Creative Class

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.

At some point during another amazing Time Kode party last Friday, I was struck by the dance floor. No, I didn’t fall over, but I had a thought - as DJ’s, our job is to create the atmosphere that activates the space such that people participate in it. When we consider the way in which the pub or club has become the gathering ground for young urban creative class 20-somethings/30-somethings, how significant is the music that they want to hear to the spaces they want to be in? Participating in public space has something of a performative value - this discourse of performance in space has been in motion since Rousseau’s philosophical anthropology defined human existence as fundamentally social in the Discourse on the Inequality of Man. and was brought to bear on the phenomenon of the 20th century city by Richard Sennett’s seminal 1974 work The Fall of Public Man. The dance floor is an interesting and practical kind of metaphor for the public space in which we perform and individuate.

Sennett was among the urbanists who contributed to 2007’s The Endless City, one of the most powerful and comprehensive books of comparative urban study that I’ve ever seen. They do not, however, profile Sennett’s home city of Chicago. Nor was youth culture and music on the researchers’ radar. If it was, they might have thought to include The Chi. Other than New York, there are few other cities in North America, or anywhere for that matter, that have made as strong an impact on youth and music culture worldwide as Chicago has. It was from there that House music would make its way into the world.

Edward Soja comments in his opening essay “The Urbanization of The World” that:

An important starting point in looking at the changes that have taken place within urban regions over the past 30 years is what Mike Davis recently described as the mass production of slums. The expansion of urban poverty has made ‘extended’ slums and burgeoning informal economies a distinctive feature of both the urbanization of the world and the globalization of the urban.

Nowhere is the concept of mass slums more poignant than in Chicago’s north and south sides. The Robert Taylor and Cabrini-Green houses are infamous even as they come down. The Chicago Housing Authority’s position on integration in the 50s led them to create one of the most severe black/white housing divisions that the U.S. would ever see. Those projects would also be the breeding ground for one of the most robust and influential informal economies of musical ideas outside of New York’s 5 boroughs.

While in Comiskey Park they were literally blowing up dance records, in a south side club called The Warehouse, dance music was reinventing itself and creating a new context for the dance floor. Revealing the world beat that would turn the UK upside down between ‘88 and ‘91, and changing the way we dance forever are no small innovations. As the homes and communities that birthed House come down, we should ask ourselves: How have the peripheral effects of space contributed to mainstream culture? In the discourse that Hope VI has initiated about dispersing or concentrating poverty, without defending the terrible conditions that places like Cabrini-Green subjected its residents to, it’s important to consider what else we’re concentrating and dispersing as well. How can we appreciate the innovations coming from a space and its productive forces while simultaneously condemning that space?

Also, how important is the nightclub/pub to the young professionals? How much does a city’s musical profile affect your impression of it? How important is it to you that you can go out and dance?

And now, as always, some music.

Last week I attended the Academy of Management Meetings in Anaheim, California. I was struck by two worlds of fantasy: Disneyland and the Creative Class. One from the past, one from the future. While a few years ago the world of management was full of old white men, today I came face-to-face with the creative class from around the world. When you meet young people from the four corners of the world, they all have had the same vision of the future from different pasts. How do I know this?

My good friend Bernard Yeung (BY) was named the new dean of the NUS Business School in Singapore. I went to the reception in his honor. The room was an experience from another world- a fantasy: white chocolate covered appetizers, cool mood music, even cooler lighting, and long drinks. From around the world the creative class mingled and contemplated the future of the world. While Disney created a make-believe future for us to experience for $75, the creative class is creating a real future for us to live in.

This future is being created in many places and Singapore is just one of them. See the post by Bob Wuebker the other day. But how are the youth creating the future, this new “Disney”? (see the post by David Miller). The answer to that was found in a set of interesting sessions at the Academy: It is in the mind. Neuro-economics is the frontier. Decision-making through the lens of neuro-economics. Is home economics a myth? Should organizations care? How do entrepreneurs think? How does the creative class think?

What we have is the intersection of a set of disciplines: neuroscience, biology, economics, cognition, game theory, entrepreneurship, and experimental economics that is shaping a new world. This transdisciplinary way of thinking is influenced by emotions, preferences, utility, rationality, behavior, and rewards. All of this can help us figure out how the creative class makes decisions about their future. Go figure. Thank you BY.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Elizabeth Wurtzel asks: What does the death of the rock star mean for America’s economic might and its soft-power?

The old-fashioned rock star has gone the way of the dodo and the dinosaur …Today’s music industry is either moribund or dead …The one thing the United States exports with serious success is our popular culture. We have conquered the world not with our weaponry, but with our music and movies. In fact, 47% of our gross domestic product involves intellectual property (IP) transactions, and about 6% of our national worth — $626.6 billion annually — is from our copyright businesses … The U.S. was meant to be a nation of commercial creativity. It is our birthright. It’s what we do …

Today there is far more excitement at the introduction of a new Apple product — look at how people flocked to get their iPhones! — than over anything artistic. The one creative area hardly affected by the encroachments of technology, at least insofar as its market has not caved, are fine arts like painting and sculpture. At a Sotheby’s auction in autumn 2007, Jeff Koons’s nearly two-ton, nine-foot, hot-pink stainless steel sculpture, “Hanging Heart,” fetched $23.6 million, a record for a work by a living artist. In November, Sotheby’s and Christie’s reported a return of $1.7 billion for that single month, up 24% from the previous November. You cannot, after all, download a painting or a sculpture. The thingness of the thing itself — all that stuff Heidegger talked about when you read him in college — cannot be translated …

Our movies and music are America. And the day the music dies, the party’s over.

Was anyone in Montréal this weekend? How about New York?

In both places, the code of the streets was the rule of law as autonomous zones were established where people could appreciate their city from the perspective of the pedestrian. Montréal is in fact a recognized world capital of design, participating as a design capital in UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network and so this weekend’s 6th annual Under Pressure International Graffiti Festival probably wasn’t much of a surprise to residents of la belle province. Young artists from all over the continent and beyond converged on MTL from Friday to Sunday, taking aerosol art and hiphop culture to the next level. It actually baffles me as to why the festival is not included in Montréal’s City of Design profile - it’s the arts- and design-related event that my peers look most forward to in that city, and it attracts an incredible amount of talent from outside of the region. It seemed like all of Ottawa was there or trying to get there this weekend.

Getting fully behind an idea like this seems like very simple and obvious ways for municipalities to engage not only young people, but the types of creative people that contribute to that great intangible - the “vibe” of a city. The emergence of the arts as recapitulated by hiphop culture - taking the idea of the G.O.B.S. (Gallery, Opera, Ballet, Symphony) and putting them on the street via Graffiti, Emceeing, B-Boying and DJing - has galvanized whole new ideas about the role of art in the city, and perhaps its ushered new conceptions of beauty itself. It has certainly brought us a new semiotics of the streets. Acknowledging that this change has taken place makes a municipal administration more relevant to its young contingent.

Case and Point: In New York this weekend, Mayor Bloomberg and Jeanette Sadik-Kahn, his transportation commissioner, launched the Summer Streets initiative. Quoting this New York Times article:

On a path that extended from the Brooklyn Bridge north to Park Avenue and the Upper East Side, thousands of people filled the streets, taking part in activities like street-side tai chi or salsa dancing. Others simply enjoyed the chance to stroll in normally car-clogged streets. In a city where walkers, cyclists, and motorists must share limited space, having a major thoroughfare through Manhattan free of cars created a giddy sort of excitement.

An interesting move on the part of the city of New York to be sure. In Toronto, this is a monthly event over in the historical district of Kensington Market, but it’s nice to see New York getting on board. To get the event moving on the right foot, Mayor Bloomberg and Comissioner Sadik-Kahn coordinated with a special guest. Can anyone guess who?

Click here to watch Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Sadik-Kahn and Jay-Z launch the Summer Streets Initiative

That’s right. The Jigga-Man.

Now let’s look past the fact that the mayor’s speech sounded like a passage pulled directly out of one of Richard’s books about the Creative Class, or the obvious discomfort that we all felt hearing Bloomberg make those scripted jokes about Jay, or how awkward Jay-Z actually was on the mic (for once in his life). There’s something bigger to be said here: The administration of New York City, in considering how best to communicate that the streets are for the people, looked to hiphop culture’s - and indeed New York’s - brightest star to emblemize that idea. They are making very strong statements about the culture of the street and of the city - in fact, other than the scale and location of the operation, their statement is almost the most innovative thing about the idea.

Now if the city could hire these kids to ride through various neighborhoods of New York from weekend to weekend, puttin’ it down and giving workshops, THAT would be some innovation. Word.

Was anyone in New York to see how this initiative went? How about Montréal - anyone make it out to Under Pressure? How are you being innovative on your streets in your city? What ideas do you have about what street culture means?

I’m really interested in your opinions!

And now, as always, some music.

R.I.P. Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes

Hello Everybody! I’m Kwende Kefentse. It’s very cool to be involved in this exchange with all of you. For my part, I’m a DJ and student from Toronto and currently living in Ottawa. My work focuses on understanding the relationship between place and the development of culture, specifically in the city - what’s been termed “urban culture.”

Just the idea that there is a genre of music that is spatially defined is something that Richard and I agree is relevant - does this imply that we have some kind of shared idea about what “urban” means. How does the physical urban space relate to that construct? I’ve been engaged in study and in developing my ideas for a long time, and I’m looking forward to sharing them with you all and getting feedback about the way that urban arts/music and youth scenes work in your cities, and your ideas about the effect of space on expression.

I thought that for the first blog, we could start with something general to give you a sense of my perspective: The Dark Knight. I know that comic book movies have been all the rage this summer, but how good is this movie though?! However many billions of dollars later, this movie has (nearly?) become the biggest box office blowout of all time. It’s that good. Kudos to DC Comics for reinvigorating that franchise.

During the previews, at least in North America, DC began the hype-machine for their next feature film: Watchmen. The original 12 comics were written by Alan Moore, a master of his craft if there ever was one. I can say without a shred of hyperbole that it is one of the most nuanced, morally complex, structurally ingenious, transformative works to be printed to paper in the last century. If you don’t believe me, Google will tell you the same.

The hype-machine pumped out seven posters and released them to the web the other week. As I was trying to figure out what to say to all of you in my first post, this poster spoke to me:

Not to ruin any of the story for the people who are going to see this film, but when Dr. Wally Weaver makes that comment he is talking about the character Dr. Manhattan, it’s that blue gentleman with his back to us, floating in the lotus position. Dr. Manhattan used to be a regular human being and a scientist, but he changed and has become something much more than human. Dr. Weaver is trying to say that in his transformation Manhattan also transformed what mankind imagined it could be. There had been nothing like him before, and moreover we couldn’t go back to the way things had been. He represents a fundamental system change.

It’s a typical Moore-type metaphor - one that rings right through time and space. The image of Manhattan has been associated with that very kind of change since the island was gridded out in 1807. There had never been a space quite like it before. Its critical mass represented an opportunity for change. Changes in housing law out of New York (the 1879 and 1901 tenement laws) affected lot sizes in cities all over North America. When they were thinking to call the WWII Nuclear project “The Knoxville Project” (Thanx Wikipedia) , they thought better and settled on the name “Manhattan” for the project that would change the face of the world forever. The U.N. would eventually establish its headquarters there. Modern architecture would transform the idea of the city in New York. System change is part of its profile. We have been in the shadow of Manhattan for quite some time now it seems.

On the north side of the island in the South Bronx there was light though. In 1973, as the tax base fled, emerging out of the shadow of Manhattan, kids were collecting their feelings and observations about the city and unleashing them as either b-boying/breakdancing, djing, emceeing, and writing graffiti. As natives of the space - the first real natives of the modern city - the social innovators in the community collected the individual art forms into a culture and system of expression that would literally become synonymous with the modern city as we know it. The entire content and formation of it was the urban experience. Eventually it would be a beacon to youth, whether urban or suburban, American or otherwise. As it became disseminated through the media from city to city around the world, hip hop culture would affect not only the way we walk and talk, but the way we think about art, and the possibilities of expression as young people in cities. It would represent a fundamental system change in the way young people in cities identified themselves and related to each other.

This isn’t to say that all young people are into hip hop, but it’s just to acknowledge the fundamental changes that have taken place. How many people in my age bracket really think that graffiti is a crime? How many young people think that DJ’ing is a cool thing to do? When did your parents learn the word “dis”? Why do they say it like it ain’t no thang - how did that become normalized? Why is Barack Obama’s hip hop mannerism so explosive? I won’t make mention of the entire industry of music that came literally out of nowhere in the late 70’s to dominate the world in the late 90’s and beyond.

It’s easy to be glib about all of this, but we have to remember that it hasn’t always been like this. Not cities, and not the culture of the city either. How did this specific expression of place transcend culture and resonate so strongly all over the globe? I remember being almost the only kid in my school that liked hip hop or even really knew about it. Is that even possible now?

As the planet enters its first urban age, one of the things I’m trying to figure out is this: As one of the first modern cities in the world, how long is Manhattan’s shadow? How bright is its beacon?

I’m looking forward to thinking about that and more with you all.

And now some music to help it all go down. I’ll keep it shorter next time, I promise.

Peace,

-K

Hi, Bert Sperling here.

My main area of work is measuring Quality of Life (QOL) in general, and using the QOL and other metrics to rank different places. By examining the differences between places and their residents, we can gain insight into what people are looking for, and how future events may impact where and how we will live.

Richard Florida’s Creative Class concept has evolved to encompass new theories regarding the importance of place and its effect on our lives. Richard and I are finding new areas of common interest as we both look at the unique attributes of different cities and metros, and theorize why some are thriving and others are in a slump.

I’m excited to lend my observations to the discussion here on the Creative Class Exchange, because I know that there will be some keen observations and challenging comments from you sharp people who regularly read it. Please consider this an invitation to share your perspective.

Where Are the Musicians?

It seems that that the most common way to measure the concentration of artists and other creatives is to analyze the United State census occupation data, which identifies Americans which list ‘artist’ as their primary occupation. This is the methodology of a recent report from the National Endowment for the Arts on “Artists in the Workforce.�

(Note - I call them “artistics”, since the category includes not only artists, but also writers, authors, musicians, photographers, architects, and others.)

Among their key findings is that nearly two million Americans identify themselves as artistics, but the total excludes “many people with secondary employment as artists – an estimated 300,000 Americans.�

Wait a minute.

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Aren’t there many more casual or part-time artistics than full-time professionals? (And I have another concern. A person shouldn’t need to earn money to provide validation for their artistic expression.)

I divide my time between Portland and small town on the Oregon coast, named Depoe Bay. In little Depoe Bay, there are some great musicians that I regularly play with, and they’re patiently teaching me the theory and practice of jazz guitar which have added a new dimension to my playing. Robin, Steve, and I have a combo that plays around the area, and have developed a nice following.

Is this activity likely to surface using the usual criteria of primary occupation? Not likely; Steve is the town’s postmaster, and Robin is a local contractor.

But in the same way that young twenty-somethings work as a barista by day, and play in a punk band at night, this is part of what makes a place interesting and unique. And because it’s so much more pervasive, I feel that this underground creativity is even more important to a city’s quality of life than the concentration of artistic professionals.

So, how would YOU determine where these underground musicians live and play, so we can identify those places which are hotbeds of creative activity? I have some ideas, but I’d like to hear from you first.

Simon Jenkins, writing in the Times of London, absolutely nails it (h/t: Bill Bishop):

Futurology seminars have long been obsessed with one question: what next after the
internet? The answer is always the same, a new electronic gizmo. …

Since the invention of the telegraph and gramophone,
innovation is interested only in kit that yields profit. What is becoming plain,
even under the strains of recession, is that the futurologist’s answer should
lie in the realm not of electronics but of reality. It is in reality television,
reality politics, reality entertainment and sport, the immediate, the active,
the present, the live.

The phenomenon is near-universal. People do not want to spend their spare time in
front of the same screens at which they increasingly work. They want to “go
outâ€�…

What is happening is a reversal of history. Artists can no longer sell the products
of their genius because the internet supplies it virtually for free. What can be
sold is that genius in the flesh.

The whole story is here.

Experiences matter. Authentic experiences, especially. Cities can provide them, and those that do so gain an edge. All part and parcel of the shift to the creative economy and society. We’re tracking the transformation of the popular music and entertainment industries in one of our big, focal projects at the MPI. More to come.

A new study by Harvard Business School’s Anita Elberse marshals substantial empirical evidence that “hits” still matter quite a bit, a seeming refutation of Chris Anderson’s popular long tail thesis.  According to Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal:

Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard’s business school
who takes the same statistically rigorous approach to entertainment and
cultural industries that sabermetricians do to baseball, … looked at data for online video rentals
and song purchases, and discovered that the patterns by which people
shop online are essentially the same as the ones from offline. Not only
do hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online, but the
evidence suggests that the Web is actually causing their role to grow,
not shrink.

Anderson responds here. Here’s Elberse’s reaction, Tyler Cowen weighs in here.

Here’s Elberse’s site: Her research looks very interesting.

“[I]n the long run, we are all the Grateful
Dead.” - Paul Krugman.

I wish. More and more of us are like the t-shirts vendors at a Dead concert, actually. A lucky few are the backup band, and fewer and fewer are sound men or roadies. One thing that seems self-evident - artists, musicians, writers, scientists, and creative people generally continue to produce terrific creative material.  It’s the transmitters and publishers of that content that are the bottleneck and the problem. What will become of the book publishers, record companies and scientific journals in this new age of digitization. Seems to me like they are the dinosaurs of the digital age on their way for extinction. More of Krugman’s ruminations on digitization of everything, authors, musicians, and IP, here.