Conclusion: Going Beyond Ordinary

Abstract

This concluding chapter starts by offering a brief summary of our main findings. We maintain that the artistic community that emerged within Philadelphia’s Fishtown/Kensington area constitutes a distinct subtype of bohemia, an artistic bohemian lifestyle community that maintains a bohemian lifestyle but eschews the anti-bourgeois antagonism that has been foundational to the bohemian tradition. This community helped launch and overlaps with a larger community of hipsters. Contrary to stereotypes of contemporary bohemian artists (i.e., as banal) and hipsters (i.e., as banal as well as superficial), we find that the area’s bohemian and hipster communities go beyond an ordinary creative class existence, and express substantive and progressive artistic, cultural, and political practices and values. These communities, however, have helped facilitate a gentrification process that is gradually displacing long-time working-class residents as well as struggling artists and hipsters themselves. This chapter then proceeds to discuss some policy implications of our main findings. We posit that various policy options may be more amenable to different artistic community types (i.e., artistic creative class, and artistic bohemian lifestyle communities).