Creative Class

That’s the question Karrie Jacobs asks after visiting the two cities (via Planetizen):

The question was harder to answer than it might seem. Clearly, she would hate much of the heedless tower mania. But the real answer would hinge on whether she regarded Dubai’s increasingly sophisticated approach to mixed-use place-making as an improvement over the sterile environments churned out by the urban planners of the 1960 …

After my return to New York, I received an e-mail about a new development called Jumeirah Gardens, a huge, upscale, master-planned community. Most of what I’d seen in Dubai had been built on open desert or land reclaimed from the sea, but this was a classic urban-renewal scheme, one calling for the demolition of Satwa. A number of accounts, none of them official, estimated that between 100,000 to 150,000 people would be displaced.

Time Out Dubai reported on the development in May: “‘These low-quality villas and the ­illegal inhabitants they house simply can not continue to exist so close to Trade Center, Sheikh Zayed Road and the heart of the city,’ our source confirms. ‘Not in such prime real estate.’” A more recent article in the Gulf News was accompanied by the kind of spectacular architectural renderings that are pro forma in Dubai, and it noted, “The development will redefine living in one of the most popular neighborhoods of Dubai, currently undergoing demolition to pave the way for the new project.” Redefine living in one of the most popular neighborhoods of Dubai? The plan for Jumeirah Gardens made me wish a Jane Jacobs could rise from Satwa.

And then there was Shanghai. In October I spent a few days in a hotel in Pudong, the district of jumbo office towers that began construction in the 1990s. I was taken on a whirlwind tour of the city’s architecture. One of the supposed highlights was Xintiandi, an enclave of preserved tenements converted to a shopping mall with the help of an American architect who drew his inspiration from Faneuil Hall. It struck me as strange that this was regarded as a premier example of preservation: it would be like taking a first-time visitor to New York to the South Street Seaport. But preservation of any sort, even the kind that turns authentic neighborhoods into malls, was the exception rather than the rule. Everywhere I went, new towers were rising and old low-rise neighborhoods were coming down. No sign of Jane here, either.

On the way to Shanghai, I stopped in Hong Kong, a city where real estate development is one of the main industries, and where the government derives much of its revenue from leasing property and selling development rights. There I caught up on the latest: another harbor scheme with more reclamation and a new waterfront highway, and still more massive luxury high-rises eating away at some of the city’s best-loved streetscapes …

Of course, what Dubai, Shanghai, and Hong Kong have in common is a top-down approach to development. Dubai has a hereditary ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. The United Arab Emirates held its first ever elections in 2006, but they’re only open to a tiny fraction of the population. …In the West, we envy China’s ability to build on a monumental scale—the Bei­jing airport! The Bird’s Nest! A subway system quadrupled in size in five years!—and completely change the face of its cities, but residents don’t seem to have a role to play in how their cities are remade, aside from getting out of the way. In Hong Kong, public participation is carefully rationed, and recent protests over the demolition of beloved landmarks—such as the Central Star Ferry Pier and the Queen’s Pier—are a subset of a larger movement advocating open government.

[I]t’s revealing to see what happens in cities where there is no Jane. Because what these people are really talking about when they complain about the Jane Jacobs mentality is democracy, the inconvenient fact that we live in a society where ordinary people can have an impact on the political process.

Jamie Galbraith says planning is the cure for America’s problems (via Planetizen).

“Planning” has been a dirty word in American politics for decades. For the hard-line right, planning destroyed freedom: it was the “road to serfdom.” Anti-planners also thought it a failure; for them the collapse of the U.S.S.R. was due to “central planning.” But without public planning, who is in charge? Lobbyists who represent the private planning of the great corporations. The public interest ceases to exist, and the public sector becomes nothing more than a trough at which private interests come to feed.

What the government needs most today is to regain an independent capacity to think. The government needs a way to imagine the future that is not dominated by lobbies or even by Congress so long as Congress is dominated by lobbies. Planning is a process: thinking, coordination, action. What is the long-term national interest? What specific targets must be met? What is the best way to do it, and who plays what role? …

Markets do not design new systems—new patterns of transport and housing, new technologies for electric power, for vehicles, for heating and cooling. To design a system, to put the pieces together, to identify the most promising lines of attack and take steps to achieve them: that is the planner’s role.

My PhD is in urban planning, so many might think I’m a proponent. But I’m more than just a little bit worried about planned solutions. Much of the time I find myself argeeing with Jane Jacob’s views on the subject – planning is a poor second to complex, self-organizing processes. And our economy, society, politics, and geography are surely a lot more complicated and complex than in her time. I’d like to believe that government can become independent of lobbyists and regain its independent capacity to think, but the realist in me asks: Is that really possible under our current system?

Jane Jacobs famously took on Adam Smith’s notion that specialization leads to growth. She countered basically that specialization can and does lead to doing the same thing better, but that it does not lead to creating new things and the new industries and work that go with it. For that, a social collectivity called the city was required.  Over at the NYT Economix, Catherine Rampell points to a new paper which finds that

ants that specialize are no more productive than ants that don’t. The author, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona named Anna Dornhaus, studied how efficiently rock ants completed their tasks of brood transport, collecting sweets, foraging for protein and nest-building. An ant was considered more specialized the more it concentrated its work on one particular task.  She found that the ants that specialized in these tasks did not perform them more efficiently than ants that remained “generalists,” and in some cases performed their tasks less efficiently. Her conclusions: “My results indicate that at least in this species, a task is not primarily performed by individuals that are especially adapted to it (by whatever mechanism). This result implies that if social insects are collectively successful, this is not obviously for the reason that they employ specialized workers who perform better individually.”

That’s the question asked here.

[N]ow the piggy bank is empty, the cards are maxed out, the NA meetings are every night at 7 and the house is upside-down. The layoffs are coming: will you be one of them or will you just be picking up a few extra hours of work to fill in for the ones who were? The slender times have begun. How will cities fare against the suburbs now? If cities really were an efficiency, a greener solution to a worn out and wasteful suburban culture, would not they have boomed in the early 90s and the late 70s? Where will Americans ride these times out? And will we learn anything from the collective experience of the past two decades?

The post advances some interesting criticisms of my own and theorizes about cities as arenas for leisure and consumption. As I hope my work makes clear, especially WYC, my viewpoint is that cities are primarily vehicles for productivity improvement and innovation, inspired by Jane Jacobs and especially Robert Lucas who famously theorized that:

The theory of production contains nothing to hold a city together. A city is simply a collection of factors of production – capital, people and land and people – and land is always far cheaper outside the city than inside. Why don’t capital and people move outside, combining themselves with cheaper land and thereby increasing profits? Of course people like to live near shopping and shops need to be located close to their customers, but circular considerations of this kind explain only shopping centers, not cities. Cities are centered on wholesale trade and primary producers and a theory that accounts for their existence has to explain why these producers are apparently choosing high rather than low cost modes of operation… It seems to me the ‘force’ we need to postulate for the central role of cities in economic life is of exactly the same character of ‘external human capital’ I have postulated as a force in aggregate development… What can people be paying Manhattan or downtown Chicago rents for if not to be around other people?

The theory of cities is a theory of production and development. They are one in the same thing.

A reader asks:

I’ve read Jane Jacobs, now I’m reading your books. After reading The Rise of the Creative Class, the question that jumps out at me is that this “Class” appears to be amoral. Is that true?

Richard Harwood sure thinks there is:

I can’t stop hearing about interesting people and organizations in Toronto, Canada. Some of the stuff that has appeared on my radar in the last few months from Toronto include:

• Richard Florida on the creative class
• Jane Jacobs on cities
• Naomi Klein on globalization and brands
• Don Tapscott on Wikinomics
• Rotman Management School on integrative thinking
• The MaRS innovation centre

I’m sure there is lots more that I’ve missed, but the fact that, without looking for them, these things keep cropping up appears to point to a creative and innovative place. Perhaps it’s because Toronto (as I have recently learned), has half of it’s inhabitants from outside Canada, and this diversity drives innovation as I’ve blogged about previously here. What else is it about Toronto, or any place, that makes it an innovative hub?

I just thought I’d capture that there does seem to be a buzz about the place which is hard to put your finger on, but you know it when you see it.

That is precisely the constellation of forces that brought us here.

Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair:

It isn’t possible to quantify the extent to which society and culture are
indebted to Bohemia. In every age in every successful country, it has been
important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by
bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals.
This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special
order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the
little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants
and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the
modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who
require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and
cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a
quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran. It was
Jean-Paul Sartre who to his last days lent the patina to the Saint-Germain
district of Paris, just as it is Lawrence Ferlinghetti, last of the Beats, who
by continuing to operate his City Lights bookstore in San Francisco’s North
Beach still gives continuity with the past …

Those who don’t live in such threatened districts nonetheless have a stake in
this quarrel and some skin in this game, because on the day when everywhere
looks like everywhere else we shall all be very much impoverished, and not only
that but—more impoverishingly still—we will be unable to express or even
understand or depict what we have lost.

The rest is here (h/t: Brian Knudsen). Photo from Vanity Fair.

Whenever these issues come up, I recall what Jane Jacobs once said to me: “When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.”