Paper short abstract

This paper examines how social constructions of artistic autonomy scale up to define an artistic neighborhood of Amman

Paper long abstract

As the Amman neighborhood of Jabal al Luweibde became an "artistic neighborhood," residents began to speak of a "Weibde Bubble," describing the neighborhood as separate from the rest of the city. This condition of separateness, tied closely to the neighborhood's artistic character, opened the neighborhood as a space for artistic, social, and political experimentation. At the same time, the spatial separateness structured a geographical imaginary around the art scene which helped to shape artistic ideologies and action. In this paper, I analyze this separateness as a spatial manifestation of artistic autonomy. While autonomy is a property typically attributed to artworks (Kant, Schiller) or artists/art-worlds (Bourdieu), here, we see autonomy as a social construct which has been scaled up from artists and artworks to apply to an entire neighborhood. Such a spatial autonomy is not only an important development for the art scene, but is socially generative in ways that stretch into society at large.