Creative Class

Terrific new paper shows just how spiky the creative class is. The research by Mark Lorenzen and Kristina Vaarst Andersen of DRUID, a research center in Copenhagen -and who will be visiting with us at the Martin Prosperity Institute this winter – charts the statistical distribution of the creative class across 445 cities in Europe.

Using novel statistical data, the paper analyzes the geographical
distribution of Richard Florida’s creative class among 445 European
cities. The paper demonstrates that size matters, i.e. cities with a
high proportion of creative class tend to get more creative through
attraction of still more creative labor. More specifically, the
distribution of the European creative class falls into three phases,
each approximating a rank-size rule, with different exponents (i.e.,
inequality).

Great piece by John Gapper over at the Financial Times on “NyLon” – the twin “city-states” of New York City and London.

NyLon is also part of the phenomenon of the city state. Coastal and
entrepôt cities around the world are outgrowing the nations that
contain them. Dubai and other Emirates states are reinventing
themselves as financial centres and a token of Shanghai’s rapid growth
was the appointment this week of Xi Jinping, one of the city’s leaders,
to the ruling Chinese politburo. Meanwhile, New York’s fortunes
have decoupled from the US in the past year or two. Home prices have
plunged in California and Las Vegas but have kept rising in Manhattan
and, while the US economy grew by only 0.7 per cent in the first
quarter of the year, New York City’s economy grew by 4 per cent.

Our own research confirms this. So, hot off the press here’s a link to our new research identifying the 40 mega-regions that truly drive the world economy.

Grant McCracken takes on Chris Anderson and the Long Tail:

The Long Tail a thoroughly partial book.  As I read through a second time, I was struck by what is missing.  You give plenty of attention to aggregators like Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, eBay, and Google and pretty much ignore the rest of capitalism!  You have taken on one of the most explosive developments in contemporary capitalism…only to offer a partial view and a single solution.  It’s as if you declined the larger intellectual challenge. … What is missing in The Long Tail is the work horse of capitalism, the corporation, and the extraordinary challenges that now confronts its innovation, strategy and marketing functions.   As virtually everyone knows, the corporate world is scrambling to deal with the speed with which taste and preference now fragment and change.  In turns out, The Long Tail pipe has pretty much a single answer for exploding markets: big (or bigger) pipes. … There are two problems with this answer.  First, there can only be a few aggregators in the world, and this limits the usefulness of this book for the rest of the world.  Second, bigger pipes isn’t, in the larger order of things, really the most interesting, ambitious or canny solution. What the “aggregator answer” ignores are the real challenges that exist as a single corporation learns how to be many things to many people, how it makes the boundary of the corporation more porous, letting the world in and innovation out, how it escapes the inevitable gravitational field created by the corporate culture, how it accomplishes some kind of continuity in the face of its external and increasing internal discontinuity. … The scope of this book is smaller than I realizeIt seems to be that The Long Tail treats an astonishing problem, with a narrow, partial, and one might even say provincial response.

Anderson responds in the comments section of McCracken’s blog.

Seems to me McCracken is onto something.  Sure individuals have more choice, but consumption still follows broad patterns.  My travels around the world – and our research on markets and consumption – convince me that the global creative class increasingly wears the same clothes, drives the saame cars, eats the same food, shops for the same brands and so on. The tail of the distribution plays its role, but I think Grant is right that it’s important to keep focussed on the big fat middle.

Andrew Blum on Jacobs, cities and the environment (pointer vis Steve Johnson).

We are wedging ourselves between a rock and a hard place: between the pleasures of medium-density living (Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Toronto’s Annex) and the ecological necessity of even more density. When it comes to our homes, we are all justifiably afraid of change, especially when it feels like (or is) destruction. But we don’t often pair that truth with another oft-repeated one: Our way of life is unsustainable. In North America’s most beautiful urban places, we unfailingly fight every new tall building in the name of “quality of life” and the “character of the neighborhood.” We claim to have internalized the idea that it’s all connected, that slowing the warming of the planet is a global project, but the nature in our backyards remains sacred—often to the point, perhaps, of self-destruction.

Blum makes some interesting points, But I’m not so sure that localism is the nub of the problem.  Our cities are much better today that they were before.  Density is increasing in Toronto and other cities. Nimbyism remains a force for sure.  The rise of a spiky world and the mega-region – the flip side of globalization – are generating tremendousn growth pressures in a dozen or two megas worldwide which are growing “up” as well as out.  Environment is a huge problem but it seems a stretch to blame localism and the residents of city neighborhoods.

Came across this interesting interview with Lauren Tan on “service design.”

They have used a lot of service design on the projects, there were designers who call themselves service designers. But there are also a lot of different people coming from different backgrounds, like psychologist, social scientist, film producers, artists … I think this mixture is very interesting. There are people who don’t come from design backgrounds, but do service design.
Service design is not new. People have been doing it in marketing, in IT, in engineering, in arts …  It’s very interesting to have lots of different disciplines involved in what we call service design. Is service design something exclusive to designers? We’ve already talked about designers working in business, but the other disciplines can also do design. It’s about the exchange, it’s fascinating.

I spent last week in Toronto and fell in love with what I will call its messy urbanism. The
city contains the usual suspects on the menu of elements of
contemporary good urban form: mixed-use, bike paths, transit, street
trees, etc. However, there’s a sort of less-than-manicured quality to
the whole thing, and coupled with a huge diversity of people, the city
ends up feeling gloriously messy, in a functional and walkable way. The
city’s messiness and realness stands in refreshing contrast to
oft-cited beacons of “smart growth” and good urban design, such as San
Francisco and Boston, where the perfection of the built form has almost
transformed these cities into museums. In Toronto, rickety and
ramshackle Victorian buildings sit snugly next to sleek modern
20-storey condos. Tree-lined streets of row houses (some restored, many
not) run right into bustling commercial boulevards filled with
streetcars, bicyclists, traffic, produce vendors. … Toronto’s urban messiness creates a truly unique city to visit and use as a role model for U.S. cities.

I could not agree more. This article captures the very essence of the city. Read the whole thing here.

“Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass” in the New Yorker (h/t: Courtney Miller).

Most interesting post by Mark Belmont over at Image and Authenticity:

With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded “creative” college
towns such as Portland, Ore., this is the music of young “knowledge workers” in
training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is
bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it
shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind
of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners
to admire. … Among at least a subset of (the younger) musicians and fans, this class
separation has made indie more openly snobbish and narrow-minded. In the darkest
interpretation, one could look at the split between a
harmony-and-lyrics-oriented indie field and a rhythm-and-dance-specialized
rap/R&B scene as mirroring the developing global split between an
internationalist, educated comprador class (in which musically, one week Berlin
is hot, the next Sweden, the next Canada, the next Brazil) and a far less
mobile, menial-labor market (consider the more confining, though often musically
exciting, regionalism that Frere-Jones outlines in hip-hop). … The profile of this university demographic often includes a sojourn in extended adolescence, comprising graduate degrees, internships, foreign jaunts, and so on, which easily can last until their early 30s. … If class, at least as much as race, is the elephant in this room, one of the more encouraging signals lately might be the recent mania for Bruce Springsteen—as if a dim memory suddenly
has surfaced that white working-class culture once had a kind of significant
berth in rock ‘n’ roll, too.

A very compelling and very careful new study of the United States by Timothy Wojan, Dayton Lambert and David McGranahan provides substantial support for a large bohemian effect on local economic development. The authors conclude that their “results support the hypothesis that an unobserved creative milieu that attracts artists increases local economic dynamism.” The study, published in the Journal of Economic Geography, is here.

The New York Times Magazine dips to a new low – with an almost cover-to-cover feature on – GET THIS – “The City (read: Manhattan) in the Second Gilded Age.” I know the magazine has devolved into a marketing vehicle for selling expensive condos, high-end cars, and watches – not to worry this Sunday’s Times also includes an entire special magazine for the chronographically inclined.  I can see Herbert Muschamp and Jane Jacobs turning in their graves. The whole thing would be completely inane if it didn’t include Bob Walker’s piece on “the Donald’s” new project downtown. Any artist or creative types left downtown are surely now packing their bags for Queens, Jersey City or Philly. And another by Dan Gross on how the place is losing it’s global edge in finance to London. After detailing the shift to London and other global financial centers, Gross tries to find light at the end of the tunnel. “So rather than high-end luxury services fueled largely by Wall Street wages and bonuses,” he writes,” New York will have high-end luxury services that
themselves fuel the economy. Wait til the dollar drops another 20 percent or so.” Maybe. More likely, the globally idle rich will buy up more of Manhattan, at the very moment its economic base is being eclipsed.  Or as Jane Jacobs would say: “When a place gets boring even the rich people leave.”