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.’’

From today’s Globe and Mail:

Toronto’s mosaic an example for American cities

RICHARD FLORIDA

May 2, 2009

En route to obtaining his back-dated, life-long Canadian citizenship, Will Wilkinson, a research fellow at Washington’s Cato Institute, and one of the sharpest young policy minds around, dropped by to visit at the Prosperity Institute.

Back home stateside, he wrote this terrific essay on why Toronto’s largely successful experiment in immigration – its global-straddling ethnic mosaic – is a big smack upside the head for notions that immigration is eating away at core “Anglo-Protestant” values and institutions, à la the late Samuel Huntington. Here’s an excerpt.

WILKINSON ON TORONTO

From Will Wilkinson’s column in the online forum, The Street, April 27, 2009:

“Here is what Toronto is not: Toronto is not dirty, dangerous, or poor. Toronto is not a hell of lost liberties or a babble of cultural incoherence or a ruin of failed institutions. Yet a popular argument against high levels of immigration suggests it should be.

“In his 2004 book, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warned that “the United States of America will suffer the fate of Sparta and Rome,” should its founding Anglo-Protestant culture continue to wane … [so] we must keep outsiders out.

“Successful societies (so this argument goes) owe their liberty and prosperity to distinct institutions which, in turn, depend on the persistence and dominance of the culture that established and nurtured them. Should that culture fade – or become too diluted by the customs, religions, and tongues of outsiders – the foundation of all that is best and most attractive about that society cannot long last.

“But somebody forgot to tell Toronto! “Nearly half the denizens of Canada’s most populous metropolis were born outside the nation’s borders – 47 percent, according to the 2006 census, and the number is rising.

“This makes Toronto the fifth-biggest city in North America, also the most diverse city in North America. Neither Miami, nor Los Angeles, nor New York City can compete with Toronto’s cosmopolitan credentials.

“Here is what Toronto is: the fifth-most-livable city in the world. So said the Economist Intelligence Unit in a report last year drawing on indicators of stability, health care, culture, environment, education, and infrastructure. … “The United States, [a] fabled land of immigrants, has fallen dismally far behind countries like Australia and Canada in openness to immigration …That cultural-fragility argument is false, and it deserves to die.

“Toronto, which has an Anglo-Protestant heritage as strong as any, has proved it dead wrong. In fact, Toronto shows that a community and its core institutions can not only survive a massive and growing immigrant population but thrive with one. … “Maybe some day an American city will place in the top 10 on the list of the world’s most livable places. Maybe – if it becomes more like Toronto…”

FLORIDA ON WILKINSON

I could not agree more. Mr. Wilkinson hits several nails directly on the head here. In my book, Flight of the Creative Class, I similarly argued against Mr. Huntington. And I offered that Canada’s – and Toronto’s – mosaic principle may well prove to be one of the core enduring principles of our economy and society.

Or, as Mr. Wilkinson concludes: “Maybe some day an American city will place in the top 10 on the list of the world’s most livable places. Maybe – if it becomes more like Toronto…”

Want to know how Toronto stacks up on the Creativity Index? Or how Ottawa compares to D.C. and is a leading creative class? Or, say, how Hamilton compares to its peers among industrial cities? The Prosperity Institute’s research engine is cranking. And researchers Ronnie Sanders and Mike Wolfe have released a blizzard of reports on how these cities and more stack up against their U.S. and Canadian competition. Click here for lots, lots more.

My computer died earlier last week so I’ve been in serious catch up mode over the past couple of days! While catching up on my blog reading, I came across a cool little documentary featuring some of Toronto’s more enduring street artists talking about the scene in the city (thanks to Mary Fogarty over at Organic Mechanic):

Writing Toronto’s (Hi)Story from Well and Good on Vimeo

I thought that it was interesting how much of the Toronto scene seemed to be defined by New York - either a reaction away from or toward it, with the exception of the photographer who picked up things by experiencing the diversity of the London (UK) scene. That geography is interesting - I’ve been putting together a bit of data here and there, and it seems like that triangle between Toronto, New York, and London has been one of the most interesting and vibrant geographical relationships of the last century. The push and pull of these cultural poles created a strong artistic dynamism in Toronto and a great visual legacy for young artists to interact with and be inspired by. It seems to be predicated by the Caribbean diaspora of people in the post-war era, under girding the movement of people and ideas as families visited each other, exchanging love, culture, media products like photographs and cassettes. Add a bit of emergence to the mix and voila.

Also interesting is that the doc is tied to Toronto’s 175th anniversary healthy city initiative. It’s nice to see a city acknowledging the things on the ground that make it great.

And now to continue catching up. But not before some music.

There’s lots of good music emerging out of the T-Dot urban music scene right now, which seems to be indicating something interesting about the city’s profile with respect to talent, at least in that scene. Toronto has a notoriously coarse urban music culture, known internationally as “The Screwface Capital” - in the analogue world, we used to get the music early from our cousins in New York and play it out just so that we could be over it first. We can’t wait to be apathetic about your music. Especially if the artist is out of the GTA. Something about that metabolism has always devoured artists from the area before they could break international ground. And yet within the last few weeks or so:

K’naan released his hotly anticipated album Troubadour yesterday:

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Drake has been generating quite a bit of buzz around the recent release of his “Mixtape” So Far Gone:

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K-OS single called 4 3 2 1 from his forthcoming Yes! album has been picking up steam with the release of the video:

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And Zaki Ibrahim’s recent EP Eclectica (Episodes in Purple) has just received a Juno nomination for R&B / Soul Recording of the Year - she’s making noise in the UK and other places around the world as well:

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So here’s a question: How many of these artists, each of whom has been experiencing great success abroad, and represents Toronto not only on their MySpace pages but also in their lyrics and music, were born in the GTA or even the province?

The answer: Only K-OS.

And while K-OS represents something of the “old guard,” one of the last monuments to the early 90s scene, K’naan, Drake, and Zaki Ibrahim are arguably some of the strongest talent cultivating some of the strongest international buzz out of the city. And they are all imports - K’naan from Somalia, Drake from Tennessee, and Zaki from… well… all over, starting with Vancouver.

While each represent the city in their own way, they are unapologetically hybrid - much like Toronto itself. These artists have been able to come to the city, call it home and find the right people, layers of connectivity, and industry infrastructure to launch their careers into the national/international stratosphere.

So what is it about Toronto’s music scene - at least the urban music scene - that international talent has found so enabling? Why has it seemed to be less kind to its “native” artists?  Why haven’t we seen this kind of talent-spiking in Halifax, or Vancouver, or even Montreal? What is it about a city that gives it the capacity to not only attract and incubate such a diversity of talent, but the capacity to launch it as well?

I know there’s already enough music in this post, but here’s some more.

Spikiness is not just something that creates winners and losers across global cities and regions, it also occurs inside cities as well, with the globe’s tallest spikes seeing some of the highest levels of inequality.  This Toronto Star report looks inside the growing economic separation of the “Three Torontos.”

Would a ban on fast food restaurants in our cities and towns help lower the rate of heart disease? Would a program to collect Dog DNA from poop left on our streets and sidewalks help us target negligent owners? Could we harness our own bio-mechanical energy to charge our cell phones, even our cars? Does ‘redshirting’ children, holding them back so that they can enter grade school at an older age, wreak havoc on social security programs? Would local stock markets for regions no larger than Barrie, or Muskoka, help citizens allocate capital more efficiently to businesses that need financing? Could we switch our dietary habits from cow to kangaroo to help save the planet?

If you think I’ve just stolen and plagiarized part of the manuscript for the yet unpublished Freakanomics 2.0, you’d be wrong. These are the hypotheses and real life programs that earn brilliant and bizarre minds recognition in The New York Times’ “Year in Ideas.” If these few examples tickle your fancy, try “spray on condoms” on for size (not literally- these bespoke coital solutions are not yet widely available). Human ingenuity never ceases to amaze, eh?

One thing that stood out for me while reading these stories was how many of these truly remarkable ideas came from Canadians - three from Toronto academics and scientists alone. For The New York Times, where Canada’s parliamentary crisis earlier this month barely registered a blip on their radar, that is a pretty impressive showing from the Great White North, and I believe it speaks to the creative incubator that Toronto has become. Read the article and take notice of where many of these ideas began. There is perhaps no better indication of a “creative city” than the brilliant ideas it fosters and develops, and some of my favorite creative cities - San Francisco, Montreal, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, and Boston, as well as my hometown, the T-Dot, get plenty of love.

While I know that Richard is the official ”Global Trends” guy around here, I hope that he won’t mind my pointing one out; if not a trend, a global synchronicity at least. In two of the world’s great cities - Toronto and Rome - disagreements in educational policy have led to strike situations.

In Toronto, from the Globe and Mail:

The campus was a ghost town yesterday, the first day of the strike by contract faculty, teaching assistants and graduate students, with classes for more than 50,000 students cancelled and pickets letting cars onto university grounds only every few minutes.

There are no plans to resume negotiations.

Christina Rousseau, chair of the Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 3903, said the striking workers are waiting for a signal from university administrators that they are ready to return to talks.

“Right now the ball is in their court,” she said. “We feel it is their turn to make a move.”

The university has offered a 9.25-per-cent wage increase over three years. A university spokesman said the administration is willing to go to binding arbitration.

The workers have asked for a two-year contract with a wage increase of 11 per cent over that period. The demand for a two-year deal is part of a broader strategy by CUPE Ontario to co-ordinate bargaining on all Ontario campuses in order to gain leverage at the negotiating table.

And in Rome from the BBC:

Sleeping bags in lecture theatres, lessons in parks, people wearing plasters on their faces. They are just some of the ingredients in Italy’s hugely divisive row over education.  The sleeping bags are being used by students, who have taken over a number of buildings. Lessons in some places are being held in parks, as classrooms are occupied, and the plasters are the symbolic sign of the “cuts” the students and staff are protesting against.

But these are not just isolated protests by a few disgruntled hardliners.  A number of recent marches in Rome have attracted up to half a million demonstrators.  Seasoned Italian commentators say they are the biggest in 15 years.

The protests are not just for university students. Secondary school teachers and pupils are also on the streets, as their slice of the education budget comes under threat as well.  The government is pushing its reforms because it believes universities and schools are inefficient and producing lacklustre results.

I also did a little bit of Facebook reconnaissance and found popular groups for and against the strike in Toronto, while Italy Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini’s page has been flooded with comments from young people on the situation.

While both are complex and ultimately different situations, one of the few comparables is popular support: In Rome it is overwhelming, while in Toronto it’s very divided. With starkly different political climates, I can’t speak on how well this bodes for either side, but it will be interesting to see how both situations are resolved. They each represent what the prospective futures of significant numbers of young people within their respective regions will be like. In turn, this will ultimately affect the overall prosperity of the regions.

And now, as always, some music.

Toronto’s ongoing creative transformation is coming more fully into view. This week saw the opening of Frank Gehry’s newly renovated Art Gallery of Ontario.

(Photo via AGO).

I was there for the opening (full disclosure: I serve on the board) and the building is beyond spectacular in the way it activates the art, stitches together old buildings and reanimates old spaces, and relates to the messy urbanist neighborhood which surrounds. Here’s what the NYT has to say;

Frank Gehry has often said that he likes to forge deep emotional bonds with his architecture projects. But the commission to renovate the Art Gallery of Ontario here must have been especially fraught for him. Mr. Gehry grew up on a windy, tree-lined street in a working-class neighborhood not far from the museum. His grandmother lived around the corner, where she kept live carp handy in the bathtub for making her gefilte fish. Given that this is Mr. Gehry’s first commission in his native city, you might expect the building to be a surreal kind of self-reckoning, a voyage through the architect’s subconscious. So the new Art Gallery of Ontario, which opened to the public on Friday, may catch some fans of the architect off guard.

Rather than a tumultuous creation, this may be one of Mr. Gehry’s most gentle and self-possessed designs. It is not a perfect building, yet its billowing glass facade, which evokes a crystal ship drifting through the city, is a masterly example of how to breathe life into a staid old structure. And its interiors underscore one of the most underrated dimensions of Mr. Gehry’s immense talent: a supple feel for context and an ability to balance exuberance with delicious moments of restraint. Instead of tearing apart the old museum, Mr. Gehry carefully threaded new ramps, walkways and stairs through the original. As you step from one area to the next, it is as if you were engaging in a playful dance between old and new.

But that’s not all. Earlier this month, Toronto’s Artscape unveiled its transformation of Toronto’s old street car repair barns into an urban park plus work-live space for artists and creators.

(Photo via Blog TO)

The project is an amazing example of creative, sustainable, and inclusive adaptive reuse. Rana and I were blown away when we saw the project as host of its opening night. The Globe and Mail reports:

The reinvention of the old Toronto Transit Commission streetcar-maintenance sheds in the St. Clair-Wychwood area of the city will banish forever your spontaneous, ill-considered desire to damn all urbanity … [T]his is a chance to feast on a version of urban heaven, a wondrous, hybridized redevelopment of something that had been left for 30 years to die a slow death. The Artscape Wychwood Barns, which open to the public this week, give us a new kind of temple in which art, community and urban agriculture are allowed to happily conspire … This is not to say that the barns will replace such major destinations as the Art Gallery of Ontario or the Royal Ontario Museum … The compelling city allows for an intermingling of all creative players. And it’s that potent mix which inspires us to stay.

Exactly. Artscape founder Tim Jones likes to say the city’s ongoing transformation involves the simultaneous recognition of the need both to put creativity on display and to more fully engage creativity at work. These two projects are part of that unfolding process to celebrate and harness creativity in a sustainable and inclusive way.

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.