Creative Class

In the last few weeks I have been building a tremendous amount of what we in government call “human resource capacity,” which is just to say that I’ve been going to a lot of conferences. I don’t know if it’s just that the year is ending and things seem faster the closer you get to the bottom of the hill, but it has certainly felt like one thing after the other since the last post. And beyond these conferences, there’s been a lot going on – not the least of which being that I’ve moved. And TEDxOttawa is happening in the morning + I’ve got a gig at night! I thought there was a lot going on in this city when I was relatively broke and self-employed, but now that I can pay for stuff and work for the city I can barely keep up. While I’m sure I’ll forget something, let’s blast quickly through these past few weeks and see if we can’t make some meaning out of them:

• November 18 – 21:  I was privileged enough to join some of Canada’s best and brightest at the Trudeau Foundation’s conference on Rethinking the Urban Commons. I’ll admit, I sorta snuck in through having participated in a pre-conference put on by two of the Trudeau Scholars,  but what a time that was. Truly it felt as if I had somehow gained access to the secret society that is improving the world with their intelligence, even as we sleep. In conversation I was sure to preface everything I said by clearly stating that I was NOT a Trudeau Scholar just so that people could set their expectations appropriately. Other than Creative Spaces + Places, this felt like the conference to be at this year if you’re interested in cities and live in the east of Canada. The list of speakers was epic, it was at the Chatueau Laurier so atmosphere was far from an issue, the discourse was at a delightfully dizzying high level, and folks at the Trudeau Foundation treat conference crashers as nicely as some places that I’ve been to treat conference-goers. Highlights were honestly too numerous to mention.  In the question period after his keynote I surprised Witold Rybczynski with a question about the connection between North American  urban morphology and Hiphop that people seemed to respond well to, and Ilmar Reepalu of Malmö, Sweden seemed to inspire everyone to new heights. The main thing to take away from this is that everyone there was so smart.

• November 20: Time Kode celebrated it’s four-year aniversary! Wow, wow, wow, what a party. We had support from TK originators Bonjay who turned our already hot and sweaty dance party into a melting pot of soul. It was truly epic. Good lookin’ out to Phil Jenkins from the Ottawa Citizen who passed by to take it in! Sadly though, few-to-no Trudeau Scholars came through despite my persistent prophesying and inviting over the days of the conference. While a mind is a terrible thing to waste, I maintain that the same is true for a good party. In fact if one was to waste one’s mind, a good party would be the place to do it. I would have liked to see how our future leaders shake it down, but alas. Another time I suppose.

• November 23: After a full 24 hours of sleep it’s over to Algonquin College for the Corporate and Community Responsibility Conference. This was a cool opportunity to get a sense of what’s going on in Ottawa’s business community particularly with respect to social innovation and entrepreneurship. I learned more about Causeway who seem to leaders in Ottawa with respect to the practice, and I got to catch up with Allyson Hewitt again who was there presenting. We both made jokes about conference fatigue, but after the respective punchlines neither of us laughed.

• November 25:  Our head of state is pretty cool. Not only does she invite me over to DJ sometimes, but she and her husband have held great forums that commiserate with the presentation of national awards called Art Matters. Over 40 done in the last four years! Well, on that Wednesday literature was the theme, and I was in the house… or hall, rather. As one who writes, this was a great conversation to be a part of. Once again, more amazing comments were extolled than I can try to recall for you here. Great food too.

• November 27:  Alert and at city hall for 7:00 a.m. to participate in the Mayor’s Breakfast series put on by the Ottawa Business Journal. The “new” head of OCRI Claude Haw was presenting his innovation strategy for Ottawa. It was early, but I’m glad I was there. They seem to be taking their lead from this guy I know…

• November 30: The Social Planning Council of Ottawa held their annual Research in Action conference which was great and thankfully a bit more low-key than the rest of my month. I learned about an amazing collaborative tool that SPC Ottawa has piloted called CIMS – Community Information Mapping Systems. It was a huge boon to discover and I’m looking forward to getting into it more deeply. Kudos to the SPC for initiating it’s realization!

On the first of December I moved and that came with its own set of bullet points, but that’s neither here nor there. What did I LEARN from all of this hob-nobbing is the question: What are the deliverables? Well, that’s not so easy to say. As one of these newly termed “knowledge-workers,” I’ve certainly come in contact with a lot of knowledge over the past month that is for sure. But how do we value knowledge and network connectivity anyways?

Thankfully people much smarter than me at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya have thought about that and written a paper. Give it a read and think on that. I wish that I could be more profound, but I’ve gotta keep going  at TED when that sun comes up. I’m going to bed.

Music.

Considering the report about Ontario in the Creative Age that came out of the MPI yesterday, and some interesting data that I came across browsing the web the other day, I thought I’d mash up some ideas and observations about youth enterprise and creative clustering emerging from youth scenes. Let’s see how they fit. While this might work better with a map, I hope that you can follow along.

So, about two years ago, the crew that I do Time Kode with (our monthly soul shakedown in Ottawa) found a spot off the beaten path to do our parties – an unsuspecting Eritrean community center called the Eri Café found at the intersection of Preston (Little Italy) and Somerset (China Town). If anyone reading knows/has been to Ottawa, they know that this intersection is quite a ways away from The Market area, where nightlife and commerce is traditionally clustered. Since we started the party, our enterprise has only picked up more steam and has really helped to put the Eri Café and that area in general on the map in the city with all of the traffic that we drive through there every month.

What I find interesting is that subsequent to – but not necessarily directly related to – our setting up shop there, more youth enterprise began to emerge along the Somerset strip. The Lay Up, an urban couture boutique successfully opened and has been building great momentum, as well as The Umi Café, a fair trade co-op that has become increasingly popular as a place that builds community between like-minded people.  My roommate, who is here from Germany for six months working as an intern for Environment Canada, found it without my instruction and has been frequenting it on a weekly basis.

All of these enterprises emerged out of the same creative scene in Ottawa – young urban artists turned business people. Most of us are under 30, and most of the people that we service are in that same age bracket, or can be described as youthful.

As I was thinking about this and knocking around the web, I thought about both the report from the MPI about creative density and innovation, and a blog entry that I stumbled upon that sought to break down some data to better understand the relationship between age and entrepreneurship. Both the findings of the report and the analysis of the data on the blog seem to combine to describe the phenomenon on Somerset.

Which brings us back to Ontario in the Creative Age. The emergence of these clusters of youth enterprise really demonstrates the value of creativity and management, even when an enterprise isn’t delivering a physical product. It also demonstrates how creative density can spur enterprise.

Can you think of any examples in your own regions where you’ve observed something like this? And how do you think this type of activity can be encouraged and not squelched as the economic climate begins to set in?

And now, with Black History Month in mind, 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.