Creative Class

The Obama administration is making moves on urban policy, according to the Washington Post. An urban czar has been appointed (former Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrion Jr.) and $20 billion in stimulus money is being directed to urban programs outside education.

The approach is winning applause from local officials and urban thinkers, who credit the administration for quietly beginning the most ambitious new policy for the nation’s cities since the Great Society programs of the 1960s.

I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but frankly I’m not convinced. You?

David Brock doesn’t pooh-pooh the challenges facing rural communities, but argues that rural places have the real assets which they can harness to successfully navigate and prosper in the Creative Age (h/t David Eaves).

Successful 21st-century economies require creativity. How will rural and remote Canada fare in the creative age? A prominent report portrays rural economic collapse as inevitable. David Brock disagrees, and argues that rural communities are sustainable, not in spite of the creative economy, but because of it. There are rural corridors full of tolerant and talented people, teeming with cultural diversity and innovative minds. Brock proposes viable policy options for rural and remote communities as he explores a leading contender for rural prosperity in the creative age, the Mackenzie Corridor of the Northwest Territories.

Read the full essay here (pdf).

This map is cool (via Catherine Rampell at Economix and based on Census data).

Yikes: More than 100 million American workers drive to work alone. Rampell, one of my fave economics bloggers, explains:

About three-quarters of American workers drove to their jobs alone in 2008. The least carpool-friendly states appeared to be Alabama, Tennessee and Ohio, where about 83 percent of workers drove alone. The District of Columbia and New York — whose residents are heavily dependent on public transportation — had the lowest rates of solo commuters, at 37.2 percent and 53.7 percent.

Anybody have the stats for Toronto?

The Toronto Community Foundation released the latest edition of its annual Vital Signs report. The report finds Toronto to be weathering the Great Reset in relatively good shape with relatively high levels of creativity, innovation, and wealth. But the report also finds that Toronto is becoming more segmented and unaffordable – reflecting the spiky nature of development that affects all global centers. Check out the full report here.

This headline over at Bloomberg today – “Wall Street Cedes to Toronto’s Bay Street” – sure caught my attention. Here’s the gist.

Henry Michaels spent 25 years as an investment banker with New York-based firms such as Merrill Lynch & Co., Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and Citigroup Inc. When the financial crisis deepened this year, he abandoned the struggling U.S. companies for a job at Royal Bank of Canada.  “In this crisis, strength and stability matter,” said Michaels, 48, who resigned as co-head of Citigroup’s banks and diversified financials group in May to join RBC Capital Markets in New York. “RBC is in growth mode, and it’s nice to be playing offense.”

Canadian banks, bolstered by their reputation as the world’s soundest, are adding investment bankers even after rivals slashed almost 316,000 jobs worldwide since the collapse of the U.S. subprime market in 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Lenders including RBC, BMO Capital Markets and CIBC World Markets have hired more than 700 investment bankers, analysts and traders in the U.S. and Canada this year, including from rivals such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup.

“The profile of the Canadian banks on the global scale has been heightened exponentially over the course of the last year,” said Rose Baker, a managing partner in Toronto with executive recruitment firm Heidrick & Struggles International Inc. “They look more powerful and are able to attract talent that was historically not available to them.”

Canadian lenders, based in Toronto’s financial district known as Bay Street, have remained profitable amid the crisis because of tighter restrictions on lending and higher capital requirements. As a result, Canada’s biggest banks posted about $20.4 billion in writedowns and credit losses since 2007, a fraction of the $1.62 trillion taken by global financial- services firms in the period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The World Economic Forum last month named Canada as home to the world’s soundest banks for the second straight year.  The resilience allowed the Canadian lenders to climb the ranks of global firms. Three Canadian banks now rank in the top 10 among North American lenders by market value.

Canadian banks are taking on experienced bankers as larger firms trim ranks. North American banks and brokerages cut 9.9 percent of their workforce in the past two years, according to Bloomberg data. Bank of America Corp. eliminated 46,150 jobs, while Citigroup cut 38,900 positions and Lehman fired 13,390 employees.  By comparison, Canada’s five biggest banks pared 3,135 jobs, or about 1.1 percent of their staff, in areas such as consumer banking, according to company filings.

With its housing market on the mend and its ability to attract global talent growing, Toronto seems poised to come out of the Great Reset in much better shape than anyone could have expected.

An intriguing new study by Brent Eastwood finds that both income and employment are associated with levels of economic freedom and the creative class, but less with social capital, across U.S. metros. Here’s the abstract.

The need to sustain economic growth has dominated urban policy in the U.S. for decades. Feeling pressure to meet this need, city and state governments have rushed to adapt economic policy concepts that are untested by researchers or need an updated examination. This article explores the effects of social capital, Creative Class Theory, and “Economic Freedom,” on U.S. urban economic growth. It tests a 272 metropolitan statistical area (MSA) sample and their scores on Florida’s (2002) Creative Class Index, Rupasingha et al.’s (2006) Social Capital Index, and Pacific Research Institute’s “Economic Freedom Index.” The author measures economic growth using the percent change from 2000 to 2004 in Total Employment and Total Personal Income for each MSA in the sample. The data show a highly significant and positive relationship for economic growth among MSAs with high Creative Class ratings and high Economic Freedom scores. The social capital variable had insignificant and or negative relationships as an explanatory variable for economic growth. (EastwoodNet.com; Applied Research in Economic Development, vol. 6, issue 1, 2009)

Read more here (pdf).

Social media, communications technologies, and more flexible workplace attitudes have been driving changes to the way we view our personal and professional lives.

A recent Knowledge at Wharton article examines the evolving etiquette as well as challenges surrounding the rise of mobile technologies, such as the Blackberry, as well as social media websites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

As Facebook, Twitter and 24-hour Blackberry access blur the lines between business and personal lives, managers and employees are struggling to develop new social norms to guide them through the ongoing evolution of communications technology. Wharton faculty and other experts say the process of creating rules to cope with the ever-expanding reach of modern communications has just begun, but will be shaped largely by individuals and organizations, not top-down decrees from a digital Emily Post. Generational differences in the approach to openness on the Internet will also be a factor in coming to common understandings of how and when it is appropriate to contact colleagues, superiors or clients.

The article then details some dilemmas – where do you stand?

1.  First, is there a time when “work” should stop and “personal life” should take over?  From the Wharton article:

For example, a Blackberry can allow parents to attend their childrens’ soccer games while remaining in contact with colleagues at the office in case an emergency comes up. But, [Nancy Rothbard] adds, “you have your Blackberry at your kid’s soccer game. That’s another … line you may be crossing.”

2.  Is it healthy to blur your personal self and professional self ?

…says Wharton marketing professor Patricia Williams, “There is the self we are for our friends, a self for our family [and] a professional self. What’s interesting is the degree to which we are comfortable playing all of those ’selves’ at one time.”

“I’ve heard people say that Facebook is for personal friends and LinkedIn is for professional contacts,” Williams notes. “But many of my Facebook friends are my colleagues – people who work just down the hall – and I don’t have a problem with that. I do, however, have some discomfort being ‘Facebook friends’ with my students, because it gives them access to my personal self that’s not normally available to them.”

3. Are younger people, today’s children up through college students, growing up with no separation between these different “selves”?  And what will this mean for the way we work?

Typically, business norms evolve through official policy disseminated by organizations and by “reality” that bubbles up from the organization’s grassroots. [Wharton Professor Monica McGrath] asks “The question is: How accessible do you want to be? [Today,] young people want to be very accessible, and in an international corporation you are expected to be available [around the clock]. Time zones mean nothing. The norms will continue to develop based upon generational leadership.”

To sum up, I expect that the line between personal and professional will become increasingly blurred. First, knowledge work is highly collaborative and it’s hard to work with people who you don’t like – therefore, people will forge friends through collaboration at work. Second, younger generations will have grown up with limited separation between their different personas.

How do mobile and social media technologies enhance or detract from your personal and professional life?

Richard Florida photographed with the Mayor of Ottawa, Larry O’Brian, October 2009.

Many things are interesting, but one of the most interesting is how people use creativity to become more innovative. I call this entrepreneurship. People in all countries are creative and want to make a better life for themselves and their families. How well are they doing?

Over the past few years, my colleagues at the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor have developed a way to measure this activity, and to suggest ways in which countries can improve on their performance. The Global Entrepreneurship Index is a tool that allows countries to understand how your country is doing on a wide range of indicators. You can download a copy for free. While lots of indexes exist, for almost everything, they very seldom allow you to actually see how to improve your current position.

Last week at a conference in Istanbul I presented the index to an audience and suggested how the world would be able to improve its well-being by following along. The results were interesting and over the next few weeks, I will be presenting a step-by-step report on the index, how it works, how it can be improved, and how it can improve lives.

I have been involved with GEM for almost a decade and have helped move this organization toward its present global position. I hope that this new index will propel it to a new level.

What determines the level of attachment people have with their communities? And how does that level of attachment and community satisfaction affect local economies? These are big questions that cross the boundaries of urbanism, economics, sociology, and psychology.

For the past several years, the Gallup Organization, in partnership with the Knight Foundation, has conducted a substantial multi-community survey called “Soul of the Community.” I worked on earlier versions of the survey and reported some results in my book Who’s Your City? Here’s a link to the study’s website.

The survey covered 14,000 Americans across the 26 Knight communities each year and asked questions about 10 key domains of community attachment: basic services like infrastructure, the economy, safety, leadership, education, aesthetics (physical beauty and green spaces), education, social offerings, openness, civic involvement, and social capital.

The newly released findings indicate that while the economic crisis is the top community concern of Americans – supplanting crime – the economic crisis did not have a significant effect on community attachment. This is because even though factors like jobs, economic trends, education, and basic services matter to community attachment, they are not predominant factors that matter in people’s community attachment.

The top three factors were openness, social offerings, and aesthetics. Matt Thompson, who edits the Soul of the Community blog, summarized the key survey findings this way.

3. Aesthetics  In each community, Gallup researchers asked residents two questions about its attractiveness – how they rated the area’s parks, playgrounds, and trails and how they rated its overall beauty and physical setting. It turns out a pretty city is a lovable city.

You might have suspected this. After all, an area’s aesthetics are one of the first things we talk about when we say why we love a place. Urban design has become a huge topic nationwide over the past few decades, well-reflected in the online conversation through popular sites like Inhabitat and Worldchanging. We intuitively thrill to projects like Manhattan’s High Line – turning an abandoned rail line into a public park – because we recognize that these aesthetic enhancements are important for a community’s well-being.

But would you have expected that our feelings about our community’s aesthetics play a bigger part in our attachment to a place than public safety or highways and freeways? That surprised me, and it suggests to me that as much as we talk about urban design and green space, we might still be underestimating its impact.

2. Social offerings
It sometimes seems as though every city in America is working on a never-ending downtown revitalization project. In recent years, a lot of emphasis has been placed on creating vibrant social cores for our communities, dense places where diverse groups of people can interact. Our study suggests these efforts are valuable.

Researchers asked residents questions about how fun and social their communities are – Is there vibrant nightlife? Is it a good place to meet people and make friends? How much do residents seem to care about each other?

Responses to these questions did a lot to indicate how attached people are to where they live. I think this is especially interesting considering the study covers residents from a number of demographics, not just the young, single urbanites that we think of when we hear words like “nightlife.”

To be a top-three characteristic overall, social offerings had to be important to people of a wide range of ages, marital statuses and incomes. And in fact, it’s an ascendant community trait whether you’re looking at a relatively older community like Bradenton, Fla., or a relatively young community like State College, Pa. – both areas where social offerings are actually the leading indicator for community attachment.

1.  Openness
The number one trait we identified as decisive in determining residents’ attachment to a community was openness. To get at this trait, researchers asked whether the community was a “good place for” different groups of people – senior citizens, racial and ethnic minorities, families with kids, gays and lesbians, college graduates, and immigrants from other countries.

In community after community, residents’ responses to these questions told us the most about how attached they were to their community.Urban scholars such as Richard Florida have been talking for years about the economic benefits of tolerance – a community’s friendliness to different groups of people. Our findings underscore the value of these characteristics and add some strong empirical weight. B ut this leaves me with some questions.

Openness might be the most significant trait in determining community attachment, but of all the areas researchers asked about, this is also one of the most personal and subjective. After all, civic leaders can fix up highways and freeways, create parks and bike trails, make housing more affordable, encourage the development of fun nightlife corridors, and work to lower crime – we have recognized public policy levers to address all of these community needs. But how does a community make itself more welcoming? Laws and policies can only go so far in addressing this perception.