Creative Class

Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Richard Branson. According to this story in Forbes, 73 of the world’s 1,125 billionaires dropped out of school along the way. An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal reports on research that says preschool is counterproductive – keep the kids home with mom and dad longer. Finland, where kids start school at seven, is seen as a model of education. Peter Drucker famously said that the resarch university would not survive the shift to knowledge-based capitalism.

So, do we need less school, or different kinds of school, or what?

What is a hipster? Being a DJ in the contemporary North American urban nightlife scene, it’s a question that I get to ponder a lot.

Last month, on their cover, Adbusters ran a story called Hipster: The dead end of Western civilization characterizing them as:

one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior [coming] to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.” An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal.

While being more than slightly polemical toward the end, the author’s point holds water. Hipsters are very slippery when looking to conventional modes of definition.

In the 1940s, it referred mainly to white youths adopting black urban culture vis a vis jazz music – the precursors to the beatniks in the 60s who extended the culture into its more suburban/hippie incarnation. These days the word has come to mean something very different, but in many ways still related – mostly through space. Despite the fact that Hipsters have taken a lot of flack recently for their eclectic dress, dance, and style there is something about the hipster that seems to have remained true throughout the ages. Their participation is fundamentally urban.

In the original hipster era, participating in urban life was synonymous with participating in black life, and so jazz music, black modes of speech, and cultural leanings on a white person made them easy to mark as a hipster. As the city hurtles toward design-intensivity, the definition of a hipster seems as mercurial as the definition of cool – as the city becomes the main nodes for the absorption of trends, hipsters seem to be the most eager people within the city to express them. Far from being a race discourse as it was in the past, this is a style discourse that seems to be engaging youth culture in all facets. Coincidentally (?) XXL magazine ran a feature that discussed the Hipster-effect on Hip hop in the same month that Adbusters ran their Hipster cover.

How is style in the city becoming a commodity? Is the common culture that it’s bringing us toward as banal as the Adbusters article would have us believe?

And now, as always, some music.

Seems the sixties and the hippie movement around the Bay Area had a big impact on architectural innovation a la Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, as well as music, popular culture, food (Alice Waters), and technology. Zahid Sardar, writing in the San Francisco Gate, reviews Alastair Gordon’s new book, Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties. Creativity requires self-expression. It also appears to arise in clumps or clusters, not just in time but in space.

Gordon’s research makes it clear that the ’60s generated many of the ideas about recycling and protecting the environment that we consider normal today … [T]he ’60s may have inspired the most visually arresting buildings by some of the most celebrated and visionary architects today.

Some of those unconventional buildings, it turns out, were created because the amateur builders could not quite figure out how to construct Fuller’s dome of conjoined triangular components. Nevertheless, you might see links between those forms and the wild imaginings of architect Eric Owen Moss in Culver City; Frank Gehry’s roof forms for the Bilbao Museum Guggenheim and the twisting, shiny Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; the wacky, wonderful main library in Seattle by Rem Koolhaas; and even the Federal Building in San Francisco by Thom Mayne.

What other areas of the U.S. seem to have been affected architecturally by the hippie movement?

A new report out by The Conference Board of Canada states that the culture sector directly contributes about $46B CDN or just under 4 percent to Canada’s overall GDP in 2007. The economic impact on the economy is much broader – $85B CDN in 2007, or just over 7 percent of total real GDP. Taking a look at employment, almost 4 percent of total national employment in 2003 can be traced back to arts and culture industries.

Indeed, those are big numbers, eh? How meaningful is the creative economy in your country or hometown? How big (or small) of an employment driver is it?

Zoltan Acs has an interesting report on global entrepreneurship which finds Tokyo as the least entrepreneurial city of any his team measured. What are we to make of this? When I go to Tokyo I am amazed at the creativity. A walk through Harajuku, Omote-sando, Ginza, Kichijoji, or any number of other neighborhoods scream creativity to me. In Kyoto we find Nintendo, Kyocera, Wacoal, and many other firms that are global-class innovators. Some of the new movies coming out of Japan are beautifully shot and fascinating studies of the human condition, as “creative” as anything coming out of Hollywood. Shifting frames, Japanese automobiles, machine tools, and various other manufactures are global-class.

This suggests a question that is worth thinking about. Namely, what is the relationship between entrepreneurship and creativity? We might accept that entrepreneurship is creative, but is the opposite true? Is a non-entrepreneurial society not creative? Or, to go even further, this obviously rhetorical question, are non-entrepreneurial societies not prosperous? What does the community think?

In Who’s Your City?, I wrote that the old trend of kids moving home after college was beginning to give way to a new one – boomer parents following their kids to more exciting cities. According to this New York Times report, it’s starting earlier than that. I’d heard about affluent parents buying condos for their kids to live in during college. But now, apparently, parents are following their kids to college and buying their own homes there. And to think: I went “away” to college (30 miles down the New Jersey Turnpike to Rutgers College) to get away from my parents’ ever-watchful eyes. I guess it’s less distance to travel to get the laundry done.

Any change or innovation tends to beget unexpected consequences. One that Cisco Systems did not expect was that implementing mobile technologies alongside a novel workplace layout can significantly reduce a company’s paper usage.

When Cisco Systems created a new concept workplace for its general administrative division, they sought to improve collaboration, not reduce the amount of paper their printers churned through. But that’s exactly what happened.

As mentioned last week, Cisco knew that employees were only at their assigned office or cubicle 35% of the time – an indication that this workplace style wasn’t really suiting the work being done.

To design more appropriate space, the workplace resource team (WPR) interviewed and studied the 140 people involved to understand how they work. They concluded that people needed the flexibility and mobility to work wherever it made sense – collaborating in teams or pairs, or working individually in silent areas or arenas that invited more informal chats. A variety of workplaces were created and employees can move from one to the next as their work needs chance. Moveable furniture in open areas, rooms for head-down silent work, conference rooms with speaker phones and video conferencing were all made available.

As Mark Golan of Cisco explains:

In many cases, this results in a flexible environment that focuses on collaborative space with little assigned seating. Employees are given a broad choice of work spaces and the technology to do their jobs. They choose where they work, based on the requirements of the tasks on which they are working.

The Connected Workplace is primarily a wireless environment…It also has wired jacks for high-speed communications needs, such as PC backups and video streaming, and technology for audio- and video-conferencing, e-mail, instant messaging, and voicemail.

Armed with the latest mobile computing and telephone technology, most people gained mobility and flexibility in organizing their workdays, but lost their assigned spaces (although the majority reported liking the new arrangement and Cisco measurements suggest that productivity improved).

One consequence is that workers cannot let paper pile up on a desk. Instead they have to file it, recycle it or take it home. Having to do this with every piece of paper printed every day caused most employees to re-think their printing habits.

Golan again:

And if they are just going to throw it out, people start to question why they are printing a document in the first place. This leads to behaviors that eliminate paper – conducting meetings solely with projectors or collaborative software…. Not only does this reduce paper consumption, but information is usually easier to find when digitally stored- instead of searching through paper files.

Could the paperless office talked about decades ago when the personal computer first emerged actually be around the corner? Hands up, who works in a paperless office?

Even if the paperless office is more dream than reality, perhaps the workplace is gradually trending toward something that involves slaughtering far fewer trees than typically occurs today. I’m a bad culprit for printing more than I need and letting it pile up on my desk. However, if I had to file it formally or discard it at the end of each day, this would be a powerful incentive for changing my ways.

Can anyone report on strategies that have worked for your workplace to cut down significantly on paper waste?

I’m already lamenting the end of the shopping bag – the gorgeous kind, you know, with maybe satin or grosgrain handles, like from Hermes or Donghia or Laduree in Paris. The kind you may hold onto for years, can’t bear to toss.

And the whole ritual of having your purchase lavishly swathed in tissue paper, held in place with a beautiful sticker, and then gracefully placed in its coordinating carrier suddenly feels sinful.

That graphic/branding indulgence is coming to an end – I know it and ruefully admit I will really miss it. Carrying bags will always be with us but will reusables ever be as glamorous as their wasteful and glorious predecessors?

Sure, we are all declining shopping bags and bringing in our own, recycling the plastic ones, etc. In my store we keep reusing them (except for gift purchases of course), without the shame we might have felt a couple of years ago. All these new practices are good and necessary and I wholeheartedly support them but I can’t imagine what, if anything, will recreate that little note of luxury when our packaging becomes truly minimal?

Have a look at urban geographer Steven Higley’s website which uses maps and graphics to illustrate the overlay of class and race in the richest U.S. neighborhoods. African-Americans make up just 0.1 percent of the 100 richest neighborhoods. Asian-Americans, 2.7 percent of U.S. households, make up 4.3 percent. The full list is here.

New York and its suburbs and greater L.A. dominate the list. Greater Chicago and greater Washington, D.C. are next. The Bay Area has two neighborhoods on the top 100. According to Higley, 22 can be classified as nouveau riche, and 12 are gated communities. Just four of the top 100 are located in central cities: Midtown Manhattan, Pacific Heights in San Francisco, Washington Park in Seattle, and the Westernmost part of Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia. Have a look at the geographic pattern of the leading Black, Hispanic, and Asian neighborhoods.

Top Black Neighborhoods
West Mount Airy, Philadelphia
Newstead, New York
Montrose Park North, New York
Flossmoor Country Club, Chicago
Portland Place-Lindell Boulevard, St. Louis

Top 5 Hispanic Neighborhoods
Key Biscayne Southwest , Florida
Biltmore Golf Club, Coral Gables, Florida
Granada Golf Course West, Coral Gables, Florida
Southern Colonial Village-Riviera Country Club, Coral Gables, Florida
Coco Plum-Gables Estates, Coral Gables, Florida

Top 5 Asian Neighborhoods
Mission Peak Foothills, San Francisco
Mission San Jose-Pine Street, San Francisco
Fremont Place, Los Angeles
Avalon Heights-Rancho Higuera Park, San Francisco
Cupertino South-Regnart Canyon, Cupertino, California

A few days ago, I came across an article that suggested in 40 years the whole population will be obese! Well, we know that about 30 percent already is and Richard Posner has suggested that this is individual choice. Well, I would venture to say that the creative class is, by and large, rather fit. They are rich, right. The rich and the creative are not obese. Why, they eat better and exercise more.

So what is the creative class doing to solve this huge social problem? What are the public policy issues? The answer, Victory Bread! Yes, the British response to winning WWII. You would think that the creative class could figure out that the solution to this epidemic would be to throw out the microwave, that menace of modernity, and buy a bread machine: It’s cheaper, it’s healthier, and it’s better for the environment. Is this creative or what?