Art festivals are a feature of many urban districts undergoing gentrification; they help to catalyze change by drawing a set of consumers with particular cultural interests. This article examines whether the arts produce racial exclusions by examining long‐term Black and White residents’ participation in and perceptions of the monthly Last Thursday Art Walks in Portland's gentrifying Alberta Arts District. We use surveys to measure arts participation and follow‐up, in‐depth interviews to understand whether long‐time residents feel excluded by the arts, and if race is a factor. We find that Black residents participate less in Last Thursdays than White residents, and they often feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. We conclude that the arts‐anchored symbolic economy results in racial exclusions that have little to do with differences in arts appreciation, but much to do with perceptions of people associated with the arts, and with residents’ abilities to use the arts to identify with neighborhood changes.

Alberta Street is emblematic of Portland’s image as a city that embraces the “creative class,” ranking high in being “bohemian” and embracing “diversity.” It is a street that has had a decline in Black businesses and an increase in White ones, both mainstream and bohemian. Through interviews with longtime Black and White residents, we find that race is salient for understanding their use and opinion of the new retail sector. Many Blacks have negative feelings, and they use racial language to articulate why they dislike the products offered and how they feel culturally excluded. Longtime, mainstream White residents, in contrast, fully embrace the new retail. These findings should give pause to cities that promote economic development by making themselves attractive to the “creative class”: They may be refashioning their cities and neighborhoods—including their retail—in a way that is hostile to some forms of diversity, including longtime Black residents in gentrifying neighborhoods.

This article reconsiders creative city planning strategies in light of a Bourdieuian field model of cultural production. Creative city discourse imagines street-level artistic scenes as tolerant milieus that attract creative human capital and promote growth, whereas a field perspective views art scenes as generating logics and practices of exclusion. Using ethnographic observation and interviews with artists and other stakeholders in art crawl events in Portland, Oregon, and Nashville, Tennessee, this article describes how artists interact with their audiences in new urban contexts. Art crawls are monthly, coordinated, gallery-opening events that bring together art scenes and new audiences in particular times and districts, and they have proliferated in cities of all sizes in recent years, notably in places without rich traditions in the arts. This article finds that artistic professionals work to attract crowds, but the logics of their field then require sorting and selecting between them. Keywords art, artists, creative class, field of cultural production, urban planning and developmentArtists and their audiences are target populations of 21st-century urban development strategies. The creative city paradigm views artists and art scenes as stimulating innovative milieus useful for solving urban crises (Landry and Bianchini, 1995), and as a source of attracting creative workers in other domains (Florida, 2002). Elites in cities of all sizes have responded by embracing the arts (c.f., Macgillis, 2009;Peck, 2005; Silver and Grodach, 2012). By contrast, a field model of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1993) views artistic scenes as social arenas of distinction and exclusion, lending doubt to the idea that artistic scenes could generate creative dividends for whole cities. This article reconsiders creative city discourse in light

Meet Josh, a typical American college kid, who, on a bitter winter day, skips classes and instead drives hours through the snow to work at the Coffee Bean (think Starbucks) location where he feels he is "needed." No one notices when he skips class, and the university will get along without him anyway. Josh is a lot like the majority of other youth workers in the United States: from an affluent background; White; will likely graduate from college. Josh does not have to pick up a shift that conflicts with classes because Josh does not exactly need to work. The job puts cash in his pockets, but more importantly, the job affords Josh an identity, a brand, and social opportunities that school does not, opportunities that scholars of youth labor in the United States have tended to overlook.Consuming is a verb in the title of Yasemin Besen-Cassino's new book, Consuming Work: Youth Labor in America, not an adjective. Work can consume a person, as the subtitle Youth Labor might "evoke images of unventilated sweatshops in the developing world . . . " (p. 2). But this book takes place in the suburbs of the contemporary United States, reflecting its many social and spatial advantages, as well as the many chain stores and restaurants that characterize Average America and provide youth with employment chances. In this context, the workplace functions in ways that other social institutions such as schools fail. Writes Besen-Cassino, "This book studies the consumption of work and branded work experiences as markers of identity among youth . . . and a social space to see friends" (pp. 16-17).Among the many strengths of the book is its challenge to existing conceptions of low-skill service employment, recasting what Ritzer called

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