In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, Thomas Chatterton Williams waxes poetic against a certain ward in Paris being turned into the next “anywhere” by the global force of hipster culture.
This is a real problem for cities all around the world, not just Paris. Every city has something special, and gentrification seems to quash anything that does not fit in with upper-class modes.
“Too much of modern urban life revolves around never feeling less than fully at ease; about having even the minutest of experiences tailored to a set of increasingly demanding and homogeneous tastes,” Williams wrote.
By simply eliminating the original culture and diversity that might not have been so homogeneous, the new culture can then just replace it with whatever it wants.
This is a classic example of colonialism and fits right in with the mission of what we today call hipsters.
Changes, however, should come to this neighborhood. There are apparently a lot of sex shops and people employed in “horizontal professions.” The tighter regulation or outlawing of prostitution (along with many other coordinated efforts) could bring better opportunities to the neighborhood and the women working in it.
However, the neighborhood was a good place to see all of life: baking bread, cigarette smoke, dirt and the faint smell of sex, according to Williams. These pieces of the neighborhood were what made it special, at least to the author. By these criteria, why eliminate anything that makes the place interesting? Why do we need another juice bar?
This subset of culture definitely had a place to exist, because it showed how different and expansive life can be. Not all places should look like Disneyland with a look of complete homogeneity and cleanliness.
“The logical extension is to 'curate' our urban spaces like style blogs or Pinterest boards representing a single, self-satisfied and extremely sheltered expression of middle- and upper-middle-class sensibility,” Williams said.
This is what hipster culture and the wider bourgeois culture seeks to do — become a singular expression, singing the praises of everyone who participates, while ignoring any problems that exist or even that they had a hand in beginning.
The final nail in the coffin seems to be the “banal globalization of hipster good taste, the same pleasant and invisible force that puts kale frittata, steel-cut oats and burrata salad on brunch tables from Stockholm to San Francisco.”
This “urban renewal” and “gentrification” turns from construction to destruction as this hipster machine rolls over the old and replaces it with the new. However, this particular segment of bourgeoisie has taken over “hipster” and turned it into — you guessed it — pure gold.
Reach the columnist at peter.northfelt@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @peternorthfelt
