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This work transforms and embraces the constant change that, as Berridge rightly insists, typifies urbanlife. But the transformation envisioned by community arts is different from that envisioned by the conceptof the Creative City. The goal of community arts work is not, as far as I understand it, to turn Davenportand Perth, for example, or Mabelle in Etobicoke, into internationally renowned boulevards of the arts. Itis to examine and honour the complexities of specific places and the people who live and have lived (andleft a trace) in them. Such work challenges the idea that there are some places that matter and others thatdon’t. It shows us why oft-neglected places and people do matter.Authentic Urban Environments?Not only is there the possibility that building the Creative City will lead to less diverse neighbourhoods,there is also the possibility that it will lead to less interesting neighbourhoods. Ironically, the search forauthenticity that is so central to Creative City discourse undercuts the authentic differences betweenplaces. Geographer Jamie Peck argues that cities striving to increase their creativity according toFlorida’s criteria have in fact applied a shockingly generic approach, reducing local character rather thanemphasizing it. “Increased public subsidies for the arts, street level spectacles and urban facades, withexpected ‘returns’ in the form of gentrification and tourist income, run the self-evident risk that such fauxfunkyattractions might lapse into their own kind of ‘generica’”, he warns. 22 Peck points out that citiesstriving to become more creative have employed a narrow repertoire of strategies, primarily consistingof the conversion of old factory buildings into lofts and cafes and the redevelopment of post-industrialwaterfronts.Community art practices, conversely, are anything but formulaic. They are deeply rooted in context.Just as Jumblies’ work at Davenport Perth reflects the local demographic, when Jumblies works in theEtobicoke neighbourhood of Mabelle the art that emerges is in both Somali and English, rehearsalsare held in the basement of a community housing high rise, and sewing and cross-cultural tea-drinkingbecome central to the artistic practice.35
ConclusionIn the late afternoon of Art at the Hub conference participants were asked to sketch their dreams forideal community “hubs”. Parks, farmers markets and sunny cafes were drawn and then added to acollective vision of the perfect neighbourhood or ‘hub’. Left out of this rosy picture were the social andaesthetic tensions that inevitably shape community art practices. Whatever the intention of the exercise,its framework left little room to address the complexities of real communities and the attendant challengesand beauty of collective art making in those communities – a subject with which many who were in theroom that day are expertly familiar. Instead the exercise encouraged us to dream of ourselves as agentsof revitalization, as creative ‘place-makers’. Where we might have begun a discussion about the currentrealities of the places we work in, we began by envisioning a utopia, a non-place. Perhaps obscured bythe benign images we were creating, here was a room of community artists being positioned as Berridge’sregeneration bulldozers. The possibility that we might bulldoze ourselves, and the people we work with,right out of the picture, loomed but stayed out of the public conversation.I want to urge community artists to engage with the Creative City agenda critically and cautiously. Weneed to judge each creative initiative on its own merit, using social inclusion as a key lens through whichto gauge that merit. We need to ask ourselves whether any given festival or cultural development brings uscloser to the kind of city to which we want to contribute. And we need to ask hard questions about whois included and who is left out when revitalized neighbourhoods are discussed. As people engaged in thework of transforming and beautifying neighbourhoods, community artists have a tricky role to play. Atevery step along the way we need to ask ourselves: are we contributing to socially inclusive transformationor are we bulldozing the very people and histories that make each place we work in matter?Maggie HutchesonMaggie Hutcheson works as a writer, researcher, teacher and community-based artist. She has conducted research for CBC’s Canada:A People’s History, produced videos and trained youth in video for Jumblies and co-produced a nine-piece bilingual video set for theVIVA! Project, a transnational study of community art and popular education in the Americas. Recently Maggie was lead audioand video artist for We Are Here: The Monument Project (with Leah Houston, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, 2008) and leadinstallation artist for the 2008 and 2009 productions of Jumblies’ Oy di velt vern yinger. Maggie is currently working on a PhDon place-based art practices and teaches in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University.36
Page 1 and 2: Dispatches from artists on the loos
Page 3 and 4: IntroductionThis publication was co
Page 6 and 7: As with the word prayer, I may be u
Page 8 and 9: Surrender and AttentionWhat Communi
Page 10 and 11: The conditions that create Sanvega
Page 14 and 15: I start the ball rolling as the fir
Page 16 and 17: Roy gives it away in his halting de
Page 18 and 19: We try it together, forced into the
Page 20 and 21: I see her full face for the first t
Page 22: Sound poems and graphic scores by E
Page 27 and 28: MarianMy father didn’t let me go
Page 29: Later during our tea time, Mona hur
Page 32 and 33: The community artist in the Creativ
Page 34 and 35: according to Creative Class Group,
Page 38 and 39: Notes1Berridge, Joe. Afternoon Pane
Page 40: Out Of Place is a collection of wri

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