Creative Class

The New York Times profiles the new head of the newly created Office of Urban Policy:

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.

The Washington Post is reporting that Obama appears to be committed to creating a new White House Office of Urban Policy. Let’s hope it’s one that recognizes urban policy as a key element of innovation, economic growth, and competitiveness as well as poverty mitigation.

Your thoughts on what a new urban policy should look like?