Creative Class

Witold Rybczynski ponders green urbanism:

The problem is easily stated. In 1950, the global emission of carbon dioxide was 6 billion tons a year. Thanks to population growth, urbanization, the expansion of wealth, and massive industrialization around the world, by 2008 this has increased fivefold to 30 billion tons a year. Assuming that nothing is done to reduce emissions, by 2058, they will be 60 billion tons a year. Thus, to reduce global warming, whose effects are already beginning to be felt, it will be necessary to take drastic measures just to stay at the present level, never mind actually making real progress. For example, to reduce the number of coal-fired generating plants, nuclear capacity in the United States will have to be doubled. To reduce car emissions, either Americans will have to drive half as many miles per year or cars will have to be twice as efficient. Buildings will have to use 25 percent less electricity …

Even assuming that anything at all gets built in the coming economic depression—during the Great Depression of the 1930s, building construction virtually halted—creating new cities and reconfiguring old ones will take many decades. We don’t have that much time.

Two conservative intellectuals have recently raised questions about the value of college for most students. While they come from different starting points, they make the same basic point. I find the sources mildly interesting but I think the basic concept is long overdue. Just as high school needs to be reinvented, so does the undergraduate college model.

Charles Murray from the American Enterprise Institute had a piece in the New York Times about a week ago, which is summarized in these first paragraphs.

Barack Obama has two attractive ideas for improving post-secondary education - expanding the use of community colleges and tuition tax credits - but he needs to hitch them to a broader platform. As president, Mr. Obama should use his bully pulpit to undermine the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification. Here’s a suggested battle cry, to be repeated in every speech on the subject: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.”

The residential college leading to a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years works fine for the children of parents who have plenty of money. It works fine for top students from all backgrounds who are drawn toward academics. But most 18-year-olds are not from families with plenty of money, not top students, and not drawn toward academics. They want to learn how to get a satisfying job that also pays well. That almost always means education beyond high school, but it need not mean four years on a campus, nor cost a small fortune. It need not mean getting a bachelor’s degree.

Then yesterday George F. Will had a rambling column in the Washington Post about civil rights court cases that included this nugget:

…many employers, fearing endless litigation about multiple uncertainties, threw up their hands and, to avoid legal liability, threw out intelligence and aptitude tests for potential employees. Instead, they began requiring college degrees as indices of applicants’ satisfactory intelligence and diligence.

This is, of course, just one reason college attendance increased from 5.8 million in 1970 to 17.5 million in 2005. But it probably had a, well, disparate impact by making employment more difficult for minorities. O’Keefe and Vedder write:

“Qualified minorities who performed well on an intelligence or aptitude test and would have been offered a job directly 30 or 40 years ago are now compelled to attend a college or university for four years and incur significant costs. For some young people from poorer families, those costs are out of reach.”

Indeed, by turning college degrees into indispensable credentials for many of society’s better jobs, this series of events increased demand for degrees and, O’Keefe and Vedder say, contributed to “an environment of aggressive tuition increases.” Furthermore they reasonably wonder whether this supposed civil rights victory, which erected barriers between high school graduates and high-paying jobs, has exacerbated the widening income disparities between high school and college graduates.

Maybe this rings true to me because it matches my own experience. I never liked school with its emphasis on memorization, and was bored to tears as a college freshman when I dropped out. By the time I went back years later and got a BA, I was able to test out of about two years worth of courses. By then I had started a couple of small businesses, edited and published two newspapers, been a broadcast engineer, managed a radio station, done a lot of political activism, and had many other jobs. None of these required me to have a college degree at the time.

However, I don’t accept Murray’s thesis that this is primarily Obama’s responsibility - everyone under the sun is trying to pile more work on his desk. Instead it should be the basis of a public conversation involving universities, think tanks, unions, and other interested parties.

What do others think?

Technology push or technology pull: it’s an age-old question. In his new book, The Venturesome Economy, Columbia University’s Amar Bhide comes down squarely in favor of the technology pull view. The real source of America’s innovative edge is not simply in great universities, research intensive companies, government sponsored innovation efforts, or tech-savvy venture capitalists and Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial companies, but in something much more basic - a large body of “venturesome” consumers ready, willing, and able to try new things. Sometimes I call them the creative class Having lived and worked in the technology push world of Washington D.C., this book should be required reading for members of the incoming Obama administration’s economics and science and technology policy teams. The Financial Times has a nice review. A power-point summary is here.

Nobel-prize winner, Joe Stiglitz says the stimulus should invest in the innovations that can power our future, and not just breathe life back into the industries and economic patterns of the past (via Mark Thoma).

That’s the title of a terrific new paper by Gerald Carlino and Albert Saiz.  The Boston Globe’s Sasha Issenberg  provides a nice summary of the study which:

looked at 150 metropolitan areas around the United States and found that those rich in what they called “consumption amenities” - the things that make a city delightful, such as parks, historic sites, museums, and beaches - “disproportionally attracted highly educated individuals and experienced faster housing price appreciation.”

In other words, urban growth and prosperity have less to do with transportation links and industrial infrastructure than the patterns that govern behavior at a social mixer: Beautiful and charming cities draw a crowd, while the featureless and unattractive wilt like wallflowers.

Carlino and Saiz’s paper could give policy makers a new way to think about the conditions necessary for economic growth. As they consider how to boost the economy, they should think not about the raw materials of business, but about what will bring together talented people in the same place. This suggests a different approach to stimulus spending - and, likely, stark assessments about where to spend it that will not make for popular politics.

The full paper is here.

In 2010 exactly - according to a Russian professor and former high ranking KGB intelligence expert who forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union - in 1976. Here’s a map and summary from the Wall Street Journal.

[M]ass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces …  He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

California will form the nucleus of what he calls “The Californian Republic,” and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of “The Texas Republic,” a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an “Atlantic America” that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls “The Central North American Republic.” Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.

In this newly published article, two Dutch researchers, Roel Rutten and John Gelissen, test the creative class theory for Europe and find it holds. I especially like the last line.

[W]e test the creativity and diversity hypothesis of Richard Florida for European regions. Florida argues that the level of regional economic development depends on the levels of technology, talent, and tolerance that regions harbour. Tolerance, in this case, is a measure for diversity of lifestyles, the creativity that results from it and population’s openness towards non-traditional lifestyles. Using data for 94 European regions we investigate whether differences in creativity and diversity are a good predictor of differences in regional wealth in additive and multiplicative regression models. The results indicate that regional differences in diversity are directly related to differences in regional wealth. Moreover, we find that the synergetic effect of technology and talent on the level of regional wealth depends on the degree of diversity that resides within regions. Our findings support the idea that creativity and diversity deserve a more prominent place in economic geography.

There’s a great post by Edward Glaeser (in the Economix blog of the New York Times), titled “New York, New York: America’s Resilient City.”

In it, he describes how New York has managed to avoid the decay that has afflicted many large older cities, and, after a brief downturn in the 1970’s, came roaring back as arguably the most influential single city in the world.

His explanation? In a word - “smart people.”

“New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city. “

Glaeser continues, describing why dense cities succeed…

“They thrive by enabling us to connect with each other, which then promotes learning and innovation. The current downturn will only increase the returns to being smart, and you get smart by hanging around smart people. As long as New York continues to attract and connect those people, the city will continue to thrive.”

Now here’s what every city planner wants to know. Is this replicable? Can this success be engineered or encouraged, and are the effects measurable in 10 years, 20 years, a lifetime?

Does anyone have successful examples of campaigns and projects to replicate this resilient infrastructure? Or perhaps, examples of some cautionary unsuccessful attempts?

Best wishes to everyone for a creative and fruitful New Year!

More than 95 percent of the world’s population lives in less than 10 percent of the earth’s land area, according to a new study and map by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and published in the World Bank’s World Development Report 2009. The research conceptualizes the world and its cities in terms of accessibility and connectivity measured as proximity and travel time to 8,500 major cities worldwide. Here’s the map.

And here’s a summary of the study in Science Daily:

[H]uman population is more concentrated than ever before. Europe’s urban sprawl gradually fades as we move eastwards into the steppes of central Asia, soon to re-emerge into the dense networks of people and places in India, China and Japan. The attraction of Australia’s coasts is dramatically revealed, while North America appears to adopt a grid system not just for its streets and road networks, but for distribution of the cities themselves.

Cities exercise enormous control over national economies - even the global economy. They provide jobs, access to the best cultural, educational and health facilities and they act as hubs for communication and transport. Of course, they also cluster massive demands for energy, generate large quantities of waste, and concentrate pollution as well as social hardship.

By using travel-time as a unit of measurement … the map represents accessibility through the … concept of “how long will it take to get there?â€� Accessibility links people with places, goods with markets and communities to vital services. Accessibility - whether it is to markets, schools, hospitals or water - is a precondition for the satisfaction of almost any economic need. Furthermore, accessibility is relevant at all levels, from local development to global trade.

More here.

That’s the question Karrie Jacobs asks after visiting the two cities (via Planetizen):

The question was harder to answer than it might seem. Clearly, she would hate much of the heedless tower mania. But the real answer would hinge on whether she regarded Dubai’s increasingly sophisticated approach to mixed-use place-making as an improvement over the sterile environments churned out by the urban planners of the 1960 …

After my return to New York, I received an e-mail about a new development called Jumeirah Gardens, a huge, upscale, master-planned community. Most of what I’d seen in Dubai had been built on open desert or land reclaimed from the sea, but this was a classic urban-renewal scheme, one calling for the demolition of Satwa. A number of accounts, none of them official, estimated that between 100,000 to 150,000 people would be displaced.

Time Out Dubai reported on the development in May: “‘These low-quality villas and the ­illegal inhabitants they house simply can not continue to exist so close to Trade Center, Sheikh Zayed Road and the heart of the city,’ our source confirms. ‘Not in such prime real estate.’� A more recent article in the Gulf News was accompanied by the kind of spectacular architectural renderings that are pro forma in Dubai, and it noted, “The development will redefine living in one of the most popular neighborhoods of Dubai, currently undergoing demolition to pave the way for the new project.� Redefine living in one of the most popular neighborhoods of Dubai? The plan for Jumeirah Gardens made me wish a Jane Jacobs could rise from Satwa.

And then there was Shanghai. In October I spent a few days in a hotel in Pudong, the district of jumbo office towers that began construction in the 1990s. I was taken on a whirlwind tour of the city’s architecture. One of the supposed highlights was Xintiandi, an enclave of preserved tenements converted to a shopping mall with the help of an American architect who drew his inspiration from Faneuil Hall. It struck me as strange that this was regarded as a premier example of preservation: it would be like taking a first-time visitor to New York to the South Street Seaport. But preservation of any sort, even the kind that turns authentic neighborhoods into malls, was the exception rather than the rule. Everywhere I went, new towers were rising and old low-rise neighborhoods were coming down. No sign of Jane here, either.

On the way to Shanghai, I stopped in Hong Kong, a city where real estate development is one of the main industries, and where the government derives much of its revenue from leasing property and selling development rights. There I caught up on the latest: another harbor scheme with more reclamation and a new waterfront highway, and still more massive luxury high-rises eating away at some of the city’s best-loved streetscapes …

Of course, what Dubai, Shanghai, and Hong Kong have in common is a top-down approach to development. Dubai has a hereditary ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. The United Arab Emirates held its first ever elections in 2006, but they’re only open to a tiny fraction of the population. …In the West, we envy China’s ability to build on a monumental scale—the Bei­jing airport! The Bird’s Nest! A subway system quadrupled in size in five years!—and completely change the face of its cities, but residents don’t seem to have a role to play in how their cities are remade, aside from getting out of the way. In Hong Kong, public participation is carefully rationed, and recent protests over the demolition of beloved landmarks—such as the Central Star Ferry Pier and the Queen’s Pier—are a subset of a larger movement advocating open government.

[I]t’s revealing to see what happens in cities where there is no Jane. Because what these people are really talking about when they complain about the Jane Jacobs mentality is democracy, the inconvenient fact that we live in a society where ordinary people can have an impact on the political process.