Volume 10, Issue 2, 2013
Aesthetic Values and the Process of Civilization
Geoffrey Skoll
Pages 49-70
The Art of Living Together
How Artistic Work Makes the Moral Bonds of a Community
A neighborhood in a US city seems to present a possibly unique exception to empirical generalizations and explanations of urban decline and occasional rehabilitation. Resisting decline, gentrification, and outside interests and actors, the neighborhood generated a subculture created by working class artists. As a valuable occasion for revising urban social theory, this essay draws on the work of Howard S. Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, Henri Lefebvre, Jacques Rancière, and Georg Simmel, among others. It relies on ethnographic method for its empirical findings.