WEEKEND READING: June 4-10, 2011

Sylvan Terrace, one of my favorite sites of "urban delight" in Manhattan

This week was like a big traffic jam of awesome in the urban-o-sphere. No time for dithering introductions, on to the good stuff.

ITEM ONE: David Roberts wraps up his five-part series on great places at Grist with a post on urban delight, taking time to note both the suburbs' relative inadequacy in this realm and Bjarke Ingels' unstoppable charge toward architectural legend.

ITEM TWO: The tenth issue of MAS Context takes on the meaty subject of Conflict in urban environments.

ITEM THREE: Speaking of conflict, Maisonneuve looks at the violence in many video games and wonders whether urban AR gaming might make for more dangerous cities (thanks to an Anonymous commenter for sharing this link on Wednesday's post!)

ITEM FOUR: Meanwhile, SimCity creator Will Wright shares his insights about the relationship between playing and learning, and how about people actually engage with video games (nutshell: the violence a'int so bad, folks).

ITEM FIVE: Nicolas Nova suggests a design studio for locative media that would be centered on visualizing the bizarrely partitioned city at the heart of China Miéville's novel The City and The City. Now that, I've gotta see.

ITEM SIX: Springwise writes of an innovative new app that crowdsources geodata to predict when the next train or bus will arrive. (WANT)

ITEM SEVEN: Urban Omnibus interviews David Giles, lead author of the Center for an Urban Future's new report on the prominence and related power of the design sector in New York City.

Enjoy the reading, and stay cool this weekend!

On Video Games, Urbanism, and the Future of Creativity

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Last summer, Newsweek reported that researchers had identified an unnerving trend: American childrens' scores on creativity tests (a la the Torrance Test) were, for the first time since they started being administered in the late 1950s, starting to drop. The article's authors, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, identified two likely factors in creating this downward turn, one being the increasing standardization of school curricula and the lack of deliberate creativity development in classrooms. Calling for a revival of such development, Bronson and Merryman wrote:

What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.

I was struck the other day by a distinct echo of this statement in a post by LiftLAB collaborator Nicolas Nova about recent video games with which he'd been impressed. Writing about the game Superbrothers, Nova explains:

This combination of players’ interactions with “sound, music & audiovisual style” underpinned by a basic narrative and very low-key dialogues made me tick. More specifically, I am impressed by the rhythm of the game, which is sometimes super slow/contemplative and sometimes very quick/nervous in combat.

Bronson and Merryman's second major cause of the creativity slump in American kids was the increase in time spent plopped in front of the TV playing video games, but Nova's description of the rhythm and structure of Superbrothers highlights an interesting alternative: video games are uniquely positioned to serve as vehicles for creativity development. Players engage in a video games with long-format storylines over extended periods of time. Many games have immersive environments that are fun to explore outside of plot-focused action (I'm thinking, here, of classic games from my youth like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound, though there are no doubt newer examples). This means that players alternate between different modes of thinking: slower, self-paced exploration (divergent) and goal-oriented tasks (convergent).

The digital worlds in which video games take place also require the suspension of disbelief, and we have all been pretty well-trained to oblige. Real people don't double in size when eating mushrooms, but while playing Super Mario Bros., few question that occurrence. In the aforementioned Earthbound, players battle everything from zombies and sea monsters to a possessed circus tent and Dali's clock (no joke). When we're in gameplay mode, none of this seems out of the ordinary. We are ready to except non-traditional ways of thinking and, I'd argue, are primed to develop our own.

The good news for cities is that video games are increasingly being played on smaller and smaller screens. More recently, we've seen games that have begun to incorporate real-world geography, with episodic content that is tied to the exploration of actual places, as well as current events. Smartphones and handheld game consoles that make the original Gameboy look as technologically advanced a platform as a pencil and paper are increasingly ubiquitous, and they can be used to change the way that we see the world around us. The myriad public places that make up a neighborhood--parks, squares, streets, shops, libraries--could easily become 'levels' with various tasks assigned to them.

Using a Nintendo DS or a Droid phone, we could walk on a street we'd been down a thousand times and be prompted by a game to stop for the very first to look around and explore our surroundings. Designer Michael Wolff describes the creative process as requiring three muscles that must be exercised regularly: curiosity and appreciation, which together enable imagination. Video games already exercise the first two of these muscles; locating games within the context of a world that we recognize and understand allows them to encourage imagination that could actually improve the places in which those games are set.

As video games become tied to physical places (which has the added benefit, by the way, of getting players off the couch) the complexity of dense urban environments offers a distinct advantage: New York's Union Square or Shanghai's Bund are the Xbox 360s to the suburbs' Atari. According to one collective in Zagreb, "Augmented Reality promises to transform all points on the map into unlimited spaces that can be exploited for self-expression by anyone." In today's socially-oriented mashup culture, the rise of games that enable players not only to explore, but to impact their environment and share their interventions, as well as build on the creativity of players who came before them, seems inevitable.

Charles Landry wrote that “A creative city is a place where people feel they can fulfill themselves, there are opportunities. Things get done.” Video games offer plenty of opportunities to get things done and obtain a sense of fulfillment; location-based games that are designed to develop players' creative faculties present an opportunity to create a truly symbiotic relationship, developing inventive populations while simultaneously enriching the gaming experience. Leisure is important in any urban environment--and there's no reason that it can't be used to build a city up.

Agricultural Education in the City

A public school in Philadelphia is training students in food production and environmental care on an urban farm. The Walter Biddle Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences is a magnet program with 600 students from throughout the city. Located in the upper Roxborough neighborhood, it includes a 130-acre farm with livestock, greenhouses, crops, and pastures.

Saul offers concentrations in Food Science, Floriculture and Greenhouse Management, Landscape Design, Animal Science, and Natural Resource Management. In addition to the agricultural program, students take a full range of high-school, advanced-placement, and college-level courses. The results are impressive. Saul's average graduation rate is 95 percent, with 80 percent going on to college. Other students start their own businesses or are hired into skilled agricultural jobs right after graduation.

Amanda Forstater, a 2009 graduate, recently gave me a thorough and enthusiastic introduction to Saul. Students begin with an intensive summer program, which provides training and experience with the different areas of concentration. This helps incoming freshman select a major and understand the kind of work that will be expected of them. They usually have a particular agricultural career in mind -- from local farming to designing parks, managing athletic fields, and caring for animals.

During the school year, students work on the farm each day. Freshman and sophomores spend one and a half hours, while juniors and seniors spend two and a half. The jobs increase in complexity as the students acquire more training. There is a farmer who lives on-site and manages daily operations.

Students are encouraged to take on leadership responsibilities in school activities, internships, and the National FFA Organization (formerly Future Farmers of America, but renamed in 1988 to include all agricultural careers). Internships and job-training programs have been set up with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, the Philadelphia Eagles, Somerton Tanks Farm, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, J. Franklin Styer Nurseries, the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, and many other local and national organizations.

Saul has established a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) partnership with Weaver's Way Cooperative. This provides the neighborhood with local produce as well as education and employment opportunities. Students are closely involved in the process. They can also work for the school farm over the summer. It is common to see them operating tractors, milking cows, and growing produce year-round.

Saul students come from urban homes with little if any farming experience. The program is helping to reestablish links with agriculture that have been lost through years of migration to cities. Along with the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, Saul is among the few urban agricultural schools in the country. Visits are encouraged, and based on Amanda’s glowing account, it's very much worth the trip.

(The first two photos were provided by Amanda Forstater. The photo of students pruning trees is from the W.B. Saul website.)

The Position of Power

With big corporations falling like skittles from a rainbow, one can only wonder where the power will pool. Not only have big businesses taken a hit, but so have the middle class "Mainstreeter," and the millennial pre-grad who will soon receive a student loan bill with a piece of paper that couldn't get him a job if it were plated in gold. So many people have lost money, time, and consequently, power. If power is seemingly draining from corporations, 401ks, and college diplomas, who will inherit this power and its attendant freedom?

The high-school graduate will inherit this power. The community college student will inherit this power, for they are the ones who will be entering the so called "real world" without a huge debt on their shoulders. Their homes didn't lose half of their value because these students are too young to own a house, and they have yet to invest in a university and therefore are not saddled with thousands of dollars worth of loans. They are staring into the reforming world with light shoulders and clear eyes.

Incredible opportunities lay ahead for these individuals. My hope for future generations is that these people do what they wish to do, which today is rarely realized due to parental and societal pressures which make kids question their ambitions and dreams. Future generations growing up with social networking, online publishing, and open courseware will be equipped with a completely new set of tools to connect, learn, and create. The real world used to mean get a job, soon it will mean create.

To learn more about the hypothetical future of our youth, see Jeff Jarvis' Hacking Education: Google U.

(Photo from Firelink. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

StimulusWatch and the Real American Housing Crisis

A couple of weeks ago, Drew posted about StimulusWatch, a site that lists all of the local projects in the United States that have been publicly announced as candidates for federal stimulus funds and lets the public vote on each project's merit. As luck would have it, my job involves researching construction projects, and I've been spending almost a month now combing through SW for several hours a day, looking for potential building projects. From what I've observed, it seems doubtful that the site will have any major impact on how stimulus dollars are spent ("Pork" is probably the most-used word in the very angry, uninformed comment sections no matter what state or city you're viewing). But SW does provide an opportunity for people working on the local level to gauge how their neighbors feel about a wide variety of public projects and services.

In the Energy category, for instance, one can see how effective the green movement has been on public opinion. Whereas a few short years ago Energy projects would undoubtably have been fewer in number and much lower in popularity, the Energy category seems to be one of the most popular, regardless of state or city, with the +/- ratio around half and half -- about the same as the ratio for Streets & Roads! Folks in small towns seem just as likely now to favor energy retrofits to their town hall and the addition of solar panels to school and library rooftops as urban and suburban Americans. People are still skeptical of hybrid vehicles, though, with many requests for money for hybrid or alternative energy-fueled municipal fleets meeting staunch resistance. But overall, the mainstreaming of energy efficiency efforts seems to have been a wide success.

It is seeing this shift that makes me hopeful that we can reverse what is undoubtedly the ugliest trend that I've noticed from coast to coast: the outright rejection of Housing projects. Items with "senior" or "demolition" in the title notwithstanding, Housing projects receive negative vote ratios so consistently that it's as if there was some sort of unspoken rule barring people from voting anything but "No." Even more disturbing than the negative vote ratios are the comments left by mostly anonymous posters at the bottom of each page. Affordable and public housing is called some terrible things, and there is more than anyone's fair share of racism, classism, and willful ignorance. Public housing in America, it is plain to see here, has still not recovered from the havoc wreaked by the slum-clearance-brought tower projects of the 1950s and 60s. Much like with Wall Street, American public housing is experiencing a crisis of confidence.

It would seem that, as much as we need the money to build units for the thousands of people who have lost or are about to lose their homes, it might not be a terrible idea to spend some of HUD's budget on increasing public awareness of the different kinds of housing available nowadays. Stigma attached to terms like "public housing" and "affordable housing" undoubtedly hampers efforts to create sustainable mixed-use communities, a contemporary goal of most major urban housing authorities, by keeping middle- and upper-income residents whose presence facilitates that integration at bay. The focus for housing advocates and agencies is no longer on concentrating poverty, but on economic integration -- and if it's not, it damn well should be. Without changing the conversation, attempts to tackle America's shortage of affordable housing will likely be uneven at best.

For anyone interested in transportation issues (Transit, Airports, Streets & Roads, Amtrak), Community Development, Energy, Housing, Public Safety, Schools, or Water infrastructure, StimulusWatch provides an opportunity to better understand the challenges facing those fields. Whether you're for or against the federal stimulus package, that opportunity shouldn't be missed.


(Photo from Flickr users TheeErin and andyandrew. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photos.)

Designing SkyCar City: A Post-Studio History (Guest Post by Ella Peinovich)

Many notable architects and designers throughout history have created transportation-centric city models that represent the future or an idealized present. Historically, architectural movements have used these models to demonstrate their design fundamentals in a pure state to a world that did not, at that time, have the capabilities to achieve such idealistic forms. Each designer, in turn, walked a fine line between reality and fiction.

A few models worth mentioning would be the Futurist Antonio Sant'Elia’s Citta Nuova, and then, within the Modernist movement, Le Corbusier’s plan for Algiers and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. Later, the traditional utopian city changed when the line was officially crossed from being about the study of technological advances to science fiction, with Archigram’s Walking and Plug-in Cities. More recently, the 3D city model has been featured in the work of Dutch firms OMA and MVRDV through designs like the Hyperbuilding and the Five-Minute City.

Taking all of this into account, one can understand how overwhelming -- not to mention exciting -- it might be for a group of young architecture students to be presented with the open-ended challenge of creating such a complex city model by Winy Maas of MVRDV, a veteran to the topic. That was the situation I (and eleven of my classmates) found myself in during the last studio of my education in architecture.

“…create a city built for the use of a skycar, a city with 'streets' at any level, or perhaps empty of streets as we know them…”
-- Winy Maas, first day of the semester describing our assignment.

My studiomates and I were presented with an experiment: see how far transportation can shape architecture, with one constant variable -- the flying car. Winy had introduced us to a whole new set of Lego pieces; ones that were gravity-defying. We were to design a city that had no specific location, no city boundary, and no technological limits. This is a similar formula to those that have been at the heart of most city models in the past, except for the fact that we (twelve near-strangers) had no pre-established theory to drive the experiment.

We, with the guidance of our studio's co-leader, Grace La, quickly developed a pragmatic methodology of how to approach our design and then applied it to our hypothetical scene, assuming that humans would always be subordinate, or at least married, to our means of travel (this was also in line with the prescribed “sky car”). Ironically, though we were all architects-in-training, little time was spent designing architecture in the traditional sense. During our process, research, and developments we wore many hats: Urban Planner, Product Designer, Civil Engineer, Research Analyst, Historian, Editor, and then Architect. This mash-up of information with the added flavor of democratic group decisions more or less drove our re-imagining of the city form.

During this experience I learned some valuable design lessons. In no particular order of importance:

1) It is our responsibility as designers to address real issues rather than represent feel-good utopias.
A city model that is designed in reaction to current outstanding issues of common society (e.g. waste disposal, greening, traffic relief etc…) will likely get a lot of attention and praise. On the contrary, our city model chose to explore and build up a topic which currently carries a negative stigma. We suggested that, as a society, we accept that every person wants the freedom of having their own car. We chose to assume this desire of every individual and suggest that public transportation has no future. We feel our model holds its clout because it is based on realistic projections of where society IS headed, rather than where it SHOULD be.

2) Design by committee vs. the individual
When an individual is allowed to carry out an idea, they are able to create one conclusive and seamless design in a similarly seamless process. As soon as you allow everyone a voice, all you get is noise -- at least at first. It took my studiomates and I a while just to figure out how we could work together, which inevitably took away valuable design time. Admittedly I, and likely others, caved to the majority vote at different times during the design process just to move forward, and I know that many “place-holders” never got re-”placed”. However, I can confidently say that our design would not have been what it was without any one person in our studio contributing their input.

3) Build from the Bottom-up
I have to believe that the Modernists and Futurists had an idea for the final form of their models before they designed the infrastructure to support it. In my experience, a top-down method can be inefficient, continually having to cover its tracks along the way. Please do not misunderstand me; once a design has been established I think it is necessary to go back and implement the design diagram to every last detail, but I am referring the process of getting to your building diagram. On the contrary, we were very honest in our studies; we did not hide the unpolished edges that are always a possibility of functionally-driven design. Our process was prescriptive and built from the bottom-up.

4) Get Published
The most responsible thing a designer can do is contribute to the Industry by publishing and distributing their work. Being able to show something as a product of thought can create a much larger ripple than just talk, especial in a visually-oriented community. Work should be shared, flaws and all, so that others may see and critique in order to create dissemination.

There may be a conflict of interest for some in the architectural profession that view their work as an artform. But when you think of what has been entrusted to us by the public (e.g. to create efficient systems, reduce environmental impact, ect…) we owe it to everyone to find the best technologies to do the job, regardless of who authored them.

Now, well after the publication of Skycar City: A Pre-Emptive History, the record of my and my classmates' semester of city-building, it is up to the readers to make their own conclusions about the success of our research and model and decide whether it is worth mentioning alongside the great city models of the past.

------------------


Big thanks to Ella Peinovich, a design associate at Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill's San Francisco Office. Ms. Peinovich participated in a mixed studio, led by guest professor and MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas, of twelve undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Architecture and Urban Planning in the spring of 2006. The participants recorded their process and city model in the book Skycar City: A Pre-Emptive History.

Skycar City Studio co-leaders: Grace La, Winy Maas

Skycar City Studio participants: Bryan Howard, Tony Janis, Nick Moen, Ryan O’Connor, Trevor Patt, Ella Peinovich, Nick Popoutsis, Tarah Raaum, Gloribed Rivera-Torres, Scott Schultz, Tuan Tran, Andy Walsh

Edited 4/12/08 to include full list of studio participants.



Blogger's Note: The original post planned for tonight and announced on Sunday was going to focus on urbanism programs for kids in Singapore and Chicago. This post has been temporarily postponed, and will run at a later date. Sorry for any confusion!


Links:
Skycar City (Powells)

MVRDV-UWM Studio (Warning: absurdly long load time).

WEEKEND READING: December 29th, 2007-January 4th, 2008

It's been a crazy week for this blogger offline, but regular posting should resume next week. I have a ton of stuff backed up from the holiday season, so Where might get busy soon. As for Weekend Reading, we're starting off 2008 with some great material!

ITEM ONE: Sick of suburban sprawl? So are the people behind Project Outrage.

ITEM TWO: Der Spiegel profiles Albert Speer, Jr., son of the devil's architect.

ITEM THREE: Deputydog features a short but visually impressive post on one of my all-time favorite buildings (now, sadly, demolished), Diller + Scofidio's brilliant Blur pavillion. (photo credit)

ITEM FOUR: WorldChanging rounds up the top city-related stories from its 2007 archives.

ITEM FIVE: Social Practice points to this site, Encounters, which "[explores] informal education, lifelong learning, and social action."

ITEM SIX: Collapse author Jared Diamond's much-ballyhooed article on scales of consumption in the NY Times.

ITEM SEVEN: Do cities have color schemes? Brand Avenue takes a look.


Enjoy your weekend. It's 27 degrees in Chicago right now...feels like summer!!

Drifting Through the City, Literally: Soldiers in the Living Room (Guest Post by Mirabai Auer)

He said: 'this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. […] The question is how do you interpret the alley? […] We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. […] I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win […] This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls. . . . Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. […] I said to my troops, "Friends! […] If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!"
–Commander Kokhavi of the Paratrooper Brigade, Israeli Defense Forces

A number of architectural and urbanist theories, dealing with geo-psychology and the conceptualization of city space, are being taught in an unlikely place -- military academies. Their strangely adapted applications serve as a reminder that ideas do not flow narrowly from the "conceiver" to "intended-user", but are rather commodities in the world marketplace, available for mass consumption and arguably, manipulation.

Eyal Wiezman details this phenomenon in his piece, "The Art of War", in which he outlines the emergence of a new guerilla strategy utilized by the Israeli Defense Forces, referred to as infestation.  In an attack on the city of Nebulus in 2002, Israeli soldiers moved through the city, via a series of holes and tunnels.  More simply, their game of war was not fought visibly on the street; the effort was conducted almost entirely indoors.  The soldiers avoided alleys, streets, courtyards, and the like.  Indeed, the soldiers were 'walking through walls,' fighting from within the urban fabric, climbing through homes, abandoned warehouses, and shops.

All of the aforementioned places have historically been considered, to varying degrees, private. After all, most homeowners don't envision their living rooms as fertile grounds for battle, nor do they anticipate soldiers 'worming their way inside (their homes)' emerging from freshly drilled holes in their drywall. Yet, increasingly, military education is proposing that the city is in fact a borderless place, in which the boundaries and intended uses of space (both public and private) are fluid and dynamic, i.e. the living room is both a strategic location and a place for television-watching and snacking.  One woman recounts her personal experience in the attack: "Imagine it – you're sitting in your living-room, which you know so well; this is the room where the family watches television together after the evening meal, and suddenly that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after the other, screaming orders. You have no idea if they're after you, if they've come to take over your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else."

The shift in tactical thinking reflects the military's adoption of several key canons of architecture and philosophy, among them Situationism.  In the 1960's, Situationists advocated for the creative and critical re-examination of the urban landscape through such practices as dérive and détournement, which involves the adaptation of obsolete spaces for new, unintended uses.  These practices encourage the re-envisioning of how spaces are used and by whom.  

For example, a dérive, or drifting walk, is propelled by emotion and spontaneity; typologically, it is rather different from the often mechanical and repetitive walk to work (or store, school, etc.)  Situationists suggested that curiously and attentively traversing new pathways could be a catalytic exercise in the process imaging the built environment afresh, and set the stage for new social contexts.  These practices grew out of an increasing dissatisfaction with landscape of the capitalist city, which Situationists believed was designed in an overly prescriptive and dogmatic fashion, and was ultimately an expression of class relationships.  Arguably, if the capitalist city had strictly-defined rules of engagement, then the practices of dérive and détournement were intended to de-contextualize the overly-ordered city and enable citizens to think outside of the systematic box.

These concepts, through the traditional lenses of planning and urban studies, are oft presented as visionary, progressive, or artistic (after all, isn't the idea of détournement partially responsible for adaptive reuse of industrial space into lofts and studios?).  In fact, yesterday's Where post, Traversing Newark Avenue, is a rather classic example of dérive in which the author documents the physical and social nuances of a Jersey City street in photos, text, and sound.  
 
Ironically, the military's co-optation of the same ideas has been used to bolster already (arguably) bloated military power and to justify the rather undemocratic invasion of private space.  Yet, after all, aren't they simply envisioning a new use for the home?  And a new relationship between the dwellers and visitors (troops, in this case)?  The author Eyal notes: "In no uncertain terms, education in the humanities – often believed to be the most powerful weapon against imperialism – is being appropriated as a powerful vehicle for imperialism."

The manipulation of philosophy and theory does in fact occur religiously.  Yet, somehow in the academic world, ideas seem to grow in their own Petri dishes, undisturbed by realities.  These little glass plates of ideas are assumed to be tended by the few and carefully trained.  And yet, ideas like dérive exist in the muddied, multi-layered context of the city; "The Art of War" reinforces the common-sense notion that places are birthed from context and a multiplicity of vantage points and that urban theory is never purely applied -- it is always a working model.

------------------

Big thanks to Mirabai Auer, an urban planning Masters' candidate at the University of Illinois-Chicago who works part-time as a GIS map maker.

(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)

Planning Cultural Values Part II

Early on in the mission statement of the Ninth Malaysia Plan is the line "There is a danger of the country possessing first-class infrastructure but third-class mentality." As I started to talk about yesterday before the weather intervened, Malaysia's plan for developing a first-class mentality puts some hefty pressure on the country's urban planners. The challenge: plan to encourage a culture of knowledge acquisition.

As the Ninth Malaysia Plan illustrates, the country has grown a great deal over the past fifteen years or so. The government's commitment to education is, indeed, apparent -- the numbers suggest admirable. Secondary school attendance rates jumped 17 percentage points, while the country's Ministry of Education managed to slightly decrease the number of students per classroom and improve the teacher-to-student ratio. The importance of education and the growth of knowledge-based industries is evident throughout the mission statement (which is admittedly all that I had time to read...it's a solid overview, and the plan is rather long).

Of course, the government is using a set of religious principles called Islam Hadhari, which "emphasises development, consistent with the tenets of Islam with focus on enhancing the quality of life through the mastery of knowledge and the development of the individual and the nation; the implementation of a dynamic economic, trading and financial system; and the promotion of integrated and balanced development that creates knowledgeable and pious people who hold to noble values and are honest, trustworthy, and are prepared to take on global challenges."

Even still, while having a state-sponsored religion will make it easier for a government to direct cultural values, the idea of creating physical plans -- street grids, public spaces, civic amenities -- that literally attempt to re-organize the priorities of the people who live in a city is a pretty fascinating concept. While in the case of Malaysia it is easiest to see this taking shape in the bustling capital, Kuala Lumpur, the way that the Ninth Malaysia Plan describes its goals (or "Thrusts," as they are referred to in the doc) the most interesting cultural planning could likely take place in the countryside. The Second Thrust, which aims to raise the country to a "first-class mentality," specifys that "a special focus on raising the standard of schools
in the rural areas."

One of the big stories in the planning and architecture circles of late has been the emergence of very large-scale eco-cities, like the one planned for Chongming island just northeast of Shanghai or the flashier dueling proposals of Sir Norman Foster and that Koolhaas character in the deserts of the United Arab Emirates. These gargantuan developments make no secret of their chief ambition: to make people live in an environmentally-friendly way. These examples represent values-based urban planning at its zenith, and I bring them up simply to show the potential for what can happen when a rapidly developing nations sets its sights on accelerating growth by using city planning to directly improve society. If gleaming, compact Knowledge Accumulation Villages designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Jean Nouvel start popping up in the Malaysian countryside at some point in the next few years, don't act surprised.


Links:
The National Mission (Ninth Malaysia Plan)

China's eco-city faces growth challenge (BBC)

WEEKEND READING: May 12-18, 2007

This week's roundup will be relatively short. All this Community 2.0 talk has (ironically?) made me want to spend more time outside. Actually, that could just be the slowly-but-surely improving weather here in Chicago...

First: I know that it's a bit silly for a little start-up blog to "promote" the most popular architecture blog in the 'osphere, but just in case you missed it Geoff over at BLDGBLOG had a really stellar week.

Second: We head over to Planetizen where one of my favorite Interchange bloggers, Josh Stephens, has a great post on working urbanism and planning into the high school curriculum in the US. (This is actually from last week, but I missed it. Better late than never...)

Third: This article by Jane Powell in SFGate has been making the rounds through the urbanism news aggregators. With good reason, too: it's
informative, hilarious, and debunks some surprising myths about the "green" building craze that's taking over our cites. It also has one of the best factoids I've heard in weeks: "Demolishing 10,000 square feet of old buildings wipes out the environmental benefit of recycling 2,688,000 aluminum cans." (!)

Fourth: I happened upon a great blog called Celcias this past week thanks to this wonderfully straightforward and informative post about building cities for people instead of cars. Who knew Bogotá was such a forward-thinking city? Probably a lot of people, right? Again, better late than never...

Fifth: My friend Jacob's blog, The Urban Louisvillian, has an interesting piece about Humane Metropolis-esque projects going on in Kentucky's largest city, like the City of Parks initiative pictured at the top of this post. I like both Jacob and the Humane Metropolis concept; thus, you are reading this plug.

That's all for this week. Make sure to check back later this evening, as "Community 2.0 and the Built Environment" will be concluding with an interview with MetroProper founder/developer Phil Tadros. And Windy City residents, don't forget about Great Chicago Places and Spaces. I'll see you there!