In 2009, the developer Tony Goldman commissioned a group of artists to paint the exterior walls of a cluster of warehouses in a Miami neighborhood called Wynwood. The neighborhood was, at the time, a light industrial district with a large Puerto Rican population, a handful of galleries, and very little foot traffic. The murals were intended to attract visitors during Art Basel Miami Beach. They succeeded beyond anyone's expectations.
Within five years, Wynwood had become one of the most photographed neighborhoods in the United States. The murals were the draw, but what followed was the full apparatus of urban gentrification: galleries, restaurants, boutiques, and eventually luxury residential development. Property values increased by several hundred percent. The original residents and businesses were displaced. The artists who had made the neighborhood interesting moved on.
The Formula
Wynwood is not unique. The same pattern has played out in neighborhoods across the United States: the Mission in San Francisco, Bushwick in Brooklyn, the Arts District in Los Angeles. Artists move into cheap industrial space. They make the neighborhood interesting. Developers notice. Rents rise. Artists leave. The neighborhood becomes a simulacrum of the creative district it once was.
The art district formula is not a failure of urban policy. It is urban policy working exactly as designed. Cities have learned that arts districts increase property values, and they have learned to cultivate them accordingly. The artists are the instrument of a process that ultimately excludes them. This is not an accident. It is the logic of the market applied to culture.
What Wynwood Is Now
Wynwood today is a theme park version of itself. The murals are still there — new ones are commissioned regularly, maintaining the visual identity that drives tourism — but the neighborhood they decorate is no longer the neighborhood that produced them. It is a hospitality district with a street art aesthetic.
This is not to say that Wynwood is without value. The murals are genuinely impressive. The restaurants are good. The neighborhood is lively in a way that many American urban districts are not. But it is lively in a particular way — the way of a place designed for consumption rather than habitation — and that distinction matters.
The question that Wynwood raises, and that no American city has satisfactorily answered, is how to preserve the conditions that make creative neighborhoods possible without destroying those conditions in the process of recognizing them. It is a question about the relationship between culture and capital, and the answer, so far, is that capital wins.