Creative Class

One of the reasons I research the entrepreneurial activities that take place in and around universities is that in many ways the campus is an ideal incubator for ideas. The frontier that is the university demands new ideas constantly (or at least should).

It is a safe space where idea generation and radical thinking are highly valued and often times rewarded. This, as we know from Richard’s and other people’s work, is crucial to improved quality of place – in both economic and social terms.

Recent Ithaca College graduate Jared O’Toole has just launched a new startup called MindFrenzy.com that is an outlet for people with new or unformed ideas. The site is targeting college students because, as Jared stated in an email,

“I just graduated college and I wanted to start a website that would help encourage college students to go after their ideas. That’s the main motivation behind MindFrenzy because most ideas in college aren’t really developed yet and kids usually need some kind of positive push before they stray from that job search and start their own thing.”

The website launched in mid August and has some interesting ideas listed and are looking for feedback from the community. In describing the site Jared stated,

“MindFrenzy is a think-tank geared towards those 2nd, 3rd, and 4th ideas on your notepad. It aims to be a creative community where even the wackiest or out-of-the-box ideas can get feedback in a positive fashion. You never know when a comment will spark something that lets you see how to get that crazy idea and turn it into something more practical.”

I think the idea of “catching” and sharing lots of the “crazy” ideas that are generated on campus is brilliant and I really look forward to seeing where Jared and his Ithaca-born idea will go (Jared pulled himself out of the finance interviewing process in order to pursue this venture).

Do you have a personal MindFrenzy.com? What do you do with the ideas that you (or your organization) don’t decide to go with? Do you keep track of them? Do they ever make it back? How does that work?

What is a hipster? Being a DJ in the contemporary North American urban nightlife scene, it’s a question that I get to ponder a lot.

Last month, on their cover, Adbusters ran a story called Hipster: The dead end of Western civilization characterizing them as:

one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior [coming] to define the generally indefinable idea of the “Hipster.” An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal.

While being more than slightly polemical toward the end, the author’s point holds water. Hipsters are very slippery when looking to conventional modes of definition.

In the 1940s, it referred mainly to white youths adopting black urban culture vis a vis jazz music – the precursors to the beatniks in the 60s who extended the culture into its more suburban/hippie incarnation. These days the word has come to mean something very different, but in many ways still related – mostly through space. Despite the fact that Hipsters have taken a lot of flack recently for their eclectic dress, dance, and style there is something about the hipster that seems to have remained true throughout the ages. Their participation is fundamentally urban.

In the original hipster era, participating in urban life was synonymous with participating in black life, and so jazz music, black modes of speech, and cultural leanings on a white person made them easy to mark as a hipster. As the city hurtles toward design-intensivity, the definition of a hipster seems as mercurial as the definition of cool – as the city becomes the main nodes for the absorption of trends, hipsters seem to be the most eager people within the city to express them. Far from being a race discourse as it was in the past, this is a style discourse that seems to be engaging youth culture in all facets. Coincidentally (?) XXL magazine ran a feature that discussed the Hipster-effect on Hip hop in the same month that Adbusters ran their Hipster cover.

How is style in the city becoming a commodity? Is the common culture that it’s bringing us toward as banal as the Adbusters article would have us believe?

And now, as always, some music.

I’m already lamenting the end of the shopping bag – the gorgeous kind, you know, with maybe satin or grosgrain handles, like from Hermes or Donghia or Laduree in Paris. The kind you may hold onto for years, can’t bear to toss.

And the whole ritual of having your purchase lavishly swathed in tissue paper, held in place with a beautiful sticker, and then gracefully placed in its coordinating carrier suddenly feels sinful.

That graphic/branding indulgence is coming to an end – I know it and ruefully admit I will really miss it. Carrying bags will always be with us but will reusables ever be as glamorous as their wasteful and glorious predecessors?

Sure, we are all declining shopping bags and bringing in our own, recycling the plastic ones, etc. In my store we keep reusing them (except for gift purchases of course), without the shame we might have felt a couple of years ago. All these new practices are good and necessary and I wholeheartedly support them but I can’t imagine what, if anything, will recreate that little note of luxury when our packaging becomes truly minimal?

A few days ago, I came across an article that suggested in 40 years the whole population will be obese! Well, we know that about 30 percent already is and Richard Posner has suggested that this is individual choice. Well, I would venture to say that the creative class is, by and large, rather fit. They are rich, right. The rich and the creative are not obese. Why, they eat better and exercise more.

So what is the creative class doing to solve this huge social problem? What are the public policy issues? The answer, Victory Bread! Yes, the British response to winning WWII. You would think that the creative class could figure out that the solution to this epidemic would be to throw out the microwave, that menace of modernity, and buy a bread machine: It’s cheaper, it’s healthier, and it’s better for the environment. Is this creative or what?

Gary Gates over at Freakonomics Quorum on the future of suburbia:

While Ward and June Cleaver and their two boys might still be around in the suburbs in forty years, my guess is that their neighbors will be Olivia and Harriet and their twin girls. The Will and Grace version of gay America — urban, wealthy, and white — is starting to look a bit dated.

Suburban locales like Decatur, Georgia (Atlanta), Takoma Park, Maryland (Washington, D.C.), and Ferndale, Michigan (Detroit), are joining urban neighborhoods like Castro, Chelsea, and West Hollywood as gay meccas. Lots of lesbians and gay men now view the suburban home with a white picket fence and a family with 2.5 kids as their version of gay equality …

Suburbs, home ownership, and marriage — what’s left but the kids? In 1990, fewer than one in ten same-sex couples had children. Today, it’s more like one in five. In states like Mississippi, South Dakota, Alaska, South Carolina, and Louisiana, it’s one in three. The gay-by boom is alive and well in small town and suburban America. And these new parents are largely non-white. African-American and Latino/a lesbians and gay men are two to three times more likely than their white counterparts to be raising kids.

So back to the question at hand — my vision of suburbia circa 2050. Lesbian and gay families will be a much more visible community fixture. They’ll probably be married, own their homes, be raising a few kids, and will very likely not be white.

Keith Schneider says stronger city-suburb alliances are needed in the era of the great intensification (pointer via Planetizen).

If the half century after World War II was the great age of the suburb, the first half of the 21st century is unfolding as the era of a stronger, more cohesive American citistate of combined center city and much more urban suburbs. Today’s economy, politics, and culture mirror that shift. The nation’s survival – our sustainability – will depend on it.

Here’s why. The spread-out civilization that America invented in the 20th century was largely the result of a handful of major market trends — cheap energy, cheap land, rising incomes, formidable government wealth. Our drive-through economy, and the culture of convenience and plenty (and anonymity) that it fostered, was possible because families could afford the homes and cars, and government built the highways and subsidized the housing that tied it all together. The big losers were cities, which hemorrhaged jobs, and marooned millions.

That description, though, now applies to hundreds of American suburbs, especially those without public transit, located far from city centers. In many of these, housing values have dropped 40 percent or more in the last 18 months. Yet nearer to the city center, in the seasoned older suburbs where transit and parks and sidewalks and neighbors are in closer proximity, America’s successful 21^st century suburban form is taking shape. And we’ll be needing these more efficiently conceived, metro-connected suburbs in a nation that will add 140 million people by mid-century …

These trends represent an absolutely sane response to critical new 21st century realities — high energy prices, high land costs, static family incomes, scarce resources, government deficits, flagging competitiveness, global climate change, and strong U.S. population growth. But even as downtown, neighborhoods and smart suburbs start to coalesce, they need to move – quickly and courageously – to assure they’ll become success points of a new American Dream.

More than $200 billion in private and public capital needs to be invested over the next decade to build rapid transit for our metro regions, plus regional high-speed rail lines to connect them. Maximizing energy efficiency in community design, and in buildings and homes, is essential to cope with the energy crisis and address global warming. And we need new zoning to locate people and businesses and shopping and schools alongside each other, something that’s now actually illegal in many American communities (and critical if we’re to promote biking and walking and combat our alarming obesity epidemic) …

Now, as we become a nation experiencing a new future- driving less, riding transit more often, living closer together – a new vision is taking root. It’s that our major cities, many wrecks 30 years ago, are positioned to be the livable, desirable centers of the metro regions that embody our top wealth, talent and hopes. Our ambition should be nothing less than pushing them to number among the most livable, energy-efficient and prosperous places on the planet.

The great intensification requires new infrastructure. My hunch is the regions to move first to develop this kind of broad, connective fiber will gain considerable competitive advantage not just in energy use but in terms of time costs and the development of new technologies and industries. Remember the rise of the highway system and suburban infrastructure was always more than transportation and real estate development – it simultaneously provides an enormous spur to the emerging industries of the day from autos to all sorts of consumer durables, generating new forms of mass consumption, and helping to fuel an incredible industrial job machine. They called it fordism, after all. Getting the infrastructure of the mega-region right will not only improve our connectivity and save energy, it will fuel the development of new markets, new technology, and new jobs.

We often talk about the importance of universities to growth in the Creative Economy. Usually we measure scientists, patents, and other similar variables. But we also need to pay attention to the entrepreneurial culture of a college or university.

How welcoming and supportive is the campus of ‘campus entrepreneurs’ (whether they are undergrads or profs)? Saxenian really highlights this topic at a regional level in her work Regional Advantage, but it is just as important at the campus/university level.

An interesting post by Simona Covel at the WSJ’s Independent Street Blog looks at what Yale is trying to do to stop the exodus of startups that leave Yale’s campus and head for Silicon Valley.

In order to fight this high-tech flight, Yale created the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute a few years ago to provide more support and increase retention of high-growth firms. From Covel’s post:

So far, says YEI director James Boyle, it’s working — at least a little bit. Two of last summer’s crop of six start-ups remain in New Haven. Just as important, Mr. Boyle says, is that the program leaves students and potential students with the impression that Yale is an incubator for student-run businesses, just like Stanford or MIT.

“It has been pivotal in demonstrating to the student body that you can start high-tech companies at Yale — a space where Yale usually isn’t known,” he says.

Does your campus put out the welcome mat for entrepreneurs? Does the administration and faculty support entrepreneurs? Have local and regional policy makers gotten involved?

From next week’s Economist:

A great piece on the rise of the Middle East economies including an interesting story with some background on the City of Dubai.

Having been to Dubai a few times, I can tell you that the story out there is compelling. This one city is home to a quarter of our planet’s construction cranes. They are spending massively to diversify their economy into industries such as IT, bio, media, and manufacturing as oil reserves shrink. Separately, Dubai has allocated a massive $15 billion dollars for public infrastructure alone over the next five years.

But is this sustainable? Even though many Middle East cities are flourishing, attracting talent and harnessing technological assets, can these places be models for the other big “T,” that being tolerance? What do you think?

Aleem Kanji

From the AFP (Paris):

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and University of Valencia in Spain
asked 549 Dutch and Spanish men and women to rate how jealous they
felt, and to list the qualities in a romantic competitor that were most
likely to make them ill at ease.

Men generally felt most nervous about attractive, rich and strong rivals. But these feelings were increasingly relaxed the taller they were themselves. The more vertically challenged the man, the greater his feelings of jealousy. For women, what counted most in jealousy was the rival’s looks and charm, but these feelings were less intense if the woman herself was of average height.

More here.

While traveling this week, my colleague and paisono, Pier Giorgio DeCicco, Toronto’s poet laureate,  gave a major address on this subject (via Tree Hugger).

“What is required is an essential atmosphere of passion. Without it, we put
up bad buildings, invent bandage solutions, and have merely a topology of
artistic events cosmetic to daily life. Fine words. What are the strategies? We
have “zero tolerance” for just about any form of abuse, to our credit. Perhaps
it is time we had zero tolerance for what enfeebles the passionate imagination
of a city. What enfeebles it?

1. The notion that money predicates vision.
2. The mean-spiritedness that criticizes before it allows.
3. The conventions of “safeness” from either the left or the right.
4. Anything that discourages human encounter in the interest of expedience and time-saving.”

It’s worth mentioning that his lecture was at The Institute without Boundaries at George Brown College which was the core partner on design guru Bruce Mau’s Massive Change project,