Creative Class

President Obama stopped by the city yesterday, inciting havoc in terms of all timing, routing, and availability of transportation. Some walkers were forced to wait two hours to cross the street along the motorcade route, while some buses that barely interacted with his route were over an hour behind schedule. This man knows how to shut down a city!

I’d like to retrench upon, and synthesize some ideas from, a couple of past blogs – namely the last one which examined space and entrepreneurial innovation, and one where we looked at the future of Obama’s urban policy -  in examining how good he might be in building cities back up.

A new bill was introduced to the House of Representatives last Tuesday – the Community Regeneration, Sustainability, and Innovation Act of 2009:

The purposes of this Act are:

(1) to provide Federal assistance, through grants and the provision of technical assistance, to establish land banks in communities and metropolitan areas that have experienced significant population loss due to large-scale employment losses which have resulted in widespread
abandonment of real property;

(2) to encourage innovation, experimentation, and environmentally sustainable practices through collaborative efforts to reuse and rehabilitate land bank property in ways that will provide long-term benefits to the public;

(3) to encourage the creation of green infrastructure;

(4) to encourage the creation of new employment opportunities, especially in areas related to environmental sustainability and green infrastructure directly related to the implementation of regeneration plans assisted under this Act; and

(5) to encourage the strategic use of other Federal, State, local, private, and nonprofit resources not provided under this Act to stabilize and improve neighborhoods not presently experiencing widespread vacancy and abandonment, but whose stability is or may be threatened if current
demographic or employment trends continue.

This is the latest in a suite of innovation bills (one focusing on small business, and another on achievement through technology) that are being worked through the House right now and, to me, it’s the one that will have the most visceral impact on youth, because it deals with the space they occupy. While one way to look at this is as a way to prop up private sector developers who are involved in Hope VI redevelopments (many of which are struggling, as I learned recently at a CHRA conference), there are a lot of great things going on with this bill that will set up more interesting spaces for youth to engage and launch innovative practices.

What’s most promising is the way in which experimentation and competition for new ideas, as well as inter-sectoral, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and “green” concepts are encouraged in the bill. The federal government (through the HUD) would finally be doing for the spaces in the core what it did for the peripheries when it created the Housing Act of 1949 and again later with the development of the New Town Corporation in the early 70s. It would be stimulating a brave new conversation about space, but with a different, more sustainable focus. The bill seeks to be inclusive to all ages, abilities, and modes of transportation as well as seeking better modes of regulation to implement the plans more effectively – probably a response to the problem that has plagued the Hope VI effort.

What isn’t seen as clearly is an attempt to account for culture. There word only comes up in the bill twice, yet cultural mapping and planning is one of the most important tools for creating prosperity out of space. Particularly with youth enterprise, what I’ve observed is that most often enterprise occurs at the intersection of location and culture. In my most recent blog, the youth enterprises that I mentioned are all based, for the most part, on culture and emerged out of cultural scenes – urban culture in particular (a culture completely predicated by the last spatial system change ironically enough). They were able to get established and survive, however, because of the relatively low barrier of entry into the local real estate markets and their ability to acquire space in which to operate. Once youth enterprise takes root in these kinds of areas, often the regeneration process is already well underway.

And how about including some youth-based metrics for gauging success? If we learned anything from past experimentation with space it’s that while grown-ups might occupy the role of pioneer in these experiments with space, youth are always the natives – we experience it in fundamentally different ways. While we react to complications of the past through bills like this, we sometimes squelch the gift of the present for youth, who will be the builders of the future. The irony being that it’s the reaction to how spatial conditions affect youth that has historically incited the support for spatial system change initiatives like this.

So: How can the experience of space as a young person help to inform the Federal framework being established for the modification of space? How does the youth experience of space differ from that of the adult, and is there room for prosperity and community within that margin?

Wow, this one turned into a long-ers. For making it through, you all definitely deserve some music.

At some point during another amazing Time Kode party last Friday, I was struck by the dance floor. No, I didn’t fall over, but I had a thought – as DJ’s, our job is to create the atmosphere that activates the space such that people participate in it. When we consider the way in which the pub or club has become the gathering ground for young urban creative class 20-somethings/30-somethings, how significant is the music that they want to hear to the spaces they want to be in? Participating in public space has something of a performative value – this discourse of performance in space has been in motion since Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology defined human existence as fundamentally social in the Discourse on the Inequality of Man. and was brought to bear on the phenomenon of the 20th century city by Richard Sennett’s seminal 1974 work The Fall of Public Man. The dance floor is an interesting and practical kind of metaphor for the public space in which we perform and individuate.

Sennett was among the urbanists who contributed to 2007’s The Endless City, one of the most powerful and comprehensive books of comparative urban study that I’ve ever seen. They do not, however, profile Sennett’s home city of Chicago. Nor was youth culture and music on the researchers’ radar. If it was, they might have thought to include The Chi. Other than New York, there are few other cities in North America, or anywhere for that matter, that have made as strong an impact on youth and music culture worldwide as Chicago has. It was from there that House music would make its way into the world.

Edward Soja comments in his opening essay “The Urbanization of The World” that:

An important starting point in looking at the changes that have taken place within urban regions over the past 30 years is what Mike Davis recently described as the mass production of slums. The expansion of urban poverty has made ‘extended’ slums and burgeoning informal economies a distinctive feature of both the urbanization of the world and the globalization of the urban.

Nowhere is the concept of mass slums more poignant than in Chicago’s north and south sides. The Robert Taylor and Cabrini-Green houses are infamous even as they come down. The Chicago Housing Authority’s position on integration in the 50s led them to create one of the most severe black/white housing divisions that the U.S. would ever see. Those projects would also be the breeding ground for one of the most robust and influential informal economies of musical ideas outside of New York’s 5 boroughs.

While in Comiskey Park they were literally blowing up dance records, in a south side club called The Warehouse, dance music was reinventing itself and creating a new context for the dance floor. Revealing the world beat that would turn the UK upside down between ‘88 and ‘91, and changing the way we dance forever are no small innovations. As the homes and communities that birthed House come down, we should ask ourselves: How have the peripheral effects of space contributed to mainstream culture? In the discourse that Hope VI has initiated about dispersing or concentrating poverty, without defending the terrible conditions that places like Cabrini-Green subjected its residents to, it’s important to consider what else we’re concentrating and dispersing as well. How can we appreciate the innovations coming from a space and its productive forces while simultaneously condemning that space?

Also, how important is the nightclub/pub to the young professionals? How much does a city’s musical profile affect your impression of it? How important is it to you that you can go out and dance?

And now, as always, some music.