Creative Class

I was talking to a 60-year-old, retired entrepreneur at a party the other night. Successful guy, very sharp. I asked him what he thinks is next for Florida and he said he did not have much hope for Florida, mostly due to lack of visionary leadership. Then he said something that really struck me. He suggested that Florida is on a course to reset to its old state of being “cheap, sunny, and dumb.”

That really struck me because while we are all talking about the great reset that is going on, I had not thought to ask the question, “What does Florida reset to?” And he may very well be right. At the state level, we are relaxing the rules for developers  to encourage even more sprawl to try to kick-start our construction industry again. We are actually lowering impact fees in places. We are lowering protections on the environment. This seems like a reset towards “cheap, sunny, and dumb.” There are powerful forces and attitudes that could very well push Florida back into this reset mode. And that is pretty scary.

While we all generally agree that this reset is needed and welcomed in some cases, we should be careful that we don’t reset back to a point so far back that we actually lose too much of our hard won progress. We all have to ask ourselves and our leadership what the plan and vision is for this reset. Each community is facing this and we act as if the reset is just something that will happen. That is not the case, yet I hear far too little  debate as to how we actively shape the reset.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Milwaukee, WI, for the first time (thank you FUEL Milwaukee!). And visiting cities for the first time, to me, is particularly exciting. Arriving for the first time is a pure and unadulterated experience. First impressions matter and how a city presents itself to a first-time visitor is very important. I learned this from my friend Charles Landry.

Milwaukee Art Museum

I arrived via the airport with the typical location outside of city. My host takes the highway toward the city. As we approach the Hoan Bridge, we pass amid the Port of Milwaukee. On both sides, there are mountains of bulk materials and cranes. While not beautiful, there is the appearance of activity and a muscularity that says “we work here.” As we crest the bridge (with its own very strange design element) I am startled because the city presents itself there in panorama. The city in the hills to the left, the waters of Lake Michigan to the right. And to the right, near the lake, your eye is drawn to the white sails of the Santiago Calatrava masterpiece at the Milwaukee Art Museum.  It looks so different and unexpected in the tableau that one cannot help but to stare. Unexpected because this is the Midwest where modern iconic design is not the norm and that is not a shot; I am originally  from the Midwest!  More photos click here.

While many question the value of “starchitects” and iconic design, I have to say that my impression of Milwaukee was and is shaped in no small part because of that building. It is different and it says something about Milwaukee that no amount of advertising and marketing could equal. It says in a profound way “we are not what you expect” and that Milwaukee is looking to the future and beyond the beer brewery image of its past. The building says it in a visible and demonstrable way that one cannot deny.

Cities that are arguing over the cost/benefits of such iconic architecture should consider the context in which the new building will occur. In starchitect-rich Singapore, one more Calatrava or Libeskind is just keeping up with the crowd. In cities with a dearth of quality architecture (lots of those) or cities that need to redefine themselves in the 21st century, a new building can be a catalyst for new design and a whole host of other values.

Today, we take it for granted the streets are there to move cars, and also to carry buses as well as cyclists, pedestrians, and the occasional skater, scooter-rider, and Segway user. The typical solution is to keep pedestrians on the sidewalk and paint lanes on the street to separate cars from cyclists or create express lanes for buses.

But maybe there’s another approach: Why not consider devoting different streets to different kinds of transportation? And surely cities need more green space and some are actually getting it. Inspired by the High-Line Park, by D.C.’s Rock Creek Park, and Toronto’s extensive ravine system, I have been noodling about the possibility of creating linear green belts or what I like to think of as sliver parks through cities. I literally feel this when I walk through Toronto’s ravines, or in the past when I cycled through D.C.’s Rock Creek Park. It provides a natural environment in the city and creates green zones for cycling, walking, picnicking, or other activities. But I thought this is far too pie-in-the-sky to actually be implemented or even proposed.

So I was more than pleasantly surprised to see The New York Times’ Nicolai Ouroussoff highlighting just such an approach coming out of  a nine-month design competition for the Bronx’s “faded” Grand Concourse.

A proposal by the New York office of the international design firm EDAW that would create a strip of communal farmland down the middle of the Concourse verges on cliché. But it improves when you keep in mind the grittiness of some of the urban gardens in New York or Berlin and imagine them stretched out along several miles. A new light-rail line would run the length of the boulevard; traffic would be reduced to two lanes in each direction, down from the current six.

A raucous proposal by the French team Nadau Lavergne Architects would pile more activities on top of existing structures to add density to the neighborhood and create unexpected urban frictions. Schools and cultural institutions would be stacked over apartment complexes, freeing up the street level for commercial use. A graffiti-covered streetcar would run up and down the Concourse, linking it to Manhattan. The Concourse would be packed with trees, transforming it into a linear urban forest.

Part of what is moving about these proposals is that their approaches have become so familiar. Not long ago the notion of building farmland in the middle of a busy urban roadway would have seemed like madness; today it seems too obvious. So does the idea that segregating urban functions can drain the life from a city.

Check out the terrific images from the project website, including this slide show. A full gallery of all the submitted projects is here.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The Obama administration is making moves on urban policy, according to the Washington Post. An urban czar has been appointed (former Bronx borough president Adolfo Carrion Jr.) and $20 billion in stimulus money is being directed to urban programs outside education.

The approach is winning applause from local officials and urban thinkers, who credit the administration for quietly beginning the most ambitious new policy for the nation’s cities since the Great Society programs of the 1960s.

I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but frankly I’m not convinced. You?

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.

Sometimes, it’s nice to be small. The City of Nanaimo has been pushing the envelope on open data and open government for a number of years now.

Recently, I was directed to their new Council Agendas and Minutes webpage. I recommend you check it out.

Here’s why.

At first blush the site seems normal. There is the standard video of the council meeting (queue cheesy local cable access public service announcement), but the meeting minutes underneath are actually broken down by the second and by clicking on them you can jump straight to that moment in the meeting.

As anyone who’s ever attended a City Council meeting (or the legislature, or parliament) knows, the 80/20 rule is basically always in effect. About 80 percent of the time the proceedings are either dead boring and about 20 percent (often much less) of the time the proceedings are exciting, or more importantly, pertinent to you. One challenge with getting citizens engaged on the local level is that they often encounter a noise to signal problem. The ratio of “noise” (issues a given citizen doesn’t care about) drowns out the “signal” (the relatively fewer issues they do care about).

The City of Nanaimo’s website helps address this problem. It enables citizens to find what matters to them without having to watch or scroll through a long and dry council meeting. Better still, they are given a number of options by which to share that relevant moment with friends, neighbors, allies, or colleagues via Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, or any other number of social media tools.

One might be wondering: Can my city afford such a wiz-bang setup?

Excellent question.

Given Nanaimo’s modest size (it has 78,692 citizens) suggests they have a modest IT budget. So I asked Chris McLuckie, a City of Nanaimo public servant who worked on the project. He informed me that the system was built in-house by him and another city staff member; it uses off-the-shelf hardware and software and so cost under $2,000 and it took two weeks to code up.

Two weeks?

No million dollar contract? No eight-month timeline? No expensive new software?

No, if you’re smart, a couple of creative hackers can put something together in no time at all.

You know what’s more – because Chris and the City of Nanaimo want to help more cities learn how to think like the web, I bet if the IT director from any city (or legislative body) asked nicely, they would just give them the code.

So how Open is your city? And if not, do they have $2,000 lying around to change that?

“When you bring artists into a town, it changes the character, attracts economic development, makes it more attractive to live in and renews the economics of that town. “There are ways to draw artists into the center of things that will attract other people.”

National Endowment for the Arts, Chair, Rocco Landesman in the New York Times.

The new chairman said he already has a new slogan for his agency: “Art Works.” It’s “something muscular that says, ‘We matter.’ ” The words are meant to highlight both art’s role as an economic driver and the fact that people who work in the arts are themselves a critical part of the economy.

“Someone who works in the arts is every bit as gainfully employed as someone who works in an auto plant or a steel mill,” Mr. Landesman said. “We’re going to make the point till people are tired of hearing it.”

In an unexpected turn, the economic slump may lead to healthier eating habits for Americans, especially lower income people. A number of trends are coming together including more people using emergency food banks, the growth of farmers’ markets and community gardens, Alice Waters’ edible schoolyard, the White House garden, etc. One thing I’ve noticed in my grantwriting class at Portland State is a number of students looking for funding to start or expand school, community, or food bank gardens.

Any number of studies say that Americans eat too much meat, fat, sugar, and salt and too few vegetables. This is especially true for poor families who live in neighborhoods without good grocery stores, or don’t have decent kitchens or time to cook, or can’t afford fresh produce. Chronic preventable diseases like diabetes and hypertension, which are epidemic in many poor and minority communities, can be prevented or controlled with diet.

Getting more vegetables into Americans’ diets would have major health benefits and note that most of these aren’t government programs. However, nonprofit Food Banks have for years overused government surplus foods, largely subsidized agricultural products, without regard to their health benefits.

This is from the Oregonian:

“We have a hunger crisis in Oregon. It’s just expanding,” explains Multnomah County Commissioner Jeff Cogen, who’s just set up a vegetable garden on the empty cropland, fertile with irony, of the former county poor farm. “My hope is this is the first of many.”

Up at the Vancouver Vineyard Church food pantry, David and Andrea Walker are looking to their third summer harvest. Clark County is part of the Oregon Food Bank area, and in its first year the operation received an OFB award for excellence in client service.

This year, the Walkers are hoping for 5,000 pounds of produce from the 3,000-square-foot garden out behind the church. It’s not a rolling or pastoral stretch; it’s off to the side of an alley-like casual road, just some cultivated acreage — or more precisely, yardage — in the midst of a weedy lot. At some point in the future, the space could turn into a small apartment court, like so many around it.

The New York Times Magazine had an article last Sunday about Growing Power in Milwaukee.

Like others in the so-called good-food movement, Allen, who is 60, asserts that our industrial food system is depleting soil, poisoning water, gobbling fossil fuels and stuffing us with bad calories. Like others, he advocates eating locally grown food. But to Allen, local doesn’t mean a rolling pasture or even a suburban garden: it means 14 greenhouses crammed onto two acres in a working-class neighborhood on Milwaukee’s northwest side, less than half a mile from the city’s largest public-housing project.

And this is why Allen is so fond of his worms. When you’re producing a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of food in such a small space, soil fertility is everything. Without microbe- and nutrient-rich worm castings (poop, that is), Allen’s Growing Power farm couldn’t provide healthful food to 10,000 urbanites – through his on-farm retail store, in schools and restaurants, at farmers’ markets and in low-cost market baskets delivered to neighborhood pickup points. He couldn’t employ scores of people, some from the nearby housing project; continually train farmers in intensive polyculture; or convert millions of pounds of food waste into a version of black gold.

Another Times story tells of a consultant who works on sustainable food in Oakland, CA:

With its high crime and poverty rates, Oakland doesn’t have nearly the same precious food culture – or produce – that defines nearby Berkeley and San Francisco. But Fernald and Sardo’s home is a modern homestead, preserving the larder for leaner (and busier) times. Every summer they host tomato-canning and jam-making parties; fall is for pumpkin-processing events and butchering pigs with 10 guests invited to make sausage, which Fernald cures in a modified wine fridge in a closet. Splitting a steer with friends? Their chest freezer contains a beefy ode to their vacuum sealer.

Fernald, 34, a former family-farm advocate, was the executive director of last year’s Slow Food Nation event. Now she combines her activism and her acumen with Live Culture, a consultancy that helps companies create sustainable food practices and products. Projects range from developing a line of artisanal cured meats in Shasta and an agritourism in Belize to helping an Alabama barbecue chain source better pork; from working with nonprofits to develop value-added food businesses to organizing the Eat Real Festival, an August fund-raising event that involves 20 taco trucks serving sustainable street food to an estimated 20,000 (plus a butchering contest and home-canned and foraged-food exchange). Fernald is also intent on spreading the urban homesteading bug throughout the Bay Area, having organized the recent Yes, We Can (Food) event, which taught 80 people to make jam.

Here’s a story about the garden on the old Multnomah County poor farm, mentioned above.

On the county’s eastern outskirts where Northeast Halsey Street meets 244th Avenue, prime farmland waited for a new calling. What if the county took even a few of its dozens of vacant acres, Madrigal wondered, and asked the community to work a farm that could help feed hundreds?

The idea not only is part of a local and national trend to return to the earth, but it also brings the county back to its historical roots. The land picked for the farm is part of a sprawling tract that once fulfilled the county’s state-imposed mission to care for its indigent: the Multnomah County Poor Farm.

For practical reasons, she says, gardening makes sense. The county garden will cost about $22,000 to clear, irrigate and plant this year. That could buy a lot of prepackaged food — but not the 20,000 to 40,000 pounds of fresh organic produce that Stone estimates could be grown on the two acres each year.

That produce will go to the Oregon Food Bank and will feed what food resource manager Mike Moran calls a desperate need.

Here’s another farm dedicated to a food bank.

Formed in May of 2000, the Mother Earth Farm is an eight-acre organic farm located in the lush Puyallup Valley. The Farm produces over 150,000 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables each growing season-all of which is distributed directly to local food banks and hot meal programs. Produce from the Farm is in the hands of food bank clients within eight hours of being harvested. In 2008, the Farm again reached full cultivation of all eight acres producing more than 149,000 pounds of fresh produce, herbs and honey.

Then there are Community Gardens, where neighbors share plots, usually on vacant land or a park. If you Google community gardens you get results for probably all major American cities, and that’s just for starters.

The American Community Gardening Association (ACGA) was founded in 1979 in order to help gardening programs share their limited resources and thereby benefit from each other’s experience and expertise.

ACGA staff, board members, and volunteers answer thousands of requests for information each year about community gardening and greening. They offer support, coach fledgling groups, and promote networking and information sharing on all levels. Through our networking, publications, trainings and annual conference held in a different part of the country each year, ACGA:

• promotes the formation and expansion of national and regional community gardening networks,
• develops resources in support of community gardening and greening,
  encourages research on the impact of community greening, and
• conducts educational training programs to further community gardening and greening.

Another model is school gardens, where students plant and tend the garden, with produce being used in the cafeteria or shared with families. Pioneered by uber- restaurateur Alice Waters in Berkeley, there are now school gardens in hundreds of communities. A quick Google search turned up four networks promoting school gardens: Kids Gardening, City Farmer, Growing Gardens, and School Garden Network.

Then there’s Michelle, who’s in a sort of class by herself in inspiring American gardeners. From a NY Times article on the White House veggie plot:

Twenty-three fifth graders from Bancroft Elementary School in Washington will help her dig up the soil for the 1,100-square-foot plot, in a spot visible to passers-by on E Street. (It is just below the Obama girls’ swing set.)

Students from the school, which has had a garden since 2001, will also help plant, harvest and cook the vegetables, berries and herbs. Virtually the entire Obama family, including the president, will pull weeds, “whether they like it or not,” Mrs. Obama said with a laugh. “Now Grandma, my mom, I don’t know.” Her mother, she said, will probably sit back and say: “Isn’t that lovely. You missed a spot.”

CCG recently finished up a Creative Community Leadership Project in Noosa, Australia. The program was a true success with the original group of catalysts championing several successful initiatives. 

As the program moves forward into the second year, it will operate under a broader umbrella – the Sunshine Coast Regional Alliance. The program’s goal will be to build off of Noosa’s success and extend the Creative Community project to the entire Sunshine Coast.

Read more about the coverage here:

Noosa Journal – Now it’s over to you…

Noosa News – Change of name is a Sunshine Coast merger

Sunshine Coast Daily – Handover stretches benefits of alliance

I’ve been thinking about social support networks lately and so pieces in recent books have stood out. Humans are social animals who are able to organize ourselves or act individually, but the family and small group networking connections are still more important than generally acknowledged. The implications for a creative economy is that how companies and cities are organized can be as important as what they do or make in their success.

These examples are mostly medical, partly because that’s where a lot of research goes on, but the implications for society are universal.

• The first chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers talks about the town of Roseto, PA which was founded by Italians from Roseto, Italy in the 1890s. Doctors noticed that the residents were unusually healthy. But investigations showed little difference in diet, personal habits, the natural environment, etc. What they did find was that the social and friendship networks were unusually strong. This mutual support resulted in less heart disease and other maladies.

• This reminded me of Dr. Dean Ornish’s work with treating heart disease with diet, exercise, meditation, yoga, and social/family support. When his success in not only stopping but reversing heart disease was reported, the medical establishment said, “Yes, we know that if our patients shifted to a low-fat diet, exercised, and reduced stress it would reduce heart attacks. But people won’t follow our orders so we just schedule bypasses.” The difference was the social and family involvement, which got people to change their behaviors.

• In The Age of the Unthinkable, Ramos tells about AIDS patients in Tugela Ferry, South Africa who had extraordinary levels of medication compliance because rather than doctors just saying “take these pills” they explained the science and involved family members. People stuck to the regimen despite the extreme side effects, while groups who were just told to follow doctors orders would stop medication when they felt better.

• A growing evidence-based practice in residential drug treatment is the “Therapeutic Community,” where peers are involved in each others’ recovery. It has better results than just staff-led treatment.

• Then this article in the Portland Tribune tells about a program to have severely mentally ill people work real jobs rather than “sheltered workshops.” The job stress that was assumed to be too much for them to handle turns out to actually help them get better.

From quality circles to army platoons to extended families, people working together are healthier, more productive and more creative. How can this knowledge be used to build the creative economy?