The Arts of Gentrification: Creativity, Cultural Policy, and Public Space in Kamagasaki

Abstract In contemporary Japanese cities, nonprofit and grassroots arts organizations are mobilized in threatened urban neighborhoods, where neoliberal forms of creativity are invoked to mitigate social and economic displacement. Gentrification is recognizable across contemporary urban societies, but its practices are contingent on representations of local cultural expression, which have particular ramifications in postindustrial centers of urban Japan. In this paper, I focus on a working‐class district of South Osaka known as Kamagasaki, infamous for its longstanding population of day laborers and homeless, in which gentrification has taken a complex route through various projects of cultural representation. Through an ethnographic history of the nonprofit arts space Cocoroom, I contribute to the anthropology of gentrification by focusing on entrepreneurial forms of creativity in local arts organizations, which reveal historical transformations of public space in Japanese urban policy, and highlight the symbolic performances of marginal communities. Gentrification; Japan; Labor; Cultural Policy; Nonprofit Arts Organizations