Creative Class

Having just gotten back, this article by Blane Hardin, one of the best urban journalists around, captures the soul of Tokyo (h/t: Ken McGuffin).

Although it is the political, economic and cultural center of Japan, Tokyo
itself has no real center. It’s a jumble of densely populated districts that are
themselves big cities, hubs for the frenetic inbound rush and exhausted homeward
retreat of millions upon millions of subway and train commuters. The cyclical
crush of humanity approaches chaos but never quite gets there — the Japanese
being sticklers for rules. A unifying thread, if there is one, is movement. But transience across such a vast canvas reveals little. To sharpen the focus, consider a triptych of
miniatures — three small stop-frames that suggest the larger rhythms of life in
the planet’s preeminent urban space.

One teeny, little correction. The article states that Tokyo is by far the biggest global city in  the world. Well sort of.  It is the biggest individual city in the advanced world. However, some of the cities of the emerging economy are bigger. And when we look at the world in term of the more appropriate category of mega-region – that is as economically connected units as opposed to political jurisdictions, it is just slightly bigger that Bos-Wash.

During the Fordist era, politics broke down clearly by income and occupation – that is along class lines. Blue-collar working class people voted Democrat, or in other other countries Labor or Socialist or even Communist.  But these voting patterns and political blocs have shifted over the past two or three decades with the rise of the creative economy, increased occupational differentiation and what Ronald Inglehart dubs the rise of post-materialist political values.  Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman has been at the forefront of tracking the political implications of income and occupation.

Here are some recent graphs on income by state, Gelman writes:

The patterns are pretty striking: the high end has increased pretty consistently
in almost all the states, and the low end increased a lot in poor states,
especially for the first half of the series. … All states have been getting richer over the decades (as measured by average real incomes). Up until about 1980, income inequality between states decreased, then since then it’s increased slightly.

Gelman and Yu-Hsieh are using data from the National Election Studies to examine the relationship between occupation and voting. Have a look at the fascinating graphs, here. Within each occupational class they’re plotting Republican presidential vote (relative to the national mean each year). And they are finding some striking patterns with professionals (doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc) going to the Democrats and
business owners going to the Republicans.

It is pretty clear to me that a key way to understand the politics of the creative economy is to understand the role of occupations. More from this fascinating line of research as it develops.

So you thought urban renewal and the destruction of neighborhoods  and tearing down of historic buildings was a thing of the past. Think again: Not in New Orleans. CNN reports:

Protests against a City Council plan to tear down low-income New
Orleans housing turned ugly Thursday, with police using pepper spray
and stun guns to clear a crowd angry they weren’t allowed into City
Hall for the vote.   The City
Council voted unanimously to greenlight the demolition of the city’s
four largest public housing developments, saying they are too damaged
by Hurricane Katrina to allow residents back into them. But many
in New Orleans, including former residents of the developments, say
they fear the local and federal governments will not guarantee
similarly affordable housing be built in their place — calling the
demolition an effort to move poor people out of the city. At
about 11 a.m., several protesters were dragged out of council chambers
after scuffles broke out among people who packed the room, and members
of the crowd booed council members and shouted insults at them. About 30 minutes later, hundreds more protesters angry that they
weren’t allowed into the meeting began rattling an iron gate outside
City Hall.

New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff writes:

[I]t is the government’s tabula rasa approach that
evokes the most brutal postwar urban-renewal strategies. Neighborhood
history is deemed irrelevant; the vague notion of a “fresh start” is
invoked to justify erasing entire communities. This mentality
also threatens other public buildings in New Orleans that can be
considered 20th-century landmarks. If the government gets its way, a
rich architectural legacy will be supplanted by private, mixed-income
developments with pitched roofs and wood-frame construction, an ersatz
vision of small-town America. That this could happen in a city that
still largely lies in ruins is both sad and grotesque. …

In an eerie echo of the slum clearance projects of the 1960s,
government officials are once again denying that these projects and
communities can be salvaged through a human, incremental approach to
planning. For them, only demolition will do. … If
the urban renewal projects of the 1960s replaced decaying historic
neighborhoods with vast warehouses for the poor, HUD’s vision would
yield saccharine, suburban-style houses. And the situation is likely to
get worse. The government has identified some other historically
important public buildings for demolition as part of its push for
privatization. Charity Hospital, an Art Deco structure built downtown
in the late 1930s, was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, and its fate
is uncertain. … The Thomas Lafon Elementary School, a sleek
Modernist structure from the 1950s, is destined for the wrecking ball.
And there has been talk of tearing down the Andrew J. Bell Junior High
School, an elegant French neo-Gothic building completed in the late
19th century.

Blow after blow, in the name of progress. Cast as
the city’s saviors, architects are being used to compound one of the
greatest crimes in American urban planning.

The always insightful Ken Jarboe points to this New York Times article on technology and traffic in Silicon Valley:

Nir Zuk, its founder and chief technology officer,
notes that Palo Alto is synonymous with high-tech innovation, and he
was living there when he came up with the name. “But in Silicon Valley, you locate a company where the engineers are,”
he said. “You would never locate a networking company in Palo Alto.” … [A] look at the microclusters within Silicon Valley
demonstrates the business relationships, the social connections and the
seamless communication that animate the region’s economy. It also
suggests the human nuance behind the Valley’s success and shows why
that success is not easy to copy, export or outsource.

Jarboe adds:

Similar to the microclimates that determine the locations of the
wineries, these microclimates are  a “collection of remarkably local
clusters based on industry niches, skills, school ties, traffic
patterns, ethnic groups and even weekend sports teams.”

All surrounded by the macroclimate of openness to new ideas and people of the greater Bay Area.  It’s time to look more closely at the intersection of these micro- and macro-climates for creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The always politically incorrect, yet sharp South Park uses Guitar Hero to offer some insights into young, creative class consumers and their reality (the digital world). Enjoy the clip. (posted by David) 

Carrie Brownstein over at NPR’s Monitor Mix:

Great music transcends the spot on the map from which it springs
forth. But music also captures the nuances and sensibilities of
people’s lives in a specific place or even becomes a reflection of the
city or State itself. Our local bands might be the best example of who
we are right now or of who we want to become, or maybe not at all. They
might live in Portland and sound like they’re from Manchester. So, it’s
not just the bands who reside in our cities and towns, or who
transplant themselves there, that make up the noises that represent our
topography or our internal and external landscapes.

Brownstein asks: What musical sounds, what bands, what songs, exemplify the places you inhabit? What say you?

MayorTV has a series of video interviews with the mayors of Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Denver, Los
Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Rochester and Salt Lake City who discuss the need for an urban agenda and in some cases their own preferences from president (h/t: Brian Knudsen).  Where Blog writes:

What this seems to suggest is that day-to-day life for most Americans
has little or nothing to do with the “hot-button” issues that
presidential candidates are so concerned about. Abortion, gay marriage,
and the Iraq war, while all important in their own ways, are by no
means the issues that have the greatest impact on this country, yet
they receive a greatly disproportionate amount of attention in the
media because they are easily polarized issues, and thus much easier to
sell. Meanwhile, people struggle every day with crime, education,
drugs, and economic issues that go largely unaddressed.

The New York Times thinks so.  Money quote:

“It has been 30 years of a strategy that says if we revitalize downtown
the rest of the city will follow,” said Kevin Boyle, a Detroit native
and professor of history at Ohio State University, who has written extensively on the city. “And that is simply not true.”

Part of the effort is to build a “Creative Corridor” along Woodward.

We’re headed there for the holidays.

In the ongoing dialogue over which matters more the Chi or the Pitts, Where Blog argues that:

As sociologists have recently documented, a new phase is being added to
the life cycle for young people in developed countries: the odyssey.
Young people have a tendency, once they have their diploma in hand, to
strike out into the world, seeking their proverbial fortunes. This
creates a diasporic network of people across the country and the world
with strong roots in a community other than they one in which they are
living. As its title suggests, this is exactly what The Burgh Diaspora
covers in depth: Pittsburgh’s diasporic population, often considered to
be one of the most extensive such networks. … Pittsburgh’s network, now,
provides it with a unique opportunity to lift smaller businesses
looking for a less overwhelming (read: risky) market in which to
develop their product. Pittsburgh is able, through its extended
diasporic network in Chicago, to earn free word-of-mouth advertising
from its expatriate sons and daughters that could potentially drive
these smaller companies east to the Appalachians.

Their dialogue focuses on what you can think of as an “out-diaspora” – leverage ex-Pittsburghers (or name your city) elsewhere as sources of ideas or even attract them back home. It’s a useful and important notion. In doing the research for Who’s Your City, I came across many examples of extremely successful people who in their middle years expressed their desire to and sometimes did move back home.  But as I also point out, no matter how good a community is at leveraging its out-diaspora and attracting some back, the numbers can’t add up – you’ll never attract back as many as you lose. That said, there are many other useful roles such an out-diaspora can provide, and BurghDiaspora and others are right to focus on it as one of a number of leverage points.

But my main point is, most North American cities – and certainly Pittsburgh – have extensive “in-diasporas” – that is in-migrants who have chosen to live there – that may provide even more leverage. These include students, the sub-group of foreign born students, domestic in-migrants and foreign-born ones as well. As Annalee Saxenian’s research has pointed out these in-diasporas are a central element in the growth, evolution and globalization of Silicon Valley. This to my mind is the even more critical element in people globalization for regions.

How can regions begin to leverage and use their in-diasporas?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is this graph from Afferent Income (via Kevin Drum) worth a whole lot more. The graph tracks U.S. income inequality between 1979 and 2005 charting the share of national income going to various groups. Look at the spike showing the rise in the share going to the top 1 percent of households over this period.