Abstract
Frederick F. Wherry’s The Philadelphia Barrio: The Arts, Branding, and Neighborhood Transformation draws on the author’s ethnography of a traditionally Puerto Rican Philadelphia neighborhood to explore the role of the arts and branding in neighborhood change. Wherry writes against an established tradition in urban scholarship that presents a portrait of an unambiguous alliance between the arts, branding, and the upscaling and commercialization of the contemporary city, particularly of global cities that promote their desirability as tourist destinations. His book demonstrates that it is a mistake to presume that all arts endeavors or even branding projects are explicitly geared toward neighborhood transformation. Instead, he suggests that scholars ought to treat the relations between these urban forces as empirical questions worthy of careful analysis.
This rejoinder to a central tenet of contemporary urban scholarship is refreshing, and The Philadelphia Barrio is poised to encourage a spate of similar inquiries. Wherry’s book calls urbanists and others to ask and document precisely how culture works in cities, and to take seriously how actors on the ground wish for culture to work. Moreover, following Mario Small, he cautions against the notion that attitudes in a single neighborhood are homogeneous, demonstrating how cohort membership influences orientations to the neighborhood, the arts, and change processes. His rich data come from neighborhood parties, parades, meetings, and interviews with residents, particularly with arts administrators and business owners.
One of the book’s greatest strengths can also be interpreted as at least a partial limitation. That is, the neighborhood change—attitudes about which are at the center of Wherry’s inquiry—around which the book is organized is presented in somewhat ambiguous terms. Is Wherry’s neighborhood gentrifying? If so, what stage of gentrification has it reached? Might the relation between the arts, branding, and gentrification be less ambiguous in a neighborhood in which the march of gentrification is itself less ambiguous? Wherry rarely uses the term “gentrification,” favoring terms such as “transforming” and “revitalization” instead. Nor does he engage with much of the gentrification literature—despite the fact that a handful of gentrification scholars have posed similarly skeptical questions about the role of culture and place promotion in gentrification processes, and level related criticisms about the dominance of an account that regards local culture as inevitably manipulated to serve elites’ interests.
In one sense, Wherry’s casting of neighborhood change in alternate terms is a missed opportunity to speak directly to the gentrification literature, particularly to gentrification scholars who seek to intervene in similar debates. That said, this ambiguity with regard to neighborhood change is also an asset, for it renders the neighborhood as its residents experience it: as neither disinvested nor gentrified, as changing but not yet changed. That is, it serves as a reminder that—especially for actors on the ground—neighborhoods are not always decidedly “gentrified” or, alternately, “disinvested”; this is vitally important, for the ambiguity of neighborhood change processes that Wherry’s book implicitly identifies guides his informants’ attitudes and behaviors with regard to the arts, neighborhood identity, and branding. Moreover, casting his neighborhood beyond or outside of the gentrification vocabulary enables Wherry to make an argument about how culture and the arts work in the city that speaks not only to questions pertaining to gentrification, but also to many other dimensions of contemporary urban life. This approach seems increasingly appropriate in a period in which gentrification has become part and parcel of urban life in many large, U.S. cities.
Taking up the questions that Wherry’s book invites, other scholars ought to inquire into whether all “branding” is aimed at transformation, as opposed to more narrowly bolstering neighborhood identity and pride. Future research might ask more generally whether all cultural efforts that take place in cities ought to be thought of as a “branding” effort. Surely long before cities engaged in official branding campaigns, residents engaged in the labor and play of neighborhood distinction and identity celebration. Must we, in the contemporary context, consider this work to be “branding”? In addition, the book opens the door for questions about how the arts and branding work differently in Philadelphia than in a city such as New York, which has been the focus of much scholarship on neighborhood promotion, the arts, and gentrification. In short, The Philadelphia Barrio reveals just how much we have yet to learn about culture and contemporary cities.
A broad range of scholars should read and assign this book. Wherry’s vivid descriptions bring to life on the page an understudied neighborhood in an understudied city, and the text makes a significant and timely intervention in scholarship on culture, the arts, branding, and urban change. For this reason, it is a must-read for urban scholars from a variety of disciplines, those who study the arts, and more generally, those who inquire into culture and what it does or accomplishes. Moreover, ethnographers will find Wherry’s careful consideration of his position in the field instructive, and the text can be productively assigned in methods courses. In sum, The Philadelphia Barrio, with its rich portrait of neighborhood life and timely theoretical interventions, is an ethnography we will read for years to come.