of Houston, but life itself—the people, the food, the clothes, the music—was literally impossible to see, having been ushered inside buildings and sequestered by a sea of parking. There were no organic transition points between the city and this neighborhood, no public spaces that made it possible to observe rhythms of life, and no infrastructure for wandering around. Our only option was to park, shuffle into each store one at a time, and try to not look awkward while walking around under the gaze of a salesperson. 

I didn’t want that kind of experience; it felt intrusive and voyeuristic to me. What I wanted was to see the culture of this neighborhood happening all around me. I wanted to see women taking their daughters to buy a new outfit, cooks grilling meat for take-out orders, families buying sweets at the local bakery, teenagers laughing at a silly joke while sipping drinks at an outdoor table. I wanted to slip into a gently flowing river of everyday life and take it in slowly, content to observe with appreciation. 

But the reality is, seeing this kind of organic culture in most cities is extremely difficult due to their design. Cultural exploration and appreciation in most North American cities is a matter of preplanning, driving, and parking, not simply moseying around various neighborhoods on foot, as a wandering explorer would do. For Houston, a city with notable cultural diversity and density, this is a particular tragedy. Such a city should be designed in such a way to showcase its various neighborhoods, yet its leading reputation is not as a thriving metropolis of diverse neighborhoods, but rather as a city choked by traffic. 

While Houston’s cultural offerings seem to have established a reputation for itself despite its competing reputation as a sprawled-out, car-choked hellscape, countless other American cities are constantly trying to figure out how to put themselves on the cultural map, whether by revitalizing their downtowns in a particularly interesting way, welcoming farmer’s markets, throwing fairs, or executing intense cultural campaigns on social media. There’s a constant struggle to figure out how to revitalize, encourage, and showcase the kind of artistic and cultural expression that makes cities distinct from each other.  

A few years ago, I won a grant to travel to various cities studying how they would attract what Richard Florida called the “creative class.” Florida saw the likes of hipsters, cultured gay couples, and artists as the indicator species of the kinds of places that could attract creative, well-paid knowledge workers (and thus their employers). At the time, cities were issuing out all kinds of incentives to get these kinds of folks to move in, with the hope that they could infuse their downtowns with vibrancy, intrigue, and, well, money. In short, cities were hoping they could help their downtowns function the way they used to with no central planning: as a vibrant stage for life itself, not as a stage for driving. 

The creative class buzz has quieted down since then, but cities whose downtowns have been gutted by urban renewal, car dependence, and suburbanization are still trying to exert a sense of identity, pride, and distinction, yet too many of them also continue to embrace the kind of economic development and car-commuter-oriented policies that killed their neighborhoods and organic arts and culture in the first place.  

True revitalization would not look like paying thousands of dollars to consultants and wasting money on top-down Arts and Culture programming. True revitalization would mean first realizing that your city, in having people, already has culture. What you need to do is get rid of the barriers that make it hard for that creative identity to shine, barriers like car-centric streets and public spaces, parking mandates, complicated small business regulations, and disheartening administrative permitting processes that threaten to kill innovative ideas before they see the light of day.  

I have a friend currently experiencing this firsthand. A lifelong Texan, Kate is trying to bring a spring festival to the downtown of her city this year. (Kate is a pseudonym, and she has asked me not to name the city, so as not to adversely affect her battle with local regulators.) Imagine balloons, live music, water activities for kids, local business booths, and food trucks. “We want to exude hospitality in a space that people have disregarded and show them the gems that are down here.” Gems like museums, coffee shops, vintage stores, and murals by local artists… All things that most folks in her city avoid because of downtown’s current lackluster reputation.

She’s been working on this plan for almost a year and running into exasperating pushback from city departments who she says are driven by fear. Fear of disrupting downtown traffic patterns, fear of any downtown revitalization efforts that come from citizens rather than the official staffers (thereby threatening their jobs), fear of another public health crisis, fear of angering business owners who might not want streets closed, and fear of encouraging future citizen-led downtown programming that’s not part of the “official” plan. 

So far, the city has refused to give her permission to block off streets on downtown’s Main Street, even though a walkable downtown is in their long-term plan. The only street they gave her was one that butted up to the jailhouse and bail bond shops, hardly the location for a family-friendly event. Not just that, but complying with health codes would prohibitively drive up costs for her and each vendor and even then, the health department has a reputation for being unpredictable. 

These kinds of problems extend beyond her festival. She has heard of business owners receiving failure-to-comply notices after the business has already been opened and they’ve spent thousands of dollars trying to keep up with the rules. “There’s still a chance even if you abide by the rules, you can still suffer resistance.” Kate told me this kind of capriciousness makes every aspiring business owner nervous and afraid to invest their resources into a new venture. 

She credits her success so far to a behind-the-scenes group of wealthy, longtime residents who want their city to be seen as a place where any resident can make change happen, not just “old families with money.” She recognizes many people trying to do something similar in other cities aren’t likely to have this kind of support. “It makes me frustrated for people who don’t have friends in high places and who are more timid.” 

Since they can't get a permit for a car-free Main Street, Kate is working on some alternative plans. In the meantime, she told me she wished city leaders would think carefully about constantly telling people “no” and leading with fear. “At some point, the discontent with…’no’ is going to hit fever pitch. If you don’t want to be in a position where you’re at odds with the community, then you need to figure out a way to truly pursue your mandate, as opposed to placating whatever liability concerns you have.” 

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