That’s the title of a terrific new paper by Gerald Carlino and Albert Saiz. The Boston Globe’s Sasha Issenberg provides a nice summary of the study which:
looked at 150 metropolitan areas around the United States and found that those rich in what they called “consumption amenities” – the things that make a city delightful, such as parks, historic sites, museums, and beaches – “disproportionally attracted highly educated individuals and experienced faster housing price appreciation.”
In other words, urban growth and prosperity have less to do with transportation links and industrial infrastructure than the patterns that govern behavior at a social mixer: Beautiful and charming cities draw a crowd, while the featureless and unattractive wilt like wallflowers.
Carlino and Saiz’s paper could give policy makers a new way to think about the conditions necessary for economic growth. As they consider how to boost the economy, they should think not about the raw materials of business, but about what will bring together talented people in the same place. This suggests a different approach to stimulus spending – and, likely, stark assessments about where to spend it that will not make for popular politics.
The full paper is here.
January 1st, 2009 at 5:19 pm
If I read their complicated paper correctly, then California is “rich” in “consumption amenities” and Texas is “poor”.
January 2nd, 2009 at 6:01 am
Again, it’s auto-causative. If a depressed city raised and borrowed cash to build amazing parks, lots of museums and great squares and encouraged grants etc for more and more cultural and leisure pursuits – then the result is a guaranteed massive failure as those parks would quickly become trashed, museums unvisited, restaurants and cafés empty.
You can’t manufacture bourgeois “pleasantness” no matter what urban geographer’s badge you want to give it (“boosterism”, “night-time economy”, “regeneration” etc).
Depressed cities with high levels of deprivation need to focus on delivering support for indigenous population, not trying to compete for the ubiquitous “young professionals” who are fickle and unfaithful. Start by improving skills, health and aspirations, and then maybe the indigenous population may become interested in setting up their own creative industries, start utilising their own latent talents and may start creating a “buzz” which then attracts the more established spending power of your Bohos and Bobos or whatever.
I keep saying time and time again that this is the fatal flaw of the Creative Class thesis – that it is seductive to those city leaders who want a quick fix to socio-economic problems by “reinventing” themselves as funky places. Although Richard Florida’s books take pains to point out this strategy won’t work and isn’t necessarily a fault of the thinking, it seems there’s still this massive confusion over whether the “Creative Class” are the industrious and creative people who generate wealth, or merely the pretentious hangers on who move in to great areas five years later and spend their DINKY money on profligate consumption and tending to their goatees.
January 3rd, 2009 at 2:26 pm
A truly beautiful civic environment benefits EVERYONE who has access to it. Working-class and poor people are just as able to appreciate beauty as people who have a higher income. The neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran has argued that the human brain is hard-wired for aesthetic appreciation, as a byproduct of evolution. For example, pattern recognition helps people to detect camouflaged predators, edible plants, imminent changes in the weather…. The brain rewards pattern recognition by releasing neurotransmitters that cause us to feel pleasure. The experience of pleasure causes us to repeat the action that produced it, i.e. look for more patterns in the environment. As a result, people are more successful at detecting both good and bad things that directly affect their quality of life. Artists and artisans design their works to take advantage of this brain circuitry: they intentionally incorporate patterns into their works so that we can derive pleasure from recognizing them. Pattern recognition is only one example. Aesthetic appreciation is something that all human beings share, unless their brains are damaged.
A beautiful civic space can bring together people of differing economic classes and ethnic backgrounds: think of all the people who enjoy Central Park in New York City on a lovely day. What other elements of our civic environment still do this job?
There are two basic arguments against public beauty: personal taste, and cost. First, regarding taste: yeah, people differ on that. I love NYC’s Chrysler Building, but others prefer a modern building facade. Some folks find beauty in grafitti, and for others it is an offense. Some people like ‘political’ art, and others feel that the political content interferes with art appreciation. So if you beautify the environment with public funds, some folks are going to feel that the money has been wasted on unworthy art. BUT if you ask people to compare works of art in the same genre they generally will agree that some are ‘better’ than others. Some works just do a better job of eliciting the pleasure response hardwired into our brains. And a city is a big place: if I don’t like the ‘old-fashioned’ Chrysler Building I can instead enjoy the classic modern Seagram building. NYC is enriched by the presence of both.
Second, regarding cost: Some people feel that government should sponsor the arts, and others believe it is a waste of taxpayers’ money. These emotions can get heightened when the art is overtly political or religious in nature. So, how can a civic community invest in public beauty? I have two responses to this. First, if a government feels it cannot directly support the arts, it can help private individuals to do so. Methods include: zoning incentives for developers to upgrade the aesthetic level of a project; partnership with business groups to educate their members about the economic benefits of public beauty; creation of public green spaces that will elevate the value of adjacent land, etc. Second. if you can’t buy beauty you often can MAKE it for yourself. There are myriad ways: community gardens, murals, free performances, demolition of eyesores, even just cleaning up the garbage on your your sidewalk…. Ask people to donate their labor. Design projects around available surplus materials. Ask students (of any age) for their participation, in return for a mentoring experience with a member of the community. You can focus available funds on hiring an artist, or solicit the community for their design ideas.
Remember that every human culture has produced art, even when cold and starving. Human beings WANT to live amid beauty. So, let’s find ways to make it happen.
January 5th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Off topic, I appologize:
Richard, you being one of the few voices out there arguing for more renting and less home ownership, I thought that you’d like this article.
http://www.forbes.com/home/2009/01/02/housing-subsidies-migration-oped-cx_jt_0105tamny.html