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.

Columnists like Stanley Crouch hope that Obama’s win will renovate the content and style of hip hop music. Throughout a recent article he takes hip hop modes of fashion to task and, by extension, the more identifiable affectations of urban culture. With his win, Crouch hopes that Obama will shift trends:

On the pop cultural end, Barack and Michelle Obama’s worldliness and common sense will greatly diminish the national appetite for and the defense of those who proudly commit intellectual suicide by submitting to anti-intellectual stances and the surface styles that repel across all ethnic lines.

At the same time, Obama is considering creating an Office of Urban Policy, hopefully to replace the ailing/failing HUD. Obviously the connection to urban America he developed as a community organizer in Chicago doesn’t stop at the White House.

With Jay-Z and Beyoncé rumored to be performing at the inauguration, and Obama’s now infamous hip hop mannerisms (brushing his shoulders off, the “fist-jab” – as Fox News so adeptly termed it – with his wife, etc.), and the overwhelming support from the urban music community bolstering his win, one has to wonder what role the hip hop community will play in this new office.

While Crouch is holding out for a great shift in urban culture, one has to wonder about the wisdom of that wish. Everyone can agree that Obama is a great role model to urban youth and urban culture in general, but hoping for this seismic shift is glib and doesn’t acknowledge the critical perspective that urban cultural practitioners can and regularly do bring to the discourse on cities. Obama as cultural-consensus-maker might not be in the best interest of the urban discourse. As in intellectual, he might be more interested in working with difference than in drawing it toward his position – collaboration as opposed to consensus.

University of London PhD candidate Markus Miessen examines the potential of a new type of collaboration in a phenomenal article:

An alternative model of participation within spatial practice will be rendered, one that takes as a starting point an understanding of participation beyond models of consensus. Instead of aiming for synchronization, such model could be based on participation through critical distance and the conscious implementation of zones of conflict. Through cyclical specialization, the future spatial practitioner could arguably be understood as an outsider who–instead of trying to set up or sustain common denominators of consensus, enters existing situations or projects by deliberately instigating conflicts as a micro-political form of critical engagement with the environment that one is operating in.

From a policy perspective, what does Obama need with more people like him when he’s trying to address a different demographic? Instead of encouraging urban youth and urban culture to emulate him, wouldn’t it be more useful for him and for them if on-the-ground representatives from urban culture could advise as post-consensus collaborators to help enrich future urban policy? Is there intellectual wealth in the distance between Obama and the “anti-intellectual stances and the surface styles that repel across all ethnic lines”?

And now, as always, some music.