Creative Class

The Iranian Presidential Election will be held this Friday. Against seemingly insurmountable odds, Hossein Mousavi, a moderate and progressive candidate (by Iranian standards) has emerged as a serious contender to the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

While his “Green Revolution,” at first seemed nothing more than a Sisyphean struggle by a group of young moderate Iranians against a totalitarian and despotic government – destined for failure despite their greatest efforts – the winds of change have dramatically and suddenly tipped in Mousavi’s favor and, at this point, it’s anyone’s race.

Iran’s state-controlled media has given Mr. Mousavi no air-time, the government has banned his party from hosting peaceful rallies in sports stadiums and other public venues, and those rallies which have occurred spontaneously in the street have been met with hostilities from government officials. Still, his candidacy built momentum.

So how did Mr. Mousavi, whose supporters promise “a new greeting to the world,” emerge as a serious contender to Mr Ahmadinejad despite a state-wide government campaign to quell his movement? The answer: FACEBOOK. Mousavi’s supporters – mostly young people and educated urban dwellers – have taken to the Web, garnering support and enthusiasm on Facebook and on blogs, posting videos of their candidate on YouTube, and organizing impromptu street rallies by mass-texting fellow supporters literally on the fly. The result: a highly organized, energetic, and sophisticated force for change.

Mousavi supporter Emad Mortazavi, a 24-year-old sociology student, said, “Last week, there was suddenly this feeling that it was possible, that Mousavi could get enough votes. Social-networking sites and text-messaging have played a big role in spreading the message.”

In typical form, Ahmadinejad blocked Facebook in May in an attempt to silence his opposition, but to no avail (it was opened back up three days later). In the end, Iran’s youth proved more tech-savvy than anyone in Ahmadinejad’s government.

In an uncanny mirror image of the U.S. election last year, it appears the Net-Generation – people born between 1980 and 1996 – may once again anchor the winning candidate by embracing progressive attitudes and exploiting the power of the internet to collaborate and organize for their candidate. Evidence of a seismic demographic shift, the precipitous rise of Mousavi proves that young Iranians are a force to be reckoned with.

The AFP reports:

“With more than 60 percent of Iranians born after their nation’s Islamic revolution in 1979, the under-30 vote will be crucial in next week’s election in which hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is being challenged by three fiercely critical rivals.

Several analysts predict a high urban youth turnout in favour of former premier Mir Hossein Mousavi…Tehran has been gripped by a new fashion frenzy ahead of the June 12 vote, with scores of teenagers and 20-somethings sporting green wristbands, scarves and T-shirts.”

Iranian youth ultimately face many of the same problems as young people in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. In a time of economic turmoil they want a candidate who can answer their questions and who can appeal to their better instincts; not some religious zealot who spends most of his time demonizing the Western World and threatening the extinction of its neighbors. The DailyKos writes,

“The economy is a key issue, and many young people with college degrees cannot find jobs or acceptable living arrangements in Tehran and other major cities…the ruling elites cannot ignore the desires of such an enormous percentage of the nation for long. Iran is in for some major shifts due to demographics alone.”

Tomorrow, the Iranian people will take to the polls. The sun may rise Saturday morning on a very different looking Middle East.

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

- Tim O’Reilly

To the popular press “hacker” means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers, “hackers” connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants-whether the computer wants to or not.

- Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters

Welcome to the Open Cities blog on CCE. My name is David Eaves and I’ve been writing, speaking, and thinking about open, citizen engagement and public policy for a number of years. Most recently, I worked to help push forward the City of Vancouver motion that requires the city to share more data, adopt open standards, and treat open source and proprietary software equally.

Cities have always been platforms – geographic and legal platforms upon which people collaborate to create enterprises, exchange ideas, educate themselves, celebrate their culture, start families, found communities, and raise children. Today the power of information technology is extending this platform, granting us new ways to collaborate and be creative. As Clay Shirky notes in Here Comes Everybody, this new (dis)order is powerful. For the meaning and operation of cities, it will be transformative.

How transformative? The change created by information technology is driving what will perhaps be seen as the greatest citizen-led renewal of urban spaces in our history. Indeed, I believe it may even be creating a new type of city, one whose governance models, economies and notions of citizenship are still emerging, but different from their predecessors. These new cities are Open Cities: cities that, like the network of web 2.0, are architected for participation and so allow individuals to create self-organized solutions and allow governments to tap into the long-tail of public policy.

And just in the nick of time. To succeed in the 21st century, cities will have to simultaneously thrive in a global economy, adapt to climate change, integrate a tsunami of rural and/or foreign migrants, as well as deal with innumerable other challenges and opportunities. These issues go far beyond the capacity and scope of almost any government – not to mention the all-too-often under-resourced City Hall.

Open Cities address this capacity shortfall by drawing on the social capital of their citizens. Online, city dwellers are hacking the virtual manifestation of their city which, in turn, is giving them the power to shape the physical space. Google transit, DIYcity, Apps for Democracy are great urban hacks, they allow cities to work for citizens in ways that were previously impossible. And this is only the beginning.

Still more exciting, hacking is a positive sum game. The more people hack their city – not in the poorly misunderstood popular press meaning of breaking into computers but in (sometimes artful, sometimes amateur) way of making a system (read city) work for their benefit – the more useful data and services they create and remix. Ultimately, Open Cities will be increasingly vibrant and safe because they are hackable. This will allow their citizens to unleash their creativity, foster new services, find conveniences and efficiencies, notice safety problems, and build communities.

In short, the cities that harness the collective ingenuity, creativity, and energy of its citizenry will thrive. Those that don’t – those that remain closed – won’t. And this divide – open vs. closed – could become the new dividing line of our age. And it is through this lens that this blog will look at the challenges and opportunities facing cities, their citizens, and institutions. Let’s see who’s open, how they’re getting open, and what it will all mean.

Michael Lind argues New York and London are in for the biggest fall:

New York, London, and other financial centers were heavily dependent on financial-sector profits. Throw in the technology-driven collapse of the publishing and broadcast industries headquartered in such places, and those cities are likely to suffer devastating blows. Capitals of both politics and commerce, such as Paris and Tokyo, will adjust the best in the new state-capitalist world. Purely commercial centers such as New York and Frankfurt will suffer the most. Without the obscenely rich investment bankers and the legions of well-paid retainers who supported their lifestyles, formerly flourishing parts of these former financial capitals may become as derelict as Detroit or the crumbling industrial towns of northern Britain and Germany’s Ruhr region.

Not so fast.

NYC and London are much more than financial centers – and always have been. Sure, finance generated a lot of income, especially in the top ranks, but the data show that greater NY is not overly dependent on finance and has significant capabilities across a broad range of creative industries. Ed Glaeser has advanced several compelling explanations for why NYC’s unemployment has remained relatively low in the face of what was supposed to be devastating losses from the financial crisis, With Washington, D.C. in its mega-region gambit, New York will do just fine even if you believe Lind about the coming era of “state capitalism.”

London is admittedly more finance-dependent, but it too has considerable capabilities in media, entertainment, fashion, and as a draw for global talent. How many other cities around the world can say that? And both NYC and London have withstood far more serious blows and and emerged stronger and more resilient, as Youssef Cassis’ landmark study of global financial centers shows.

Paris and Tokyo are much more likely to lose as the global city system consolidates. This year’s edition of the Global Financial Centres Index shows NYC and London consolidating their hold on global finance in the heat of the crisis, while Paris and Tokyo are getting clobbered.

The winners in the new era of capitalism are more likely than not to share the same fundamental characteristics that have defined leading-edge global cities in previous capitalist epochs – the economic benefits of diversity and openness in attracting talent, and of density and speed in mixing to create new innovations, new firms, and new industries. Those advantages will only compound in the future.

Hiring people with international living experience may become a priority in future creative workplaces. According to recent psychology research reported in The Economist, people who have lived abroad are better problem-solvers than those who have never lived anywhere but in the USA.

[Researchers] presented 155 American business students and 55 foreign ones studying in America with a test used by psychologists as a measure of creativity. Given a candle, some matches and a box of drawing pins, the students were asked to attach the candle to a cardboard wall so that no wax would drip on the floor when the candle was lit. (The solution is to use the box as a candleholder and fix it to the wall with the pins.) They found 60% of students who were either living abroad or had spent some time doing so, solved the problem, whereas only 42% of those who had not lived abroad did so.

A follow-up study with 72 Americans and 36 foreigners explored their creative negotiating skills…. where both negotiators had lived abroad 70% struck a deal …. When neither of the negotiators had lived abroad, none was able to reach a deal.

Just having traveled abroad was apparently not enough to improve a person’s likelihood of solving the problems. Also, the researchers claim they found a way to filter out factors like the possibility that better problem-solvers are the ones more willing to live abroad.

As creative talent remains in short supply, improving the problem-solving skills of employees will be a priority at many companies. If further research in this area continues to support the findings, we may see employers who need a creative workforce – with top problem-solving skills – seeking to hire people with experience living abroad (which, of course, includes immigrants who by definition have done so). A global firm may even offer to give people that experience early in their careers, stationing people outside their home countries.

Or, as another recent Economist article reports, right now some companies are offering jobs to people – next year. What if they helped them to live and volunteer abroad in the meantime? Perhaps paying a small stipend. They’d score the double bonus of securing talent for when the economy rebounds and improving the problem solving skills of that talent.

Have you lived abroad? Do you think it improved your problem-solving skills?

Ed Glaeser asks: “If the world is so flat, then why are cities growing so quickly, especially in the third world?” He explains:

In the developing world, urbanization has often taken the form of exploding populations in megacities. Mumbai’s population increased to 19 million in 2007 from 10.8 million in 1985. Bangalore, the urban symbol of the flat world, has had its population double over two decades, to 6.8 million today from 3.4 million in 1985.

The growth of these cities and the continuing strength of older urban areas – like New York, London and Paris – is no accident. Globalization and new technologies attract people to big cities, by increasing the returns to urban proximity …

Globalization and technological change have increased the returns to being smart; human beings are a social species that get smart by hanging around smart people.

This powerful clustering force – identified by Jane Jacobs and Robert Lucas, among others – is making the world more geographically concentrated everyday.

Figuring out ways to adjust to it – especially how to address the huge costs being borne by people and places being left behind – remains one of the most pressing domestic and international public policy questions of our time.

In a recent issue of the American Interest related to The Ends of Growth, we argue that, “Our focus on economic growth is misplaced and our leaders’ conception of the U.S. economy is misplaced. No wonder were in such a mess.” Defining Prosperity suggests that both republicans and democrats have an outdated understanding of our political system. The republicans have an absence of principle and the democrats have an obsolescence of purpose.

The next America needs to have an understanding of what America is. Economic growth, or its absence, is merely an indicator on the dashboard of our ongoing national journey. The engine that propels American capitalism forward is entrepreneurship; the fuel is opportunity; the work of foundations recycles the energy of society, making progress and widespread prosperity sustainable.

This century – the global century – will rest on sustainable development in global cities driven by entrepreneurs and fueled by venture capital. However, what will make this happen is the reconstitution of wealth on a global scale the likes of which has never been seen.

Wealthy individuals from around the world will have to learn from the American model that entrepreneurship leads to wealth, wealth needs to be given back to create opportunity for the next generation. The entrepreneurship-philanthropy-opportunity cycle is the inner dynamic of American capitalism and the source of its prosperity. The strengthening of it in the global economy is our most important job today.

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.

Richard Florida will discuss economic competitiveness, demographic trends, and cultural innovation at the Global City Forum in Abu Dhabi on April 7. Over 1,000 urban decision-makers from 250 cities will be gathered at this event.

Global City is the only international forum where public and private leaders exchange best practices and share sustainable urban strategies. This unique networking platform dedicated to mayors, urban planners, decision-makers and leaders, will be held in Abu Dhabi in April 2009 – for the first time in the Middle East.

What do you consider the greatest challenges of globalization and sustainability that face your city?

Rana and Richard Florida and event organizers, Reed Exhibitions

Global City, Abu Dhabi - Emrites Palace

Richard's representative from Abu Dhabi

Richard giving the morning keynote

Mr. Eid AlMazroi advisor to the chairman of the Department of Planning and Economy, Rana & Richard Florida

Source: Financial Times

The fall of U.S. and British banks has been swift and thorough-going as these maps from the Financial Times show. In 1999, U.S. banks were far and away the dominant players in global finance. Today, Chinese banks have a market capitalization as big as U.S. and British banks combined. Worldwide, bank capitalization as a share of global GDP has declined from around 12 percent to less than five percent. In the UK, bank capitalization has crashed from more than a quarter of GDP to less than five percent.

Bonus: Click here for a list of the world’s 50 safest banks.

Globalization, it’s commonly thought, has made the economies of major countries more integrated. New research by economist Kamil Yilmaz uses a global “spillover index” to gauge how much the economic shocks in one country spillover to other countries, tracking this spillover or integration effect from 1960 to today (pointer via Mark Thoma).

Since September 2008, the index has jumped higher than ever, ashis chart (above) shows, leading Wilmaz to conclude:

The spillover plot as of December 2008 shows how current global recession starkly differs from past recessions. Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, in a matter of four months all major industrialized economies of the world are pulling each other down, with the US playing a leading role. There is a desperate need for coordinated policy action to stop the free fall in industrial output around the world. G20 countries should agree to increase the size of fiscal stimulus packages and coordinate the way these policies are implemented. Obviously, these policies cannot be expected to have full impact unless the US government comes up with a feasible plan to clean up the balance sheets of its banks from toxic assets.

What are the odds of this actually happening? And what might be the mechanism for achieving such a coordinated global response?