Setting the Tone
Nia King, the third of our Oakland Conference bloggers, covered the preconference After Ghost Ship: Supporting artist-led solutions to equitable and accessible space development on Sunday, October 21. Here she opens her reporting from the preconference:
It makes sense to study Oakland when you are looking for solutions to displacement because we’ve been dealing with it for such a long time. Gentrification and displacement often feel too big to stop, so it was encouraging to see a variety of people with experience at putting practical solutions into place. I think one of the greatest strengths of this panel, curated by Claudia Leung, was that it featured subject matter experts on several different approaches to stemming gentrification, on the larger policy level of community benefits agreements and pushing an equity focus in city cultural planning, and on the more micro levels of buying buildings and getting them to comply with city codes.