Toward A Productive Mourning: Street Art, Melancholia, and the Politics of Gentrification

This article examines the affective experience of encountering street art in the contemporary gentrifying city, taking St. Petersburg, Florida, as its primary case study. Beginning from an autobiographical experience of melancholy produced by walking through downtown St. Petersburg curated mural landscape, the article develops a theoretical framework that draws on Sigmund Freud’s account of mourning and melancholia, Gernot Böhme’s concept of affective atmosphere, Rafael Schacter’s historicization of street art as a bounded period, and Walter Benjamin’s notion of melancholy as a site of political energy. I argue that the disorientation many encounter amid sanctioned street art programs is neither incidental nor purely personal but is instead produced by a psychic loss—the internalization of an idealized, participatory cityscape—that is actively deepened by the affective atmospheres gentrification generates. Rather than settling into what Wendy Brown calls “left melancholy,” which treats street art’s complicity in gentrification as total and inescapable, the article proposes a practice of productive mourning. By recognizing street art as a historically situated practice with a specific emergence and transformation, mourning becomes possible, enabling a more differentiated and politically generative engagement with urban change.