Across London and the UK, developers wanting to improve the vibe of a building or area so it becomes more culturally desirable will offer artist spaces or put on shows. The cultural energy becomes appealing, creating a membrane around a site so the whole area feels alive rather than derelict. Artist studios, pop-up exhibitions, temporary residencies, meanwhile-use projects, curated viewings – all of it shifts a place from dead edge to cultural edge.
Atmosphere. Presence. Footfall with intention. A building feels lived-in, wanted, interesting. Buyers pick up on that immediately.
This is a known strategy in London – King’s Cross, Peckham, Hackney Wick, Deptford, Nine Elms – and in smaller cities too. Developers use culture as an early-stage signal of future value.
Developers bring in artists or short-term cultural projects to shift the feel of a building or street. They want movement, creativity, evening openings, people coming and going. It changes perception – safety, interest, desirability. Suddenly the area feels like something is happening.
It’s a tactic. A way to warm up a place before sales or redevelopment. The cycle is predictable.
Artists arrive. Heat, texture, intrigue follow. Property becomes desirable. Prices climb. The studios close. Artists move to the next affordable edge – Berlin, Margate, St Leonards, Glasgow, wherever the rent allows breath again. Then the cycle repeats.
Very rarely do artists and collectors live side by side. Artists move into derelict buildings or edges and pour creative labour into raw, borderline-uninhabitable spaces – painting, fixing, improvising, hosting, building a scene. They make the place breathable. They metaphorically change the water quality, creating culture that signals possibility.
But the moment an area gains cultural heat, the economics shift. Desirability rises, buyers arrive, prices climb, the area gets expensive and artists can no longer afford to live or work there. So they move on, and the cycle restarts.
Artists have been the purification system, the early-stage builders of atmosphere, but they’ve rarely been given structural permanence. They make the place livable then get priced out of the life they created.
It’s time for a new cultural phase – where artists become essential infrastructure, the way key workers are essential infrastructure. As AI absorbs labour, repetition and output, the real scarcity becomes originality. The seed of an idea. The human generating field.
Those people become the value in a post-labour world. Housing them isn’t philanthropy. It’s cultural strategy. It’s investment.
When artists move into an area – Notting Hill in the 60s and 70s, Shoreditch and Hackney in the 90s onward, Peckham in the 2010s – property prices rise. Consistently. Cultural activity creates desirability, footfall, safety, identity. Buyers respond. Developers respond. Valuations climb.
The pattern is well-documented in urban economics:
creative presence → cultural heat → buyer interest → rising values.
So attracting and retaining artists is investment.
The craving now is for real cultural presence: artists in their studios generating real cultural heat. The energy of the 60s, 70s, early 2000s – that intensity of making. People want that around them again.
The old cycle – artists arrive, create texture, raise the area, then get displaced – collapses under current conditions. The future is asking for the reverse: prime areas holding permanent space for the people who generate cultural life… the enlightened way – anything else is structurally absurd.
To bring in artists to generate life, regeneration, identity, footfall, desirability – and then remove them at the moment the culture becomes valuable – is to cut out the cultural engine.
And of course the culture evaporates and the area flattens into something generic. It’s short-term thinking. Developers sell, prices rise, but without nurturing the culture, the atmosphere that created the value drains away.
Artists raise the identity, desirability, and long-term economic potential of an area. When the culture isn’t held, the value they generate disperses. The area loses what made it magnetic, and the artists lose their place in it.
It’s like buying into a company for its innovation, then firing the innovators. The value collapses because the source has been removed. You can’t retain a culture when you remove the people who generate it.
This has been one of the great blind spots in urban thinking. The enlightened way is to anchor artists as permanent cultural infrastructure – and to recognise that as investment.