Creative Class

1. Minneapolis and Seattle (tie)

3. Washington, D.C.

4. St. Paul

5. San Francisco

6. Atlanta

7. Denver

8. Boston

9. St. Louis

10. Cincinnati and Portland, Ore. (tie)

The ranking is based on six key indicators: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources for cities with populations of 250,000 or greater. (via USA Today). My eyeball analysis suggests this ranking is reasonably though not entirely correlated with levels of human capital and the creative class.

For a while I’d had the idea to do a head-to-toe profile of modern urban couture, so I thought that I’d start today. In an increasingly interconnected world, the way that we dress is an important mode of relatedness. I’ll try to keep it as unisex and lighthearted as possible.

So, starting with the head: I am going to be bold and claim the 59Fifty as the official headgear of the city. What’s a 59Fifty you might ask? It’s the technical term for what we’d colloquially call a baseball cap. And It turned 55 this year:

Up until 1954, players wore many styles of headgear, such as sloughy caps and pillbox styles… So the company developed a fitted cap as the uniform headwear for Major League Baseball. Today this style, known as the 59Fifty, remains the official cap of US ball players.

And its many variations have become a key part of the standard urban wardrobe, be it for an American tourist, a footballer’s wife or a young man aping a rap hero.

There is just something so affirming about seeing one’s city represented on a passerby’s head, be it the city of your origins, or the one you’ve adopted. When growing up in the GTA during the Blue Jays’ back-to-back World Series win, a Blue Jays cap was easily one of the coolest things to have on your head – especially when crossing the border. I liked to represent. It felt like we finally had something beyond the ubiquitous design staple of the New York Yankees cap that we could distinguish ourselves with in the world.

At that time teams only had their official hats available with the exception of the Yankees – of course – who had their standard hat available in three colors. As both specialization and design intensiveness in cities increased over time, there are now dozens of variations on standard team caps designs. They have fashion flexibility and give people the ability to express their individuality, while still being down with their team or city. In my fantasy world of vanity, I would wear a different Blue Jays hat every day. Even toques, which once held the distinction of being the hat to wear if showing off one’s nicely shaped head, have grown brims, taking design cues from baseball caps. Beyond even professional sports, it has become a prevalent form of headwear engaged by fashion brands that aren’t even sports-exclusive.

What is it about the baseball cap I wonder? What about its design has brought citizen after citizen in city after city around the world into line with its fitted decree? What does it say about the relationship between sports, urban identity, and the concept of representing? What does it mean that something so distinctly American has almost passively emerged to dominate casual urban headwear globally?

I feel a boxing day trip to the New Era store coming on…

And now, for a change, not some music:

Happy Holidays!

Some members of San Francisco’s creative class are taking advantages of bargain prices being produced by the crisis, according to this San Francisco Chronicle report.

For the younger employed set who lack crushing debt, mortgages or families to support, the recession has a silver lining: Previously out-of-reach items are suddenly affordable. As consumer prices fell 1.7 percent in November, the biggest monthly drop on record, some have decided to take advantage of the deals – though not without caution …

“In a year where we would have expected the consumer to say ‘no’ to spending, this younger generation – the young adults who have not had to divert all of their discretionary spending to other family members – continues to self-indulge,” said NPD Market Research Chief Analyst Marshal Cohen. “It’s not a new concept,” Cohen added, noting that “mobile young adult consumers” have always wielded buying power. “It’s just a surprise that people are doing it when they are told not to.”

Cynthia Jaspar, a consumer spending expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that although young people are vulnerable to job loss in a recession, they will continue to be an important retail sector. Indeed, both the Wall Street Journal and Forbes magazine have reported on the youth-driven bright spots in retail: American Apparel, Urban Outfitters and Buckle stores are some of the only clothing companies to see sales rise in November. Analyst Cohen points to the video game industry as a sign that young adult buying power remains strong …

But just because young consumers may be able to afford holiday sales doesn’t mean they are spending with abandon. Certainly, the culture of excessive spending itself has been called into question by the current recession. Many report a newfound sense of guilt or unease about buying things. “But I’m young, single and don’t have the burden of property. This sounds really sad, but maybe we’re like the carpetbaggers of the horrible economic situation.”

USA Today’s Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg report on how the combination of the crisis alongside longer-run economic and demographic trends are reshaping America’s economic landscape. The once booming Sun Belt is taking it on the chin.

The housing collapse and economic crisis are dramatically transforming the population and political landscape of the nation by ending the Sun Belt boom that dominated growth for a generation, according to Census Bureau estimates released Monday.

For the first time since the early 1970s, more people left Florida for other states than moved in during the 12 months ending July 1. Nevada, among the four fastest-growing states for 23 years in a row, slipped from No. 1 to No. 8. Michigan lost people for the third straight year.

The housing meltdown has turned migration flows on their heads. Of the top 20 fastest-growing states, all but four showed slower growth this year compared with last year and only one of the top 10 (Colorado) grew faster, according to an analysis by William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution.

“A giant share of it is housing,” says Robert Lang, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech. “One, you can’t sell a house. You’re stuck. Two, there’s no job growth attracting people to those states.” Lang says every previous recession had one thriving state or region that lured people. This time, no place is immune.

How do you remake a city of sprawl. That’s exactly what the city of Mesa, Arizona is trying to do, according to The Economist. Mesa has experienced tremendous growth in the past several decades, surging from 7,000 in 1940) to roughly 450,000 today. While many people still haven’t heard of it, Mesa numbers among the nation’s 50 largest cities, bigger than Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, or Miami. It’s a classic “edge city” which, as The Economist writes, consists of: “Mile after mile of strip malls and tract houses, whose evocative names and fanciful architecture cannot disguise the fact that they are large, stucco-covered boxes, dominate the landscape.”

Now Mesa is working hard to turn itself into a more liveable city. To bolster its economy, it’s constructing a new airport downtown (to better connect itself to the world – recall the Phoenix-Tuscon area is one of the world ’s 40 biggest mega-regions) in an effort to remake itself as what University of North Carolina’s John Kasarda calls an “aerotropolis” – the thinking being that air transport today is analogous to what canals, railroads, and cars were to past urban systems. Even more interesting is the city is investing heavily in improving its quality of place – urban design, mixed use development, strict building heights, increased density, warehouse conversions, and an extensive network of urban neighborhood parks in an effort to improve its ability to lure talent and jobs.

Read more here.

Warning: If you’re over 30, please proceed with caution. I mean it. This may upset you.  I just caught wind of a 28-year-old musician who goes by the name of ‘Girl Talk’ who is ‘sampling’ The Band, The ‘Stones, R.E.M, AC/DC, and Aretha Franklin, and mixing their iconic sounds with the likes of 50 Cent, T-Payne, Gwen Stefani, and Bubba Sparxx (who!?)

Listen here.

Because he (Girl Talk is a he) started his own ‘independent label’ he thinks he can basically do whatever he wants! No royalties, no fees. And his album is basically free! His website says, “Pay whatever you want.” And he encourages YOU, the listener, to use and sample his music. This internet-driven model threatens to bury the whole record industry!

Here’s another way to look at Girl Talk: as an artist and as an MC, but not in the traditional sense of the word. He has no records, no turn-tables, and no CDs. He has a laptop. That’s it. Girl Talk is commonly described as a mash-up artist: someone who takes the vocals from one song and the instrumentals from another and mixes them together into a new, unique sound. Think The Beatles’ The White Album meets Jay Z’s The Black Album to create Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album. But Girl Talk takes the style to a whole new level. 50+ samples in one four-minute song are not uncommon, and he mixes his massive database of music at live shows in real time on a plastic wrapped computer. Because his samples are so short, nothing he does is illegal according to “fair use” copyright law in the U.S.

I believe Girl Talk’s music is a metaphor for my generation. His songs, which sample from Roy Orbison, Queen, Nirvana, and T.I., to name a few, require a very broad musical knowledge to be fully appreciated. N-Geners today listen to a lot of music and can give a wink and a nod to the clever way older songs are used. Even if they don’t know those songs, odds are many kids will go online and discover them afterward.  OK, kids listening to and/or learning the greatest rock/pop songs of all time. That’s a good thing.

On the other hand, his music can be construed as the ultimate symbol of our short attention spans and our obsession with short, easy-to-digest sights and sounds (think Sneezing Panda on YouTube). One could argue that digital technology has left us incapable of focusing on a good song for more than a few minutes (so let’s jam 50 samples into one track instead!), and Girl Talk is my generation’s answer. OK, that’s a Bad thing.

Girl Talk understands his target audience. He knows his music will be widely disseminated online, for free, before he has the opportunity to release a CD. So he embraces an open, online platform for his music where payment is optional:

“I think what we went for seems like an obvious game plan now, just because as soon as it hits the internet, anyone…can get it for free if they want to. So why not tap in and let them actually take a step back and think about it, and maybe offer some money?”

Get the whole interview with Pitchfork Media Here.

In this open and collaborative model, more money goes directly to the artist (and not a major label), he fosters good will with his fan base, more people get to hear his sound, and as a result he attracts a wider audience to live shows. I think this is a good thing.

This last question depends on your perspective. Some of his mash-ups take important songs out of context and use them only as a means to an end. How would you feel if he mixed Sam Cooke’s powerful and spiritual ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ with the vacuous and asinine ‘My Humps’ by the Black Eyed Peas just to get a ‘cool’ sound? In this regard, his music can be construed as not respecting the wholeness and message of his songs. I’m not a music critic, so I’ll stop there before I start sounding foolish, but I encourage you to share your thoughts.

The cities want in, as David Miller noted here earlier. Their lining up for stimulus funds and the tab is getting pretty hefty, according to this Forbes report (h/t: Dean Alexander).

On Dec. 8, just two days after Obama’s pledge for massive infrastructure spending, the U.S. Conference of Mayors released an 803-page report–a wishlist of some 11,391 infrastructure projects they would love to press ahead with.Those cities that responded would like $17 billion for streets, $15 billion for water and sewage, $13 billion in community development grants, $7 billion for transit systems, $6 billion for energy projects, $4 billion for schools, $4 billion for public safety, $4 billion for airports, $2 billion for public housing and $1 billion for Amtrak infrastructure.

Here’s a partial list: Miami: $3.4 billion; Sacramento: $2.8 billion; Philadelphia: $2.6 billion; Los Angeles: $2.4 billion; Albuquerque: $2.3 billion. There’s plenty more.

The economic crisis is having highly uneven geographic impacts. Detroit for one is being hammered. David Crary and Corey Williams of the Associated Press provide a detailed look.

The jobless rate has climbed past 21 percent, the embattled school district just fired its superintendent, tens of thousands of homes and stores are derelict and abandoned … “It’s a depression — not a recession,” McDuell said, with the authority of someone who has lived through both. “It will get worse before it gets better.”

Money quote: “Even with no hurricane or other natural disaster to blame, Detroit has — by many measures — replaced New Orleans as America’s most beleaguered city.”

Few things are more important in capitalism, or any society for that matter, as the incentive structure. If the incentive structure is right, people will move into productive activities. If it is not they might become unproductive or, even worse, destructive. During 1980, the business community engaged in unproductive, or what we call rent-seeking activities. These take from Peter and give to Paul. During the 1990s, the U.S. was involved in one of the most productive periods in its history with large numbers of people engaged in productive activites (ICT revolution) that created new wealth. During the 2000s, a set of unfortunate events created an incentive structure that destroyed instead of creating wealth. This destructive entrepreneurship was caused by ideology, changes in the tax laws, and lax regulation. The outcome – trillions of dollars in wealth lost. This form of destructive entrepreneurship is the legacy of the past decade when investment did not flow into productive activities. In fact, it was destructive. How to change the incentive structure to get us back to a productive form of enterpreneurship is a million dollar question for which there are no easy answers.

Who moves, and who stays put? A new study by the Pew Research Center takes a close look. The study finds that fewer Americans are moving now than previously. Some 13 percent of Americans moved from 2006 to 2007, down from a high of 21 percent in 1951; the Census predicts a further decline to 11.9 percent by 2009. That said, America remains a highly mobile society. Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of adults said they have moved to a new community at least once in their lives; 15 percent say they have lived in four or more states.

Highly educated people are much more likely to be mobile: more than three-quarters (77 percent) of college graduates have moved at least once compared to 56 percent of those with a high school diploma. Younger Americans, unmarried people, and those who are foreign-born are among the most likely to move. The Midwest is the most rooted region; the West the most mobile. The main reasons stayers stay: family ties, a desire to stay in their home town.