Richard Florida was one of the “Big Three” who gathered at the Creative Cities Summit 2.0 in Detroit, Michigan on October 14. His counterparts included John Howkins, author of The Creative Economy, and Charles Landry, author of The Creative City. Also present was Carol Coletta, the president of CEOs for Cities and the host of Smart City Radio, a nationally syndicated NPR radio program. Click here to see the video.
The city of Ottawa and I are going through a situation that underscores a longstanding intuitive observation that was confirmed in my history of housing class. First the situation, then the observation, then some questions, and then, as always, some music:
Because I’m a musical artist, I need a bit of space to be able to make noise, so I live a bit outside of the core and rent a house in a neighborhood that was built for World War II veterans, some of whom still live there. Young musicians and old retirees get along much better than you might think, but obviously we differ on a few things. During the summer I tend to let the grass grow. If someone complains though, I always cut it. That having been said however, somehow the city sent my landlord a bill for an undisclosed amount saying that they had to come and cut the lawn.
Now both my landlord and I are sure that the city either cut the wrong lawn, or got the wrong address but it’s not the bill or their mistake that I’m observing in this situation – it’s the fact that they won’t discuss it with me because I’m not the property owner. As a renter, I don’t have any say in the matter as far as the city is concerned – they need to talk to the owner, even if he doesn’t live on site. It goes right back to something that my prof said in my housing class: In North America you’re not considered to be truly participating in society unless you own property. Here, the privilege and promotion of ownership as a goal and ideal is as old as the frontierism that brought Europeans to these shores in the first place. Land ownership is part of the ethos, promise, and policy of both North American nations.
As a renter, I can’t help but have a problem with this notion. And while many owners tend to pat me on the head and give me their best “that’s-the-way-it-is” pout, I still think that it is worth considering; just because an owner has the responsibilities incumbent upon the choice to be rooted, does that mean that their stake/ability to participate in society should be greater than someone who rents? What if renting isn’t simply an intermediary in the quest to own, but is actually its own kind of stake in the community?
This is one of the issues where youth and seniors share a common ground. While as young people we will rent until we own, seniors often want to offload the burden of ownership as they get on in age. For both there is a strange transition – a friction that seems tied to a system rooted in an anachronistic compulsion toward ownership that the current markets can’t even sustain. As young people who – let’s face it – will be renting for at least the first part of our individual domestic careers, what steps do we need to take to change current attitudes about rentership toward attitudes of equal participation?
The new Global Cities Index is out – a joint venture of Foreign Policy and A.T. Kearney. New York tops the list, with London in second, then Paris and Tokyo. Toronto comes in 10th overall – scoring fourth in culture and 13th in higher education.
Wharton real estate professor, Joseph Gyourko, outlines why and how the housing crisis and single family home ownership impedes flexibility and mobility.
Housing busts and rising foreclosures can force some households to move, but others can find themselves locked into their current homes. Default-induced moves are the first mobility-related impact observed during a downturn, but they might be the most important to a regional economy. Research indicates that factors such as falling home prices and rising interest rates can also lock in homeowners, making it harder for them to relocate for jobs or changing family circumstances. Around 12% of American homeowners typically move in any two-year period; yet, families with negative equity are around half as likely to relocate. Those facing higher mortgage rates are 25% less likely to move. Most households with negative equity do not have sufficient liquid reserves to cover the costs of moving, and thus are locked into their current homes until the market recovers. Lower mobility associated with mortgage lock-in can have important effects on local labor markets, housing finance, and public policy.
When corporations redesign workplaces today, they typically want space that makes employees and processes more efficient – but that also communicates particular messages to employees or customers. For some companies, the workplace celebrates their core product.
For Boeing, that core product is airplanes. And in Renton, Washington, outside Seattle, their recently renovated facility celebrates the 737 – which is also designed and built there.
The massive 760,000-square-foot airplane hangar (originally built in 1941) now contains a sprawling office space mezzanine within it. The office space is three-stories high, 50 feet wide, and “12 blocks long” as described by Fred Moody of Metropolis Magazine. On one side, the office workplace looks outside toward the lake, and on the other has splendid views of the 737s being assembled.
The entire facility now accommodates 2,500 sales and engineering staff – formerly housed off site – as well as 900 manufacturing employees who work on the hangar floor, which can hold five 737 aircraft.
These different groups of people didn’t always see themselves working toward the same goal. As Boeing VP of 737 Operations – and visionary for this change – Carolyn Corvi explained to a journalist documenting the change for Oneworkplace.com:
“There was always a huge gap between the people who design the product and those who build it on the factory floor,” recalls Corvi. The plant was a “no-go zone” for some engineers proud of their hard-earned white-collar stature.
“Everyone’s got to be focused on the airplane,” she says, “and you can’t be focused on the airplane if you’re in an office a quarter of a mile away.”
Indeed, as Moody in Metropolis further detailed, “When something went wrong on the production line, a machinist would have to call or e-mail engineering, in a separate building some distance away, and eventually an engineer would visit the production line to see what was wrong. A plane could be held up for days.”
In this renovated facility (that opened in December 2004) everything has changed. As described in the Oneworkplace.com article:
On the production floor – where it now takes 11 days, not 22, to make a 737 – is the revolution. Light streams in through windows carved into the 10-city-block facility, a highly controversial move – distracting and dangerous, said the naysayers – which eventually came to define the liberation of corporate culture. Engineers who once never set foot inside the factory now see what’s happening. After all, it’s right before their eyes.
… Where a problem encountered by a mechanic once took days or weeks to solve, it’s now often solved within the hour. A system of green, yellow and purple lights visually displays the status of production on the line and helps communicate when urgent issues require attention. Engineers come down from the mezzanine to offer help. Huddles form around a bottleneck. There are even cases of engineers anticipating issues and arriving before a problem arises.
For those interested in innovative ways that corporations can harness employee creativity, this is a great example. The Boeing facility enhances collaboration between engineers and factory workers, sales people and designers. It makes more people within Boeing’s 737 division a part of the innovative process – essential for Boeing at the time as they were losing market share to the leaner, more productive Airbus.
This new space brought Boeing a 50 percent increase in productivity as well as real estate cost savings since the office space is now contained within the hangar.
The office space also celebrates the Boeing 737 in other ways. Walls in one section are made from recycled bamboo packing crates that delivered components from China. The artwork is made from spare airplane parts. Door handles were made from angle irons. The names of different building “neighborhoods” come from the names of cities 737s fly into.
And, Boeing isn’t a one-off in celebrating the product. Corvi’s inspiration came from visiting the Starbucks world headquarters, also in Seattle, in which all the corporate office space is designed to look like – and celebrate – a Starbucks coffee bar.
Addendum: I ponder whether there are lessons for cities in this style of workplace organization here.
Here’s my piece on that great city in the Montreal Gazette. Incidentally, we were there on Thursday evening en route to a delightful event with a terrific group of faculty, students, and alumnae at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Point is, Montreal has an energy which is just infectious…
We are living through a great turning point in world history. In just a few short months, our economy and our society are on their way to being transformed.
The U.S. and Canadian stock exchanges have lost as much as a third of their value. Gone are the days when regions will grow wealthy from ephemeral finance capital. Only those that build their real economy from the only true capital we possess – the creative energy of our people – will enjoy sustainable prosperity.
Gone, too, are the days when one’s identity can be purchased literally off the shelf through designer brands and a Sex and the City lifestyle. Times are tight, credit is no longer freely available, and the house is no longer an infinite piggy bank that can be used to finance luxury consumption. The regions that will succeed and be attractive are those that offer history, authenticity, and realism – and where the price tag is more affordable.
Montreal is well-positioned not just to weather the economic storm but to flourish in the long run. The city and its surrounding region have underlying economic and social capacities which, if properly harnessed, will position them to develop a truly sustainable prosperity and perhaps to serve as a model for other regions in Canada.
By no means am I trying to pooh-pooh the problems facing Montreal. Some of them stem from external economic forces, while others are self-inflicted – and I’ll get to them in a moment. But Montreal has not just the opportunity but the obligation – to itself, Canada, and the world – to lead the way out of the current financial crisis.
With credit tight and in some cases unavailable, the real economy, real people, and real creativity replace finance capital as the new coin of the realm. …
The rest is here.
Dayton Creative Catalysts are making news and making things happen in their community!
Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and Dayton Mayor Rhine McClin convened with a group of DaytonCREATE catalysts and volunteers to discuss the economic revitalization of the Dayton-Springfield region. The meeting was held at The Entrepreneurs Center in downtown Dayton.
Change agents from the five teams of the DaytonCREATE initiative gathered to encourage the Governor and the Office of Economic Development to support state-level initiatives that enable economic revitalization and development efforts at the community level.
“This is visionary,” said Mayor Rhine McLin in her opening remarks, speaking of the depth and breadth of the DaytonCREATE initiative. “This is reality,” followed Sean Creighton, Executive Director of SOCHE. “It’s about people, it’s about place, and it’s about becoming such an attractive environment that jobs come to the people and come to the place. This is the hope, that community revitalization and change can happen at this level.”
For more information about DaytonCREATE and the amazing initiatives changing the community, visit: http://www.daytoncreate.org
Congrats, Dayton!
The newest Nobelist explains his work on economic geography:
In the world of the old trade theory, “factor mobility” was a substitute for trade: if factories and industrial workers can move freely, they’ll spread out to be close to the farmers, and neither food nor manufactured goods will have to be shipped long distances. But in the economies-of-scale world I had been studying, the “centrifugal” effect of widely dispersed resources, which tends to push economic activity into spreading out, would be opposed by the “centripetal” pull of access to large markets, which tend to promote concentration of economic activity.
Think of Henry Ford and his Model T. He could have established many factories, spread across the country, to be close to his customers. Instead, however, he found that it was worth incurring extra shipping costs to achieve the economies of scale of one big factory in Michigan.
And once you’re concentrating production in a limited number of locations, which locations will you choose? Locations where there’s a large market – which will be locations where lots of other producers have also chosen to concentrate their production. If the centripetal forces are strong enough, you’ll get a cumulative process: regions that for historical reason have a head start as centers of production will attract even more producers, becoming the economic “core” while other areas become the “periphery.” Thus for about a century, until the rise of the Sunbelt, the great bulk of U.S. manufacturing was crammed into a fairly narrow belt from New England to the inner Midwest; today, 60 million people live along a narrow stretch of the East Coast. Those 60 million people aren’t there because of the scenery; each of them is there because the other 60 million people are also there.
The same sort of logic explains why particular industries concentrate in certain locations, except that in such cases the logic involves things like a deep labor market for specialized skills and a good market for suppliers of specialized inputs. What determines which industry locates where? Often, accident: Silicon Valley owes its existence in large part to a couple of guys named Hewlett and Packard, who started some stuff in their garage, New York is New York because of a canal that only pleasure boaters use today.
It’s been a busy week of conferences and symposiums and forums! This week in Toronto the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association had their Tri-Country Conference; in Ottawa yesterday the Governor General held an Arts Matters forum on Architecture at Carleton University; and today we had the Carleton Senate Symposium focusing on the role of architecture in relation to health and the environment, where I presented my research on youth cultures in young spaces.
At all three of these meetings-of-the-mind, the issue of housing was focal, and at two of the three the issue of youth engagement in housing came up. At the Tri-Country Symposium in Toronto, Julia Unwin gave a great speech which, among many things, addressed the lack of system thinking when it comes to addressing the matter of youth and housing. The next day at the Arts Matters Forum in Ottawa, Professor Boyle talked about housing existing in something of a void as it relates to young people, and the open discussion often returned to the issue of what the best way is to engage society with the art of architecture.
The discussions got me thinking about my own education. I spent four years doing a fairly high level liberal arts degree and, even then, I never learned much about architecture or housing. It took some continued education, a lot of digging in the course calendar, and a bit of luck for me to stumble upon a history of housing course that really developed a deeper appreciation for the built environment by showing me the process. Not only the physical changes that the houses went through, but the changes in human consciousness that followed and sometimes preceded those changes in our modes of living. The relationship between form and function, and how space is one of the sedimentary aspects of all life. Moreover, that the places we live, work, and play didn’t just show up as we did. They’re a product of a long deliberated process and negotiation with the things we value and our increasing ability to realize those things physically in the world.
To put it in even less lofty terms, I’ll paraphrase what Sarah Webb of the UK delegation said during our group discussion at the Tri-Country Symposium: If you do choose to buy a house, it will most likely be the most expensive, most complicated, most determining decision of your life. Why is it that most young people only start to learn about it as they’re about to do it?
If the places we live are such important financial and personal investments, should there not be some base level courses about architecture, or at least housing in our secondary or post-secondary curriculums? Is it reasonable to raise young people without giving them the understanding of their built environments as a part of a process? Without some context, how can young people develop opinions about how space should be used when they are voting citizens of a municipality? Where did you first learn about where/how you live?
And now, as always, some music.
As I mentioned in a previous post here, I was asked to do a Q&A on the Freakonomics blog in the New York Times. Readers posed their questions about “Best Places” studies, and now I’ve posted my responses.
We had more than 60 questions, and they were all interesting and thoughtful. They covered the quality of life in Scandinavia, the effect of our Best Places studies on cities, Wasilla, boring Dallas, and whether I get offered bribes to influence our rankings. In my responses, I addressed the effect of the creative class and how Richard’s work impacts our research in finding the Best Places to live, work, and play.
People asked if I’m holding a bowling bag in the photo which they used. And the answer is yes – and here’s the full picture. I’m including it because this is my homage to Bob Putnam’s “Bowling Alone.” I saw they were going to remodel this local building with these very cool old bowling illustrations, and I had to capture them in case they were gone forever. And sure enough, weeks later they were just a memory.
