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?

In one of my most recent posts, I wrote about the international graffiti and urban arts festival Under Pressure, and about the pressure that it and many other music festivals have been under with the economic downturn. Cultural initiatives that depended upon bigger, corporate-type sponsors have been feeling the pinch, some festivals just disappearing. While there is community and cultural value embedded in these festivals, by hitching their sails to finance that has disembedded and severely stunted that community’s ability to deliver that value. There was a good chance that Under Pressure wouldn’t make it this year.

Community to the rescue – community of practice that is. Across the region, and beyond provincial borders, grassroots arts organizations have come together to support this gathering. Parties in Toronto to save a festival in Quebec? Why not? As the digital media networks broke down geographical boundaries with respect to the access to cultural interaction and accumulation, cultural affinities are spanning unexpected geographies presenting new opportunities for collaboration.

This is certainly true in the world of DJing and promoting. If an artist is passing through a dense cluster of cities it’s to the benefit of promoters to share costs with respect to travel, or to share the cost of a national booking fee. The Quebec City-Windsor corridor with its clustering of university towns and cities alike is already replete with cost-sharing and collaboration at the grassroots level, but there is room for a big boom there.

Groups like the Grassroots Youth Collaborative in Toronto have begun coalescing the efforts and power of this growing sector. Recently I came across a very interesting paper out of the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center about grassroots scenes and the role that they play in the creative economy ecosystem that was really prescient as well. What lessons can we learn from these informal youth networks as they support each other through financial crisis?

And now, as always, some music.

Sometimes, it’s nice to be small. The City of Nanaimo has been pushing the envelope on open data and open government for a number of years now.

Recently, I was directed to their new Council Agendas and Minutes webpage. I recommend you check it out.

Here’s why.

At first blush the site seems normal. There is the standard video of the council meeting (queue cheesy local cable access public service announcement), but the meeting minutes underneath are actually broken down by the second and by clicking on them you can jump straight to that moment in the meeting.

As anyone who’s ever attended a City Council meeting (or the legislature, or parliament) knows, the 80/20 rule is basically always in effect. About 80 percent of the time the proceedings are either dead boring and about 20 percent (often much less) of the time the proceedings are exciting, or more importantly, pertinent to you. One challenge with getting citizens engaged on the local level is that they often encounter a noise to signal problem. The ratio of “noise” (issues a given citizen doesn’t care about) drowns out the “signal” (the relatively fewer issues they do care about).

The City of Nanaimo’s website helps address this problem. It enables citizens to find what matters to them without having to watch or scroll through a long and dry council meeting. Better still, they are given a number of options by which to share that relevant moment with friends, neighbors, allies, or colleagues via Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, or any other number of social media tools.

One might be wondering: Can my city afford such a wiz-bang setup?

Excellent question.

Given Nanaimo’s modest size (it has 78,692 citizens) suggests they have a modest IT budget. So I asked Chris McLuckie, a City of Nanaimo public servant who worked on the project. He informed me that the system was built in-house by him and another city staff member; it uses off-the-shelf hardware and software and so cost under $2,000 and it took two weeks to code up.

Two weeks?

No million dollar contract? No eight-month timeline? No expensive new software?

No, if you’re smart, a couple of creative hackers can put something together in no time at all.

You know what’s more – because Chris and the City of Nanaimo want to help more cities learn how to think like the web, I bet if the IT director from any city (or legislative body) asked nicely, they would just give them the code.

So how Open is your city? And if not, do they have $2,000 lying around to change that?

“When you bring artists into a town, it changes the character, attracts economic development, makes it more attractive to live in and renews the economics of that town. “There are ways to draw artists into the center of things that will attract other people.”

National Endowment for the Arts, Chair, Rocco Landesman in the New York Times.

The new chairman said he already has a new slogan for his agency: “Art Works.” It’s “something muscular that says, ‘We matter.’ ” The words are meant to highlight both art’s role as an economic driver and the fact that people who work in the arts are themselves a critical part of the economy.

“Someone who works in the arts is every bit as gainfully employed as someone who works in an auto plant or a steel mill,” Mr. Landesman said. “We’re going to make the point till people are tired of hearing it.”

In an unexpected turn, the economic slump may lead to healthier eating habits for Americans, especially lower income people. A number of trends are coming together including more people using emergency food banks, the growth of farmers’ markets and community gardens, Alice Waters’ edible schoolyard, the White House garden, etc. One thing I’ve noticed in my grantwriting class at Portland State is a number of students looking for funding to start or expand school, community, or food bank gardens.

Any number of studies say that Americans eat too much meat, fat, sugar, and salt and too few vegetables. This is especially true for poor families who live in neighborhoods without good grocery stores, or don’t have decent kitchens or time to cook, or can’t afford fresh produce. Chronic preventable diseases like diabetes and hypertension, which are epidemic in many poor and minority communities, can be prevented or controlled with diet.

Getting more vegetables into Americans’ diets would have major health benefits and note that most of these aren’t government programs. However, nonprofit Food Banks have for years overused government surplus foods, largely subsidized agricultural products, without regard to their health benefits.

This is from the Oregonian:

“We have a hunger crisis in Oregon. It’s just expanding,” explains Multnomah County Commissioner Jeff Cogen, who’s just set up a vegetable garden on the empty cropland, fertile with irony, of the former county poor farm. “My hope is this is the first of many.”

Up at the Vancouver Vineyard Church food pantry, David and Andrea Walker are looking to their third summer harvest. Clark County is part of the Oregon Food Bank area, and in its first year the operation received an OFB award for excellence in client service.

This year, the Walkers are hoping for 5,000 pounds of produce from the 3,000-square-foot garden out behind the church. It’s not a rolling or pastoral stretch; it’s off to the side of an alley-like casual road, just some cultivated acreage — or more precisely, yardage — in the midst of a weedy lot. At some point in the future, the space could turn into a small apartment court, like so many around it.

The New York Times Magazine had an article last Sunday about Growing Power in Milwaukee.

Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites – through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.

Another Times story tells of a consultant who works on sustainable food in Oakland, CA:

With its high crime and poverty rates, Oakland doesn’t have nearly the same precious food culture – or produce – that defines nearby Berkeley and San Francisco. But Fernald and Sardo’s home is a modern homestead, preserving the larder for leaner (and busier) times. Every summer they host tomato-canning and jam-making parties; fall is for pumpkin-processing events and butchering pigs with 10 guests invited to make sausage, which Fernald cures in a modified wine fridge in a closet. Splitting a steer with friends? Their chest freezer contains a beefy ode to their vacuum sealer.

Fernald, 34, a former family-farm advocate, was the executive director of last year’s Slow Food Nation event. Now she combines her activism and her acumen with Live Culture, a consultancy that helps companies create sustainable food practices and products. Projects range from developing a line of artisanal cured meats in Shasta and an agritourism in Belize to helping an Alabama barbecue chain source better pork; from working with nonprofits to develop value-added food businesses to organizing the Eat Real Festival, an August fund-raising event that involves 20 taco trucks serving sustainable street food to an estimated 20,000 (plus a butchering contest and home-canned and foraged-food exchange). Fernald is also intent on spreading the urban homesteading bug throughout the Bay Area, having organized the recent Yes, We Can (Food) event, which taught 80 people to make jam.

Here’s a story about the garden on the old Multnomah County poor farm, mentioned above.

On the county’s eastern outskirts where Northeast Halsey Street meets 244th Avenue, prime farmland waited for a new calling. What if the county took even a few of its dozens of vacant acres, Madrigal wondered, and asked the community to work a farm that could help feed hundreds?

The idea not only is part of a local and national trend to return to the earth, but it also brings the county back to its historical roots. The land picked for the farm is part of a sprawling tract that once fulfilled the county’s state-imposed mission to care for its indigent: the Multnomah County Poor Farm.

For practical reasons, she says, gardening makes sense. The county garden will cost about $22,000 to clear, irrigate and plant this year. That could buy a lot of prepackaged food — but not the 20,000 to 40,000 pounds of fresh organic produce that Stone estimates could be grown on the two acres each year.

That produce will go to the Oregon Food Bank and will feed what food resource manager Mike Moran calls a desperate need.

Here’s another farm dedicated to a food bank.

Formed in May of 2000, the Mother Earth Farm is an eight-acre organic farm located in the lush Puyallup Valley. The Farm produces over 150,000 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables each growing season-all of which is distributed directly to local food banks and hot meal programs. Produce from the Farm is in the hands of food bank clients within eight hours of being harvested. In 2008, the Farm again reached full cultivation of all eight acres producing more than 149,000 pounds of fresh produce, herbs and honey.

Then there are Community Gardens, where neighbors share plots, usually on vacant land or a park. If you Google community gardens you get results for probably all major American cities, and that’s just for starters.

The American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) was founded in 1979 in order to help gardening programs share their limited resources and thereby benefit from each other’s experience and expertise.

ACGA staff, board members, and volunteers answer thousands of requests for information each year about community gardening and greening. They offer support, coach fledgling groups, and promote networking and information sharing on all levels. Through our networking, publications, trainings and annual conference held in a different part of the country each year, ACGA:

• promotes the formation and expansion of national and regional community gardening networks,
• develops resources in support of community gardening and greening,
  encourages research on the impact of community greening, and
• conducts educational training programs to further community gardening and greening.

Another model is school gardens, where students plant and tend the garden, with produce being used in the cafeteria or shared with families. Pioneered by uber- restaurateur Alice Waters in Berkeley, there are now school gardens in hundreds of communities. A quick Google search turned up four networks promoting school gardens: Kids Gardening, City Farmer, Growing Gardens, and School Garden Network.

Then there’s Michelle, who’s in a sort of class by herself in inspiring American gardeners. From a NY Times article on the White House veggie plot:

Twenty-three fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington will help her dig up the soil for the 1,100-square-foot plot, in a spot visible to passers-by on E Street. (It is just below the Obama girls’ swing set.)

Students from the school, which has had a garden since 2001, will also help plant, harvest and cook the vegetables, berries and herbs. Virtually the entire Obama family, including the president, will pull weeds, “whether they like it or not,” Mrs. Obama said with a laugh. “Now Grandma, my mom, I don’t know.” Her mother, she said, will probably sit back and say: “Isn’t that lovely. You missed a spot.”

CCG recently finished up a Creative Community Leadership Project in Noosa, Australia. The program was a true success with the original group of catalysts championing several successful initiatives. 

As the program moves forward into the second year, it will operate under a broader umbrella – the Sunshine Coast Regional Alliance. The program’s goal will be to build off of Noosa’s success and extend the Creative Community project to the entire Sunshine Coast.

Read more about the coverage here:

Noosa Journal – Now it’s over to you…

Noosa News – Change of name is a Sunshine Coast merger

Sunshine Coast Daily – Handover stretches benefits of alliance

I’ve been thinking about social support networks lately and so pieces in recent books have stood out. Humans are social animals who are able to organize ourselves or act individually, but the family and small group networking connections are still more important than generally acknowledged. The implications for a creative economy is that how companies and cities are organized can be as important as what they do or make in their success.

These examples are mostly medical, partly because that’s where a lot of research goes on, but the implications for society are universal.

• The first chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers talks about the town of Roseto, PA which was founded by Italians from Roseto, Italy in the 1890s. Doctors noticed that the residents were unusually healthy. But investigations showed little difference in diet, personal habits, the natural environment, etc. What they did find was that the social and friendship networks were unusually strong. This mutual support resulted in less heart disease and other maladies.

• This reminded me of Dr. Dean Ornish’s work with treating heart disease with diet, exercise, meditation, yoga, and social/family support. When his success in not only stopping but reversing heart disease was reported, the medical establishment said, “Yes, we know that if our patients shifted to a low-fat diet, exercised, and reduced stress it would reduce heart attacks. But people won’t follow our orders so we just schedule bypasses.” The difference was the social and family involvement, which got people to change their behaviors.

• In The Age of the Unthinkable, Ramos tells about AIDS patients in Tugela Ferry, South Africa who had extraordinary levels of medication compliance because rather than doctors just saying “take these pills” they explained the science and involved family members. People stuck to the regimen despite the extreme side effects, while groups who were just told to follow doctors orders would stop medication when they felt better.

• A growing evidence-based practice in residential drug treatment is the “Therapeutic Community,” where peers are involved in each others’ recovery. It has better results than just staff-led treatment.

• Then this article in the Portland Tribune tells about a program to have severely mentally ill people work real jobs rather than “sheltered workshops.” The job stress that was assumed to be too much for them to handle turns out to actually help them get better.

From quality circles to army platoons to extended families, people working together are healthier, more productive and more creative. How can this knowledge be used to build the creative economy?

Last summer, I blogged about Under Pressure in Montreal, one of Canada’s premier graffiti conventions. While out last night checking out a show, DJ Static [of the internationally acclaimed WEFUNK radio show and regular DJ @ Under Pressure] mentioned to me that the festival has recently encountered some economic peril with many of its funders backing out. It is not the only one though as the Under Pressure blog indicates:

After 13 years of dedication and hard work, the organizers of Scribble Jam had to regretfully announce that due to lack of funding and the current economic climate, they do not have the resources to continue with the festival this year.

Read more HERE.

Events such as Toronto’s Style In Progress have already succombed to the same fate and this serves as a reminder more than ever that Under Pressure 2009 needs YOUR support this year…

Meanwhile, festivals that are a bit smaller like Ottawa’s House of PainT, which are primarily DIY with a bit of local community support, continue to roll on. I’ve always understood Hiphop culture to be grounded in “get-it-how-you-live” economics. In other words, it emerged out of an endogomous low-budget environment where the idea of sponsorship or support from external agents was far-fetched at best. To borrow a concept form Karl Polanyi, the economy was very embedded in the society. To extend that idea a bit further, when economy is embedded in society that way, value becomes determined by metrics that are responsive to that society. That is to say the distance between expense and expectation is shorter in these kinds of societies. Particularly with respect to cultural products – currency expectations (read: cost) are set based on the value of that product, which is determined by those society specific metrics.

Haute Finance and global economics have disembedded economy from society such that the value of a product, cultural or otherwise, is set externally and determined by metrics that are often quite apart from the society that produces them. The idea was that the ability of federal governments to communicate, exchange currency and goods, and participate in this international system would set up a more even-handed trickle-down system for the citizens who produce those goods/services. 150 years later, we see how that’s worked out.

What’s going on with these festivals is a good example of all of that. As this culture globalized and patched itself into a bigger economic system, it’s on the ground value – the endogamous value – became supported by off the ground finance, and things got disembedded such that culturally important gatherings find it difficult to support themselves on their own steam.

Might we see more regional and embedded expressions of culture in the future, based on real value to that region like the House of Paint model? What other feasible models might emerge? How will cultural investment strategies be affected by/reposition on account of the economic climate?

Before I go, I’ve gotta give a big Rest In Peace shout to IZ the WIZ, one of the very few Kings graffiti, setting the standard in New York and all over the world. He passed away on Friday. Do the knowledge here.

Ed Glaeser has some very sensible things to say about the shrinking cities brouhaha. Despite the growing hype, there’s not a shred of evidence that the Obama administration is considering bull-dozering anything. Glaeser says it makes a heck of a lot more sense to favor people over places. Invest in human capital and encourage people to be mobile, Glaeser contends, promise much better long-term economic payoffs than undertaking expensive and dubious strategies to try to revive dying places.

It’s useful to put the current debate in historical context. “Planned shrinkage” was originally proposed in the 1970s by then NY housing commissioner Roger Starr. Even earlier, the late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan advocated for the related idea of “benign neglect” as a pillar of urban policy. Both resulted in a slew of unintended and nasty outcomes – like increased arson and violent crime. And as the market for some central locations, like NYC, began to improve, a whole bunch of neighborhoods that were candidates for government-assisted “shrinkage” (read: slow demolition) once again became valuable – parts of Brooklyn, Queens, Hoboken, even Jersey City. Economics is a big part of their comeback. But this would not have happened if the building stock of those places had been allowed to completely decay or was demolished.

It’s abundantly clear that the contemporary shrinking cities movement in the U.S. and Europe is much more sensitive to urban conditions. These contemporary approaches recognize that globalization and market forces work against some older locations. They sensibly suggest that such places would be better served by proactively managing the process of economic transformation and adjustment. Flint and Youngstown provide useful models of how older communities can strategically adjust to the strong forces of economic concentration and spiky globalization. Pittsburgh’s economic transformation – feted by Newsweek’s Howard Fineman among others as a model for Detroit and other places – is a case study of how to shrink smart and strategically.

The most successful shrinking strategies, like Pittsburgh’s, are not top-down affairs driven by all-knowing governments, but organic, bottom-up, community-based efforts. While Pittsburgh government and business leadership pressed for large-scale urban renewal – stadium-building, convention centers, and more far-fetched schemes for local mag-lev trains – its real  turnaround was driven by organic, bottom-up initiatives. Community groups, local foundations, and non-profits – not city hall or business-led economic development groups -  were the driving forces behind neighborhood stabilization and redevelopment, university-based economic development, water-front revitalization, park improvements, and green building among others.  This kind of bottom-up process takes considerable time and perseverance. In Pittsburgh’s case, it took the better part of a generation to achieve stability and the potential for longer-term revival.

All of which brings us back to a big question: What about people versus place strategies? I agree with Glaeser: people must be the priority. Especially in tough economic times, public investment should flow toward people. Early childhood investments, as James Heckman has shown, are the most important, longest-running and highest-paying investments we make.

But places also matter. Sure, there are plenty of things that urban policy has done wrong – like large-scale, top-down urban renewal – things that we need to stay wary of and not repeat.  That does not mean public policy should ignore places.

The quality of the place we live is a key component of our happiness and subjective well-being. We now have solid empirical evidence about what people want and need from places: safety and security, good schools, economic opportunity, the ability to connect to other people, ethical and forward-looking leadership, opportunities for civic engagement, a place that gives everyone a go with abundant green space, a clean environment, and a strong sense of its own history, among other things.

There are plenty of small-scale, locally rooted investments that can and do make a difference – the kinds of things Jane Jacobs and others have long advocated – that don’t cost an arm and a leg and which provide broad public goods kinds of benefits: improving run-down buildings and community sore spots, encouraging community engagement in schools, upgrading parks and open space, planting trees and urban gardens, adding bike lanes, widening sidewalks to encourage both pedestrian use and outside activity, updating zoning and building codes to enable upgrading of commercial strips, live-work conversion and mixed-used development.

As with so many things in life, it’s the small stuff that can really make a difference – in this case not just to cities, shrinking and otherwise – but to the quality of life and happiness of the people who live in them.

Crosscut argues that it’s time for Seattle and other cities to learn from NYC’s example and start turning old elevated structures into parks and other good uses (pointer via Planetizen).

[T]hink a bit about the advantages of elevated linear parks. They can provide remarkable views, often through the slots of the cityscape. They open up access to back-door and upper-level spaces. They make connections with gritty urban history. The design experience is not the usual bland blend but instead has the visual excitement and tension of green spaces set amid rusting iron forms. The Seattle aesthetic has been to make open space as green and pastoral as possible, as if blotting out the city. Time for a richer palate, a more dissonant and beautiful chord.

(Image from thehighline.org)