Double Double, Toil and Trouble
In the early hours of November 12, 2009, a fire engulfed several buildings at the corner of Main and Broadway, a few blocks away from my apartment. On my way to work, I stopped to survey the scene. A number of the storefronts, including a popular diner, had collapsed. The night before, I’d noticed that Lugz, an independent coffee shop in the vicinity, was beginning renovations; post-fire, its structure remained intact but was ravaged by smoke. Firefighters trained a hose on the charred wreckage. I overheard one of the restaurant owners being interviewed by a camera crew: “I can start over, but it will never be quite the same,” he said. It was a sad day for the neighbourhood.
A couple of months later, I read that a Tim Hortons was planned to open in the old bank at the southwest corner of Main and Broadway, adjacent to the site of the fire. Word that these plans were in motion before the fire didn’t quell the sense of outrage palpable in online communities, and once the “Coming Soon: Tim Hortons” sign was posted on the storefront, it wasn’t long before the following graffiti appeared:
Photo: flickr user eych-you-bee-eee-aht-tee
(More recently, the same “branding” was sprayed onto the front of the Ginger condo development in Chinatown. A photograph can be viewed at http://www.flickr.com/photos/entheos_fog/4918004231.)
Shortly thereafter, the Tim Hortons sign was moved out of the line of aerosol, inside the shop’s windows, and the graffiti painted over—just another layer in the palimpsest that is a city. But this visible mark of dissent seemed to strike a chord with an angry subset of Mount Pleasant residents (who, it should be noted, love their coffee: by my count, there are at a dozen coffee shops within a four-block radius, including three Starbucks). The singling-out of Tim Hortons as a “gentrifier” gave me reason for pause. The term “gentrification” has been used—and some would argue, misused—in many ways, both pejorative and optimistic. Here, I understand it to mean “the transition of inner-city neighbourhoods from a status of relative poverty and limited property investment to a state of commodification and reinvestment” (Ley 2003:2527). The term generally encompasses a large-scale shift that happens over an extended period of time, and cannot be localized to a specific agent. I note that the demarcation of space and related politics of resistance implied by the graffiti have specific resonance with Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on tensions between cultural and economic capital, as interpreted by David Ley in the context of gentrification, and also with Jürgen Habermas’s theories on the public sphere.
The Mount Pleasant neighbourhood (or “SoMa,” short for “South Main,” as it has been designated by some condo marketers, much to my chagrin) is known for its bohemian sensibility and artist population. The charge of “gentrifier,” leveled by an artist of some sort, addresses the looming presence of a national chain threatens the urban neighbourhood’s character and individuality: urbanity imagines itself cloaked in a dull coat of suburban homogeneity and despairs.
In “Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification,” David Ley, a member of the UBC Geography Department, observes that “gentrification has become not a sideshow in the city, but a major component of the urban imaginary” (2003:2527). Following Bourdieu, he examines the artists’ role in processes of gentrification within the field of cultural production: they have high cultural capital but low economic capital, the latter of which becomes a point of pride and prestige (Ley 2003). Artists seek low-cost rental housing in older neighbourhoods, often with dense immigrant populations; eventually, their accrued cultural capital entices “spatial proximity by other professionals to the inner-city habitus of the artist” (Ley 2003:2527)—individuals who bring high economic capital in hopes of exchanging it for some of this symbolic capital.
One of the sculptors Ley interviews provides this explanation of the artistic community’s need to preserve what they consider the space’s authenticity:
Artists need authentic locations. You know artists hate the suburbs. They’re too confining. Every artist is an anthropologist, unveiling culture. It helps to get some distance on that culture in an environment that does not share all of its presuppositions, an old area, socially diverse, including poverty groups. (qtd .in Ley, 2003:2534).
After mapping Bourdieu’s field of cultural production onto the dynamics of space involved in gentrification, Ley points out that we cannot blame the artists for instigating these shifts, for “it is the societal valorisation of the cultural competencies of the artist that brings followers richer in economic capital” (2003:2541).
Going back to our Mount Pleasant graffiti artist with this knowledge in mind, it seems there is indeed an obligation to wage these kinds of public battles on the very landscape being contested in order to sustain the tension between cultural and economic capital that areas like Mount Pleasant were built on. The fact that the artist produced a stencil that was used in more than one location suggests it is part of a larger project—gesturing toward the soulless reproduction of mass culture while performing a uniform judgment at, presumably, a number of locations. It resists consumerism in the name of aesthetic legitimacy; the fact that a Tim Hortons coffee might be the cheapest coffee option available in an putatively less affluent neighbourhood is beside the point. But to my nose, there is a whiff of elitism about it—why not let the free market determine which businesses will succeed? Why is Tim Hortons, with its working class Canadian connotations, worse than (three) Starbucks? And in a neighbourhood reputed for its proliferation of “hipsters,” self-appointed arbiters of “cool”—another form of symbolic capital—could it be that the graffiti is really speaking out for taste rather than class?
Still, perhaps another factor worth considering is the nature of the targeted business. In “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” Jürgen Habermas theorized coffee houses, along with salons, as important sites of public discourse—particularly in the literary domain—as well as “seedbeds of political unrest” (1991:59) that exist between the private realm of civil society and the authority of the state (1991:30). Starbucks CEO Howard Schulz has spoken of positioning his stores as a “third space”: a communal space between home and work (Goldin 2006). Perhaps the graffiti accusation was meant to criticize the fact that unlike Starbucks, Tim Hortons makes no pretension to being a public space. Tim Hortons locations often post time limits on how long one can sit at their tables, and to my knowledge don’t offer free WiFi or sell CDs, as Starbucks does. Perhaps the graffiti was an attempt to reclaim this space as part of the public sphere.
The Tim Hortons at Main and Broadway opened nearly a year after the fire without much fanfare or protest. (There was even a moment of levity when someone created an animated GIF that riffed on the “Deal With It” internet meme to suggest that people move on with their lives.) The Lugz coffee shop also reopened under new ownership, with a new name: Kafka’s Coffee and Tea. Franz Kafka, of course, was known to hold court in Prague’s bohemian coffee houses. Meanwhile, I consider my $800/month rent a steal, and live in constant fear of the day it goes up.
Works Cited
Goldin, Daniel
2006 Starbucks and the White Whale. The Huffington Post, Oct. 3. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-goldin/starbucks-and-the-white-w_b_32889.html, accessed Feb. 7, 2011.
Habermas, Jürgen
1991[1962] The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, trans. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ley, David
2003 Artists, Aestheticisation and the Field of Gentrification. Urban Studies 40(12): 2527–2544.