Did You Hear? Mavericks Is Closing!” Punk Refusal of Gentrified Endings

Bibliographic Data

ID13100705
AuthorsSarah Gelbard (0000-0003-0738-2710, McGill University, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume9
Issue1
Pages211-229
Publication date2023-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeoHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2373-5678 • E-ISSN: 2373-566X
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/2373566x.2023.2180418
OpenAlexW4365504111
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited28

Decades of experience with closed, relocated, and renamed venues, make punks very familiar with cycles of gentrification. Often established in edge neighborhoods, punk venues participate in reproducing the “grit” of urban decline and subculture. Urban revitalization plans that promise community, livability, and culture, rarely leave spaces for established punk community and subculture. The newly branded Retail, Arts, and Theatre District in Ottawa, Canada is a case study in cultural urban development that operationalizes creative placemaking and its future-oriented visions of urban revitalization through cultural spaces and activities. Although the city’s Official Plan celebrates that existing cultural venues add diversity to the district, the pressure placed on punk venues by surrounding development reveal that not all venues are to be recognized by the city as legitimate or desirable forms of either diversity or culture. Close readings of official city planning documents, urban histories, development proposals, and marketing literature are juxtaposed with auto-ethnographic, storytelling, punk histories, and song writing. I argue that punk counter-cultural placemaking practices provide counter-information, counter-environments, and counter-temporalities to space in the city to resist gentrification and refuse displacement as endings. Gentrification kills punk. But punk always comes back, finds new places, haunts old sites, and remembers its past

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Civil engineering · Gentrification · Media studies · Placemaking · Punk · Sociology · Subculture (biology · Urban design · Visual arts · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Engineering · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Music History and Culture · Architecture

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