Creative Class » Office of Urban Policy

Urbanite in Chief

Richard Florida — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:55:18 +0000

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

To his critics, Mr. Carrión’s vision was unremarkable and his record of accomplishments a matter of debate. They argue that he often sacrificed community concerns to please business interests and failed to follow through on many of his ideas.

Mr. Carrion’s promise in 2003 to build ice skating rinks at three Bronx parks fizzled, though a temporary rink is planned as part of the Yankee Stadium redevelopment. His Office of Faith Based Initiatives has been largely inactive after the death of its director. And his plans in 2006 to start a Bronx Sports Commission and a health insurance co-operative for small businesses remain works in progress.

Mr. Carrión’s handling of two big projects especially angered many in the Bronx … The shopping center being built on the site of the old Bronx Terminal Market displaced about two dozen wholesale produce and ethnic foods merchants, and a community benefits agreement negotiated by Mr. Carrión with the developer was criticized for shortchanging residents.

The new Yankee Stadium was built on land occupied by two neighborhood parks, and a number of community leaders and parks advocates objected to the loss of the parks and plans to replace them with smaller parks scattered around the neighborhood. Months after a Bronx community board voted against the stadium plan, Mr. Carrión replaced or demoted several board members in 2006.

“It’s ironic that President Obama hired Adolfo Carrión, whose record in the Bronx at every turn thwarted the interest of the community, and yet the president started his career as a community organizer,” said Richard Lipsky, a lobbyist for the market’s former merchants.

Mr. Carrión received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from several individuals who worked for developers, companies or institutions building retail, housing or other developments in the borough, often as plans for those projects were still winding through the approval process.

What, to you, does this appointment signal about the Obama administration’s perspective on cities and urban policy?

Collaboration Beyond Consensus in the White House

Kwende Kefentse — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:37:12 +0000

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.

Obama Urban Policy

Richard Florida — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:20:03 +0000

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?