Creative Class

In one of my most recent posts, I wrote about the international graffiti and urban arts festival Under Pressure, and about the pressure that it and many other music festivals have been under with the economic downturn. Cultural initiatives that depended upon bigger, corporate-type sponsors have been feeling the pinch, some festivals just disappearing. While there is community and cultural value embedded in these festivals, by hitching their sails to finance that has disembedded and severely stunted that community’s ability to deliver that value. There was a good chance that Under Pressure wouldn’t make it this year.

Community to the rescue – community of practice that is. Across the region, and beyond provincial borders, grassroots arts organizations have come together to support this gathering. Parties in Toronto to save a festival in Quebec? Why not? As the digital media networks broke down geographical boundaries with respect to the access to cultural interaction and accumulation, cultural affinities are spanning unexpected geographies presenting new opportunities for collaboration.

This is certainly true in the world of DJing and promoting. If an artist is passing through a dense cluster of cities it’s to the benefit of promoters to share costs with respect to travel, or to share the cost of a national booking fee. The Quebec City-Windsor corridor with its clustering of university towns and cities alike is already replete with cost-sharing and collaboration at the grassroots level, but there is room for a big boom there.

Groups like the Grassroots Youth Collaborative in Toronto have begun coalescing the efforts and power of this growing sector. Recently I came across a very interesting paper out of the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center about grassroots scenes and the role that they play in the creative economy ecosystem that was really prescient as well. What lessons can we learn from these informal youth networks as they support each other through financial crisis?

And now, as always, some music.

President Obama stopped by the city yesterday, inciting havoc in terms of all timing, routing, and availability of transportation. Some walkers were forced to wait two hours to cross the street along the motorcade route, while some buses that barely interacted with his route were over an hour behind schedule. This man knows how to shut down a city!

I’d like to retrench upon, and synthesize some ideas from, a couple of past blogs – namely the last one which examined space and entrepreneurial innovation, and one where we looked at the future of Obama’s urban policy -  in examining how good he might be in building cities back up.

A new bill was introduced to the House of Representatives last Tuesday – the Community Regeneration, Sustainability, and Innovation Act of 2009:

The purposes of this Act are:

(1) to provide Federal assistance, through grants and the provision of technical assistance, to establish land banks in communities and metropolitan areas that have experienced significant population loss due to large-scale employment losses which have resulted in widespread
abandonment of real property;

(2) to encourage innovation, experimentation, and environmentally sustainable practices through collaborative efforts to reuse and rehabilitate land bank property in ways that will provide long-term benefits to the public;

(3) to encourage the creation of green infrastructure;

(4) to encourage the creation of new employment opportunities, especially in areas related to environmental sustainability and green infrastructure directly related to the implementation of regeneration plans assisted under this Act; and

(5) to encourage the strategic use of other Federal, State, local, private, and nonprofit resources not provided under this Act to stabilize and improve neighborhoods not presently experiencing widespread vacancy and abandonment, but whose stability is or may be threatened if current
demographic or employment trends continue.

This is the latest in a suite of innovation bills (one focusing on small business, and another on achievement through technology) that are being worked through the House right now and, to me, it’s the one that will have the most visceral impact on youth, because it deals with the space they occupy. While one way to look at this is as a way to prop up private sector developers who are involved in Hope VI redevelopments (many of which are struggling, as I learned recently at a CHRA conference), there are a lot of great things going on with this bill that will set up more interesting spaces for youth to engage and launch innovative practices.

What’s most promising is the way in which experimentation and competition for new ideas, as well as inter-sectoral, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and “green” concepts are encouraged in the bill. The federal government (through the HUD) would finally be doing for the spaces in the core what it did for the peripheries when it created the Housing Act of 1949 and again later with the development of the New Town Corporation in the early 70s. It would be stimulating a brave new conversation about space, but with a different, more sustainable focus. The bill seeks to be inclusive to all ages, abilities, and modes of transportation as well as seeking better modes of regulation to implement the plans more effectively – probably a response to the problem that has plagued the Hope VI effort.

What isn’t seen as clearly is an attempt to account for culture. There word only comes up in the bill twice, yet cultural mapping and planning is one of the most important tools for creating prosperity out of space. Particularly with youth enterprise, what I’ve observed is that most often enterprise occurs at the intersection of location and culture. In my most recent blog, the youth enterprises that I mentioned are all based, for the most part, on culture and emerged out of cultural scenes – urban culture in particular (a culture completely predicated by the last spatial system change ironically enough). They were able to get established and survive, however, because of the relatively low barrier of entry into the local real estate markets and their ability to acquire space in which to operate. Once youth enterprise takes root in these kinds of areas, often the regeneration process is already well underway.

And how about including some youth-based metrics for gauging success? If we learned anything from past experimentation with space it’s that while grown-ups might occupy the role of pioneer in these experiments with space, youth are always the natives – we experience it in fundamentally different ways. While we react to complications of the past through bills like this, we sometimes squelch the gift of the present for youth, who will be the builders of the future. The irony being that it’s the reaction to how spatial conditions affect youth that has historically incited the support for spatial system change initiatives like this.

So: How can the experience of space as a young person help to inform the Federal framework being established for the modification of space? How does the youth experience of space differ from that of the adult, and is there room for prosperity and community within that margin?

Wow, this one turned into a long-ers. For making it through, you all definitely deserve some music.

On Tuesday, I DJ’d a party for the Governor General of Canada celebrating Barack Obama’s Inauguration. It was a cool little affair that brought a diversity of youth together to discuss what this event means to us as young Canadians. Peace to Emcee E and Nomadic Massive who also performed. At the end of the blog I’ll post my playlist, since people often wonder what one might play at an event like that.

In as much as we are different, Canada and the U.S. in fundamental ways – landmass, population, density, demographics, political structure, etc. – we are the same in that we are neighbors and share the same land and, in broad strokes, share ideals about how life should be lived. This event and the reactions in the room showed how more than ever the American dream is really a North American dream that we all take part in.

Young people are definitely empowered by President Obama as a living example of change. It’s interesting, however, to see how hungry young Canadians are to play a role in and identify with this change. As neighbors to ground zero of the global Obama-wave, and a nation that is deeply interlinked with the U.S., it is natural and fair that we pose the question “where is our Canadian change?”, and not unreasonable that we would yearn somewhat for an Obama figure of our own – to give young people a sense that their voices participate as equals in their democracy. In this new vision of the North American dream, what will Canada’s role be and where will its youth place?

While Canada’s version of the dream is younger, less dense, a bit smaller, and more cautious, it is sturdy, perhaps a bit more agile, and has the advantage of being able to consider the trials and missteps of its older, bolder neighbor in order to innovate on that experience and those ideas – probably in a faster and more dexterous way as a result of being over 60 percent slimmer in terms of population and density. While we might not do the scaling up, we are in a great position to build the models. The climate will most certainly be ripe for the ideas. More than anything, I think that’s where young people, particularly in Canada, will be participating heavily. Whereas Barack finally opened the door for youth in the U.S. to participate in driving the U.S. with their vote, he might have also opened the window for young Canadians to make significant contributions to the welfare of this continent with their ideas – particularly with the U.S. school system in the state that it’s in. With any luck, the positive feedback loop between the two countries will help us retrofit the way that leaders lead in Canada, because one thing that was voiced repeatedly at the forum is that we need that kind of reform.

While the U.S. is being clear that it wants to set the pace, how can young people in Canada help to finish the race, considering our position as neighbors and co-participants in the dream? What is the most constructive way to set up this partnership?  How can we see the innovations in the democratic process invoked over the border be brought into play over here?

And now, the inaugural playlist:

1. We Almost Lost Detroit – Gil Scott Heron
2. My People…Hold On – Eddie Kendricks
3. Long Time Coming – Aloe Blacc
4. Stakes Is High – De La Soul
5. Resurrection – Common Sense
6. The Souljazz Orchestra – Mista President*
7. Black President (Feat Johnny Polygon)  – Nas
8. Voices At The Crossroads – Knaan f. Tracy Chapman*
9. What’s Going On – Marvin Gaye
10. Change – Donald Byrd
11. Get Involved – Soule, George
12. Positivity (Mark Ronson ‘68 Remix) – Stevie Wonder
13. Brand New Day – Staple Singers

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.

It’s been a busy week of conferences and symposiums and forums! This week in Toronto the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association had their Tri-Country Conference; in Ottawa yesterday the Governor General held an Arts Matters forum on Architecture at Carleton University; and today we had the Carleton Senate Symposium focusing on the role of architecture in relation to health and the environment, where I presented my research on youth cultures in young spaces.

At all three of these meetings-of-the-mind, the issue of housing was focal, and at two of the three the issue of youth engagement in housing came up. At the Tri-Country Symposium in Toronto, Julia Unwin gave a great speech which, among many things, addressed the lack of system thinking when it comes to addressing the matter of youth and housing. The next day at the Arts Matters Forum in Ottawa, Professor Boyle talked about housing existing in something of a void as it relates to young people, and the open discussion often returned to the issue of what the best way is to engage society with the art of architecture.

The discussions got me thinking about my own education. I spent four years doing a fairly high level liberal arts degree and, even then, I never learned much about architecture or housing. It took some continued education, a lot of digging in the course calendar, and a bit of luck for me to stumble upon a history of housing course that really developed a deeper appreciation for the built environment by showing me the process. Not only the physical changes that the houses went through, but the changes in human consciousness that followed and sometimes preceded those changes in our modes of living. The relationship between form and function, and how space is one of the sedimentary aspects of all life. Moreover, that the places we live, work, and play didn’t just show up as we did. They’re a product of a long deliberated process and negotiation with the things we value and our increasing ability to realize those things physically in the world.

To put it in even less lofty terms, I’ll paraphrase what Sarah Webb of the UK delegation said during our group discussion at the Tri-Country Symposium: If you do choose to buy a house, it will most likely be the most expensive, most complicated, most determining decision of your life. Why is it that most young people only start to learn about it as they’re about to do it?

If the places we live are such important financial and personal investments, should there not be some base level courses about architecture, or at least housing in our secondary or post-secondary curriculums? Is it reasonable to raise young people without giving them the understanding of their built environments as a part of a process? Without some context, how can young people develop opinions about how space should be used when they are voting citizens of a municipality? Where did you first learn about where/how you live?

And now, as always, some music.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited back home to Toronto to attend the Canadian Youth Arts Network Forum wherein a group of about 40 young artists were brought together with various leaders in the cultural and creative industries and policy advisors.  We discussed ways to strengthen the youth arts sector and our common predicament under this government among other things. It was a really interesting meeting of minds and practices, and a lot of critical information, expertise, and advice were made available not just to the youth delegates of the conference, but to the leaders and advisors as well. It was the fortunate situation of us mutually needing a better sense of the others’ perspective.

There has been much made of the business argument for the arts. As artists, we’re fortunate that it’s within the mandate of institutes like the MPI and that they’ve made the kind of point that might resonate with our current federal regime: the arts are drivers of regional income. They help people make money – that’s a compelling argument to Conservative values. Another potentially persuasive argument to Conservatives or those of any political persuasion is the outreach potential of the arts to two oft neglected groups that I hope to hear addressed in the upcoming debates: youth and the homeless.

In both cases, the arts have shown themselves to be the most effective tools to affect the lives of youth at risk or otherwise, and the homeless as well, particularly in urban environments. This is on target with much of the latest research and theory on cities. Prof. Adam Krims’ latest work, Music and Urban Geography theorizes about how music affects and has affected the tremendous physical upheaval that urban and ex-urban space experienced in the modern, post WWII era. One of his most interesting observations is the way in which the city has moved toward design intensity which he defines in the introductions as “the tendency in advanced societies for products and services to owe much of their value to aspects of design and informational content, and for design and informational aspects of products and services to develop rapidly.”

As young people and (sub)urbanites, the bar has been raised as far as our tolerance and expectations of design. The simple fact is that unless the content of our products and services appeal to this heightened design sensibility, they are disadvantaging themselves with respect to young people as well as urban populations who are native to this design intensive era we occupy. The value of art has never been higher. It’s no surprise that, at the international level, the UN has acknowledged hip hop’s outreach potential with their Messenger of Truth program. At the local level in Toronto, programs like Sketch make this point more poignantly than I ever could. Even at the most crass level of pop culture in these media-intense times, not supporting your ability to compete in the arts is like surrendering your access to the interest of the youth contingent, at least.

If the arts are understood to be the most effective outreach tool for affecting change in youth, then by cutting funding for the arts are we diminishing our ability to communicate with our young people? What is the potential fallout of a less engaged youth population? If arts programs are helping those without homes get on their feet and contribute to society then why do we not understand contributions to the arts as “investments” rather than “funding”?

Much will be said at the debates, but it will be more important to see what our politicians actually do.

And now as always, some music.