the Think Tank that has yet to be named

“Community” in Question: Conversations and readings on art, activism, and community vis-à-vis the Green Line Expansion

Posted by DIM on April 5, 2009

• Participating Directors:
• Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Cross-Pollination (DICP)
• Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Neutrality and Palatability (DINP)
• Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Meaning (DIM)
• Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Metaphorical Agency (DIMetA)
• Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Performance Anxiety (DIPA)
• Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Tactical Education (DITE)

The Think Tank that has yet to be named presents a walking workshop entitled “Community” in Question: Conversations and readings on art, activism, and community vis-à-vis the Green Line Expansion, in which we collectively investigate the proposed public transportation expansion (MBTA Green Line) into Somerville-Medford and examine how residents respond to (both for and against) changes in transportation and how transportation effects their cities. Leaving from the Tufts University campus, our walking and talking followed a portion of the proposed route of the Green Line expansion, visited 2 proposed T stop locations, and then culminated at Davis Square Red Line T stop.

Download the accompanying reader: 25 Texts on “Community” In Question: Conversations on Art, Activism, and Community and appendix: History & Resources on the MBTA Green Line Expansion

Directors of the Think Tank that has yet to be named presented this workshop for a conference entitled “Convergence: The Intersection of Arts and Activism” at Tufts University in early April 2009. Co-sponsored by the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and Massachusetts Campus Compact, the conference gathered together artists, activists, and educators interested in social justice and the arts.

The Long Version…

We (The Think Tank that has yet to be named) propose to explore the idea of community and the many assumptions, ambiguities, and boundaries that inform this powerful and oft-cited trope found in contemporary urban society. Our project involves two convergent courses of research with respect to community — one general and one topical. Generally, we will address the nominal subject of this conference: the relationship between art and activism; topically, we will undertake a case study local to Somerville-Medford: the relationship between gentrification and the expansion of Boston’s public transit system. We believe that to better understand how community is defined — that is, created, delineated, cohered, dissolved, complicated, contested, infiltrated, invaded, and generally transformed — will prove instructive for guiding our — artists’ and activists’ — capacity for collaborating with diverse groups of people in the struggles for social, spatial, and economic justice.

As the title and theme of this conference indicates, there has been a growing conversation around what it means to be an artist working as an activist or an activist working as an artist. We are concerned by this notion of artists employing the tools of activism, because few seem to be astutely addressing key questions: What is gained when artistic and activist frameworks merge? Who profits? Is an artistic engagement with other fields highly superficial, or is effective work being done to benefit those constituencies and communities with which artists work? Is our work merely symbolic, as does it act directly and affect measurable change in the world? What is the relationship between artists and the communities they may work with? We ask these questions of ourselves, because we are a group comprised of community organizers, activists, and artists who must continually readdress the art-activism duality.

Turning to the specific and the specifically local, the problems of defining community become very apparent when considering the proposed expansion of the MBTA Green Line into Somerville and Medford. The expansion, with stops in Union and Ball Squares, will affect the areas immediately surrounding Tufts University, much like the 1980s expansion of the Red Line into Davis Square. By looking into the historical record and colloquial memory surrounding the Davis Square extension, we hope to gather a basis for questioning the effects of the newly proposed transit expansion. The character of Davis Square is said to have changed quite a bit since the completion of the Red Line station in 1984. More money and business came to the Square, more public art and new infrastructure; but with this also came increasing rents that, when coupled with the loss of rent control and other public housing assistance, ultimately displaced lower income residents away from the new station. This indicates a tension between the desire for more public transportation (less reliance on cars, potentially more efficient and environmentally sensitive) with the potential gentrifying consequences of such public transportation expansion, especially those expansions that connect high-end urban centers with outlying neighborhoods. We hope to examine how residents respond to (both for and against) changes in transportation and how transportation effects their cities and neighborhoods in order to further investigate key questions about the nature of community.

The tools and tactics we will use to execute these overlapping analyses of community are: creating an educational reader on community, organizing PHPMs within Somerville-Medford involving key stakeholders of the MBTA expansion, and facilitating a workshop within the Convergence conference that presents this dialogue in order to frame a critical conversation with conference participants about the notion of community and how artists (and activists) engage productively in the communities they wish to collaborate with.

KEYWORDS: community, gentrification, phpm, place, projects