Weird City: Sense of Place and Creative Resistance in Austin, Texas (review)

In the last quarter century, Austin, Texas, seen by many as an urban success story, has undergone a population surge as it has emerged as a technological epicenter. While other industrial cities have languished, Austin has become the poster child for what urban theorist Richard Florida has dubbed the “Creative City.” Urban planners across the country have looked to and sought to mimic Austin’s unique characteristics as they have crafted their own “Smart Growth” strategies. In Weird City, human geographer Joshua Long complicates this narrative as he examines the problematic aspects of growth from the perspective of the “creative class” that has played such a pivotal role in defining Austin’s quirky identity. Focusing on the “Keep Austin Weird” movement, Long argues that by cultivating a collective “sense of place,” the city’s artists, bohemians, and independent shop owners have creatively resisted the homogenizing tendencies of outside capital investment. While the developers and city planners’ vision for the city’s future remains at odds with the vision from below, Long argues that the dynamism between these conflicting approaches adds to the city’s vibrancy.

While Long originally sought to tell a story of how city boosters appropriated the slogan “Keep Austin Weird” to sell the city, he instead finds the movement is one crafted from below as a reaction to the dislocations brought about by the city’s rapid growth. The movement, embraced by an assortment of colorful characters, successfully preserves some of Austin’s most iconic spaces threatened by new development. While at times Long overstates its power, he documents a very unusual landscape and historic preservation movement that fights to sustain alternative record and book stores, taco stands, and bars.

In tracing the dynamics of the tense relationship between city officials and developers in one camp and small shop owners, musicians, artists, and bohemians in another, Weird City is on strong footing. Where it falters is by suggesting these are the only two camps—those who seek to “Keep Austin Weird” and those who promote “Smart Growth.” Rather than acknowledging the limits of the study, Long implausibly argues that this tension is the central one that cuts across all residents of the city regardless of gender, class, race, and ethnicity. By focusing on the stereotypical “creative class,” with a few notable exceptions, he erases the ways in which working-class African Americans and Latinos craft their own alternative “sense of place.” While we hear from the people who both plan and resist the high-rise loft developments, we know nothing about the people who actually build them. Who are they? What are their attachments to the city? What is their relationship to weird Austin? Without looking at the micro-cultural landscapes and the internal fissures within the city, Austin comes across as relatively undifferentiated and one dimensional.

The strengths and weaknesses of the study are to some extent rooted in his unorthodox methodological approach. Fueled by caffeine and alcohol, Long conducts “exploratory interviews” and “informal focus groups” in many of the city’s coffee shops and bars (5–6). Focusing on the people who occupy these spaces offers a robust portrait of the “sense of place” among bohemians in Austin. That feat is not a small one given their role in shaping the identity of the city that resonates in our national popular culture. Long leaves the reader wanting to know more about the worldviews of many of his “weird” narrators such as Leslie Cochrane, former mayoral candidate and homeless transvestite. Meanwhile, Long dynamically presents the perspectives of buttoned-down city leaders and real estate developers, who may have little in common with their bohemian fellow-Austinities other than their love for coffee. With both these groups, Long has successfully reached “sufficient redundancy” and “richness” in his interview sample (6).

If Long was transparent about the limits of his study, then this informal technique may have been...