Creative Class

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!

For a while I’d had the idea to do a head-to-toe profile of modern urban couture, so I thought that I’d start today. In an increasingly interconnected world, the way that we dress is an important mode of relatedness. I’ll try to keep it as unisex and lighthearted as possible.

So, starting with the head: I am going to be bold and claim the 59Fifty as the official headgear of the city. What’s a 59Fifty you might ask? It’s the technical term for what we’d colloquially call a baseball cap. And It turned 55 this year:

Up until 1954, players wore many styles of headgear, such as sloughy caps and pillbox styles… So the company developed a fitted cap as the uniform headwear for Major League Baseball. Today this style, known as the 59Fifty, remains the official cap of US ball players.

And its many variations have become a key part of the standard urban wardrobe, be it for an American tourist, a footballer’s wife or a young man aping a rap hero.

There is just something so affirming about seeing one’s city represented on a passerby’s head, be it the city of your origins, or the one you’ve adopted. When growing up in the GTA during the Blue Jays’ back-to-back World Series win, a Blue Jays cap was easily one of the coolest things to have on your head - especially when crossing the border. I liked to represent. It felt like we finally had something beyond the ubiquitous design staple of the New York Yankees cap that we could distinguish ourselves with in the world.

At that time teams only had their official hats available with the exception of the Yankees - of course - who had their standard hat available in three colors. As both specialization and design intensiveness in cities increased over time, there are now dozens of variations on standard team caps designs. They have fashion flexibility and give people the ability to express their individuality, while still being down with their team or city. In my fantasy world of vanity, I would wear a different Blue Jays hat every day. Even toques, which once held the distinction of being the hat to wear if showing off one’s nicely shaped head, have grown brims, taking design cues from baseball caps. Beyond even professional sports, it has become a prevalent form of headwear engaged by fashion brands that aren’t even sports-exclusive.

What is it about the baseball cap I wonder? What about its design has brought citizen after citizen in city after city around the world into line with its fitted decree? What does it say about the relationship between sports, urban identity, and the concept of representing? What does it mean that something so distinctly American has almost passively emerged to dominate casual urban headwear globally?

I feel a boxing day trip to the New Era store coming on…

And now, for a change, not some music:

Happy Holidays!

I’m a member of the Net-Generation, people born between 1978 and 1997. At first glance, my cohort seems tailor-made for a decentralized and “flat world,� so we shouldn’t care so much about the place where we work. After all, the internet, like no other technology, has lowered geographical and temporal barriers for communication and collaboration, and N-Geners, like no other generation, are the most comfortable and capable working, learning, and communicating online. Case in point: I recently found myself collaborating on a project with two college pals on Skype (the free online video phone application): one in Palo Alto, California, the other in Alaska, while also chatting and sharing photos with a friend who was in an internet café in rural Vietnam.

However, while technology has lowered barriers and allowed people all over the world to participate in the global economy, it’s a mistake to suggest now that ‘place’ is no longer important for today’s emerging creative workers. Indeed where one works matters now more than ever.

Whether interested in finance, law, politics, computer programming, consulting, or medicine, young friends and colleagues of mine are drawn inexorably to the epicenters and major nodes of their respective fields; in cities, suburbs, and exurbs that also happen to score very high on the creative class index. This is certainly true for my friend in Palo Alto, a city straddling the area between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. He is a talented computer programmer working for an internet start-up. But what about my friends in Vietnam and Alaska, you ask? Did Google just open a server farm in Juno? Is rural Vietnam the new Silicon Valley? Why do your friends want to live there? Truth is they don’t.

My Alaska friend was working for Mark Begich, a Democrat, who defeated the incumbent Senator (and convicted felon) Ted Stevens. If ever there was an appropriate time to say “got out of there like a bat out of hell,� Jeff’s escape from Alaska after the big victory was it. Jeff is passionate about politics, and he is now in Washington, D.C. looking for full time work. Truth is he would rather struggle for a little while in D.C. than be instantly employed anywhere else. After all, every politically engaged young person he and I know wants to be in the U.S. Capitol and, as a result, a burgeoning social scene of smart, creative, and ambitious young people has flourished there. Dave, my friend in Vietnam just graduated from McGill’s School of Management and is wandering Southeast Asia barefooted and bearded trying to ‘find himself,’ but really he’s just on vacation. Like me, he will soon find himself up to his elbows in financial statements and spreadsheets. He is returning to Toronto to work at a boutique private equity group. Jeff was drawn to the epicenter of the political world. Dave, a former business student with an entrepreneurial streak, will return to Toronto- Canada’s financial capital, because he knows the city offers great opportunity for a person with his interests (it also helps that he is a die-hard Leafs fan). In both instances, the where did not merely influence their decisions, it determined them. If anything, their stints in Alaska and Vietnam simply reinforce the notion that the Creative Class, and young people in particular, travel and move throughout the world with increasing ease.

Though not identifying it as the “Net Gen� specifically, Richard Florida presciently foresaw the emergence of a new generation of the “Creative Class� in The Rise of the Creative Class, a theme that has surfaced in ensuing works. His experience interacting with students at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University revealed that young people are drawn to certain hubs, crowding together in thriving and diverse places where like-minded individuals share lifestyles, cultural tastes, and work interests. While the moniker ‘Creative Class’ is not generation-specific, by 2018, when all members of my cohort will be of working age, the Net Generation will, simply put, dominate the creative class. As Boomers retire and Generation Xers fill the ranks of senior management, there will be an overwhelming demand for these young, highly educated people. Attracting them to companies and regions where they can thrive and prosper will be the next great imperative for today’s corporate leaders and politicians.

I encourage everyone to share your thoughts and opinions with me.  If a conversation begins, I will be happy to engage in it with you.

Today, CEO-Read announced it’s “100 Best Business Books of All Time.” Among the top 100, The Rise of the Creative Class.

Congrats, Rich!

How has The Rise of the Creative Class shaped your area’s approach to community and economic development? Has the book changed your perspective on creativity and talent management? How? Share your stories with our team.

To learn more about the guide for the top 100, click here. The guide is set to be released in February 2009.

One of our esteemed CCE bloggers, Nisi Berryman, is featured in the December 2008 issue of Metropolitan Home magazine, generously opening the door of her home to give us a glimpse into the creative environment in which she lives. View the piece online or download the PDF version in its entirety. Bravo, Nisi!

Tell us, how brave are you with color in your own home?

That’s the central conclusion of a new study published in the British Medical Journal.  Fortunately, unhappiness is far less so. Here’s one press summary:

A sociology professor at Harvard University, Nicholas Christakis, has discovered that happiness is contagious. In a report published today by the British Medical Journal, Christakis finds that happiness can spread like a virus through social networks, extending up to three degrees of separation: in other words, to the friends of one’s friend’s friends. Christakis concludes: “People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, like health, as a collective phenomenon.” … Thankfully, Christakis’s report shows that unhappiness is not nearly as contagious as happiness. “Unhappiness doesn’t spread as intensely or as consistently as happiness,” says the professor.

The full paper is here (h/t: Charlotta Mellander).

It’s become a veritable truism that cities are cold, lonely places and that small towns are the centers of a more connected, communal life.  This view is wrong, according to the growing field of “loneliness” research, which finds that the notion of urban alienation is more fiction then fact.

How many apartments in Manhattan would you have guessed have just one occupant? One of every eight? Every four? Every three? The number’s one of every two. Of all 3,141 counties in the United States, New York County is the unrivaled leader in single-individual households, at 50.6 percent. More than three-quarters of the people in them are below the age of 65. Fifty-seven percent are female. In Brooklyn, the overall number is considerably lower, at 29.5 percent, and Queens is 26.1. But on the whole, in New York City, one in three homes contains a single dweller, just one lone man or woman who flips on the coffeemaker in the morning and switches off the lights at night.

These numbers should tell an unambiguous story. They should confirm the common belief about our city, which is that New York is an isolating, coldhearted sort of place… In American lore, the small town is the archetypal community, a state of grace from which city dwellers have fallen… Yet the picture of cities—and New York in particular—that has been emerging from the work of social scientists is that the people living in them are actually less lonely. Rather than driving people apart, large population centers pull them together, and as a rule tend to possess greater community virtues than smaller ones. This, even though cities are consistently, overwhelmingly, places where people are more likely to live on their own.

Much more here (h/t: Brian Knudsen).

This is the most amazing newspaper report I have ever read.

People on unemployment benefits, single mothers with children, and soon-to-be-unemployed people working in construction stating that they are keeping their Christmas shopping expenditures down - they are even shopping? Another volunteers, “I don’t usually save, so this year is different,” as she buys an iPod.  “He really wants one thing.” WT*? She needs to say, “We do not have the money and you can’t have it!” Another’s husband is in construction and doesn’t get enough work, and she is spending $1,000 - this is called “saving?” And Obama is promising to give these people a bailout?

The proper analogy for the situation is the following. Category 10 hurricane winds are already uprooting trees, the swells are breaking over weakening sea walls, while these folks are heading down to the beach for a last stroll and they expect to be bailed out? There will be no freaking money left as Paulson, Bernanke empty the Treasury for the final heist, even as Obama is bringing back the previous gang. The world economy is being tag-teamed by idiot savants blinded by the failed mainstream economics.

For the last two years, as Rich can attest, I have been telling people to hunker down, unload real estate, equities, and be in cash. I remember sitting on airplanes and telling people this. And they answered to me, “You are a pessimist, I’m an optimist!” I remember walking around a lake in August 2008 with a friend of mine affiliated with a very large conglomerate. I gave my typical better hunker down a “bad moon’s on the rise” speech. And he said, you are overly pessimistic etc. In October, his firm got the equivalent of a multi-hundred million dollar margin call. Now he won’t speak with me - probably because I have put my investment dollars where my mouth is.

The suffering that Cassandra went through. In earlier times, an “optimist” was not a synonym for a “fool.”  Optimism is associated with realism - not deliberate ignorance. Sometimes people can’t hear or feel the wind even as it is tearing at the clothes on their back.

I only hope I am wrong and the people buying on “Black Friday” are right. If they are wrong and I am right, their children will have iPods but be relegated to homeless shelters. This searing experience will never let them forget how thoughtless their “optimistic” parents were.

Am I wrong?

Map via XKDC (h/t: Charlotta Mellander). Thoughts?

Greg Easterbrook in The Atlantic:

The Bills could help forge mutual affection between the cities—even a regional identity. Buffalo’s civic promotion has generally reached southward; in this newly globalized world, it should reach northward, toward a country that is as underappreciated among nations as Buffalo is among cities.

Connections to cosmopolitan, multi­cultural Toronto might change Buffalo’s image from backward-­focused to wave-of-the-future. Toronto is growing by leaps and bounds, and some portion of the growth may already be spilling over; most of the immigrants to Buffalo in recent years were Canadian. Buffalo offers urban living free of traffic jams and boasts one of the nation’s last under­developed stretches of premium waterfront. During its City of Light heyday, when Buffalo was the first electrified metropolis, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, and other fabled names designed homes and parks. In the lovely Delaware Park area, magnificent Beaux Arts homes sell at exceedingly low prices compared with homes in elite U.S. cities—or in Toronto.

So long as the Bills keep a foot in the city, they keep alive the dream of a Super Bowl win—a hope that an infusion of Loonies (Canadian dollars) might sustain. And should the Bills win the Super Bowl, Buffalo will return to national prominence. I don’t just think this will happen, I know it will.

It’s all about the mega…