Creative Class

My computer died earlier last week so I’ve been in serious catch up mode over the past couple of days! While catching up on my blog reading, I came across a cool little documentary featuring some of Toronto’s more enduring street artists talking about the scene in the city (thanks to Mary Fogarty over at Organic Mechanic):

Writing Toronto’s (Hi)Story from Well and Good on Vimeo

I thought that it was interesting how much of the Toronto scene seemed to be defined by New York – either a reaction away from or toward it, with the exception of the photographer who picked up things by experiencing the diversity of the London (UK) scene. That geography is interesting – I’ve been putting together a bit of data here and there, and it seems like that triangle between Toronto, New York, and London has been one of the most interesting and vibrant geographical relationships of the last century. The push and pull of these cultural poles created a strong artistic dynamism in Toronto and a great visual legacy for young artists to interact with and be inspired by. It seems to be predicated by the Caribbean diaspora of people in the post-war era, under girding the movement of people and ideas as families visited each other, exchanging love, culture, media products like photographs and cassettes. Add a bit of emergence to the mix and voila.

Also interesting is that the doc is tied to Toronto’s 175th anniversary healthy city initiative. It’s nice to see a city acknowledging the things on the ground that make it great.

And now to continue catching up. But not before some music.

There’s lots of good music emerging out of the T-Dot urban music scene right now, which seems to be indicating something interesting about the city’s profile with respect to talent, at least in that scene. Toronto has a notoriously coarse urban music culture, known internationally as “The Screwface Capital” – in the analogue world, we used to get the music early from our cousins in New York and play it out just so that we could be over it first. We can’t wait to be apathetic about your music. Especially if the artist is out of the GTA. Something about that metabolism has always devoured artists from the area before they could break international ground. And yet within the last few weeks or so:

K’naan released his hotly anticipated album Troubadour yesterday:

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Drake has been generating quite a bit of buzz around the recent release of his “Mixtape” So Far Gone:

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K-OS single called 4 3 2 1 from his forthcoming Yes! album has been picking up steam with the release of the video:

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And Zaki Ibrahim’s recent EP Eclectica (Episodes in Purple) has just received a Juno nomination for R&B / Soul Recording of the Year – she’s making noise in the UK and other places around the world as well:

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So here’s a question: How many of these artists, each of whom has been experiencing great success abroad, and represents Toronto not only on their MySpace pages but also in their lyrics and music, were born in the GTA or even the province?

The answer: Only K-OS.

And while K-OS represents something of the “old guard,” one of the last monuments to the early 90s scene, K’naan, Drake, and Zaki Ibrahim are arguably some of the strongest talent cultivating some of the strongest international buzz out of the city. And they are all imports – K’naan from Somalia, Drake from Tennessee, and Zaki from… well… all over, starting with Vancouver.

While each represent the city in their own way, they are unapologetically hybrid – much like Toronto itself. These artists have been able to come to the city, call it home and find the right people, layers of connectivity, and industry infrastructure to launch their careers into the national/international stratosphere.

So what is it about Toronto’s music scene – at least the urban music scene – that international talent has found so enabling? Why has it seemed to be less kind to its “native” artists?  Why haven’t we seen this kind of talent-spiking in Halifax, or Vancouver, or even Montreal? What is it about a city that gives it the capacity to not only attract and incubate such a diversity of talent, but the capacity to launch it as well?

I know there’s already enough music in this post, but here’s some more.

Spikiness is not just something that creates winners and losers across global cities and regions, it also occurs inside cities as well, with the globe’s tallest spikes seeing some of the highest levels of inequality.  This Toronto Star report looks inside the growing economic separation of the “Three Torontos.”

Would a ban on fast food restaurants in our cities and towns help lower the rate of heart disease? Would a program to collect Dog DNA from poop left on our streets and sidewalks help us target negligent owners? Could we harness our own bio-mechanical energy to charge our cell phones, even our cars? Does ‘redshirting’ children, holding them back so that they can enter grade school at an older age, wreak havoc on social security programs? Would local stock markets for regions no larger than Barrie, or Muskoka, help citizens allocate capital more efficiently to businesses that need financing? Could we switch our dietary habits from cow to kangaroo to help save the planet?

If you think I’ve just stolen and plagiarized part of the manuscript for the yet unpublished Freakanomics 2.0, you’d be wrong. These are the hypotheses and real life programs that earn brilliant and bizarre minds recognition in The New York Times’ “Year in Ideas.” If these few examples tickle your fancy, try “spray on condoms” on for size (not literally- these bespoke coital solutions are not yet widely available). Human ingenuity never ceases to amaze, eh?

One thing that stood out for me while reading these stories was how many of these truly remarkable ideas came from Canadians – three from Toronto academics and scientists alone. For The New York Times, where Canada’s parliamentary crisis earlier this month barely registered a blip on their radar, that is a pretty impressive showing from the Great White North, and I believe it speaks to the creative incubator that Toronto has become. Read the article and take notice of where many of these ideas began. There is perhaps no better indication of a “creative city” than the brilliant ideas it fosters and develops, and some of my favorite creative cities – San Francisco, Montreal, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, and Boston, as well as my hometown, the T-Dot, get plenty of love.

While I know that Richard is the official ”Global Trends” guy around here, I hope that he won’t mind my pointing one out; if not a trend, a global synchronicity at least. In two of the world’s great cities – Toronto and Rome – disagreements in educational policy have led to strike situations.

In Toronto, from the Globe and Mail:

The campus was a ghost town yesterday, the first day of the strike by contract faculty, teaching assistants and graduate students, with classes for more than 50,000 students cancelled and pickets letting cars onto university grounds only every few minutes.

There are no plans to resume negotiations.

Christina Rousseau, chair of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903, said the striking workers are waiting for a signal from university administrators that they are ready to return to talks.

“Right now the ball is in their court,” she said. “We feel it is their turn to make a move.”

The university has offered a 9.25-per-cent wage increase over three years. A university spokesman said the administration is willing to go to binding arbitration.

The workers have asked for a two-year contract with a wage increase of 11 per cent over that period. The demand for a two-year deal is part of a broader strategy by CUPE Ontario to co-ordinate bargaining on all Ontario campuses in order to gain leverage at the negotiating table.

And in Rome from the BBC:

Sleeping bags in lecture theatres, lessons in parks, people wearing plasters on their faces. They are just some of the ingredients in Italy’s hugely divisive row over education.  The sleeping bags are being used by students, who have taken over a number of buildings. Lessons in some places are being held in parks, as classrooms are occupied, and the plasters are the symbolic sign of the “cuts” the students and staff are protesting against.

But these are not just isolated protests by a few disgruntled hardliners.  A number of recent marches in Rome have attracted up to half a million demonstrators.  Seasoned Italian commentators say they are the biggest in 15 years.

The protests are not just for university students. Secondary school teachers and pupils are also on the streets, as their slice of the education budget comes under threat as well.  The government is pushing its reforms because it believes universities and schools are inefficient and producing lacklustre results.

I also did a little bit of Facebook reconnaissance and found popular groups for and against the strike in Toronto, while Italy Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini’s page has been flooded with comments from young people on the situation.

While both are complex and ultimately different situations, one of the few comparables is popular support: In Rome it is overwhelming, while in Toronto it’s very divided. With starkly different political climates, I can’t speak on how well this bodes for either side, but it will be interesting to see how both situations are resolved. They each represent what the prospective futures of significant numbers of young people within their respective regions will be like. In turn, this will ultimately affect the overall prosperity of the regions.

And now, as always, some music.

Toronto’s ongoing creative transformation is coming more fully into view. This week saw the opening of Frank Gehry’s newly renovated Art Gallery of Ontario.

(Photo via AGO).

I was there for the opening (full disclosure: I serve on the board) and the building is beyond spectacular in the way it activates the art, stitches together old buildings and reanimates old spaces, and relates to the messy urbanist neighborhood which surrounds. Here’s what the NYT has to say;

Frank Gehry has often said that he likes to forge deep emotional bonds with his architecture projects. But the commission to renovate the Art Gallery of Ontario here must have been especially fraught for him. Mr. Gehry grew up on a windy, tree-lined street in a working-class neighborhood not far from the museum. His grandmother lived around the corner, where she kept live carp handy in the bathtub for making her gefilte fish. Given that this is Mr. Gehry’s first commission in his native city, you might expect the building to be a surreal kind of self-reckoning, a voyage through the architect’s subconscious. So the new Art Gallery of Ontario, which opened to the public on Friday, may catch some fans of the architect off guard.

Rather than a tumultuous creation, this may be one of Mr. Gehry’s most gentle and self-possessed designs. It is not a perfect building, yet its billowing glass facade, which evokes a crystal ship drifting through the city, is a masterly example of how to breathe life into a staid old structure. And its interiors underscore one of the most underrated dimensions of Mr. Gehry’s immense talent: a supple feel for context and an ability to balance exuberance with delicious moments of restraint. Instead of tearing apart the old museum, Mr. Gehry carefully threaded new ramps, walkways and stairs through the original. As you step from one area to the next, it is as if you were engaging in a playful dance between old and new.

But that’s not all. Earlier this month, Toronto’s Artscape unveiled its transformation of Toronto’s old street car repair barns into an urban park plus work-live space for artists and creators.

(Photo via Blog TO)

The project is an amazing example of creative, sustainable, and inclusive adaptive reuse. Rana and I were blown away when we saw the project as host of its opening night. The Globe and Mail reports:

The reinvention of the old Toronto Transit Commission streetcar-maintenance sheds in the St. Clair-Wychwood area of the city will banish forever your spontaneous, ill-considered desire to damn all urbanity … [T]his is a chance to feast on a version of urban heaven, a wondrous, hybridized redevelopment of something that had been left for 30 years to die a slow death. The Artscape Wychwood Barns, which open to the public this week, give us a new kind of temple in which art, community and urban agriculture are allowed to happily conspire … This is not to say that the barns will replace such major destinations as the Art Gallery of Ontario or the Royal Ontario Museum … The compelling city allows for an intermingling of all creative players. And it’s that potent mix which inspires us to stay.

Exactly. Artscape founder Tim Jones likes to say the city’s ongoing transformation involves the simultaneous recognition of the need both to put creativity on display and to more fully engage creativity at work. These two projects are part of that unfolding process to celebrate and harness creativity in a sustainable and inclusive way.

Frank Moulaert and Allen John Scott’s 1997 work Cities, Enterprises and Society on the Eve of the 21st Century: A State of Knowledge makes the point that there has been a general shift in the way we look at the city. We’ve moved from the notion of the city as a reproduction of the labor force to a notion of the city being a productive force of its own. While they warn us against over-simplifying that shift, they note it as an important one and so do I.

In my post on House music and Chicago, there was a comment by Felix saying that he had gone to the city to find some vestige of the music’s history but could find none, but that he “walked around listening to Mr Fingers on my headphones…that was almost enough.” He makes an interesting point. There is something to be said about that special feedback loop – listening to the products of a city in the city that produced it – that is so revealing. A city’s music is like it’s signal to the world. When we talk about a city being “put on the map” so-to-speak by an artist or a song, we’re really saying that the world responded to that signal in a way that valorizes that place. When an artist is propelled from the local to the international level, by representing their home it’s like that locality is also made international.

And so the opening lines of this review of the latest offering from Toronto artist Kardinal Offishall spoke to me, specifically as someone born and raised in the GTA, and even more specifically as someone raised in the GTA’s urban music scene. The writer captures something that I also observed in listening to the album and being from the city. As an urban music scene, we have been working toward the international level of respect and recognition for some time, but Toronto’s productive forces are so unique – from the physical geography, to the cultural demographics, to the nightlife. We permit and respect and resolve so many cultures within the city that the signal we put out can often be misunderstood as noise. Perhaps understandably so – complex productive forces wouldn’t necessarily create a product that is simple to understand. It would take time to make intelligible. After listening to that album though, I couldn’t help but smile and feel very well represented. In simple choices of diction, lyrics, collaborators, etc. Kardinal made an album that could only come from a Torontonian and one that radiates with locality at an international level. After working at it for over 10 years, it seems like he’s made something of a signal from the city’s noise. We’ll see if the world responds commercially.

Can you identify the artistic products of your city through the dull hum of the homogenization of popular culture? What is distinct about them with respect to the locality and its productive forces? What does it take to get a local scene’s signal out to the world? How do you keep it honest with respect to that locality?

And now, as always, some music.

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.

“In terms of what I am doing, I would pretty much say hands down that Toronto is the best place in the world.”  That’s a quote from UoT chemical geneticist, Guri Giaever, in a feature story on Toronto’s rising scientific prowess in Nature. Click here to download. Add to that what is happening in physics at Waterloo and the mega-region is emerging as serious global scientific centers. I’d say the same thing about what we’re doing at the Prosperity Institute and across the university in my field.