The Upside of Shrinking

Photo Credit

Last month, Newsweek produced a list of "dying" cities in the US with "bleak" futures based solely on population loss over the past few decades. For the Love of Cities author Peter Kageyama made quick work of the dismantling of this rather lazy list over at The Infrastructurist: "As human beings," he notes, astutely, "we stop 'growing' in our early 20s, yet we hardly think of a 25-year-old as dying — still, at a cellular level, they are dying in the same way that these cities are dying. Losing population is not the same as losing hope, losing purpose, or losing life."

The loss of population does not guarantee a continued slide toward obsolescence. Conversely, an influx of educated creative types does not necessarily result in an economic boom. Everyone has the potential to be creative, but not everyone is cut out to start (and successfully run) a business. The entrepreneurial spirit is something that needs to be sparked, and then cultivated. On the list of things that can serve as that spark: watching an exodus from a place that you love. In the above-linked Burgh Diaspora post, Jim Russell shares a story about Doug Dwyer, a former First Data employee who chose to stay in Boulder when his employer moved to Atlanta. The decision to stay required Dwyer to "think like an immigrant," and he has since founded a company, Mocapay, that employs 20 people.

When it's possible for the upwardly mobile to leave, those who stay behind by choice are bound to be more invested in their cities. These passionate people are some of the greatest assets that a city can have, and the fact that there are fewer other people around inherently makes it more likely that these passionate residents will bump into each other, share ideas, and perhaps start something exciting--as long as shrinkage is managed through smart urban planning to maintain some level of density, and to preserve downtown areas as places of economic and intellectual exchange. Especially when large areas begin to empty out, it's important to think about how to encourage interaction.

In a recent promo video for the new book Living in the Endless City, Saskia Sassen was asked what makes a city successful. She answered that "It’s their incompleteness that gifts them their longevity. A city does not become obsolete." Population loss does not equal death: it's just part of the process of rebirth.

The Attraction fo Free

Everyone likes to get free stuff, even when it's junk -- like brochures and keychains at a trade show, or a reusable bag from your local market. Retailers and businesses give out free things as a marketing ploy, to build rapport and disseminate information. Another form of free comes in the newspaper ads, with the buy one get one free coupon, or the holiday giveaways (think Black Friday.) These giveaways are designed to attract patrons to a certain retail location in hopes that they will spend more moeny, come back more often, and essentially support the business. It seems to work as my mailbox is inundated with these coupons nearly everyday.

So, with my tabletop covered in coupons and freebie offers, I began to think, how can Rustbelt cities and cities with declining populations use the idea of free to attract new residents. The goals seem similar, stores need people to come in and buy their assorted goods while cities need to attract people to come and start businesses, raise families, and pay city taxes. Perhaps these cities could create marketing campaigns targeting young creative entrepreneurs by offering buildings, land, space, tax breaks. After all, the Rustbelt is, if nothing else, is rich in land and space, just look at Flint.

There exists a whole class of creatives out there who would love to start their own businesses but can't due to the burden of large overhead costs especially in business hubs like NYC or Chicago. Rustbelt cities in conjunction with the internet's world wide marketplace offer very low overhead costs. However, in order to make these individuals pack their bags and move to a new city that they know little about and attempt to form some type of business, they need incentive. Businesses take time to start, and by offering entrepreneurs free rent, you are granting them time to learn the city, be inspired by the city, and establish their own business' in the city.


The real power of a program like this comes in the formation of a community. Once the idea catches on and creatives begin to take to he plunge into the Rustbelt, stronger and stronger creative communities will form attracting more and more people to the city. This can be seen in the reformation of the DUMBO neighborhood in NYC from a burnt out, unattractive block, into a vibrant community of artists and professionals. David Walentas, a NY developer bought up a huge portion of the Dumbo neighborhood in the late 90's then enticed an array of artists to take up residence by offering free rent for an extended period of time. The artists attracted the professionals and soon the neighborhood was bustling with a diverse group of New Yorkers. So the question is, can this work on a national if not global scale with the Rustbelt and other declining cities?


(Photo from icanhascheezburger, Corine Vermeulen-Smith, and NYT The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

The Two Creative Classes

Many of mankind’s greatest achievements are products of the urban cauldron. That the density, heterogeneity and social environment of cities leads to more rapid innovation and idea sharing should not surprise many, but it’s worthwhile to examine and understand the mechanics of the relationship between cities and their cultural products.

Richard Florida’s Creative Class thesis has garnered much attention since he introduced it in 2002 with The Rise of the Creative Class. That book’s main point—cities that manage to attract members of the “creative class” benefit economically and socially in comparison with cities that don’t—seems to dovetail nicely with the notion that cities are innovation hubs.

The relationship between the two ideas, however, may not be entirely harmonious. While the coffeehouses of early 20th century Vienna may have produced the likes of Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus, those literary talents didn’t necessarily equate directly with Vienna’s economic vitality. Likewise, the music scenes that emerged from New York and Cleveland in the 1970’s came out of urban decay, and didn’t necessarily effect a change in those conditions.

The Creative Class, on the other hand, is expected to translate that same intelligence into economic activity. When civic leaders develop incentives to attract this demographic, their goal is generally not art for art’s sake—not that it should be. Municipal government should not be charged with giving a city an arts scene, but it’s reasonable to charge city leadership with creating economic activity. That, in short, is what the Creative Class program means for mayors and city councils.

So far, so good. City leadership can take a laissez-faire approach to the arts and a hands-on approach to the local economy. The trick, though, is not to stifle the former by attending to the latter. A city can attract plenty of creative types who will start companies and go out to eat four times a week, but the incentives employed to attract those groups might inadvertently extinguish the scenes that don’t pay and don’t spend. If it becomes too difficult to live cheaply in a city, the will to tinker or experiment on a minimal income might dwindle or vanish. The two aforementioned groups need not be mutually exclusive, however, and as planners and elected officials articulate their vision for a given city, they should remain conscious of what both creative classes have to offer and encourage each to exist in that city.


(Photo from Flickr user nickmickolas.)

The Value of Scarcity

Urbanization is caused, at least in part, by scarcity. Certain resources are limited, and thus more efficiently used in a communal setting. Through urbanization, more people have access to these resources than would if settlements were less densely populated. This is true of everything from intangibles like creativity to more solid things like water and electricity, which are more cheaply and easily distributed to dense urban areas than rural places. Cities are often trumpeted these days as "the solution" to the challenge posed by global climate change because of this very phenomenon; as energy sources become more scarce, the efficiency of densely populated cities becomes the most viable way for developed nations to maintain a high standard of living while simultaneously reducing energy usage.

A recent article by Thomas Friedman gave me pause because of its implications for the scarcity of energy. Two weeks ago, Friedman wrote about a laboratory in the Bay Area that is optimistic about its ability to make cold fusion power a reality within the next decade. This claim has, of course, been made before, and as Friedman quips, such revolutionary technologies tend to be "20 years away and always will be." The successful commercialization of cold fusion would, at least in theory, solve the problem of the scarcity of energy once and for all; assuming that it were actually only ten years away, what would this mean for cities? How would patterns of urbanization change if energy were not an issue?

On the one hand, an endless supply of cheap, safe, clean energy would make currently-cost-prohibitive technologies like mag-lev trains and supertall skystrapers (we're talking about the kind of buildings that would make the Emirates blush) much more feasible. Mag-lev trains, in particular, would present an interesting challenge to cities by opening up an even more vast range of the exurban hinterlands to development. With the density-related benefits of energy rendered moot, how would urbanists need to re-think their arguments in favor of high-density urban cores?

On the other hand, it could be argued that the end of energy scarcity would make developed world-conditions in currently-developing countries much, much easier to achieve. This would be a massive economic boon to lower-income and impoverished people around the world, freeing up people previously locked into cycles with few or no opportunities for advancement, greatly accelerating the growth of the Creative Class across the globe. Innovation-intensive fields tend to encourage clustering, as Richard Florida has argued so thoroughly in his books, meaning that a massive shift like the advent of cold fusion power might actually be a boon to urbanism.

Whether or not cold fusion is possible within the foreseeable future, the idea that it is challenges some of the most basic tenets of urbanist thought. What might we learn about how contemporary cities work if we were to give such a seismic technological shift some serious thought? What value does the scarcity of energy -- or any resource -- have for cities?


(Photos from Where@FFFFOUND!. The originals can be viewed by clicking the photos.)

Chicago: Creative Capital?

Fast Company's Fast Cities 2008 list (which is about a thousand times more coherent than last year's) came with a delightful cherry on top for this blogger, as it named Chicago the "Creative Capital of the Universe." Being from Milwaukee (Chicago's little brother to the north) and currently residing in the Windy City, I found this exciting news; Chicago has long suffered from what you might call Second City Syndrome, always trying to get out from under New York's shadow. (For the record: we don't really think of Los Angeles as a real place, so we're still #2).

All About Cities' Wendy Waters wrote a post tonight questioning whether or not the title was quite accurate; indeed, her assessment of the title's pithy, attention-grabbing nature is right on: it would be boring to read another article about New York or San Francisco being the most creative. But there's more merit to the title than you might think if yer not from 'round these parts.

I'll turn to Paul Graham's recent essay, "Cities and Ambition," for my defense. In his highly enjoyable piece, Graham asserts that cities that act as hubs of ambition have a way of communicating with people; New York says to its residents, "You should make more money;" Silicon Valley says "You should be more powerful;" Cambridge says "You should read all of those books you've been meaning to read." Chicago is most certainly an ambitions place -- it's the Emerald City of the Midwest, the Mount Olympus of Flyover Country. All (rail)roads lead here, so to speak. But after reading Graham's essay, I had trouble picking out exactly what Chicago was saying through its citizens' ambition.

"Creative Capital of the Universe" hit me like a brick in the face. Of course! Chicago says to its citizens, "You should be more interesting." The city is a domestic melting pot, pooling people from a region that is typically overlooked and underappreciated. We of the rust belt and great plains cities flock to Chicago to prove ourselves. Chicago's Second City Syndrome is a great asset; a city that is constantly trying to prove itself, after all, demands that its citizens do the same. And because of the slight sense of inferiority, Chicago is less pretentious than other global hubs like New York, London, or San Francisco. That lack of pretention has the power to erode fear of the unknown; Chicago has always understood that, to make big headlines, you need to take big risks.

In a world as spiky and competitive as the one that we live in today, it's pretty much impossible to claim that one city can claim to be the creative capital. But in terms of big headlines, Chicago seems to have inspired exactly what it was hoping: controversy. Screw being rational. Be more interesting.

(Photo from Flickr user kellyhafermann. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
US City of the Year: Chicago (Fast Company)

Chicago: Creative Capital of the Universe? (All About Cities)

Cities and Ambition

Where Joins Brazen Careerist

It's been in the works for the past few months, and today BrazenCareerist.com finally went live. Where is proud to have been invited to be one of the 50+ blogs included in the launch of this new site, a Gen Y-focused career advice aggregator from internet freelancer extraordinaire Penelope Trunk and Employee Evolution founders, Ryans Healy and Paugh.

Where might seem, at first, like an odd choice to be included in a career advice site...this was acknowledged by both the BC team and myself at the outset. However, this blog was selected as an example of a young professional (ahem) using blogging as a tool to begin building a career and a professional identity within a specific field. w00t!

Congrats to the Brazen Careerist team for today's launch. Show your support, friends and neighbors. Click the above image or the BC logo on the sidebar and check out the fancy new digs!

In related news, the end of this blogger's Americorps service year is fast approaching and my job search is officially on, so if anyone's looking to hire a good urbanist come mid-April, shoot me an email. ;-)


Links:
BrazenCareerist.com

Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist

Employee Evolution

WEEKEND READING: February 9-15, 2008

Good stuff, good stuff, good stuff. Enjoy some reading this weekend, folks. There's something here for everyone...

ITEM ONE: Deputydog explores Portland's Dignity Village, the "most organized shanty town on earth."

ITEM TWO: Creative class guru Richard Florida, MIT Department of Architecture head Yung Ho Chang, and Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybek are just a few of the experts to which Architect Magazine posed the question: "How Would You Spend $1.6 Trillion on Infrastructure in the US?"

ITEM THREE: A pleasingly astute assesment of the Gentrifyer's Guilt from the blog Believe in the Greatest City that Reads in America (which is Baltimore, apparently).

ITEM FOUR: Landscape Urbanism with a great (and well-illustrated) profile of Jean Nouvel as part of the Veg.itect series. (Also check out this review of the Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes exhibit, which opened this week in Minneapolis). (Photo credit)

ITEM FIVE: WorldChanging on how peak population -- and the inevitable decline to follow -- should frame the current discussion of susatinability.

ITEM SIX: Guest blogger Dave Atkins reviews Suburban Transformations over at All About Cities. Where featured a review of this book last month, and if you missed that, make sure to check out Mr. Atkins' post.

ITEM SEVEN: In case you missed it, Science just put out a special issue focusing on cities and the "urban planet" phenom.

See you Sunday for Urbanffffinds!

WEEKEND READING: January 19-25, 2008

Another really great crop for Weekend Reading this Friday. We're going all over the web this week...make sure you set aside some time to browse.

ITEM ONE: TNAC's Hayley Richardson on Richard Florida and the Creative Class (And Florida's response).

ITEM TWO: Nifty blog about architecture and urban planning in the Ugandan capital, Kampala (via Global Voices Online).

ITEM THREE: Ever tried traversing every block of every street in your city? Bill McGraw of the Detroit Free Press has, and now his findings are online.

ITEM FOUR: This one's not so much about the reading as it is the watching -- a mind-blowing clip of software that builds automatic online cities.

ITEM FIVE: Bill Gates calls for a "creative capitalism." (Where is published on a Mac, but this blogger does admire Mr. Gates' social ingenuity).

ITEM SIX: WorldChanging goes head-to-head with the pro-car crowd, breaking down how cars aren't just killing the natural environment, but the built as well.

ITEM SEVEN: The curiously named blog List of Dorms ruminates on the suburbanization of urban cores, with Chicago as a brief case study. (This looks like a blog to watch...)

ITEM EIGHT: One more for the road -- City of Sound provides this well-illustrated update on its World's Best Urban Places & Spaces project.

Sheesh...if the urbanism web keeps up at this speed, the eighth item might become a standard feature! Have a gerat weekend.

(Photo from Flickr user pinehurst19475. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Chicago vs. Pittsburgh: Conclusion

Tonight's post is the last of three in a blogging debate, in which Jim Russell of The Burgh Diaspora, who guest posted at Where last month, and I will discuss the relationship between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and which city relies more heavily on the other.

After Monday and Tuesday's conversation between Where and The Burgh Diaspora, Richard Florida became an impromptu (but welcome) third party to the debate; responding to my conjecture from yesterday and Dr. Florida's musings on Chicago's inherent geographical disadvantages in the globalized marketplace, Jim Russell came up with the following nugget of vocabularial wonder:

"Pittsburgh's bet on Chicago might be a bad one. The network economy springing from the migration of human capital could result in a cul-de-sac for global connectivity...both cities should seek to diversify their connectivity portfolios. No city is a standalone cash cow. Chicago is not a world onto Pittsburgh, nor should it be." (Emphasis added)

Tonight, we wrap up the "blog duel" with some conclusions; what have we learned from this exchange?

The concept of the "cul-de-sac for global connectivity" strikes me as a key takeaway here. The world has always, to some extent, operated regionally. The size of the regions that we are expected to follow and respond to has changed dramatically over the course of human history; where mankind's regional interests were once tied directly to the changing seasons and animal migration patterns, we now take in news at all times from across the globe. We belong to multiple tribes that move in different directions, at different speeds. We follow our neighborhood, our state or territory, our country, and our specialized circles of interest around the world.

But as cities become more closely woven through globalization, it is regionalism that becomes a threat to places like Chicago. I found Dr. Florida's suggestion that Chicago maintains no global geographic advantage particularly interesting because that very point highlights the exact problem posed by the rise of the global city: it has become very easy, in contemporary culture, to assume the inevitability of places like Chicago, which have in fact gained their prominence for very regional reasons. The loss of importance of physical regions and the diminished need for literal proximity represent a very basic but worldview-altering paradigm shift; Chicago is important in terms of American and especially Midwestern economics -- it rose as the transportation and distribution hub of the country -- but without increased efforts toward economic and connectivity diversity, it might just wind up as the Pittsburgh of the global megacity hierarchy.

Thanks again to Jim Russell for proposing this week's debate. Make sure to check out The Burgh Diaspora -- a must not just for Pittsburghers, but for anyone interested in learning more about diasporic networks in the global urban age.

(Photo found on FFFFOUND!. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Chi-Pitts Globalization (The Burgh Diaspora)

Chi-Pitts, or Vice-versa (Richard Florida and the Creative Class Exchange)

Diasporas, In and Out (Richard Florida and the Creative Class Exchange)

Chicago vs. Pittsburgh: Round 2

Tonight's post is the second of three in a blogging debate, in which Jim Russell of The Burgh Diaspora, who guest posted at Where last month, and I will discuss the relationship between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and which city relies more heavily on the other.

Yesterday and today, in arguing Pittsburgh's heavier reliance on Chicago, The Burgh Diaspora made the following points:

(1) "Pittsburghers are using their extended network and doing all the heavy lifting concerning the connectivity between the two cities. On the other hand, I suspect that a Chicago located firm looking for opportunity discovers Pittsburgh through Pittsburghers, not via transplants to the City of Bridges."

(2) "Chicago needs the talent developed in Pittsburgh...However, Chicago is also an impressive producer of human capital. If Chicago retained all of its local graduates, then would the city need Pittsburgh at all? Like Pittsburgh, Chicago's research universities are world class. Furthermore, Chicago attracts global human capital in ways Pittsburgh has not...Chicago does not actively seek Pittsburgh talent, but Pittsburghers still move there as a result of established migration patterns[.]"

But these two passages, when read together, play off each other in a way that suggests that Chicago's reliance on Pittsburgh and other domestic second-tier cities plays a very major role in Chicago's establishing itself as a global city in the first place.

Let's start by looking at the second statement. Assuming that it were able to retain the talent developed at universities like U of Chicago, Northwestern, Loyola, and UIC, Chicago would indeed be sitting pretty. So would Pittsburgh, if it were able to retail all of the graduates of Pitt, CMU, and Duquense. This is, especially in a fluid global economy, impossible. As sociologists have recently documented, a new phase is being added to the life cycle for young people in developed countries: the odyssey. Young people have a tendency, once they have their diploma in hand, to strike out into the world, seeking their proverbial fortunes.

This creates a diasporic network of people across the country and the world with strong roots in a community other than they one in which they are living. As its title suggests, this is exactly what The Burgh Diaspora covers in depth: Pittsburgh's diasporic population, often considered to be one of the most extensive such networks. This is where cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, traditionally viewed as demographic "losers," gain a foothold. As the process of globalization continues to make centralization less of a necessity and more of a luxury, second-tier cities not only provide the cheaper business climate than their megacity counterparts (though, ironically, Pittsburgh is currently burdened by byzantine economic policies), they also become the default choice for smaller start-ups, making second-tier cities even more important incubators for the kind of talent needed to keep a megacity economy chugging along.

Back to the first of Burgh Diaspora's points: Pittsburgh's network, now, provides it with a unique opportunity to lift smaller businesses looking for a less overwhelming (read: risky) market in which to develop their product. Pittsburgh is able, through its extended diasporic network in Chicago, to earn free word-of-mouth advertising from its expatriate sons and daughters that could potentially drive these smaller companies east to the Appalachians. In the end, the Pittsburgh market is not as important to Chicago companies as the Chicago market is to Pittsburgh companies; I'll concede this. But in a global marketplace, Chicago's larger companies do need Pittsburgh's smaller ones to stay ahead of the international competition.

(Photo from Flickr user scoobyfoo. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
IntoPittsburgh: Chicago (The Burgh Diaspora)

IntoPittsburgh: Chicago II (The Burgh Diaspora)

Chicago vs. Pittsburgh: Round 1

Tonight's post is the first of three in a blogging debate, in which Jim Russell of The Burgh Diaspora, who guest posted at Where last month, and I will discuss the relationship between Pittsburgh and Chicago, and which city relies more heavily on the other.

Nowadays, anyone following urbanism, economics, public policy, or related fields will have certainly heard of the theory that we are entering into an age of global urbanism where cities all over the world will be competing directly with each other for talent. Talent, we are told, will be more and more valuable as society becomes more technologically advanced, shifting even more heavily toward an international information economy. What you know, essentially, will become what you're worth. In this economic environment, megacities like Chicago will no longer merely be competing with New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco for talent; soon (already, many would say) Chicago will have to go head to head with London, Paris, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Mumbai, Tokyo, Shanghai, Sydney, and on and on.

This is a fairly logical progression of events. The major city has always acted as a magnet throughout its history in human civilization. People come to the city to get a job, to prove themselves, to make their fortune. The individual reasons are myriad, but the inspiration is the same: people come to the city to improve their quality of life. It doesn't always work out that way, but that's the basic impetus. Chicago, then, has long needed Pittsburgh -- and other cities like it -- to sustain itself. The larger the city, the more daunting it is to dream-chasers and immigrants. Medium-sized cities, then, are a prime source of population for larger cities.

Without Pittsburgh, in the literal sense, Chicago would not crumble and blow away; to think so would be naive. But Pittsburgh is a part of a group of cities that, together, have allowed Chicago to experience its recent -- and rather stunning -- revival over the past two decades. As post-industrial Western megacities like Chicago, New York, or London began to try to pick themselves up after losing manufacturing jobs in the 1970s and 80s, they began to rely on what you could call innovation-intensive fields like biomedicine, design, information technology, and (of course) the arts. These are highly specialized fields, and ones that many traditional middle class workers were not trained or educated to particpate in. Megacities, then, needed to draw in new talent from surrounding smaller cities.

Here's where Pittsburgh gets the upper hand over Chicago. As a mid-sized city, Pittsburgh is large enough to provide a genuinely urban lifestyle while not overwhelming the newcomer. As a bonus, the city also happens to be an important center of higher education, with two of the nation's best colleges (U of Pitt and Carnegie-Mellon) located in the Oakland neighborhood of the city. Generationally speaking, this works in the city's favor because it becomes an excellent place for people to move from a smaller city to start a family, where the parents can take advantage of the lower cost of living and provide for their kids, who can then more easily take advantage of nearby educational resources. Pittsburgh is, for all intents and purposes, a creative class factory.

This happens around the country. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Saint Louis -- all of these mid-sized cities have traditionally fed job-seekers into Chicago. Today, the competition is national, and Chicago draws more than ever from Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Birmingham, San Diego, Denver, et. al. As the stakes are raised in coming decades, Bordeaux, Liverpool, Fortaleza, Adelaide, Fukuoka, Busan, Medellin, and Alexandria will all enter the mix. And not in the sense of traditional immigration, which creates ethnic communities, but in the sense of global creative class migration, which could create massive gentrified (or at least economically stable), internationally diverse areas in cities around the world.

Western society already operates as a sort of imperfect meritocracy. As this becomes more true, Chicago will need places like Pittsburgh more and more as it works to maintain and build its competitive creative core. Pittsburghers have the option to stay put; Chicago needs to convince them not to. It has to prove, however possible, that it can provide a better life. The burden lies with larger city.

(Photo from Flickr user -Nicole-. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
The Burgh Diaspora

WEEKEND READING: November 16-November 30, 2007 (Guest Post by Colin Kloecker)

Fair warning: this installation of Weekend Reading is kind of one huge shameless plug for a project I'm involved with called Solutions Twin Cities.

The project was born out of what I think is a very common frustration in our hyper connected online world: we have so much access to great work being done all around the world that it is easy to loose sight of the great work happening right in our own backyards. Being junkies of great websites like WorldChanging, TED Talks, Inhabitat, and others – we were constantly inundated with inspiring projects, but living smack in the middle portion of the United States, we hardly ever had a personal connection to them. This made us sad.

So after one too many alcohol induced pity fests, we decided to do something about that. We set out to find our very own world-changing neighbors and figure out how to celebrate their work while connecting them to other people yearning for a more personal connection to their sources of inspiration. The event we created takes inspiration itself from the Pecha Kucha model: short presentations (each under 7 minutes) comprised of both visual and spoken input. We put together each show with an eye towards conveying the full spectrum of projects happening in the Twin Cities and as you'll see below, it's all about diversity. We throw in live music, good food, and cheap drinks and… well, people show up, over 300 at our last event.

So this is the meat and potatoes of this weeks WR. I'd like to introduce you to some of my neighbors:

ITEM ONE: Ramy Selim just opened Minneapolis' first one stop eco-shop, Sunny Day Earth Solutions. More then just selling eco-friendly home products, Ramy is the guy to go to if you want the dirt on photovoltaic panels, solar water heaters, straw-bale construction, and bio-diesel auto conversions. See video here.

ITEM TWO: Chuck Olson and The Uptake are enabling citizen journalists nation-wide to better cover the stories that are meaningful to them. Their next project? Putting 100 citizen journalists with video cameras on the streets of downtown St. Paul for 2008's RNC Convention.

ITEM THREE: Chris Wegscheid and Corrie Zoll started RoofBloom with the simple goal of bringing green roofs to the Twin Cities en mass. Rather then encouraging consumption of any particular commercial green roof system, they empower individuals with the knowledge and materials needed to install green roofs themselves. See their presentation here.

ITEM FOUR: Stephanie and Kelly Kinnunen sold all of their possessions and invested their lives in the creation of NEED Magazine. With smart design and beautiful photography, NEED Magazine showcases the work of humanitarian organizations around the world and provides readers with the information needed to get involved and make a difference. They also just got hugged by Bill Clinton. See their presentation here.

ITEM FIVE: Jennifer and Jessica own the Smitten Kitten, a feminist sex toy boutique in Minneapolis. They also started the Coalition Against Toxic Toys (click to find out why they heart Arnold Schwarzenegger), because if we really care about what we put into our bodies, why should sex toys, a notoriously dirty industry, be any different?

ITEM SIX: Arlene Birt is a young graphic designer whose Background Stories project might just revolutionize the way socially and environmentally conscious companies package and market their products.

ITEM SEVEN: Christian Trifilio & Jacqui Belleau work for the industrial design firm Worrell, Inc. A connection made through NEED Magazaine led them to FilmAid International and a very cool collaborative project designing a mobile movie theater for refugees. This project was a 100% volunteer effort. See their presentation here.

ITEM EIGHT: Cathy Ten Broeke is the Coordinator to End Homelessness in Hennepin County and the city of Minneapolis. She is spearheading a fresh, solutions based movement to end homelessness in the county within the next 10 years. See her presentation here.

So who are your neighbors? When was the last time you were inspired by somebody face to face, did you get to meet them? Solutions Twin Cities is looking for partners to help spread the event to other cities around the world. Please don’t hesitate to email us if you’re interested. And please check out our website for more on Solutions Twin Cites and to watch more videos from our first event last May.

Thanks for reading, and Happy Friday!

Five Innovation Myths Applied to Urbanism

A recent CEOs for Cities post pointed out a great article by Dev Patnaik that outlined five common mistakes made by businesses looking to be innovators. All of them, in one way or another, dealt with the myth of the silver bullet, and the article made a clear and concise argument for the importance of institutional context and diversified methodology. The myths that Patnaik does away with are all important for urbanists to consider as cities work to position themselves as both innovative places and as incubators of economic and technological innovation. On top of that, responding to context (cities each have very different conditions, physically and economically) and diversification (urban problems are both numerous and intrinsically interconnected, and there is no one solution to anything) are particularly applicable. The following is a breakdown, in urbanism terminology, of Patnaik's ideas.

• Over-reliance on high-profile, "sexy" projects

The Guggenheim Bilbao made just as big a splash in the fields of urban planning and policy as it did in architecture. Now, it's a commonly-held belief that cities can build megaprojects that will catapult them into the international spotlight and trigger a surge of prosperity. In reality, even when such projects are independently successful they are never the silver bullet that was imagined. Chicago's Millennium Park, for example, is by all accounts a huge success as a public space and tourist attraction. Still, it was a financial fiasco, and the glamour and goodwill afforded the city by the park is now being squandered by the miserable failure of the city's transit system -- a battle in which the City of Chicago is too strapped to play any meaningful role. Big projects can be important to cities, but it's even more important to pay close attention to what trade-offs will need to be made in terms of basic services (transit ain't the only thing hurtin' in Chicago) in order to pull off a good piece of stunt urbanism. Millennium Park is an innovative piece of landscape architecture, but as an urban regenerator it's as archaic as they come.

• Unhealthy fascination with unique, charismatic civic leaders

Michael Bloomberg, Gavin Newsome, and Ken Livingstone all command a considerable amount of media attention for their efforts to improve their cities. This innovation red herring is especially potent in urbanism: everyone loves a superstar mayor. And while these mayors can teach us a lot, it is important to remember that the best and most innovative mayors from the past (Jaime Lerner is a prime example) were willing to take risks; that is to say that great mayors have often made names for themselves by bucking trends and trying new ideas that were responsive to their specific cities rather than following standard procedures being replicated, cut-and-paste style, in other cities.

• Misapplication of other cities' approaches

Building on the previous point, it is often assumed that because Idea X worked in City Y, it will be equally successful in City Z. This is absurd. Take, for instance, the public transportation system in Medellín. The city's 3.2 million inhabitants live in a long, narrow valley. While the central part of the city, located in the lowest and flattest part of the valley, is served by a standard subway system, the densely populated neighborhoods that climb up the western hillsides are served by the Metrocable, a cable-car line that has become very successful both as a transit line and -- to the delight of city officials -- a tourist attraction that has helped (along with other projects) to lower crime and improve the economic outlook for the neighborhood's poorer residents. The lesson to be learned here for other cities is that unconventional transit options can be worth the risk if they are properly tailored to the needs of the community. The misapplication of this lesson would be for a flat city to assume that building a cable car would be a good idea since it worked in Medellín. This is a relatively simple illustration, but you get the idea.

• Descent into a cycle of self-recrimination

Pittsburgh, the oddball city so dear to my own heart, is the poster child for this kind of thinking. Many Pittsburghers labor under the assumption that their city is suffering because it is unable to hold onto the talented young people who graduate from major universities in the area like the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University. (In fact, Pittsburgh has an unusually high rate of retention of its young natives). Pittsburghers see Creative Class capitals like San Francisco and Austin attracting large numbers of young creative types and makes the assumption that it is not cool enough to compete. Untold energy is put into trying to make the city cooler and more attractive to young people. Meanwhile, the draconian tax system that discourages start-ups (the number that exist regardless of this fact is a testament to the city's unrealized potential) go unchanged because Pittsburgh fails to realize that music festivals and extensive bike paths aren't going to save the city. The Burgh was a global hub of commercial and technological innovation at the turn of the 19th century. To be successful today, all cities (Pittsburgh included) would do well to look back at their strongest points and learn how to replicate that kind of success.

• Resignation to superficial changes

Patnaik uses the example "Let's just paint the walls purple" to mock companies' shallow understanding of the funky interiors of creative business HQs -- most famously, the Googleplex. Cities have a long and storied history of believing in the power of cosmetic changes only to be let down by the results. A phenomenon that you might call Trinket Urbanism had a death grip on North American cities until relatively recently as every city rushed to have their version of one-off amenities built in other cities. Baltimore's Festival Harbor spawned a gazillion of those so-called "Festival Marketplaces." Arenas were all the rage throughout much of the 1990s. Making a city more attractive is certainly not a bad idea, but there is a dangerous perceived correlation between beautification and prosperity. Flowering medians do not a center of innovation make.

(Photo from Flickr user emsef. The original full-color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)


Links:
Innovation Mistakes (CEOs for Cities)

Five Common Mistakes in Innovation (Business Week)

WEEKEND READING: October 20-26, 2007

No good news on the laptop front...the machine is very dead, but whether the files on the hard drive are salvagable or not is a mystery until next week. In the meantime...

ITEM ONE: Built Environment Blog chimes in on the Atlantic Yards megadevelopment in New York with a brief history of the Superblock.

ITEM TWO: The Map Room features João Machado’s colorful map creations.

ITEM THREE: The Affordable Housing Institute highlights a series of articles from the Times of India that illustrate how myriad urban problems in Mumbai are interrelated.

ITEM FOUR: Does Big Development kill the American Dream? The American thinks so (and I agree!).

ITEM FIVE: Richard Florida's new report (with Tim Gullden and Charlotta Mellander), The Rise of the Megaregion, presents us with a whole slew of new opportunities for "BosWash"-esque portmanteaus -- and some kickass demographic images like the one at the top of this post.

Have a great weekend, everyone! Hopefully I'll be able to get my paws on a laptop for Urbanffffinds on Sunday.

(Re)Building Intellectual Infrastructure

Richard Florida, Dr. Creative Class himself, spent a good deal of time in a post today on his blog responding to some of the concerns raised in yesterday's Where post on questioning the logic of the CC. I'll admit that I haven't yet read Rise of the Creative Class (yesterday's post was about the phenomenon, not specificlly the book that started it), so reading his thoughts taught me a lot that I didn't know about his argument. As it turns out, I agree with him on more than I had originally thought. From Dr. Florida's post:

"My bottom line is that every human being is creative. And the creativity cannot be forced into the social categories we have imposed on ourselves...The real task is to build pathways to a creative society in which all can contribute and be rewarded [and] in which all engage their creativity at a much fuller level, thereby contributing to economic growth...The key to the future will be to extend the creative force into the service and manufacturing economies - across all segments of the population. The logic of the creative economy is such that the further development of the economy requires the further development of human creative capabilities. We need to shift from a creative economy and a creative class to much fuller and broader creative communities and a creative society."

This plays directly into the follow-up I had planned to last night's post. If cities hope to strengthen the creativity of their citizens in order to secure their economic futures, the officials holding the purse strings need to realize that coffee shops and bike paths aren't going to cut it -- they're the icing, not the cake. As illustrated in the Slate article referrenced yesterday, the creative class will seek out existing creative societies. Cities looking to invest in their creative infrastructure, then, should focus on building up the skills of those who already live there instead of looking to bring new folks in. To paraphrase City Comforts, brilliance innovates, genius follows.

Cities looking to build a creative populace can do so if they are willing to invest in what we'll call their intellectual infrastructure. Civic leaders' first step here would be to create the strongest school system possible -- a major responsibility that many cities illogically refuse to take seriously. That sadly overpoliticized issue aside, cities must find innovative ways to encourage their citizens to develop their own creative skills. It's time that politicians stop looking at citizens as "constituents" (read: votes) and start seeing them as what they are: the city's greatest assets.

In a recent post at atlas(t)'s Galleon Trade Edition, blogger Claire Light waxed nostalgic about the proverbial days of yore: "Once upon a time, before art was professionalized (insofar as people are willing to pay artists, that is to say) folks stayed at home a lot and made art themselves. Every middle class home had a piano, every working class one a fiddle, or a jew's harp. Young ladies drew each other for sport. Young men drooped from the forks of tree branches shouting, 'Beauty!' Jigs were danced, and danced well, on homemade wooden heels, family theatricals taught children the fine art of crying at will, [and] a blank wall was excuse enough for interpretive dance..."

As Dr. Florida (and several readers who commented on yesterday's post) pointed out, creativity is about a lot more than what we traditionally think of as the arts. Creativity and innovation, especially in terms of economics, must be valued in all fields and industries. What the atlas(t) post illustrates particularly well is the way that art used to be intregrated into society; these kinds of activities were much more accessible to the general public. Art-for-fun had no social stigma; it was just something that everyone did. In this way, artistic endeavors served as both social activities and intellectual stimulation. When you gathered around a piano and sang songs with your friends, you got some beneficial social juju and you gave your brain a workout. While you may not have been able to use your piano-playing skills or your ability to sing a high G at work the next day, your musical exploits sent you to the office or the factory with a fresh and slightly-stretched mind.

So what policies or public projects could a city undertake to try to rebuild this kind of intellectual infrastructure that makes creativity a common civic value? One idea comes from a recent airoots post (them again!) about a kind of dwelling in the Dharavi area -- best known as Asia's largest slum -- in Mumbai known as the "tool-house." When is a house a tool-house? "When every wall, nook and corner becomes an extension of the tools of the trade of its inhabitant. When the furnace and the cooking hearth exchange roles and when sleeping competes with warehouse space. A cluster of tool-houses makes for a thriving workshop-neighbourhood and its public spaces emerge as a dynamic by-product of such an auto-organized habitat."

To attempt the transformation of a contemporary Western (or Westernized) city into a tool-house city would be both disingenuous and impossible. What we can learn from these places is a social principle, not a building practice. Tool-house cities are innovative by necessity, but they illustrate "the relationship between production, livelihood and spaces." This relationship is vital to creative cities, where production -- not consumption -- is the primary economic mode of the citizen (think "prosumer").

Cities, then, should invest in projects and policies that reinforce the production-livelihood-space relationship and encourage citizens to apply the skills that they learn on the job to the world around them in new ways. Citizens should also be encouraged by civic leaders to build off-the-job skills as well, as these can also be applied to urban problems and will likely be more potent and flexible when combined with work-related knowledge.

But what, physically, might this kind of thing look like? Perhaps cities could organize and/or facilitate neighborhood skill-shares or tool-sharing programs, sponsor a job-shadow program for adults, or subsidize classes that could teach arts and trade-related job skills (how about a graffiti club that teaches teens masonry skills so that they can learn to build walls to paint on -- and how to clean them off) There are ten times as many solutions as there are problems. Any ideas?

(Photo from Flickr users pbo31 and Soumik.)


Links:
Creative Class Debates (Creative Class Group)

Manalo Juan (atlas(t) Galleon Trade Edition)

Urban Fictions: The Toolhouse (airoots)

Questioning the Creative Class Logic

Sometimes I can't help but wonder if maybe the whole Creative Class phenomenon is doing more to harm cities than it does to help them. Not in all cases, of course...certainly many cities are benfitting from the investment in their artistic and recreational infrastructure. But the primary purpose of a city is to provide high-quality services to all of its citizens, and at times it seems like this responsibility falls by the wayside as civic governments try to focus on building Creative Class-friendly amenities.

Gentrification happens because neighborhoods throughout a given city are unequally supported. And while this isn't the fault of the Creative Classmates, they appear to be exacerbating the problem by attracting a disproportionate amount of attention -- and funding -- from mayors who think of their presence as a silver bullet. With rich creative people comes an increased tax base, and with an increased tax base, more problems can be solved in less privileged areas, right?

Portland, Oregon, is seen as one of the capitals of the Creative Class. The city's arts and cultural scenes are thriving, with artists flocking to the once-granola metropolis to be a part of the scene. As a recent article in Slate pointed out, "it's rare to meet a young, creative Portlander who's from Portland." Its success in drawing talent from other cities is, in fact, one of the reasons that Portland is held up as model of the Creative Class metropolis. The CC is all about migration, after all; it could not exist without the internet, which allows for artists to live in cheaper cities while still participating in the larger artistic fields in which they are interested and/or employed.

Jump to the other side of both the country and the spectrum, to New York City. Manhattan and Brooklyn (and, to some extent, Queens) have become inordinately expensive. The city -- or The City, with caps, as it's known Stateside -- has become what airoots recently described as "a networking platform and marketplace for established creative people from all around the world, [but not] much of a place for emerging artistic production within the city." NYC is a popular city with the Creative Class as well; in fact, it is the sun to their universe, around which all things (in some way) orbit. In effect, New York has become the City of Art, while the artists have fled to the hinterland.

But what has made Portland -- or Boston, or Boise for that matter -- a hub of activity for those who have fled New York's rising rents? One of the things that a large chunk of the Creative Class' centers of production share is a strong public services network that pre-dates the city's popularity. They are cities with well-maintained parks, strong transit systems, and clean and affordable utilities (water, electricity, etc.) Cheap space must be available -- again from airoots, the new creative cities "are open and messy enough to provide artists with interstitial spaces they can takeover and make their own."

Walkability, density, urban character -- all of these things are supposedly important to the Creative Class. Yet there are cities much closer to New York (aka the Center) than Portland that offer all of these things in larger helpings yet have failed to tap into the Creative Class boom as effectively as the Rose City. To name a few: Philly (which is starting to benefit from NY's overflow but is still limping considerably), Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Richmond. It seems to me that the advantage that Portland had over these places was strong, well-maintained infrastructure. After all, if you don't want to live in New York but you can live pretty much anywhere else, you're going to choose a city that can provide you with the most comfortable life with the lowest amount of stress.

Milwaukee is a perfect illustration of the benefits of maintaining strong basic urban infrastructure -- and what happens when that maintenance falls by the wayside. The city managed, against all odds, to remain in the black into the 1930s while other cities across the US struggled with the Great Depression. This was largely due to the civic integrity of the city government (socialists, for the record) and the fact that they had not been extravagant in their spending during the Roaring Twenties. Milwaukee eventually suffered from the depression like the rest of the country, but anyone who has followed the history of the Midwest can tell you that the Brew City never suffered the kinds of blows sustained (or not) by Saint Louis, Detroit, and Cleveland. After the depression passed, the industrial city roared, and its services remained strong and well-maintained until the 1980s. Slowly over the past twenty-five years, the city and county have been chipping away at Milwaukee's utilities, infrastructure, and once-legendary bus and parks systems. Even with the Creative Class leading a renaissance in parts of the city, crime is at an all-time high and the racial segregation is some of the worst in the nation.

The importance of creativity in the modern economy is nothing to sneeze at. While basic services are something that cities need to focus more heavily on, it is important that they bolster the creativity of their populace. But it seems to me that spending city funds on cultural amenities, building artist housing, and hosting snazzy (and pricey) festivals might not be the best way to go about incubating a culture of innovation and artistic aspiration. If anything, they seem likely to create a dangerous "us and them" tension between the Creative Class and their fellow city-dwellers. In a way, this could even be seen as the institutionalization of the overprofessionalization of art.

So how can cities create a dynamic, creative culture without overreaching? I have some ideas, but this post is starting to get long, so I'll save them for tomorrow.

(Photos from Flickr users gonebiking and Digital Trav.)


Links:
The Indie City (Slate) (via Brand Avenue)

New York Rollercoaster City (airoots)

Urban Fictions: The Toolhouse (airoots)

WEEKEND READING: April 7-13, 2007

I read a lot of stuff, okay? And until I started Where, I never understood why so many of the blogs that I read every day put up those weekly link pages. I always thought it was lazy. Now I know better.

There is just too much going on in the wide world of placemaking, so I'm going to start putting up links to what I don't get around to discussing during the week. Hopefully you'll find these lists, which will appear on Friday or Saturday, useful for those lazy weekend afternoons when you have nothing to do but sit around and read articles on the internet. You know those afternoons. Sure you do.

Springwise, Trendwatching.com's blog, had an article on a new service in San Francisco that's easily adaptable for any city--a green version of those coupon books every city's tourism department puts out. This fantastic resource for San Franciscans (The Green Zebra Guide) has the dual purpose of making life easier (and a little cheaper) for people who've already made the decision to "go green," as well as encouraging the decision in other people by making the transition less daunting. Check out the guide at www.thegreenzebra.org.

Much noise has been made about the Creative Class since Richard Florida hit the scene a few years ago with his theories about the modern boho crowd. Now, while he draws up pretty (and mildly offensive, in a weird way) charts that show how gay people affect real estate values, some people are actually trying to figure out how to use the internet to turn creativity into a real asset instead of a tool for gentrification. CEOs for Cities announced a new study with Charles Leadbeater on Tuesday, which you can read about here.

Speaking of creativity, the New York Post brings us a story about some art students who turned an MTA train car into a cozy living room, complete with welcome mats. As is often true about places, it's most interesting to read peoples' reactions, which include this comment "This is criminal...It may be beautiful, but that's not the issue. They are obstructing the subway." Iiiiinteresting...

BLDGBLOG brings us this blurb about plant life on other planets. It's nothing I'll ramble about...it's just really freakin cool.

As you may remember, I'm not such an optimist about congestion pricing. The other four transit concepts presented in this article on decongestion over at Good Magazine are pretty interesting, though. I love seeing Curitiba continue to gain more attention for it's brilliant and innovative BRT system (which I think would work particularly well in American cities, which have ample road infrastructure.) The Naked Streets concept is new to me...it seems pretty innovative, too. (The image above came from this article, for the record.)

To bring this list full-circle, "going green" seems to have really, truly gone mainstream in the States. Over the past few weeks I must have read that slogan a hundred times, in publications as diverse as an independent Atlanta weekly (can't recall the name) and Vanity Fair. Interchange has a post about smart growth and urban placemaking very quietly hitting the mainstream as well. It's short and sweet, and while I think that there's still a ways to go in getting the average American to give up their sacred fear of urbanity, it does seem like we're hitting a sort of critical mass.

There are also a few new links up on the Otros Blogos side bar, including Pruned, Inhabitat, and things magazine (all of which I discovered while reading Geoff Manaugh's profile at BLDGBLOG for the first time.) I'm eventually going to get around to creating a list of websites as well, so if there are any kickass suggestions drop me an email or comment on this post.