Taking Root Without Taking Over

Two Case Studies on the Micropolitics Between Art, Gentrification, and Agency

By Dahlia El Broul


“Is there a way to act together in cities that are increasingly dividing us? Many see artists and galleries as a bellwether for the first wave of displacement of low-income individuals and families in economically vulnerable communities.

This book examines how cultural institutions—including galleries and universities—play a role in gentrification through a qualitative research methodology, using two neighbourhoods as case studies, and by interviewing five locals from each district.

The thesis seeks to go beyond a moralistic binary of separating good from bad practices—instead cultivating ways to address the various entanglements and contradictions within gentrification processes and among cultural workers, who find themselves at the intersection of agency and precarity.

The first locality I examined was Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, USA, where arguments made by rooted residents dragged art spaces out of the sanctum of tacit valorisation. Here, a clear politicised conflict exposed art and the cultural spaces of display/inquiry, as neither harmless, neutral, nor apolitical.

Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion become the framework for a subtle and gradual encroachment in Nord Holland, Kassel, Germany, the second area of my research. I wanted to go beyond using the two locations as a comparison, to preferably lay out on the table the multitudes of solidarities, fractures, traumas, and contradictions.”

—Dahlia El Broul