At Home in Chinatown: Community-Based Art Activism and Cultural Placemaking for Neighborhood Stabilization

Abstract

Since the turn of the 21st century, urban studies and planning research has examined the strategic role of artists, arts organizations, and cultural activity as local and regional economic development catalysts. This article shifts the spotlight from the “creative class” and “creative industries” as drivers of a “creative city” to study the role of art, culture, and creative practices in community-led, place-based efforts to stabilize neighborhoods and advance more hopeful, healthy, and equitable urban futures. It explores Boston’s Chinatown, where community-based art activism has a long history of addressing critical issues such as reclaiming land taken by interstate highway and urban renewal projects, as well as combating gentrification and displacement through site activation. The case study focuses on Residence Lab, a community-based arts residency program initiated by the Pao Arts Center and the Asian Community Development Corporation that brought together multimedia artists with residents to collectively preserve Boston’s Chinatown through creative and artistic activation of underutilized sites in the neighborhood from 2019 to 2022. We examine a selection of ResLab projects, which give form and meaning to the struggles and aspirations of being at home in Chinatown and embody the art activism of partner organizations and program participants, along with the ResLab’s impacts on participating residents and artists. The concluding discussion considers ResLab’s contributions and implications for the shifting ways in which urban, political, and artistic cultures have intersected and impacted one another in Chinatown along with the relationship between collective action and the preservation and transformation of culture in the urban frame.

1. Introduction

Since the turn of the 21st century, urban studies and planning research has examined the strategic role of artists, arts organizations, and cultural activity as local and regional economic development catalysts (Markusen 2006, 2014). Various locales have embraced the concept and practice of placemaking, or the creative process of designing, planning, and managing public and shared spaces utilizing arts and cultural activities, as a means for community revitalization and real estate development in previously disinvested areas (Courage et al. 2021). In an era of urban-based economic development in which cities have become desirable locations for real estate investment, knowledge-based sectors, and engines of social and economic inequality, critical perspectives have associated placemaking with creative gentrification (Cameron and Coaffee 2005; Mathews 2010; Grodach et al. 2018). Urban researchers have also begun to study how local activists and urban social movements are incorporating arts and cultural organizing into place-based struggles for the right to the city (Gainza 2017; Eynaud et al. 2018). Placekeeping has emerged as a justice-oriented, grassroots approach to actively shape and maintain places of belonging, resistance, and endurance against forces of displacement and experiences of historical and ongoing marginalization (Bedoya 2014).

Urban arts can play a role in advancing patterns of speculative real estate development and exclusionary urbanism in the 21st century city, as well as disrupting and combating them. Top-down, government- and developer-led placemaking initiatives often cater to the “creative class” and “creative industries” as drivers of a “creative city,” characterized by technological innovation, knowledge-based economic and spatial restructuring, and urban growth (Florida 2002, 2003, 2014). “Artwashing,” whether in the form of public murals by world-famous graffiti artists or high-end art galleries in working-class neighborhoods (Lees and Phillips 2018), can reinforce mainstream values and spatial imaginaries based on social exclusivity and increased commodification and exchange value of space (Lipsitz 2007, 2011). Alternatively, arts-integrative urban interventions grounded in community-led activism and place-based advocacy can help reclaim neighborhoods from external control and preserve their cultural identity and social fabric in the face of development pressures (Crockett 2018; Xie 2023; Montenegro 2025). Such approaches to art activism and cultural placekeeping require arts practitioners to build relationships with, and follow the lead of, community-based partners in forging creative practices that elevate the visions and desires of community members for the neighborhood and honor the stories that they want to tell and share (Yanchapaxi et al. 2023).

This article explores how arts and creative practices can support community-led, place-based efforts to stabilize neighborhoods and advance more hopeful, healthy, and equitable urban futures through a case study of Residence Lab (ResLab), a community-based arts residency program in Boston’s Chinatown. Maria Osorio Jackson’s concept of “artful lives” calls attention to how arts and culture are a part of everyday lived experience of making, doing, teaching, and learning (Jackson 2011; Jackson and Hughes 2024). Humans share the capacity to be creative, imaginative, and expressive on their own terms and undertake meaningful practices and expressions that address trauma, navigate the uncertainties and challenges of living, imagine new possibilities, and share their desires for the futures (Stern and Seifert 2017; Venable-Thomas 2018; Kaimal 2022; American Artscape 2023; Courage and McKeown 2024). By honing in on how the artful lives of Chinatown residents informed the community-based arts residency and activation of underutilized sites in Chinatown, we seek to expand comprehension among artists, cultural workers, and designers—as well as other built environment professionals—of how they might take cues from, and contribute to, existing art activism and cultural placekeeping in neighborhoods. The article also illuminates the way urban, political, and artistic cultures intersect and impact one another, and how collective action shapes the preservation and transformation of culture in the urban frame, as this special issue aims to consider.

2. Learning from Boston’s Chinatown

We turn to Boston’s Chinatown as a critical and emblematic case in which the artful lives of residents and community members emanate from and reflect ongoing struggles to preserve the historic neighborhood and maintain it as a dynamic gateway for immigrant and working-class families. Located near the heart of Boston, Chinatown is not only a commercial hub of ethnic businesses and services and a cultural anchor for Chinese and Asian Americans in the region but also home to 11,528 residents, many of whom live under the federal poverty line (Chinatown Community Master Plan 2020).1 Early Chinatown’s adjacency to 19th-century railroads and leather and garment factories made it undesirable but for preceding Irish, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern immigrant families and Chinese workers seeking safety in numbers amidst racial violence and exclusionary immigration and labor laws (Chinatown Atlas 2025).2 In the postwar era, Chinatown lost roughly a third of its housing to two interstate highway projects and a third of the land to the Tufts–New England Medical Center through urban renewal. The City of Boston additionally created an adult entertainment zone next to Chinatown and failed to recognize it as a residential neighborhood until 1990. Today, Chinatown’s dense mixed-use, walkable neighborhood environment with abundant amenities and easy transit access, along with upscaled development along the edges, enhances its appeal to white and higher-income newcomers, escalating housing costs and displacement pressures on long-time residents.3

Chinatown has a long history of community-based art activism (Chinatown Cultural Plan 2024). From the late 1960s, a new generation of American-born Chinese, who grew up around Chinatown and were politicized by civil rights, Black power, anti-war, and decolonial movements, joined the growing Asian American Movement and created service agencies and activist organizations in the neighborhood (Liu et al. 2008; Vrabel 2014; Liu 2020). Founded in 1979, the Asian American Resource Workshop (AARW) used the arts to promote Asian American storytelling and identity in new ways that combated mainstream stereotypes and thematized collective resistance and struggle while addressing critical issues in the community (Ho and Leung 2000; Liu et al. 2008). The AARW organized the first citywide exhibition of Asian American artists, Asian Pacific American Heritage Month celebration, and Asian American film festival, and created documentary films supporting community-led campaigns against police brutality (1985) and in support of garment worker rights (1987). As part of the Coalition to Protect Parcel C (1990–1993), they worked closely with the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA), leading media strategies, creative protests, and art-based site activation to stop Tufts from parking a tower on the parcel and further reclaim it for community-based planning and development (See Figure 1; Leong 1995; Lai et al. 2000; Liu 2020). Chinatown art activism expanded with the Car Jam protest to fight Liberty Place, a 30-floor luxury development organized by the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC) (2001), Hudson Street for Chinatown Coalition to reclaim Parcel 24 led by CPA and the ACDC (2000–2005), and the decades-long, youth-led campaign to restore the Chinatown branch of the Boston Public Library (2001–present).

Since the 2000s, the downtown luxury development boom has shifted Chinatown from a historically disinvested neighborhood into one of the hottest real estate markets in the region (Hung 2018). To counter development pressures, art activists and community organizers in Chinatown have turned to cultural placekeeping strategies, using cultural programming, community-led urban design, and planning interventions to maintain Chinatown’s cultural identity and role as a working-class immigrant hub and promote conversations about Chinatown’s immigrant, working-class history and future (Lowe and Xu 2023). R Visions for Chinatown (2014–2015), led by CPA, used temporary art interventions such as yarn-bombing, murals, performances, and site installations to highlight public properties with potential for community development and push against displacement.4 In 2017, the ACDC initiated its ANCHOR placekeeping strategy, leveraging arts, culture, and resident leadership to create community-centered public art and site activations that extend the edges of Chinatown and remind immigrant and working-class individuals and families that they belong in the neighborhood. In 2024, the Chinatown Community Land Trust launched the Immigrant History Trail, a multimedia public art project honoring Chinatown’s immigrant, working-class history and connected to its efforts to develop Chinatown as a Historic and Cultural District where working-class Chinese residents and small businesses can remain and thrive.

3. Case Study Design and Overview

Residence Lab (ResLab) is a community-based arts residency program by the Pao Arts Center and the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC) that brought together multimedia artists with residents to collectively preserve Boston’s Chinatown through creative and artistic activation of underutilized sites in the neighborhood from 2019 to 2022. The multi-method research study of ResLab grew out of a joint effort by the Pao Arts Center and the ACDC to conduct a program assessment and public exhibition on ResLab. From 2022–2024, Rubin served as the lead researcher for the ResLab program assessment, conducting a total of 32 interviews with 11 artists, 15 residents, four organizational staff members, and two organizational partners, and non-participant observations of ResLab workshops with a focus on the curriculum, group dynamics, and participation of the artists and residents.5 Over summer 2023, Song accepted an invitation from the Pao Arts Center and ACDC staff to serve as the ResLab exhibition curator, working with non-profit partners, multimedia artists, local residents, and students to assemble visual materials and develop public programming for the exhibition at the Pao Arts Center. Through a fall 2023 architecture research studio, she continued to investigate ResLab’s genealogy, evolving neighborhood challenges and the role of arts and cultural practices in community stabilization and neighborhood preservation. Supplemental interviews with community activists and leaders from February 2024 to May 2025 helped clarify the role of arts and cultural organizing in place-based struggles and community-led campaigns in Chinatown. The authors’ embeddedness in the ResLab program and collaborative relationships with the Pao and ACDC provided a closer view and mutual research benefits, while their long-standing engagement with Chinatown’s organizational landscape and spatial politics allowed broader insights.

Whereas Chinatowns in the United States are widely perceived as tourist destinations, the ResLab case study provides a more community-centered perspective of Chinatown as a residential neighborhood, commercial hub, and cultural anchor. As the brief overview of neighborhood history and art activism indicates, Boston’s Chinatown is a politically active, civically engaged, and socially resilient neighborhood with a rich cultural heritage that continues to house new waves of working-class immigrants and generations of mom-and-pop businesses due to a strong record of community organizing and advocacy. Its historic urban environment of brick rowhouses, industrial buildings, and compact streetscapes is not frozen in time but adapted by community members to accommodate their changing needs and ways of life over time. As described in the next section, ResLab emerged from the respective and intersecting work of the Pao Arts Center and Asian Community Development Corporation in Chinatown and generated a series of art installations exploring a theme inspired by an ongoing community challenge or aspiration and informed by the lived experiences of Chinatown residents over its four-year span. We examine a selection of ResLab projects, which give form and meaning to the struggles and aspirations of being at home in Chinatown and embody the art activism of partner organizations and program participants, along with the ResLab’s impacts on participating residents and artists. The concluding discussion considers ResLab’s contributions and implications for the shifting ways in which urban, political, and artistic cultures have intersected and impacted one another in Chinatown along with the relationship between collective action and the preservation and transformation of culture in the urban frame.

4. ResLab: Partners, Program, and Procedures

4.1. Partner Organizations

The Pao Arts Center was established in 2017 as Chinatown’s first community arts center and Boston’s first dedicated Asian American and Asian immigrant cultural space through a visionary program collaboration between the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center (BCNC)6 and Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC). The Pao Arts Center celebrates and strengthens the Asian Pacific Islander community of Chinatown and Greater Boston through access to culturally relevant art, education, and creative opportunities. It is situated on Parcel 24, where dozens of Chinese and Syrian families lived before being displaced by highway construction in the 1950s and which Chinatown community members reclaimed through collective organizing and advocacy from the early 2000s. Following community-based participatory visioning for the site, the Asian Community Development Corporation worked with private companies to deliver the mixed-income housing development with ground-floor community space, One Greenway Park, and the Pao Arts Center. Through public exhibitions and events, community classes and programs (i.e., dance and movement, ping pong and karaoke nights), and neighborhood-based initiatives (i.e., mural art and festivals), the Pao Arts Center harnesses the power of arts, culture, and creativity to nurture individual health and wellness, the strength of Asian American Pacific Islander communities, Chinatown as a thriving neighborhood, and more equitable society.

Established in 1987, the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC) is a non-profit developer that seeks to create vibrant, inclusive neighborhoods by building affordable homes, empowering families with asset-building tools, and strengthening communities through resident and youth leadership programs. Based in Boston’s Chinatown with a focus on meeting the needs of low-income Asian American immigrants, the ACDC serves individuals and families of all backgrounds throughout the Greater Boston area, including Malden and Quincy. The ACDC has preserved and created over 400 affordable homes, and their multilingual programs help working-class households purchase their first home through first-time home buyer workshops, a matched-savings program, and individual homebuying counseling. Their holistic community development approach includes a placekeeping strategy that leverages arts, culture, and play to create public spaces that promote people’s health, happiness, and wellbeing and strengthen the sense of cultural identity at the edges and borders of Chinatown that are particularly vulnerable to gentrification and displacement of businesses and residents. The ACDC’s youth programs—Asian Voices of Organized Youth for Community Empowerment (A-VOYCE) and Summer Leadership Academy (SLA)—also engage young people in activating public spaces with family-oriented activities and cultural programming.

4.2. ResLab Program

In the course of their four-year collaboration on ResLab, the Pao Arts Center and the Asian Community Development Corporation advanced their core missions by bringing together artists and community members to co-create site-specific art installations that socially activate Boston’s Chinatown’s underutilized and edge spaces while lifting up the narratives, culture, and desires of Chinatown’s residents. As stated by an ACDC staff member, “We see all of this rapid displacement, all this shifting on this northern edge. We feel downtown creeping down. What we can do is insert, inject ourselves into the public landscape and make sure everybody remembers that this is still Chinatown.” The community-based arts residency provided a unique outlet for residents of Chinatown to express their experiences in dealing with gentrification, racism, and life as an immigrant. Through the intentional partnerships and creative interventions, they also aimed to equip Chinatown residents and local artists with the resources and skills to reimagine and transform neighborhood public and third spaces in ways that foster their sense of agency as civic designers and leaders and collective care for the spaces and the Chinatown neighborhood at large. Besides working with artists and residents, the Pao and ACDC facilitated relationship building with key stakeholders and landowners in the neighborhood, including the City of Boston, Tufts University, and the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy.

Every year, ResLab explored a theme aligned with the Chinatown 2020 Master Plan that reflects the shared strengths, challenges, and visions of Chinatown residents, activists, and grassroots organizations. Since 1990, Chinatown has undertaken four rounds of community-based planning every 10 years. The first Chinatown Community Master Plan of 1990 responded to community members’ concerns about competing demands for affordable housing and institutional expansion in Chinatown (Metropolitan Area Planning Council 2025), which the 2000 plan reaffirmed, in addition to emphasizing lacking physical connections to adjoining communities and the overwhelming use of vacant parcels as parking lots. The 2010 community master plan recognized Chinatown’s growing residential diversity and social and cultural significance for Chinese and Asian Americans in the region, as well as the extended eastern and southern boundaries. The 2020 Chinatown Master Plan focused on stabilizing Chinatown as a diverse, residential neighborhood anchored by immigrant and working-class families and as a sustainable social, economic, and cultural hub. As an addendum to the 2020 plan and as the result of a multi-agency collaboration including the ACDC, the Pao Arts Center, the Chinatown Community Land Trust, and the Rose Kennedy Greenway, the 2024 Chinatown Cultural Plan includes an updated inventory of the neighborhood’s cultural assets and lays out strategies to preserve and expand cultural and artistic vitality in Chinatown in connection with the 2020 Chinatown Master Plan’s goals for housing, mobility, health, environmental justice, and open space (Stephens 2023; Boston Chinatown Master Plan 2020).

4.3. Procedures

Pao and ACDC staff recruited and selected artists and residents to join the ResLab cohort, typically comprising three teams per year. In an open-call process, prospective participants completed applications that Pao and ACDC staff reviewed, ranked, and selected, with an emphasis on promoting synergies between artists and residents and including a mix of newer and longer-term residents. Within each team, the resident’s role was to share Chinatown experiences and stories, communicating their perspective on the neighborhood and any issues they want to address. The artist’s role was to leverage their creative skill sets to facilitate co-creation sessions and project development, manage the budget, and lead final production. Both were expected to attend all workshops and events, as well as work with ACDC and Pao Arts Center staff throughout the process and provide constructive feedback to improve the program for the subsequent year. Each resident received a modest $600 stipend for participating, while artists received $1500–2000 stipends and oversaw $2000 project budgets.7 The ResLab program also provided food, childcare, and translation assistance (aided by communication apps such as WeChat) to ensure accessibility of the program, particularly for Chinatown residents with busy work schedules, families, and limited English proficiency.

Over the course of 5 to 6 months, each cohort explored that year’s core theme through a three-part process, each focused on a set of questions: (1) Co-learning: How do our personal experiences connect us to each other and Chinatown? What does the design of our spaces tell us about the people, values, and goals that are centered? Weekly workshops focused on community building and cultivating understanding of Chinatown’s history, built environment, and lived experiences of residents, encompassing ice-breaker activities, storytelling, interactive artmaking, and guest speakers. (2) Co-creation: How do we dream big, start small, and learn by doing? In bi-weekly meetings, the teams learned community engagement skills and creative design strategies, applied them to prototypes of their site activations, and refined their final installations with peer feedback. (3) Celebration: How might we invite the Chinatown community to re-imagine and co-steward this space through shared celebration? Opening Day was a culminating event showcasing the site activations and honoring cohort achievements in the presence of numerous attendees, including other Chinatown residents, artists, community members, civic and institutional leaders, and elected representatives.

4.4. ResLab Projects: Four Case Examples

4.4.1. 2019 Oasis: A House Shaped Dream

ResLab’s theme for 2019 was “oasis,” referring to a place, person, or experience of refuge and regeneration. Reflecting on how Boston’s Chinatown was forged from the necessity of surviving racial exclusion and discrimination and is now struggling with gentrification and climate impacts (e.g., heat island effect, flooding), participants took on the challenge of re-imagining an asphalt lot into a green oasis for gathering, play, and regeneration. That year’s site was 8–10 Hudson Street, commonly referred to as “Chinatown Backyard.” Situated in the commercial heart of Chinatown along Hudson Street near Mary Soo Hoo Park, between another vacant lot and a commercial building, the privately owned lot had sat vacant and unused for decades since the late 1980s. From 2006, the ACDC used the site for Films at the Gate, an annual weekend event held in August bringing together people of all backgrounds and ages to watch kung fu flicks outdoors in the evening.8 Then, with middle school youth from Boston’s Chinatown Neighborhood Center’s Red Oak program, A-VOYCE members developed the concept of a communal backyard for Chinatown, where few families have private backyards but share desires to grow their own food and enjoy a relaxing, family-friendly setting. As the youth created garden beds and art installations to transform the lot into a community space, ResLab joined their efforts.

“A House Shaped Dream” was a 2019 ResLab installation by Chinatown residents Pihua Lin and Yuyi Li with artists Lily Xie and Crystal Bi-Wegner at Chinatown Backyard (See Figure 2). The inspiration for the artwork came from multiple conversations about what residents want to see for the future of Chinatown, including safe streets, affordable housing, less pollution, and more green space. The multimedia installation weaved together visions for a better Chinatown by augmenting and layering desired sounds and images of Chinatown on top of the natural experience of being in the lot, including the noise and pollution in the area. Visitors were invited to rest, rejuvenate, and participate by adding their own dreams to the house-like structure on paper ginko leaves. Those who walk into the structure, invoking both the familiar shape of a bedroom and a capsule from a future that has not happened yet, were asked to consider what function imagination plays in shaping our collective future. Following the installation, the artist team created a set of stickers and zines to document the hopes and concerns recorded during the installation. In the zine, “I hope for Chinatown to stay,” the leaves were paired with supporting research and data. These images were ultimately incorporated in the 2020 Chinatown Community Master Plan, a community-led document detailing plans for the next decade in Chinatown.

4.4.2. 2020 Portal: Slow Down for Chinatown

The 2020 theme of “portal” responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, asking participants to consider the present as a gateway, and what to bring along and what to shed as they journeyed into the future. As ResLab took on a virtual format, each team could choose their own site, one being Kneeland Street, a busy multi-laned arterial road cutting through Chinatown and connecting it with highway access ramps. Chinatown residents routinely cross Kneeland Street, which divides Chinatown between the largely commercial part on the north and residential part on the south, and is a hotspot for traffic crashes and injuries. In so doing, they navigate poor infrastructure conditions such as the wide road, narrow sidewalks, lack of cross walks, and frequent construction activities that disrupt the pedestrian realm, along with risky driver behaviors such as speeding and disregard for traffic lights. Older adults and children are particularly vulnerable when crossing and walking along the street, which creates worry and stress for their caregivers and families. In short, Kneeland Street is emblematic of how Chinatown community members shoulder undue infrastructural burdens and environmental injustices that allow local and regional motorists to travel through with speed and convenience while inflicting them with the highest level of fine particulate matter of any neighborhood in the state.

“Slow down for Chinatown” was a window installation on 35 Kneeland St and 66 Hudson St by Chinatown residents Po Chun Chow and Sylvia Chen with the artist Maria Fong (See Figure 3). The two residents, who were living in a building perpendicular to Kneeland Street with small children, felt deeply concerned with the high traffic speeds on the street and overall mobility and accessibility needs of youth in Chinatown. The team designed a series of public health posters with messages for cars that spoke to pedestrian feelings of unsafety stemming from the design of traffic infrastructure around Chinatown and featuring images of people based on real-life residents. Displayed in prominent buildings that line Kneeland Street, the window art appealed to individual drivers to recognize the needs of children using the streets and consider their needs. The team further advocated to the City of Boston’s Department of Transportation to demand more pedestrian safety infrastructure. Participants in the project drew on worksheets who needs to cross the street and where they are going in their community, which the artist then compiled and sent to the Transportation Department.

4.4.3. 2021 Collective Care: Abundance Among Us

For 2021, the theme of “collective care” honored the work of caring for one another in ways that strengthen interdependence and nurture individual and collective well-being. Considering how mutual aid, community support networks, and redistribution systems fill gaps left by institutional neglect and harm, participants explored what collective care could look like in the public realm. The site for that year was Mary Soo Hoo Park, located directly adjacent to the Chinatown Gate, along a busy arterial road that leads into the I-93 and I-90 highways. Named for a long-time community leader, owned by the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, and managed by the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, the modest 0.082-acre park is partly defined by an obstructive highway vent with a painted canvas cover that divides the park into two distinct zones. The area west of the vent, abutting Hudson Street, is commonly frequented by Asian elders who use the numerous tables to play cards, checkers, and mahjong. The east side of the vent, along Surface Road, is less activated and predominantly used for circulation to and from Chinatown. Despite its importance as a gathering space and gateway for visitors to Chinatown and the Rose Kennedy Greenway, some Chinatown residents indicate that they do not feel safe going to Mary Soo Hoo Park because of the gambling and smoking at the tables, along with the drinking, drug use, and public urination that some have observed on the east side of the vent.

“Abundance Among Us,” by Chinatown resident Cass Li and artist Sheila Novak, created space for intergenerational gatherings in Mary Soo Hoo Park (See Figure 4). Addressing the former’s concern as a mother that Chinatown residents with children did not always feel comfortable at the park due to some of the observed behaviors by visitors on the east side of the vent, the duo explored ideas for welcoming people of all ages to the area. They created a functional art piece in the form of a three-part table that scales down to a child-sized level, providing space for multiple generations to sit together. The work signified the importance of all, regardless of their age, to the vitality of the community. The long, meandering three-tiered picnic table was decorated with a golden dragon, which further evoked the strength of the group. Drawing sessions at the table invited community members to illustrate their ideas of abundance, which were then put on display for everyone to see. When gathered together to share a meal, have a conversation, draw, or play, park users could experience the power of being in community. By activating the space and increasing “eyes on the “street” rather than inviting policing, the community could also exercise collective care for fellow park users.

4.4.4. 2022 Radical Inclusion: Welcome Home

The 2022 theme of “radical inclusion” addressed post-pandemic spikes in racialized violence, wealth and technology gaps, and feelings of fear and isolation. It invited participants to expand practices of community building and belonging across differences by imagining how Chinatown’s public spaces could be safe, healing, and joyful for those who are often overlooked or excluded. The site was Tufts Community Common, located on Harrison Avenue at Tufts University’s Health Science Campus in Chinatown and serving as an open, shared space. Tufts University and Medical Center together occupy about a third of the land in Chinatown.9 Though open to the public and used as a recreational space for local children in day care facilities and families residing in the area, the green space remained underutilized by residents of Chinatown, a neighborhood with the least open space per capita and tree canopy coverage in Boston. The gated fence along the perimeter was often locked during official opening hours. By working with Tufts University to activate Tufts Community Common, ResLab aimed to make the space more accessible to Chinatown residents, many of whom were unaware that it was open to the public.

“Welcome Home,” by Chinatown residents Allison M. and Winne Yuen and artist Ann Dinh, drew inspiration from the history of Chinatown as a multi-ethnic neighborhood home to working-class immigrants and aimed to create a space where all residents felt welcome (See Figure 5). In addition to long-time Chinese and Asian residents, they honored other immigrant groups, people of color, and lower-income households that have moved into new affordable housing units in Chinatown. The multimedia installation included a door-less telephone-booth that invited visitors to walk inside, where they would find a television with a mirror at eye level and be able to listen to and record a story. While the space was designed to evoke a sense of warm reception, the storytelling component aimed to generate a feeling of inclusion and belonging by inviting people to become a part of the catalog of recorded and represented stories. The artist wanted people to reflect on the idea of Chinatown as a home, a place that is not only visited by tourists but also where people live and find a home away from home. The stories and installation sought to help alleviate stress, alienation, and unease among Chinatown residents and people of color amidst gentrification and displacement pressures, while providing a reminder that the distinct and diverse residents of a community like Chinatown make Boston what it is.

4.5. Participant Perspectives on ResLab

Besides intervening in neighborhood spaces to enhance the presence of Chinatown residents and create a sense of social inclusivity and belonging, Reslab impacted how participants saw themselves and their role in the neighborhood. By learning Chinatown history and sharing stories as part of the ResLab curriculum, Chinatown residents were able to connect their current challenges with air pollution, noise, traffic, housing unaffordability, and lack of open space to public policy and urban planning decisions, some of which were ongoing and could be contested. Exposure to design thinking and interactive art-making activities provided residents with a creative outlet for processing and applying lived experiences. A resident stated, “I have a say about what I want other people to see…This is how I feel about Chinatown and this is an outlet of making it a visual feeling for other people walking around.” Another respondent shared, “I never thought that I would be able to participate in art projects, without ‘artistic cells’… It makes us feel like we belong here. They care to put in the thoughts of the residents.” A different resident spoke to the accessibility and inclusivity of Reslab’s art-based curriculum:

When I go there, every time they invite a guest and then the guest will give us inspiration and teach us how to think, the pathway, and how to create. Before I didn’t know I could create. Now after that, I have some artist mind, too. I can think too like an artist. I used to think I wasn’t an artistic person. I have so much fun.

Other comments touched on the relational aspects of the program: “[ResLab] promotes a sense of intimacy among people. If there is no place for this activity, everyone will not be able to chat after getting off work and closing their doors.” A newer resident added, “I very much feel part of the community and a lot of that has to do with the ResLab.” Touching on the ability of ResLab to create stronger bonds among residents and break down barriers of race, ethnicity, culture, and language, a resident clarified:

When I say sense of community, I don’t just mean Chinese people or Asian people. It’s a community on my hall, and it’s a melting pot, just like the rest of the city of Boston. In the beginning I may see them as outsiders, but then the more I see them, it’s like, they’re part of my community. They’re not outsiders anymore.

A different interviewee shared their regard for the contributions of artist collaborators and ResLab in addressing issues in Chinatown:

It turns out that there are still many people who will pay attention to this place, not just focus on development of the land. It turns out that there are people who still pay attention to the problems existing in Chinatown and listen to what the residents here want. If we promote Chinatown through literary and artistic exchanges, works of art, dance, and Cantonese music concerts, it would receive good reviews. Our project has promoted more people to pay attention to Chinatown.

In the case of artists, the ResLab curriculum helped connect the stories they heard from residents with a larger historical and spatial context, deepen their sense of empathy and commitment to collective problem solving, and gain creative inspiration as they worked through novel concepts of codesign, participatory artmaking, and placekeeping. Interviewed artists expressed their appreciation for ResLab’s distinct approach as a community-based art residency, contrasting it with other art residencies that tend to be faster, outcome-oriented, and competitive. One noted, “They really emphasized that residents are the experts.” Another mentioned, “the community was truly exemplified” and “expectations were community-centered.” Reflecting on ResLab’s impact on Chinatown, an artist stated:

I think it’s so important to have initiatives like ResLab that’s getting power back to people who actually live there and work there and have lived there for a long time and have built it into the community. It is giving them the power to say this is what we want and this is what we want to see and this is what we want back.

The quote also underscores the importance of residents in working-class communities like Chinatown shaping their own narratives about the neighborhood and their visions for the future. Other artists commented on how the ResLab experience shaped their views on public art:

I’m more critical of what public art is…I think one part is empowerment for the people participating in it…that they believe they can change what their neighborhood looks like…giving them a feeling of responsibility and agency that they can also show up to make change.

An artist from ResLab’s first cohort reflected four years later:

It was very transformative… totally shifted the direction of my art practice…It really helped me understand and see the potential and what art can do…It changed what I thought I could do or be within an art practice. There’s so much possibility in collaboration and like different forms of collaboration…It was the first time I was really introduced to ideas like co-design or participatory art-making. Ideas of [placekeeping] were really impactful for me. I didn’t know that there was a way to think about art and how it can work together with other sorts of community advocacy efforts.

Another comment from a different artist also highlights experienced changes:

I really loved the experience. It pushed me beyond boundaries that I didn’t consider myself a community artist or a public artist. It pushed me to think of myself in that way and take on that role…It really solidified the ways that art and imagination work can have on policy, land ownership, and a feeling of belonging within the community.

Finally, some of the interviewees expressed their appreciation for the burgeoning network of ResLab artists maintaining connections to Chinatown and opening doors for each other:

So many artists that had been part of ResLab before are still so involved with the Chinatown community. It was especially cool to see them come back and help us find our way as new artists to the program, to like find our way through and to see what has been done before.

ResLab alumni have since participated in various other public art and cultural placekeeping projects in Chinatown,10 impacting critical issues and spaces across the neighborhood.

5. Concluding Discussion

In sum, ResLab’s community-engaged arts residency program expands art activism in Chinatown by recruiting neighborhood residents and local artists who may not have been previously involved in the community and supporting them to become civic designers and leaders. Through a participatory approach to art education facilitated by staff from the Pao Arts Center and ACDC, both of which are active in cultural placekeeping efforts in Chinatown, ResLab fosters arts-integrative urban interventions paying testament to the artful lives of residents and grounded in community-led activism and place-based advocacy in Chinatown. The curricular focus on community building among participants and cultivating understanding of Chinatown’s history, built environment, and lived experiences of residents, in addition to teaching community engagement skills and creative design strategies, offers an antidote to mainstream values and spatial imaginaries based on social exclusivity and increased commodification and exchange value of spaces; so do ResLab’s annual themes reflecting shared strengths, challenges, and visions of Chinatown residents, activists, and grassroots organizations (oasis, portal, collective care, and radical inclusion). They can inform preparatory steps for artists, cultural workers, and designers—as well as other built environment professionals—who seek to work with community-based partners to disrupt and combat patterns of speculative real estate development and exclusionary urbanism in the 21st century city.

Situating ResLab in a historical and spatial trajectory of community-based art activism in Chinatown provides insight on the shifting ways in which urban, political, and artistic cultures intersect and impact one another. Rooted in the radical social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, the Asian American Resource Workshop in Chinatown served as an anchor for multimedia artists to participate in community-led campaigns in Chinatown, adding visual communication, creative protest, and cultural organizing capacities to grassroots mobilizations and place-based struggles such as the Justice for Long Guang Huang campaign against police brutality in the mid-1980s. During the 1990s and early 2000s, this direct-action approach to art activism culminated with the reparative spatial justice campaigns of the Coalition to Protect Parcel C and Hudson Street for Chinatown Coalition that reclaimed land taken from Chinatown residents for community-driven planning and development. Over the next two decades, art activism took a more organizational turn, with the CPA, ACDC, BCNC, and other Chinatown-based organizations incorporating arts practices into their respective programs, especially with youth, and often addressing displacement pressures through cultural placekeeping strategies, and supporting each other’s initiatives when possible. ResLab marked an orientation towards organizational partnership around arts and culture from 2019, which became magnified with the multi-agency collaboration on the Chinatown Cultural Plan since 2023.

ResLab’s site-level challenges reinforce the importance of relationship building with institutional representatives, civic leaders, and government agencies in Chinatown and coordinating iterative efforts across community-based organizations over the longer term. Notwithstanding the ACDC’s tactical efforts to activate 8–12 Hudson Street and negotiate with the private owner to purchase the lot, they were unsuccessful in gaining ownership of the site and ultimately relocated Chinatown Backyard to Tufts Community Common, partly thanks to the relationship building between the ACDC and Tufts University through ResLab. While Kneeland Street remains a heavily-trafficked arterial road, the City of Boston’s Department of Transportation is undertaking three major projects in Chinatown with built-in community engagement, one of which is on Kneeland Street.11 At Mary Soo Hoo Park, the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy commissioned the artist Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong to install a “Year of the Tiger” community pavilion on the east side of the vent where the ResLab installation previously stood, and partnered with the Pao Arts Center to organize an outdoor performance series over summer 2022. The live performances by Boston-area spoken artists and performers encompassed a wide range artistic styles, cultural traditions, and languages reflecting Asian American Pacific Islander communities while offering visions of a shared future. Between April and October, the Greenway Conservancy also works with the ACDC’s A-VOYCE youth, who host SaturPLAY at Mary Soo Hoo Park, using pop-up games and activities to activate the park for families and children.

Finally, the case of Boston’s Chinatown illuminates the relationship between collective action and the preservation and transformation of culture in the urban frame. From the early establishment of family and clan associations for mutual aid and protection in the late 1800s to the founding of social service agencies and community-based action organizations from the 1970s, Chinatown has been a community that has rallied together to survive and preserve the neighborhood throughout its 150-year history. While relative exclusion and isolation from mainstream society helped sustain cultural values and traditions, Chinatown’s inordinate exposure to spatial and social injustices in the urban and political context also cultivated cultural repertoires of community organizing and mobilizations to address environmental racism and institutional encroachment among other collective challenges for the neighborhood. Arts and cultural organizing took on different forms and advanced ranging goals from cultural preservation in the postwar era to direct-action campaigns from the 1980s and community-driven planning and development since the 1990s. Amidst heightening development pressures and shifting demographics, ResLab provides a glimpse of how community-based arts education and participatory site activation can give meaning and significance to being at home in Chinatown for both long-time residents and people newer to the neighborhood. It also offers an example of how a community-based arts residency can prepare arts practitioners to join community members in actively shaping and maintaining places of belonging, resistance, and endurance, and advancing more hopeful, healthy, and equitable urban futures.