Creative Class

Richard Florida photographed with the Mayor of Ottawa, Larry O’Brian, October 2009.

Want to know how Toronto stacks up on the Creativity Index? Or how Ottawa compares to D.C. and is a leading creative class? Or, say, how Hamilton compares to its peers among industrial cities? The Prosperity Institute’s research engine is cranking. And researchers Ronnie Sanders and Mike Wolfe have released a blizzard of reports on how these cities and more stack up against their U.S. and Canadian competition. Click here for lots, lots more.

As I walked down my street on Monday, I heard a hauntingly familiar rumble, followed by a flash of red and white. And, just like that, visual confirmation that the nearly 60-day bus strike was over. Part of me was so perturbed about the whole situation that I still wanted to walk, but my feet were begging for the ride, and the ATU was trying to show some beneficence and win back some of their ridership by eliminating the fare for a week, so I hopped on.

As I took my seat and picked up the paper on the seat next to me – an amenity of public transportation that many avail themselves of, and had probably been missing as well – I found an article that really spoke to me and to the root of my exasperation with the strike:

People get the government they deserve. Certainly Ottawa does. If you are prepared to take nearly two months without public transit, without a clear return, and few compensatory measures to soften the cost, that’s what you’ll get.

When Ottawans stoically and heroically organized car pools, walked to work, rearranged their lives, missed classes, lost income or stayed home, they gave politicians no incentive to act.

Astoundingly, the first protests came late in the strike. Until then, some real suffering — particularly among the elderly, the sick, the disabled and others who have no voice — was easily ignored. In Paris and other real cities, they would have been marching on city hall, if not burning it down

…But the transit strike is symptomatic of Ottawa’s larger problem, which lies in its contented people and its feckless politicians.

There are no citizens of Ottawa, as the mayor likes to say. Citizenship implies a sense of belonging. That notion, even if it had a legal standing, is foreign to this city. Ottawans aren’t residents, either. Even those who own homes or are born here have a permanent impermanence. More likely, Ottawans are tenants.

The article goes on to challenge Ottawa, in no minced words, to get serious about itself as a city. As a resident I feel as guilty as the next person. While I did my best to incite some conversation (and ire) around the issue with my radio show, it wasn’t until mid/late January that I got it in me to start trying to organize some of the young entreprenurial community in the city, and by the time I had myself organized, the strike was over. It was exasperation with the complacency and civic deficit that spurred me to act though. I felt that Ottawa was selling itself short. Telling by the wave of responses the article has garnered, I’m not the only one.

It has been said over and over by Richard and a host of others – it’s a shame to waste a good crisis. Initiatives like ChangeCamp have been probing the frontiers of civic engagement through technology. In a city that isn’t organized with density in mind, is this the kind of thing that Ottawa needs? How does Ottawa leverage this one to emerge from it a more responsive and engaged population? What will it take for people to wake up, get involved, and become citizens?

And now, as always, some music.

Considering the report about Ontario in the Creative Age that came out of the MPI yesterday, and some interesting data that I came across browsing the web the other day, I thought I’d mash up some ideas and observations about youth enterprise and creative clustering emerging from youth scenes. Let’s see how they fit. While this might work better with a map, I hope that you can follow along.

So, about two years ago, the crew that I do Time Kode with (our monthly soul shakedown in Ottawa) found a spot off the beaten path to do our parties – an unsuspecting Eritrean community center called the Eri Café found at the intersection of Preston (Little Italy) and Somerset (China Town). If anyone reading knows/has been to Ottawa, they know that this intersection is quite a ways away from The Market area, where nightlife and commerce is traditionally clustered. Since we started the party, our enterprise has only picked up more steam and has really helped to put the Eri Café and that area in general on the map in the city with all of the traffic that we drive through there every month.

What I find interesting is that subsequent to – but not necessarily directly related to – our setting up shop there, more youth enterprise began to emerge along the Somerset strip. The Lay Up, an urban couture boutique successfully opened and has been building great momentum, as well as The Umi Café, a fair trade co-op that has become increasingly popular as a place that builds community between like-minded people.  My roommate, who is here from Germany for six months working as an intern for Environment Canada, found it without my instruction and has been frequenting it on a weekly basis.

All of these enterprises emerged out of the same creative scene in Ottawa – young urban artists turned business people. Most of us are under 30, and most of the people that we service are in that same age bracket, or can be described as youthful.

As I was thinking about this and knocking around the web, I thought about both the report from the MPI about creative density and innovation, and a blog entry that I stumbled upon that sought to break down some data to better understand the relationship between age and entrepreneurship. Both the findings of the report and the analysis of the data on the blog seem to combine to describe the phenomenon on Somerset.

Which brings us back to Ontario in the Creative Age. The emergence of these clusters of youth enterprise really demonstrates the value of creativity and management, even when an enterprise isn’t delivering a physical product. It also demonstrates how creative density can spur enterprise.

Can you think of any examples in your own regions where you’ve observed something like this? And how do you think this type of activity can be encouraged and not squelched as the economic climate begins to set in?

And now, with Black History Month in mind, some music.

What a time to be in Ottawa! Just when the city dodged the bullet of the 2009 municipal budget, the city is hit with a blizzard and then a transit strike:

Sam Barr left his home near the airport at 5 a.m.

“I’ve been walking for 2½ hours to get to work now. It’s pretty tough,” Barr told CBC’s Steve Fischer after meeting him on Bank Street in the Glebe.

He was heading to the Elgin Street Diner downtown, the rendezvous point for him and his colleagues, who do electrical work.

In North America, particularly in the past 50 years, residential planning has been dominated by the concept of the suburb. A demographic that didn’t exist at the time of the first American census now represents over 50 percent of the American population in the 2000 census and is overwhelmingly where children are being reared in Canada as well – in an analysis of the 2001 Canadian census data, it was determined that 17 of the 25 fastest-growing municipalities in Canada are suburbs.  Without the automobile opening up the option of living beyond the limits of mass transit, these kinds of demographics wouldn’t be possible.

As the strike lengthens and the (rather surprising) public vitriol towards labor unions grows, a city is getting to know itself by foot in a way that it hasn’t for some time. Pedestrian scale thinking is setting in and people within the region, many without cars, are being forced to re-think the way they navigate automobile-scaled environments.

This means that even moderate distance travel is now delimited by one of three things:

1. Cash flow – Can I afford a cab to where I have to go and back? Can I do this every time I go out?
2. Walking distance – How far is it? How long will it take to walk there?
3. Network capacity – Can I get a ride from someone? Do I know someone going in that direction?

For those without the cash flow to support taxis as their primary mode of transportation, walking distance is the first option for individual movement – a position that it hasn’t enjoyed for quite some time. As I prepared myself to leave my house the other day, I also realized that I hadn’t thought about distance in those terms since I was 11 or 12. And that’s when it struck me:

This strike is to the average non-driving adult in Ottawa what life is like for any kid in the suburbs without a license. While being somewhat inconvenient, this strike also offers an opportunity to appreciate something that we might take for granted: the transportation reality of youth in an auto-scaled world.

If we find those delimiters challenging during this strike as adults, imagine the experience of a young person moving into a suburb with limited access to public transportation. Their movement is restricted exactly the way that mine is now, except compounded by parent-set boundaries, inexperience, and limited income – space is really a challenge for them.

So while it might be a bit to the left, what this transit strike really has me thinking is: how can we include the perspective of someone limited by those three things – cash flow, walking distance, and network capacity – in suburban planning practices? Not specifically for transit-strike situations like this, but overwhelmingly for kids in general?

And now, as always, some music.

Ottawa’s 2009 municipal budget was just released, and the arts, culture, and heritage community is reeling. After realizing that the city would require an either $59 million decrease in spending or increase in revenue, Mayor O’Brien brought out the axe. It is not surprising that in a budget where the words ‘arts’ and ‘culture’ can be found less than 10 times respectively, buried on page 52 is a 42 percent cut to all arts, culture, and heritage investments as well as a complete retraction of festival and event investments.

A close inspection of the budget reveals that the “adjustment to cultural services” is the most expansive, and highest impact (in terms of dollars) single-cut of anything offered in the 5-part Options for Reduction or Revenues package, other than adjusting underperforming bus routes. Yet while the rationale concerning the transit cuts enjoys a 5-page deliberation, the rationale for “Adjustment to existing services” – the category under which the arts, culture, and heritage cuts are relegated – is breezed through in less than a page, the final paragraph of which is:

All of the services identified for adjustments may be considered essential to individuals or specific groups in the city. However, compared to the multitude of services and programs the City provides, these proposed adjustments do not seriously impact the functioning of the city, nor do they compromise general public safety.

As a member of the Arts and Culture community in Ottawa, and author on this website, my opinion on the cuts won’t shock you. For all of the reasons that thinkers like Richard, Charles Landry, and Glen Murray have espoused, these cuts are a bad idea. The budget-in-question never once profiles the region’s rich cultural economy, nor does it consider expansion of its cultural industries in any of its economic forecasting, or leveraging the momentum that it’s been building within the global festival community. For having such an uninhibited willingness to cut arts, culture, and heritage investments, there doesn’t seem to be as great an effort from the city to understand arts, culture, and heritage contributions in any nuanced kind of way. One page certainly doesn’t do them justice. This kind of cut may save in the short term, but if money is the only currency being considered then the city is doomed to waste a lot of it.

To workers in the affected areas within the cultural industries: how can these challenges be overcome with a positive net impact on the arts, culture, and heritage sectors? Another sector that is getting hit hard by cuts is housing – they are facing similar questions. Feeling the pinch of restricted access to debt markets more than most, social enterprise models are becoming increasingly employed to generate capital in the housing world. Can the city and these arts, culture, and heritage bodies work together to leverage the currency and momentum that they already have into shared and re-invested profit? How do we encourage a modicum of cultural planning in our municipal budgets? Could budgets like these bring about a shift in the way that the arts, culture, and heritage are financed in general?

And now, as always, some music.

For those who don’t know, I do a radio show once a week on CKCU, our nation’s oldest and most distinguished campus-based community radio station. It’s funding drive season, and the two hours of begging for money on the air last week got me thinking about the function of community radio – other than satisfying my love to play music, what does the radio station do, and why does it deserve the money it’s asking for? Especially considering the fact that in the shift from more communal modes of organization to more individual ones, radio was one of the first technologies to be absorbed into the Internet? Community radio – defined as radio that’s community based, independent, and participatory – not only incubates and creates opportunity for media talent, artists, and local business but in fact has a critical role in the building of place itself.

In addition to still being the most democratic way to transmit information (at least until access to the Net becomes an inalienable right), people in places like Afghanistan have used radio for its very strong community building functions. It permits feedback and creates the critical collective third place wherein a culture develops, by playing the role of arbiter (and depending on the host and quality of the programming, arbiter elegantiae) between the global and the local – or as some young people might regard it, the digital and the physical. Moreover, radio does this on a scale that is appreciable by the community.

To that end, community radio is still the most representative of what’s going on at the ground level of any broadcasting locality precisely because it is implicitly community based and rooted to a physical locality/broadcast radius. The Internet, for all of its wonders, cannot make that claim. Place can easily be dissolved in the web, which is both its strength and weakness. The Internet might be more democratic in terms of access to information, but actually less expressive in terms of what that information means to the person accessing it, and their world. Community radio helps to emphasize that while preserving micro-cultural diversity within larger regions by physically defining that community and giving that locality a collective voice.

Ironically, at least as it relates to music, the MySpace/online music revolution might have served to make community radio more relevant. Young people with seriously sophisticated media sensibilities often require more than a link to take something seriously. A link might get a cursory glance, but something physical and real – something tethered to human contact, effort, and excitement – is what garners the sustained look. When a local band or group or personality has made it on community radio it communicates that something about that band or group or personality – whatever it is – has translated beyond the flux and fire of the digital world for somebody. They’ve been pulled out of the faceless ether of information and brought into a real, physical community, and community radio is a much more authentic word of mouth than its digital counterparts because of it.

How do you feel about the relevance and value of radio in these digital days? How does the concept of a physical broadcasting range help form community?

And now, as always, some music.