San Leandro is a small city, half an hour’s drive from San Francisco. Formerly an industrial working class community, it is a last bastion of relative affordability in a runaway real estate market. All of this is set to change with recent initiatives to attract technology companies, including new citywide fiber optics boasting the fastest internet speeds in the country. And that sure sign of gentrification – an extravagant piece of public art – has exposed the conservative flipside to northern California’s perceived liberalism.

This summer it was announced that a sculpture of a 55-foot tall female figure, a nude by some accounts, would adorn a new $200m tech campus in a former industrial area. City planners had required that the developers, Westlake Urban, commit 1% of the construction budget to public art.

Titled Truth is Beauty, by Bay Area artist Marco Cochrane, the work depicts a mesh female figure in repose, lit from within by more than 3,000 LED lights programmed by Google software engineer Ka-Ping Yee, created with a custom algorithm to generate patterns similar to a sunset. Truth is Beauty is one in a series of three sculptures called Bliss Project – another in the series, titled R-Evolution was featured at Burning Man earlier this year and a third is due to be erected in a US city not yet disclosed.

In San Leandro, where this writer has lived for six years, public art has generally been limited to occasional graffiti and homemade sculpture, including a rusting peace sign occupying the parking lot of an auto parts store. Artists have been allowed permission to paint utility boxes, and last year a striking mural by famed San Francisco painter and sculptor Rigo 23 initiated a burst of redevelopment activity around the local Bay Area Rapid Transit station.

Following the revelation that Truth is Beauty would land in San Leandro, controversy played out on neighborhood social network Nextdoor and in letters to the weekly 12-page San Leandro Times.

One incensed citizen asked whether the town would become known as “the capital of outdoor porn”, while others lauded the sculpture as “a beautiful addition” to the landscape. The furore has had little to do with more pressing questions, such as how the sculpture might signify a forthcoming wave of gentrification or how private enterprise is able to erect large public artworks without public input.

Cochrane says that the figure is not nude and that the work has a political message, chiefly the desire to see a world in which women are safe from violence. All of his work, in fact, is inspired by the childhood trauma of learning about the abduction and rape of a young friend. “I’ve spent my whole career addressing it. My work is a necessary expression to solve the problem,” he says, citing playwright Eve Ensler’s recent campaign One Billion Rising, a public initiative inviting women to “dance in the face of violence”, as a creative effort parallel to his own.

His objective is to “draw humanity toward the light and to then confront them with a message”, inscribed at the base in multiple languages, asking: “What would the world be like if women were safe?” At Burning Man in 2013, the same message was inscribed on the festival ground, known as the playa, in more than 50 translations. That year he and his wife, Julia Whitelaw, distributed 10,000 bracelets inscribed with “together we stand”, admonishing wearers to take active responsibility in the safety of their “sisters on the playa”.

Asked how Truth is Beauty might be received differently in an urban area near a transit station, versus the tranquil open space of the desert, he says: “I don’t know what it’s going to be like to see it there, but I know it’s going to work. The sculpture says something about female energy that I don’t really understand, as a man, but I do know that the only way we can survive as a species is to really hear what women have to say, in order to make the world a better place.”

It seems a tall order for a Burning Man sculpture set in a technology park in a Bay Area suburb, but not entirely implausible given the rate at which technology is transforming our lives on a global scale. Whereas some have criticised the work’s placement – one resident likened it to the nude calendars seen in a mechanic’s garage – there is also a way in which this placement provokes dialogue about gender parity in an increasingly pervasive industry known for its “tech bros”.

San Leandro government, Cochrane says, was overwhelmingly supportive because city hall is predominantly female-led. It probably also helps that the city has recently initiated a new improvement association, specifically to make San Leandro more attractive to tech companies, including increased policing and the presence of community ambassadors tasked with discouraging panhandling and reporting “suspicious activity”. Other shifts focused on revitalisation, a loaded term in cities facing redevelopment in favor of tech money, include a proposed revision to rent review ordinances.

I asked people to share their thoughts about the sculpture on Nextdoor and gathered some 70 responses. Only a select few were vocally oppositional; for the most part the general message echoed that of resident Marga Lacabe, who said “This piece seems lovely, but we’ll have to see how it looks once installed. But even then, public art I dislike is preferable to no public art.”

With the rising dominance of technology businesses and the pervasive influence of Burning Man, both of which go hand in hand in the Bay Area and beyond, it seems likely that cities everywhere will be joining the debate as more and more work moves off the Playa and into everyday life. Whether or not humanity will be drawn to the light remains to be seen.