Creative Class

This item over at 2Blowhards.com captures what is truly great Pittsburgh.

“The Wife and I recently spent a few days in Pittsburgh … and it was a treat meeting and comparing notes with some of
Pittsburgh’s young-and-creative set. The Wife and I were both struck by what a cool city Pittsburgh has
become. (The locals tell us that this turnaround has taken place very
recently — in only the last five or six years.) The
old-industrial-powerhouse basics of the city are great: lots of
working-class brawniness and pride, and some impressively quiet and
spacious, old-tycoonish stretches too. The city is blessed with mucho
in the way of geographical variety — hills, rivers, cliffs — and is
crammed with tons of character-filled neighborhoods, and an amazing
stock of gorgeous old commercial buildings and houses. As well as — of particular interest to Offbeat Us — a couple of
fizzy boho neighborhoods. It’s great that housing prices are modest
too. An offbeat, slacker-ish person, in other words, could lead a swell
life in Pittsburgh.”

Read the whole thing here. And while you’re at it check out the Manifesto for a New Pittsburgh.

It’s not very often that I come across new research which I think is absolutely seminal to how we understand cities and regions.  But a new study of “urban scaling” by researches affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute is promises to change the way we think about cities. It’s a must read!  Here is a quick distillation of two recent press summaries.

A new report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA confirms what many city dwellers, who account for the bulk of people on Earth, have claimed for years: Cities have an almost magical ability, spurred by increased human interaction, to stimulate innovation and increase wealth.

The report also pooh-poohs the popular comparison of the growth of cities with biological organisms. An animal slows as it balloons in size ; in contrast, the researchers note, cities speed up as population and everything from crime to per capita income grow.

Cities create a sort of “urban economic miracle,” says study co-author Luis Bettencourt, a research scientist in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Theoretical Division. “When you integrate all these people and all these activities and the struggle to make a living, total productivity increases,” he says.

The researchers sifted through an extensive amount of data on many urban systems—mostly big American cities, but also European (primarily German) and Chinese urban areas.

The researchers mathematically modeled these factors according to population growth to see how each respond when more people move to a city. They found that human needs, such as employment, utility consumption and housing, correspond directly with the population …At the other extreme, researchers found that increases in social activity and production outpace population growth. In other words, if the number of city denizens doubles, these factors—both negative (crime) and positive (wealth creation, total wages and gross domestic product)—will more than double.

“The
one thing that we know about organisms, whether it be elephants or
sharks or frogs, is that as they get large, they slow down,” Lobo says.
“They use less energy, they don’t move as fast. That is a very
important point for biological scaling.
“In
the case of cities, it is actually the opposite. As cities get larger,
they create more wealth, and they are more innovative at a faster rate.
There is no counterpart to that in biology.”

What was
surprising to the team was that the creative output (jobs, wealth
generated and innovation), as cities grow, becomes faster and faster
per capita.
“It
isn’t like if you double the size of a city, you double its creative
output,” Lobo said. “But it does increase by about 10 percent to 30
percent.”
“Cities
are really one of the most important innovations in human history,”
Lobo says. “We need to think of them as being very human entities, and
as engines of our collective creation.”

The paper is here.

“I love my new glasses,” says American cultural anthropologist Richard Florida. “I bought them two years ago. They emulate the classic old horn-rim design. I think they’re emblematic of the way design now is used to create identity in a very customized way for consumers. We used to have an industrialized system that enhanced similarity. Now we have this new system that enhances difference. My father sold eyeglasses, so the nostalgia of how these things look has an extra personal dimension for me. I have a real fondness for classic industrial design — not fussy, not ostentatious, but well made. You use these objects to create yourself.”

Free Agent Nation author, Dan Pink loves the I-phone.  Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management lusts for the Mini-Cooper.  Paola Antonelli, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art, New York has a thing for Guilio Lacchetti’s iconic fly swatter. For Patrick Whitney who heads the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology it’s his new La Pavoni Espresso makers.  Roger Mandle, president of the Rhode Island School of Design is smitten by the Southwest Wind Generator.

From Sarah Milroy’s story on design in today’s Toronto Globe and Mail, here. More on Retrospecs and Company from the New York Times, here.

Tell us about your favorite things and why you love them.

The locations where Wal-mart gets its products (via Marginal Revolution via Kottke). Original map is here.

So, where is the Creative Class?

Looking at this, the answer must be "go east, young man".

The map shows the "heat" being generated by the Creative Class across the entire U.S.  There are a few hot spots in the west, but unlike their compatriots in the east, they don’t get to share the warmth generated by their neighbors.  The hot spots are New York City to Philly, metro DC, central & eastern Virginia, Atlanta, and the Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville “triangle”. I generated the map based on current Creative Class numbers and plotted the log of the total number of Creative Class members in each county.  The heat mapping process is based on both individual strength and proximity to others and their values, so the higher population densities favor the eastern states.  Values are displayed relative to the other locations on each map, so the results stay consistent but the view changes with zoom levels.  For separate regional views or a better version of the map, see the attached PDF file.

Download CreativeClassHeatMap.pdf

(Special shout-out to Jeff at HeatMapAPI for his work and quick response in getting things working.)

Posted by: Kevin Stolarick

That’s what their discussing over at Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution. According to a recent economics study, the answer is one.

In comparing identical twins, Kohler found that mothers with one child are
about 20 percent happier than their childless counterparts; and while
fathers’ happiness gains are smaller, men enjoy an almost 75 percent
larger happiness boost from a firstborn son than from a firstborn
daughter.The first child’s sex doesn’t matter to mothers, perhaps because women are better than men at enjoying the company of both girls and boys, Kohler speculates.

Interestingly, second and third children don’t add to
parents’ happiness at all.  In fact, these additional children seem to
make mothers less happy than mothers with only one child—though still
happier than women with no children.

“If you want to maximize your subjective well-being,
you should stop at one child,” concludes Kohler, adding that people
probably have additional children either for the benefit of the
firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them
happy, the second one will, too.

The longer story is here; here is the paper, and the author’s home page.

I’m guessing lots of you have children. Care to weigh in.

Over at Slate, they’re excerpting Witold Rybczynski ‘s new book which follows the making of new residential subdivision. Here he discusses why we live in
houses in the first place.

“Many things—government policies, tax
structures, financing methods, home-ownership patterns, and
availability of land—account for how people choose to live, but the
most important factor is culture. To understand why we live in houses,
it is necessary to go back several hundred years to Europe. Rural
people have always lived in houses, but the typical medieval town
dwelling, which combined living space and workplace, was occupied by a
mixture of extended families, servants, and employees. This changed in
17^th-century Holland. The Netherlands was Europe’s first
republic, and the world’s first middle-class nation. Prosperity allowed
extensive home ownership, republicanism discouraged the widespread use
of servants, a love of children promoted the nuclear family, and
Calvinism encouraged thrift and other domestic virtues. These
circumstances, coupled with a particular affection for the private
family home, brought about a cultural revolution. People
began to live and work in separate places; children grew up with their
parents (rather than being apprenticed to strangers, as before); and
the home, securely under the control of what we would now call the
“housewife,” was restricted to the immediate family. This intimate
domestic haven was always a house. Seventeenth-century Dutch cities and
towns were composed almost entirely of houses built in rows, side by
side, wide or narrow depending on the wealth of the owner.”

The rest is here.

While most people take the single family house for granted, I’m not so sure it’s here to stay. Houses simply do not fit in very well with the demands for flexibility, mobility and continuous innovation in the creative economy.  They cost a lot and suck up a ton of capital – a significant percent of gross fixed investment and overall gross national product which could be used for other more productive activities.  They are energy sinks and most people and families don’t use or need all that space.  They’re environmental disasters.  They’re bulky, can’t be moved, and take a long time to buy, rennovate or sell. There is a growing body of economics research which suggests home ownership is associated with lower rates of productivity, lower incomes, and higher rates of unemployment. Density breeds innovation

My sense is we’ll eventually have to invent a new form of housing for the creative age. Not just higher density or more apartment like. I think ownership is a big part of the problem, so it will have to give. Take cars for example. When I was young virtually anyone who wanted to a car had to buy it. Now more and more people lease. They pay less, have a new car to drive, and can change when they want to.

It’s only a matter of time until new forms of high-end leasing are coming to the residential real estate industry. Sure, lots of people buy houses because they want to own, but others do it because they simply can’t get what they want on the rental market. So they buy, design and rennovate to get the kind of home they desire. And despite the recent speculative boom, housing ain’t such a terrific investment.  Many are now arguing that is now a much better deal to rent than to own. What if residential real estate companies took a cue from commercial real estate developers and started tailoring houses to buyer’s specifications, changing kitchens, baths, and decor to suit.  The market is out there. Heck, something like this is already happening in high-end markets like Manhattan and Miami Beach.

Such a system would contribute considerably to overall economic efficiency beyond housing. It may be well that the era of the house is already past.

Last week Richard blogged about extreme commuting in the US, where more and more people are spending 2-3 hours each way. Today Eric Bellman of the WSJ (sub required) explores the deadly nature of commuting in the high-growth, developing city of Mumbai, India. From the article:

"India’s economic growth in the past several years has
brought new wealth and a higher standard of living to many in this
metropolis of 18 million. But it also has created suburban sprawl that
is adding more people to a rail network that has seen few new trains or
tracks added in the past 30 years.

Indian officials have a new term to describe the 2.5
times capacity crowds that now ride at peak hours: Super-Dense Crush
Load. That is, 550 people crammed into a car built for 200.

The result is what may be the world’s most dangerous
commute. According to Mumbai police: 3,404 people, or about 13 each
weekday, were killed in 2006 scrambling across the tracks, tumbling off
packed trains, slipping off platforms, or sticking their heads out open
doors and windows for air.

The toll has been increasing as daily ridership has
increased to more than six million people a day. Last year’s tally was
up 10% from the year before. Accidents are so common that stations
stock sheets to cover corpses."

The article is accompanied by interesting video and image features as well.

posted by David

OK, so I’m a couple of weeks late. But over at TCS Daily, Ilya Shapiro, a Canadian working as a lawyer and writer in Washington D.C., provides a personal perspective on America’s bad joke of an immigration policy.

“Because April 1 was a Sunday, the day exposing the
foolishness that is U.S. immigration policy fell on April 2 this year.
This is the day when employers are allowed to begin filing petitions
with the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services for highly skilled workers to be given what are known as H-1B visas. …The problem is that there aren’t enough of these visas: Congress limits the number of H-1Bs that can be granted each year, and that magic number
has been set at 65,000 for four years now. Before that, and in response
to the technology boom of the late ’90s, Congress temporarily raised
the H-1B cap to 195,000. But that expansion expired in 2004, and the
cap has been reached earlier and earlier each year since. In 2005, that meant August. Last year, it was May 26. This year, the cap was reached on… April 2 — the very first day you could file.
Yes, by that Monday afternoon, USCIS had received over 150,000 H-1B
applications. Officials quickly announced that it would randomly select
65,000 petitions from all those it had received April 2 and April 3.”

Ugh……

As for the vast majority of employers and employees who were out of luck,
the immigration laws said, like so many Cubs fans on what was also
baseball’s opening day, “wait till next year.”

Except, in this case, next year means putting your business or career on hold
until October 1, 2008—the day that people who secure H-1Bs for fiscal
year 2009 can start work.

Now, why do I care about this issue so much? Because I myself am a foreign
professional. No, not an engineer or scientist—haven’t taken math since
high school. I’m actually a lawyer, and I do quite a bit of political
law right here in Washington, DC.

What helps me is that I come from Canada—my parents took a wrong turn at the
St. Lawrence when we immigrated from the Soviet Union—which gets a
special provision of un-capped visas under NAFTA. Still, these NAFTA
visas are only good for one year at a time, and I have to maintain the
legal fiction that after getting my education in the US and living my
entire adult life here, I have no intention of staying permanently.

But at least I get to be here, tenuous as my grasp on the American dream
may be. As the H-1B petition statistics demonstrate, there are hundreds
of thousands of qualified people with job offers in America who
cannot realize their dreams in their home countries. These are people
who, like my engineer parents, want a better life for their children
and see the United States as a bastion of freedom and rule of law in an
unruly time. They aim to leave places that, while not always oppressing
them, have sclerotic economic systems less conducive to
entrepreneurship and growth than America (India, France, most of the
world).

Yet neither the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act the Senate passed last year nor the STRIVE Act, a bill now pending before the House that combines increased border
security with a guest-worker program, contemplates the doctors,
scientists, and software developers (forget lawyers and pundits!) the
country needs. And, as I said before, even those in that category who
make it here have to leave just as they’ve planted roots and become
increasingly assimilated.

Thus America continues to maintain an incomprehensible and
counter-productive immigration policy, damaging both pocketbooks and
heartstrings from Silicon Valley to the Bay of Bengal. And unless
Congress and the White House do something to fundamentally reshape
immigration rules with respect to skilled workers (let alone the
hard-working gardeners and construction workers who get all the news
coverage) things will only get worse.

I just hope I get married—absurdly, the only route to permanent residence
open to people like me—before I have to leave the country.

If only this were all a bad April Fools’ joke.