Creative Class

Writing in The Nation, Jeff Chang makes a powerful case for it.

“[T]he creativity stimulus” goes far beyond job creation and even economic development. Culture is not just something conservatives wage war on. The arts are not just something liberals dress up for on weekends. Creativity can be a powerful form of organizing communities from the bottom up. The economic crisis gives us a chance to rethink the role of creativity in
making a vibrant economy and civil society. Artists as well as community organizers cultivate new forms of knowledge and consciousness. One of the unsung stories of the past twenty-five years is how both have used creativity to inspire community development and renewal. Creativity has become the glue of social cohesion in times of turmoil.

He notes that creativity was a key hinge-point of Obama’s victory and that a creative communities approach is transformational, post-partisan, and progressive.

Deeply rooted in the communities that made Obama’s victory possible, these centers understand their work as transformational. Their communities are the most vulnerable to assaults on creativity, but they are also incubators of the most innovative ideas and movements of our time. This “creative communities” approach has created a vigorous and vital alternative to neoliberal and neoconservative versions of change.

I could quibble and say that Chang is mistaken when he refers to me as a “boom era theorist” uncritically reflecting the framing of my argument (largely by social conservatives) “as attracting new chai latte-sipping bourgeois into decaying parts of town.” Rather the core principle of my work is that every single human being is creative.

But Chang’s writing in The Nation is too important to get bogged down in that. I’m ecstatic that the  progressive left is beginning to see the value of creativity to connecting people and building the broad cross-class, cross-race, and cross-cultural cohesion so critical for broad social and economic transformation. I agree broadly with Chang’s argument. Creativity is key to our economic and social future; it’s the basic building block that ties us together; it is the way to upgrade and improve working and service class jobs. It provides a whole different road-map to a broad and shared prosperity beyond backward-looking bailouts and stimulus plans.

Perhaps, we’re beginning to see a turning point in the conversation about our economic future.

Here’s is the Globe and Mail’s excerpt from the hot-off-the-press Canadian edition of Who’s Your City?.

ANALYSIS: CANADA HAS BEEN SPARED – FOR HOW MUCH LONGER?

Our cities are good, but they’ll need to be a lot better

Just back from a terrific event, Rotman School Dean Roger Martin and Canadian pollster Michael Adams discussed how Canada can prosper during and after the economic crisis. Martin summarized work led by Jim Milway of the Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity and our own Martin Prosperity Institute which identifies Canada’s prosperity gap vis-a-vis the U.S. and other advanced nations. Adams summarized the latest polling data on Canadian opinions on the crisis, the state of capitalism, and hot-button issues like immigration. My Rotman colleague Ajay Agrawal discussed his research on the relationship between immigration flows and innovation. McKinsey’s Sacha Ghai outlined the findings of “Breaking Away from the Pack”, a recent study of corporate performance in Canada. Read the full report here; a short oped by Martin and Milway here.

Richard Florida is the headliner for the Canadian Housing Renewal Association’s 41st annual congress on April 16 in Toronto. “Renewing Our Communities” is the theme of the event which will feature housing experts and creative thinkers who are ready to grow fresh ideas about affordable housing, renewing communities, and creating neighborhood change, even in tough times.

If money were no object and you could choose to do one thing to renew your community, what would it be?

Remember the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Geographers at Kansas State University have developed a sin index and have mapped them. They presented their research at the  recent annual conference of American Association of Geographers tailoring their research to the conference host city Las Vegas and state of Nevada (h/t: Karen King). The Las Vegas Sun summarized the study this way.

[T]he Kansas geographers also compared the level of sin in 10 top casino markets, and while the Las Vegas Strip ranked first for greed, it could muster no better than third place for pride, the aggregate of all sins. It was the southern gambling cities — Lula, Miss.; Biloxi, Miss.; and Shreveport, La., that came out on top of the bottom. Why, exactly, remains to be seen. The Kansas geographers started this project, it seems pretty clear, for the erudite amusement; something to stand out at a 6,000-person convention consumed with the world’s heavy questions. But if Tuesday’s convention crowd was evidence, the sin study was interesting to other scholars as well. So Vought and colleagues plan to continue their national study of evil. “It’s too much fun,” Vought said, smiling in a way that suggested, if not pride, then a good deal of pleasure.

The Japanese edition of Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City? is now available.

To see all the book covers of Who’s Your City? in their various translations, check out our gallery on the Who’s Your City? Facebook page (and if you’re not already a Facebook friend, join us there as well as on the Creative Class Facebook page).

Have you taken the Who’s Your City? place finder to discover just where you belong? Try it out here and tell us what you think of your results!

Publisher’s Weekly provides the details:

James Levine at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency has accepted several preempts for Richard Florida’s Reset: How the Economic Crisis Will Forever Change Our Economy, Society, and the Way We Live. Hollis Heimbouch took the title in the U.S. for HarperCollins. Preemptive offers were also accepted in Canada from Random House Canada, with Anne Collins editing; and in Brazil from Caroline Rothmuller at Campus/Elsevier via International Editors, Inc. Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class was a bestseller for Basic.

I could not be more excited to be working with such an exceptional publishing team.

A newly released Brookings report “revisits” an earlier 2001 study of “job sprawl” across 98 of the largest U.S. metropolitan areas. The study finds that private sector jobs continued to decentralize in the late 1990s and 2000s.

• About a fifth (21 percent) of workers work within three miles of downtown, while nearly half (45 percent) work more than 10 miles outside the center.
• The larger the metro area, the more likely people are to work more than 10 miles away from downtown.
• 95 of 98 metro areas saw a decrease in the share of jobs located within three miles of downtown.
• The outer-suburbs of these metros saw job growth of 17 percent compared to less than one percent growth in the urban core.
• Job location varies considerably by industry. More than 30 percent of jobs in utilities, finance, and insurance, and educational services industries are located withing three miles of the urban core, while  at least half of the jobs in manufacturing, construction, and retail are located more than 10 miles outside it.
• Overall, 17 of 18 industries studied saw employment decentralization, led by transportation and warehousing, finance and insurance, utilities, and real estate and rental and leasing.

I’m not so sure this stretched out spatial pattern bodes well for long-run U.S. economic prosperity or environmental sustainability. Your thoughts?

In the research that I’ve done connecting the history of ideas with respect to modern economics, modern urban form, and modern urban youth cultural production and reproduction, I’ve had to bring together several disciplines to animate a single narrative. In academia however, there’s still something of a reticence to remix culture when dealing with disciplines, so it’s been tricky. That having been said, kudos to my local university library for ordering a book that I have been waiting for for quite some time: Urban Informatics.

From the foreword by Anthony Townsend, Director with the Institute for the Future:

Taking a long view of urban informatics, the simultaneous urbanization and global economic integration we are currently experiencing can best be seen as a refinement of the city as a system for information processing. In the pre-electronic era, face-to-face proximity and the clustering of functions was the most efficient means of replicating, transmitting and searching for information in social and economic networks. Over time, new tools augmented this function, but in a sense the city itself is our original and greatest information technology.

So it’s the idea that once the shape for the city emerged, bringing us into our current spatial relations, and technology advanced, that there was another layer of connectivity and expression that was also emerging.  To understand the way that this new digital layer helps us express and improve our old analogue tendencies requires what is called a “transdisciplinary” approach.

It combines members of three broad academic communities: the social (media studies,
communication studies, cultural studies, etc.), the urban (urban studies, urban
planning, architecture, etc.), and the technical (computer science, software design,
human-computer interaction, etc.)

In a final, very evocative comparison from Townsend’s foreword:

To use a crude analogy, if aerial photography showed us the muscular and skeletal
structure of the city, the revolution in urban informatics is likely to reveal its
circulatory and nervous systems. I like to call this vision the “real-time city”, because
for the first time we’ll see cities as a whole the way biologists see a cell –
instantaneously and in excruciating detail, but also alive. This is in contrast to the way
astronomers see a heavenly body – as it was, some time ago, light-years in the past.

As I was taking all of this in, I began to think about articles like this about smartphone use in classrooms, and stats like this letting us know that over 50 percent of the world not only lives in cities, but that over 50 percent uses a cellular phone, the implications of this digital nervous system that has been emerging began to get more broad. I began to wonder how it would affect expression, particularly with respect to the urban arts.

This I saw this @ Wiispray.com:

Just a will, a Wiimote, flash technology and German ingenuity, and graffiti’s gone digital.

The implications are pretty clear: once we break down some disciplinary silos and get this circulation going, the future will certainly be an interesting place.

And now, as always, some music.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia created and diligently monitored by scores of regular users mass collaborating over the internet, has been a source of immense controversy since it first appeared online seven years ago.

While most of us (I think) regard the online encyclopedia as a very useful resource for initial research into an unfamiliar topic (not to mention one of the world’s greatest time killers), and see its method of creation (mass collaboration) as both novel and strikingly accurate, there has been no shortage of bluster from both sides of the aisle to just how best to describe/exalt/deride the online phenomenon.

The staunchest self-described ‘Wikipedians’ see their community as the first real democracy, a new egalitarian mode of production and a nation online.

Critics argue that Wikipedia is, quite literally, the death of knowledge. Wikipedia embodies a generation (mine) of lazy cheaters – using half-baked, ‘user-generated’ (re: inaccurate) articles written by computer-nerds and other weirdos that skew the truth and focus only on the trivial. Wikipedia is lowering our standards for accuracy and simultaneously lowering our collective IQ.

Describing Wikipedia as either a Virtual Utopia or The Death of Knowledge is reductionism at its finest. While I am generally skeptical of these far-flung metaphors that try to pin down the online encyclopedia, I was intrigued by one recent attempt by Noam Cohen in the New York Times. He says Wikipedia most closely resembles a vast, diverse, online fact city- and quite a creative one at that.

Cohen adapts a Socratic tone in asking a number of thought provoking questions. He says:

“Wikipedia encourages contributors to mimic the basic civility, trust, cultural acceptance and self-organizing qualities familiar to any city dweller. Why don’t people attack each other on the way home? Why do they stay in line at the bank? Why don’t people guffaw at the person with blue hair?”

He could just as easily ask: why don’t people sabotage Wikipedia pages? Why don’t people post misinformation?

The reality, of course, is that they do. Just as sometimes in our real cities, people are attacked, lines are budded, and people with blue hair get ridiculed- occasionally. But the stronger the city and the sense of community, the stronger the social forces that combat devious behavior. The same is true for Wikipedia.

To support his claim, Cohen consults the writings of Urban Oracle Jane Jacobs. He quotes the prolific Wikipedian Andrew Lih (who paraphrases Jacobs) saying she “argued that sidewalks provided three important things: safety, contact, and the assimilation of children.” He continues, “She may as well have been talking about wikis. A wiki has all its activities happening in the open for inspection, as on Jacobs’s sidewalk. Trust is built by observing the actions of others in the community and discovering people with like or complementary interests.”

So is Wikipedia perfect? Or another question: will we (because it really is we) ever ‘finish’ Wikipedia? The same question could be posed for Chicago, Paris, or Toronto. Of course it isn’t perfect and it will probably never be finished – just as a city is constantly changing, evolving, and reinventing itself.

For the sake of all people who can access this vast, unprecedented body of knowledge, I hope Wikipedia grows – especially in the 100+ versions that exist now in other languages. Never before have we been given such a low barrier – the internet – to access this vast canon of human knowledge.

So forget the controversy, the metaphors, and the bluster and take a stroll down one of the long, wide information boulevards of the online city – you never know what side street you may end up on, or what secrets you might find.

On a lighter note: College Humor’s take on the Wiki-phenomenon.