Creative Class

The New York Times does Toronto (the 8th most popular story at the Times as I write this):

As one of the planet’s most diverse cities, Toronto is oddly clean and orderly. Sidewalks are spotless, trolleys run like clockwork, and the locals are polite almost to a fault. That’s not to say that Torontonians are dull. Far from it. With a population that is now half foreign-born — fueled by growing numbers of East Indians, Chinese and Sri Lankans — the lakeside city offers a kaleidoscope of world cultures. Sing karaoke in a Vietnamese bar, sip espresso in Little Italy and catch a new Bollywood release, all in one night. The art and design scenes are thriving, too, and not just on the bedazzled red carpets of the Toronto International Film Festival, held every September. Industrial zones have been reborn into gallery districts, and dark alleys now lead to designer studios, giving Canada’s financial capital an almost disheveled mien.

And Pittsburgh:

I always thought you were meant to be disquieted by other people’s cool, but that is not the formula at Brillobox. The place is a hipster pub, which is not an oxymoron in Pittsburgh, whose alternative paper last year named it both Best Overall Bar and Hipster Bar. The props of Gen Y irony are everywhere: Home Depot chandelier, chili pepper lights, the D.J.’s cool segue from Foghat to the ‘‘Willy Wonka’’ soundtrack, a lavatory that is an anarchist collage of decals and ink. (‘‘It looks like Rosemary’s Baby was whelped in there,’’ my friend said.) But the ambience lies deeper. ‘‘I walk in on a Saturday night,’’ the novelist said. ‘‘It’s shoulder to shoulder. They’re playing old-school funk — nothing cutting-edge. And everyone here knows my story. They know what happened to me that week.’’

Earlier this week Richard posted on movie production incentives as a development tool. This weekend’s WSJ has an interesting editorial by Jerry Bowyer investigating NFL Conference Championship teams Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Baltimore’s use of stadium centric development in recent years. (The Arizona Cardinals, based in the Phoenix-metro, is the fourth team playing this weekend.)

From the Op-Ed, Sports Mania Is a Poor Substitute for Economic Success;

“If there ever was a time to crow about the wonders of rebuilding a city around a professional sports team, this would be it. Three of the four teams remaining in the play-offs hail from cities — Baltimore, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — that in recent years spent billions rebuilding their downtowns around pro sports facilities and other community “anchors.”

Except that there’s a problem. The teams might be competitive, but the cities definitely are not. All three continue to shrink in population, and have stagnant job markets and crumbling public schools.”

And later,

“When the Steelers were in the Super Bowl in 2006 I was the host of a radio show in Pittsburgh. I argued that the franchise was an exercise in leadership excellence in a city whose politicians were anything but. Numerous callers hammered me. They said there are a lot of “Steelers” bars across the country, and that proved the city still had some national respect. Indeed, there are hundreds of watering holes dispersed across America loaded with fanatical devotes of the Pittsburgh Steelers. “Where are the Seahawks bars?” the callers asked.

In Seattle, of course. That city has gained population while Pittsburgh lost it. Steelers bars are the visible cultural artifact of a kind of economic diaspora.”

I am a huge sports fan and appreciate many of the new stadiums across the country and know the record is mixed - look at the benefits of the privately financed Verizon Center in D.C’s China Town. Clearly the devil is in the financing details and the overall balance of the regional economy as to whether stadiums help or hurt economic success.

This is a big question - for which there are no easy answers. Some cities are quite resilient: places like NY or London seem to be able to remake themselves seamlessly for new economic times. Others falter and never bounce back. But reading stories this weekend on two of my favorite cities -  Pittsburgh, where I lived for nearly two decades, and Detroit, where my wife Rana’s family lives and where we visit often - got me thinking.

The superb article on Detroit by Lawrence Ulrich in the Sunday Times captures the true soul and very real dilemma facing that city. It is a must-read for anyone who cares about cities and Detroit in particular.

The second article, also in the Times, takes a looks at Pittsburgh’s rebirth and, among other things, suggests there may be lessons there for Detroit and places like it.

It’s hard not to compare the two cities and regions, but they are really different places. Pittsburgh for one developed before Detroit. Its core industry was steel which emerged in the late 19th century; and it also had a more diverse industrial base - with leading firms like Westinghouse, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, Alcoa, Heinz, and others across a wide and diverse group of industries. Plus it was a financial powerhouse, with the Mellon interests not only being banking titans but functioning as an early sort of venture capital firm. Its major universities are located in the city. Its downtown core is intact (much of the worst decline was concentrated in mill town along the rivers outside the city’s limits). The city retains several very high-income neighborhoods and several excellent urban public schools. It has perhaps better “material” to work with and certainly a longer time frame to rebuild.

A colleague of mine once speculated that it takes at least two generations to overcome an economic crisis.  And that seems to hold, at least generally, when looking at, say, the crisis of steel in Pittsburgh or the crisis of manufacturing a generation or so earlier in Boston.

Detroit, while it has long faced urban decline, is facing its real economic test today. Yes, it has many assets, as Ulrich mentions. And, yes, it has to imagine and act on a future after auto. Auto has a role in it, particularly in design. But design itself is a bigger part of it, as Ulrich notes, Detroit was - and is - a center of design broadly. But it also must realize that even more so than Pittsburgh or Boston it cannot save itself.  It is home to several good universities, but its major intellectual assets are outside the city - the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Michigan State University in Lansing. It also has to realize that it can benefit from greater connectivity to major metros and mega-region hubs nearby - Chicago and Toronto.

So, what do you think?

Readers of the blog know I’m a huge Buffalo fan. Visiting the city on “homecoming” weekend, New York Magazine’s Adam Sternbergh tells us why that city and others like it - and no, not his adopted home of NYC - is the new frontier.

New York will always offer you the singular opportunity of testing yourself against the best, of sharpening yourself against the city’s fabled grindstone. Hopeful people will always scrape together their savings to come here, to split a one-bedroom apartment with five other people, whether that’s in Greenwich Village (then) or Bushwick (now). But New York, for all its mythology, is no longer a frontier. Buffalo is a frontier. And when you think of the actual frontier, you’ll recall that no one ever packed up and moved West to a gold-rush town because they heard it had really good local theater. They moved looking for opportunities. They moved for the chance to build a new life for themselves.

This, ironically, has always been the siren song of New York City: the chance to turn yourself into someone new, to live the life you’ve always imagined. But what a city like Buffalo offers is a very different promise of what could be. It offers the chance to live on the cheap and start a nonprofit organization, or rent an abandoned church for $1,000 a month, or finish your album without having to hold down two temp jobs at the same time, or simply have more space and a better view and enough money left over each month to buy yourself a painting once in awhile. A city like Buffalo reminds you that, beyond New York, there are still frontiers.

And Adam, if you’re out there reading: your piece is the No. 3 story on the Buffalo morning TV news (yes, they rank them everyday). Buffalo is our other, local TV market here in Toronto.

Over at Burghdiaspora, Jim Russell uses the very same story to take me to task:

Somehow the urban frontier effect has eluded Richard Florida. He’s busy chasing yesterday’s city stars. The rise of places such as Austin also had a lot to do with providing a frontier experience. In the Sun Belt, blank slate geographies abounded (see Houston for the best example of a frontier political geography). And then the scene of opportunity shifts as the hipster cities mature (i.e. get more expensive). This is the fickle fortune of geographic mobility.

Huh? The Rustbelt elude moi? I am a big believer in observed locational preferences: let’s look at mine. Save for three years in Washington, D.C. and a sabbatical at Harvard in the mid-1990s, I’ve lived since the early 1980s in: Buffalo, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and now Toronto (and yes, it qualifies too). I met my wife in Detroit. Rustbelt cities are fantastic places - filled with history, authenticity, real messy urbanism, abundant garage spaces, spectacular interplay between the built and natural environments and great universities. What has kept them down - caused their own sons and daughters to move out and kept talent away? Simple. In addition to economic trauma, it is a long legacy of close-minded and intolerant leadership - squelchers. I’ve seen it firsthand in so many of these places. That’s now starting to turn around in Buffalo, as Sternbergh’s story shows, and in Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. Go Tor-Buff Bills!

One of the keys to building a sustainable, creative economy is leveraging a city or region’s assets and engaging the citizens with those assets. A great piece in today’s WSJ highlights how Pittsburgh, PA and Carnegie Mellon University (where Richard taught/lived for years) has supported its citizens’ efforts to learn about and build robots - including edible robots! Here is the website for Robot 250 (the year-long robot festival).

From the article by Clare Ansberry:

Mickey McManus took five seedless cucumbers, carved them so they looked like fingers and anchored them to a hunk of Edam cheese. To this “hand,” he attached a small electronic device, programmed to respond to sound; when someone laughed or clapped, the fingers flexed. He brought his cucumber robot to a wine-and-cheese party as an appetizer, along with a robotic Rice Krispies Treats man that pivoted whenever the lights dimmed…

The yearlong program, called Robot 250, coincides with the city’s 250th birthday. Teachers fanned out to 13 neighborhoods, providing materials, instruction and troubleshooting. “We wanted to put technology into the hands of as many people as possible,” says Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, who came up with the idea…

People in Pittsburgh have been building robots for decades. Seventy years ago, an engineer at Westinghouse Electric created Elektro the Moto-Man, who could walk and smoke cigarettes and had a 77-word vocabulary. His sidekick, Sparko the Moto-Dog, wagged his tail, sat and barked on command.

Today, there are more than 30 robotic companies in Pittsburgh. They make drowsy-driver warning systems, and robots that help with surgery, unload crates and search for life on distant planets. Alcoa Inc. has a 6-foot-tall robot spokesperson, Al, who hosted a recent Robot Block Party at the Carnegie Science Center.

Part of the Robot 250 event, the block party was billed as the city’s largest and most diverse public gathering of robots. A solar-powered robot mingled with hazmat robots that search for explosives. Robots built by teenagers were on display. Red Rover, a four-wheeled robot that has become a local celebrity in robot circles, made an appearance. Red Rover and his creators are vying for the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon and transmit video, images and data back to Earth.

Pittsburgh has had many struggles over the years, but is continually trying to use its historical strengths to claw its way back to the leading edge of the economy. Many cities and regions could take a cue from Pittsburgh’s efforts to engage its people and their creativity. What is your city doing? Is it working?