Managing the Creative Class

1.  Over at Innovation Playground Idris Mootee writes (pointer from CEOs for Cities):

Any atmosphere of crisis and tension kills creativity. Creative people need downtime to recharge so always give them time to dream. There is nothing called optimized creativity. Exploration requires time and we need to accept the fact they may have “strategic time wasting” mission as part of their job description. . A situation of constant stress does not let new ideas to flourish. We should encourage them to apply their imagination in the workplace and make sure they are appreciated for those efforts.

Have faith in the process and the people and do not try to micromanage their work. While routine tasks are important, you have to give people the freedom to explore “white spaces” and work out what may seem foolish ideas.

2.  Check out this Business Week story on how a "clouds," major new innovation happened at Google.

3.  William Holstein reviews Gary Hamel's terrific new book, The Future of Management over at the New York Times.

Mr. Hamel argues that these innovative companies realize that employees should not be treated like 13-year-olds who need clear boundaries on their freedom. Employees are on the front lines and are often closest to customer needs. As a result, they should have power to reveal to their hierarchies what products and services are needed, and they should be involved in deciding how the company’s time and money are spent. Moreover, they should be pursuing a passion or a mission, not just quarterly profits. The implication of all this is that we don’t need as many managers in organizations. Yes, we still need some managers and some centralized processes to prevent an organization from spinning wildly in all directions. But the best organizations will be those whose employees have the power to innovate, not just follow orders from on high, Mr. Hamel says. In such an environment, the notion of a whole class of managers evaluating and re-evaluating each action of those below them in a vertical hierarchy becomes nonsensical.

Here's the clincher.

As insightful as Mr. Hamel’s book is, it’s surprising that it has attracted so little attention since being published in October.

Why do you think that is - and might it say anything particularly relevant about the state of business management these days?

City of the Future

The New York Times asked a handful of people to speculate on the city in 2108.  There are two that really resonate with me.  First up from Kim Hatreiter, co-founder of Paper magazine.

The island of Manhattan in 2108 is half the size of what it was a hundred years ago; Seventh Avenue and Third Avenue are waterfront. Richard Meier’s glass towers are under water and filled with schools of phosphorescent fish; tourists come by submarine taxi to see them. ... What used to be known as downtown types have all moved to what used to be called New Jersey. Bayonne is the new mecca for radical thought and creativity.

Next is Kate Kaplan, a 12 year old, 7th-grader at the School of the Future, a New York City public school near Gramercy Park.

The city will be all skyscrapers, no more town houses and brownstones. ... Central Park will be preserved in a bubble to protect it from the adverse effects of global warming. ... The Empire State Building will no longer be New York’s largest building; it will probably be replaced by a giant Starbucks.

My own sense: NY will no longer be the world's center for creativity and finance and no longer number among the world's ten largest cities. It may well lose its role as a magnet for talent and immigrants. It's trajectory across the 21st and 22nd centuries will be similar that of Berlin in the past century. Among North American cities, New York in 2108 will be similar in size, scale and influence to Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco and Los Angeles.  In the west, New York influence will be far eclipsed by London which will become the financial and creative center for the western world.  But, the world's largest and most important cities will all be in Asia - from Beijing to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore even Sydney - some may morph into dense mega-regions of 500 million people or more.  North America's most significant and vibrant cities will be the ones on its Pacific coast.

Your thoughts on New York - or how your own city will fare, or on the state of cities worldwide - a century for now?

Dead Malls

The Economist says that America's mid-20th century suburban consumption machine is in decline.

By the early 1980s indoor shopping centres were woven tightly into American culture. New cuisines (the term is perhaps too grand) emerged in them, thanks to chains like Cinnabon and Panda Express, which did not exist outside malls. They began to swell to the point of absurdity. Canada's West Edmonton Mall, which opened in 1982, has an ice-skating rink, a pool with sea-lions and an indoor bungee jump. The Mall of America, in Minnesota, has three rollercoasters and more than 500 shops arranged in “streets” designed to appeal to different age groups. Every morning it opens early to accommodate a group of “mall walkers” who trudge around its 0.57-mile perimeter for exercise.

Artists and urban anthropologists began to note the appearance of mall-based tribes. Most celebrated—and lampooned—were the Valley girls who congregated in California's Glendale Galleria. Frank Zappa's then-teenage daughter, Moon Unit, wrote a hit song that captured their argot (“ohmigod!”, “no biggie”, “grody to the max”, “total space cadet”) and praised the Galleria for having “like, all these, like, really great shoe stores”. Mall-oriented films followed, spreading the Valley girls' culture like spores in the wind.

Just as the onward march of malls began to seem unstoppable, though, things began to go wrong. In just a few years they turned from temples of consumption to receptacles for social problems. The changing attitude to shopping malls can be seen in two films, both of which, appropriately, are to cinema what Panda Express is to the Chinese culinary tradition.

Urban designer, David Lewis, has long said finding ways to reuse "dead malls" will end up being a much bigger revitalization project then rebuilding urban centers.

Do you have a dead mall story you'd like to share?

Music Models

David Byrne on the evolution of the music industry over at Wired (h/t: Brad Glonka, Kevin Stolarick). 

No single model will work for everyone. There's room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that's fine. I like Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man." Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won't be forced to choose. Ultimately, all these scenarios have to satisfy the same human urges: What do we need music to do? How do we visit the land in our head and the place in our heart that music takes us to? Can I get a round-trip ticket?

Actually, I like both of those songs too- they're hooky-catchy and they pack a punch.And, yes, I'm only admitting that because Mr. Byrne already did  The version of Umbrella Rihanna did at the World Music Awards in Monte Carlo rocked far harder then the original version. Problem is there are far fewer popular songs like this, these days.

But Byrne's article raises a deeper question. The great economist, Mancur Olson argued that  major shifts in economic models often go together with major geographic shifts - the rise and decline of nations or geographic regions.  Will this shift in the music industry model also cause a geographic shift and the rise of new musical centers?

Urban Sound System

My new Globe and Mail column on music scenes is here. A short snippet below, the whole kit-and-kaboodle after the jump.

Something that has struck me for a while is the vibrancy of the music scene in Canada's three big cities. Feist and Broken Social Scene in Toronto, Arcade Fire in Montreal and the New Pornographers in Vancouver are just the most obvious examples of performers who not only have hit the proverbial "big time" but are also critics' darlings, with rave reviews in major music publications. Arcade Fire leader Win Butler recently shared the cover of Spin with Bruce Springsteen and Feist is a clear favourite in the Grammys, with nominations for best new artist, best female pop vocal performance for the song 1234 and best pop vocal album for The Reminder.

What's going on? Does all this signal that Canada's big three are on the verge of becoming music meccas? And does it say anything about their economic potential? As part of a new project on the music industry and its impact on regional economies, I worked with Kevin Stolarick, a University of Toronto colleague at the Martin Prosperity Institute, as well as Charlotta Mellander of our Prosperity Institute of Scandinavia and Scott Jackson, a doctoral student at George Mason University in Washington, D.C., to chart the evolution of popular music scenes and what they mean for regional economies. Our findings suggest there's good news coming.

                 

The New Geography of Real Estate

Paul Krugman asks how far is down? 

"So I come down to the view that the price-rental ratio will have to move most if not all the way back to historical norms. And that’s a long, long way down."

Brad DeLong and Ryan Avent weigh in.

My assessment: it all depends on where you are.  It's not as simple as zoned versus flat or coast vs. middle.  This picture is geographically complex.

The Midwest will feel it badly.  Speculative markets with little in the way of a "real economy" have an even longer way to the bottom - South Florida and Las Vegas are headed a long, long way down.  That decline is just beginning to start because owners and investors haven't quite woken up to the new reality - sooner or later they will.  Suburban markets are also in for a long tumble.

The places that will hold up best are urban markets where supply is limited in major creative/ super-star centers - largely as a result of global demand for those properties.  NYC - that is Manhattan - will hold up best, but San Fran, urban DC, urban Boston, Seattle and the like will weather the storm better than most predict. 

One thing that is likely to come out of this, as Clive Crook and Tim Hartford are on to, is the reversal of the long shift toward homeownership. It will become clearer and clearer to individuals how inflexible home-ownership is especially during downturns in the market.  Leasing will start to comeback, not just among the working poor and middle class; it's resurgence will be led in luxury markets by the reasonably well-to-do, who will not want to get caught in this kind of bind again.  And with the market stuck in the pits, they'll have a plethora of great rentals to choose from.

Most Ridik-a-lus City List Ever

Click here, ugh.

Turning Blue

Two of America's leading political analysts, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira have an intriguing op-ed piece in Sunday's Washington Post (must have missed it while traveling) on the demographic, economic and geographic trends they believe will lead to a new Democratic majority.

[T]here are professionals, once the most Republican of all occupational groups. In 1960, they backed Nixon over JFK by 61 percent to 38. But as professionals -- including nurses, teachers and actors as well as doctors, scientists and engineers -- have become a larger proportion of the workforce (about 7 percent in the 1950s, and about 17 percent today), they have turned decidedly blue. In the four presidential elections from 1988 to 2000, professionals backed Democrats by an average of 52 percent to 40 percent. The reason: Professionals typically used to see themselves as pro-business entrepreneurs, but by the 1990s, most had become salaried workers, wary of big corporations and the untrammeled free market. ...

One key to this shift has been the development of post-industrial metropolitan areas -- places that combine city and suburb, that are devoted to the production of ideas and services, and that act as powerful magnets for precisely the professionals and minorities who are most likely to vote Democratic. These areas include greater Los Angeles (which now employs more entertainment workers than aerospace ones), Seattle, Chicago, Boston and even Austin in Bush's home state. Call them ideopolises, and color them bright blue.

On one level, they're onto something. The rise of the creative economy and the creative class is coincident with the rise of what Ronald Inglehart calls post-materialist values and politics.  And large metropolitan areas do skew heavily blue. But it's a great leap of faith to conclude this will lead to lasting majority of either party. That's because neither of them has come anywhere near embracing those post-materialist values. The way I see it we're in a period of simultaneous polarization and dealignment - with lots of "true believers" on the one hand and lots and lots of others who are disillusioned with the process, parties and candidates. I tried to map this out a couple of years ago in this paper with Jerry Mayer - while it's a bit dated, the gist of the analysis still holds up fairly well.

If you asked me who will win today, my guess is Mike Huckabee for three reasons - he comes across as a regular guy, he is relatively undefined in the popular mind, and he's a governor. Plus he lost weight, hunts and, plays the bass - more evidence he's a regular guy - sort of a cross between the old Bill Clinton, John Madden, and Dr. Phil.  And, if we use the simple but effective "congress people never win rule" that means none of the Democratic candidates - Clinton, Obama or Edwards will win, and the next president will be either Romney, Guiliani, or Huckabee.  The first two are self-destructing in real time, while Huckabee is rising. Huckabee is to 2008 what Clinton was to '92 and "W" was to 2000. As for what that means for American politics, have another look at my paper with Mayer. While Huckabee will come across as a "uniter" in the campaign, American politics will veer further away from our scenario 1, and toward some morphing of scenario's 2 and 3. 

My hunch is that of the major candidates only Obama can set in motion dynamics that would put the US back on course toward scenario 1.  But I am not so sure he can win either the Democratic nomination or the general election. Though given what I've just said, I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong on both scores and for Judis and Teixeira to be right.

What say you?

Pop Pop

Housing prices are down 6.7% for October - the largest decline ever recorded -  according to the new Case/ Shiller data. Only three metros remain positive - Charlotte, Seattle and Portland, Oregon. The hardest hit areas remain speculative markets like Miami and Tampa which lack real economies, Detroit which has suffered an economic body blow and San Diego. In these markets, especially South Florida and the Rustbelt, the carnage is far from over (Chart via Seeking Alpha).

Happiness and the City

It's more complicated than you think according to this great little essay in The Walrus magazine's Cities issue (pointer via Where Blog). BTW, I'm a huge fan of the Walrus, which if you didn't know it already, is literary magazine from Toronto - sort of similar to the New Yorker or the Atlantic.

The Stadium Ruse

A new report by sports economists Dennis Coates and Bruce Humphreys shows once again how pro sports stadiums don't add to economic development - they actually have a net negative effect on local income (University of Illinois News via the Street).

“Our conclusion, and that of nearly all academic economists studying  this issue, is that professional sports generally have little, if any, positive effect on a city’s economy,” Humphreys and Coates wrote ... The professors based their report on new data as well as previously published research in which they analyzed economic indicators from 37 major metropolitan areas with major-league baseball, football and basketball  teams. “The net economic impact of professional sports in Washington, D.C., and the 36 other cities that hosted professional sports teams over nearly 30 years, was a reduction in real per capita income over  the entire metropolitan area,” Humphreys and Coates noted in the report. The researchers found other patterns consistent with the presence of pro sports teams. Among them:  • a statistically significant negative impact on the retail and services sectors of the local economy, including an average net loss, • an increase in wages in the hotels and other lodgings sector  (about $10 per worker year), but a reduction in wages in bars and restaurants (about $162 per worker per year).

Those employed in the amusements and recreation sector appeared, at first glance, to benefit significantly from the presence of a pro team, with an average annual salary increase of $490 per worker, Humphreys said. However, he added, “this sector includes the professional athletes whose annual salaries certainly raise the average salary in this sector by an enormous amount. As it turns out, those workers most closely connected with the sports environment who were not professional athletes saw little improvement in their earnings as a result of the local professional sports environment.

The full report is here.  I am amazed at how cities continue to get away with such boondoggles in the face of such overwhelming evidence that they are a waste of taxpayer money. Think for a moment of what other, more positive things could be done with those funds - the opportunity costs. I am also amazed that the economic development profession continues to fall behind stadium building efforts. Imagine if doctors continue to practice in a way that flies directly in the face of medical science. As a group of professionals, it would seem that economic developers should be held to some standard of professional accountability here.  Is that expecting too much?

The Shark Has Been Jumped

In a level of cluelessness I am not sure has ever been equaled in urban affairs commentary, we have this nugget:

Urban scholar Joel Kotkin says inevitably, the killing will spill over into the city’s core. “A lot of the Toronto establishment, if you want to put it that way, sees itself as this hip cool thriving city doing so much better than many American cities,” says Kotkin. Increasingly, Toronto is a domain of the very rich and very poor, he says, as the middle class and the jobs they create migrate to the suburbs. Violent crime is a major part of that migration. “I mean, (crime in Toronto) hasn’t reached the level of New York in the 1970s,” he said. “(But) people talk about crime when they talk about Toronto now, where it was a non-issue not so long ago.”

By any meaningful standard of comparison Toronto, though more stratified than it once was, remains a city that is on another planet of economic diversity compared to US cities with a strong thriving urban middle class, a large urban working population, and much better conditions for the poor. Fortunately my colleague Kevin Stolarick who works with actual statistics and facts benchmarking North American cities puts the matter in perpsective.

Toronto’s numbers are “phenomenally wonderful” compared to equivalent cities south of the border. The murder rate in Toronto this year will be slightly more than three per 100,000 people. Detroit’s murder rate in 2004 was 42, while Washington’s was 36.

Having lived in New York, Boston, DC, Pittsburgh and other US cities, I can confess Toronto is a world apart in terms of crime and violence. Several people were murdered in our neighborhood in Northwest DC. I would worry every time Rana went for a walk outside alone or with a friend in broad daylight. We locked down our house at night and put the security system on: If there was a rattle or noise in the middle of the night we jumped out of bed. In Toronto where we line a mile or so from the city core, people simply do not worry at all about violent crime. Kids - yes there are lots and lots of them from all class backgrounds in the city of Toronto - walk safely on the street and take the subway or bus unescorted to get around.

UPDATE: NYC is reporting a record low number of murders for 2007: 500.

Women in Cities

I was surprised when single women we interviewed during the research for Rise said they  preferred gay neighborhoods because they were safe. Now USA Today reports American cities are finally waking up to the issue of women's safety. The article notes that:

•There are 118.5 million women in the nation's central cities and their suburbs, more than half the urban population.

•About 17 million women in those areas are age 65 and older — almost 60% of the total number of seniors in cities.

•Women 65 and older are three times as likely as their male counterparts to live alone.

•More than 14 million women live alone in cities.

•More than 23 million women are heads of households.

•More than 60% of those who care for an older person are women.

While Canada and the UK have been dealing with this issue for some time, according to the article, the U.S. is just now waking up to it.

Creative Class High on ...

A week or so ago someone wrote the creative class's drug of choice is cocaine. Now this week, the folks at Dig say its absinthe, while these folks say its espresso.  I think the drug of choice is actually productive engagement and intrinsic reward, but who am I to talk.

The Inclining Significance of Class

It's become increasingly clear that city-regions are becoming more stratified and polarized by income and class.  A fascinating new study by my colleagues at the Centre for Urban and Community Studies (CUCS) tracks these trends over the past several decades in Toronto, and argues that the “city of neighbourhoods” is becoming three separate "cities" defined by widening disparities.  I am very fortunate to work with the best collection of urbanist colleagues in the world. A press release on the report is here (I am trying to track down an electronic copy).  The Globe and Mail asked for my thoughts on the landmark study:

Toronto, despite its worsening economic polarization, or perhaps because of it, is perhaps in the best position worldwide to lead here. It should put aside its dream of becoming another New York, London or, in some quarters, another high-tech Silicon Valley. Those are yesterday's models - thriving commercial cores and growing polarization and poverty. Toronto must break the mould and strive to deal with the spikiness and polarization that its improved position in the global creative economy has brought with it.

Caught today between the twin pillars of economic growth and widening social and economic polarization, Toronto has the opportunity to become a model of the prosperous, sustainable and inclusive region - one where each and every person can fully develop their talents, find work that fufills their dreams, and connect the further development of human creative capabilities to future economic prosperity. The three Torontos can become one Toronto. The time to act is now.

My full column is here.

New Work(Space)

Over at PSFK, Jeff Squires notes:

... the growing trend of professionals stepping out of their cubicle to get work done. The idea is that nobody actually gets anything done at their desk - the constant distractions and mundane routines of sitting at one’s desk often prevent any creative or introspective actions from surfacing. This frustrating aspect of traditional office life is driving people to seek out “white space” - a term that implies a place set apart, physically and mentally where the work actually gets done. “White Space” is subjective - it’s different for everyone. Some seek out solitude, while others flock to crowded coffee shops to hunker down and get it done. The bottom line is, people perform better when they have options. While this may seem glaringly obvious to many, it can be a hard pill for companies to swallow. However, it seems the technology and creative industries have taken notice and are taking steps to nourish this Bedouin work style and still keep employees in the office.

He points to this New York Times article titled " You Won't Find Me in the Office."

Technology companies are eliminating assigned space for open floor plans. Cisco Systems, Google and Sun Microsystems have already knocked down partitions. This month, Intel began testing alternative floor plans at three locations — creating open work areas with clusters of armchairs, library-style tables with laptop plugs, electronic white boards where inspired doodles can be transferred to e-mail, and a variety of conerence rooms when privacy is needed. It is not just the high-tech firms that are becoming cozier.

The creative industries — such as advertising and design — are embracing the approach, too. At ?What If! (yes, that is really the name, punctuation and all) an “innovations company” (that seems to mean marketing) with a Manhattan outpost, employees never sit in the same place two days in a row. This is known as “hot desking,” said Nina Powell, the managing director of the United States office, and the purpose is to give workers a perspective that changes with the task. When the work requires collaboration and interaction, she said, the communal tables are the place to be. When the work is more introspective, there are cafe-style booths providing quiet and privacy.

Indeed!  These are some of the core concepts guiding the design of our new space for the Prosperity Institute - lots of interesting space for interaction, for visitors, for impromptu meetings, for connecting and catching up. And space that creatives and students as well as business and political types feel "at home" in.

In Rise, I said the organizational precursors of the creative company are Edison's laboratory and Andy Warhol's factory.  The traditional office is a place for control and for gossip and small talk. It is inefficiency and waste taken to a new level.  People visit with one another, chit-chat, and get little actual work done. Just watch any episode of "The Office" for crying out loud.  With the rise of electronic technology, like the stuff I'm using now, we can get focused work done more effectively at home, on the road, in a coffee shop  and other venues than at the office. Ar home I work on the couch - I've given up my home office. Right now I'm working on a rattan lounge chair.

The office - or what used to be the office - now becomes a venue for social interaction, for catching up, for discussing joint projects. The social function becomes less about killing time and more important as a way to connect, build relationships and keep up. One trend I've noticed in my own work-style  is that when I meet with colleagues and collaborators at the office, we spend a lot more time catching up on each other's lives  and bonding so to speak then even talking about our actual work. We then go home and send e-mail to catch up on that.

Fordism in Crisis

In a moment of unusually blunt honesty, the Wall Street Journal reports that Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli said this at a major meeting with employees:

"Someone asked me, 'Are we bankrupt?' ... Technically, no. Operationally, yes. The only thing that keeps us from going into bankruptcy is the $10 billion investors entrusted us with."

They're not the only ones. Welcome to the iceberg's tip.

UPDATE: Major melting in progress: Friday's New York Times reports the U.S. auto supply chain is now also experiencing massive declines in stock prices.

The Great Sell-Off

The New York Times asks: Who's Buying up NYC Real Estate?" The answer: Europeans.  The globalization of what Wharton real estate expert, Joseph Gyourko, has dubbed "superstar cities" is a significant bulwark against massive real estate price declines in these global hubs.

“The exchange rate is like a gift from God for Europeans,” said Danielle Grossenbacher, the broker for Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy who showed the Millers around. “Everybody is feeling they have an opportunity to purchase a piece of Manhattan.” The number of foreign buyers has doubled in the last two years, according to data from the research firm Radar Logic. In just the last 18 months, they have bought one-third of all new condos that were up for sale, said Jonathan J. Miller, an executive vice president at Radar Logic and its director of research. “We’d have had difficulty absorbing the elevated level of new development coming on the market without foreign buyers,” Mr. Miller said. “They are a key source of demand for new development.”

Hmmm.... So the weak dollar ends up filling America's global hubs with global elites. I can hear the right wing bloviators already: "We've sold off our once great cities to hordes of chardonnay-swilling, espresso-chugging, artsy-fartsy cosmopolitan global elites, dependent upon low skill (illegal) immigrants for services."  You think it's bad now: Just wait for even more fear, anger and fuming about the evils of cities and the demise of good old American family values.

Fast Food Index

A new study by the University of Alberta shows a link between the density of fast-food restaurants in a city and obesity rates (pointer via Planetizen). 

More New Orleans

Spacing Montreal picks up my earlier post and adds this important point:

This sort of redevelopment reminds me of how downtown & inner city Detroit has been rebuilt over the years: pockets scattered here and there like patches on a devastated urban quilt. The problem with these new developments is they have a decidedly un-urban character: suburban style townhouses with garages out front surrounded by big steel fences; CVS drugstores with similarly fenced in parking lots and strip mall architecture; and wide roads where no building meets the sidewalk — all located in what was once dense urban neighbourhoods. In a city like New Orleans that is desperate for any kind of investment, watching this unfold is intensely interesting from a city-building (or un-building) point of view, but rather hard to watch from a human perspective, where the suffering of these Americans does not seem to end. Poor NOLA indeed.

But then again New Orleans has Brad Pitt injecting his architecture and design savvy. What's next: Britney Spears moves back and Perez Hilton takes direction of the rebuilding effort. What in god's name does this constellation of urban renewal, federal intrusion, local arrogance and celebrity culture have to say about today's society? 

Tokyo Tales

Having just gotten back, this article by Blane Hardin, one of the best urban journalists around, captures the soul of Tokyo (h/t: Ken McGuffin). 

Although it is the political, economic and cultural center of Japan, Tokyo itself has no real center. It's a jumble of densely populated districts that are themselves big cities, hubs for the frenetic inbound rush and exhausted homeward retreat of millions upon millions of subway and train commuters. The cyclical crush of humanity approaches chaos but never quite gets there -- the Japanese being sticklers for rules. A unifying thread, if there is one, is movement. But transience across such a vast canvas reveals little. To sharpen the focus, consider a triptych of miniatures -- three small stop-frames that suggest the larger rhythms of life in the planet's preeminent urban space.

One teeny, little correction. The article states that Tokyo is by far the biggest global city in  the world. Well sort of.  It is the biggest individual city in the advanced world. However, some of the cities of the emerging economy are bigger. And when we look at the world in term of the more appropriate category of mega-region - that is as economically connected units as opposed to political jurisdictions, it is just slightly bigger that Bos-Wash.

 

Work, Income and Politics

During the Fordist era, politics broke down clearly by income and occupation - that is along class lines. Blue-collar working class people voted Democrat, or in other other countries Labor or Socialist or even Communist.  But these voting patterns and political blocs have shifted over the past two or three decades with the rise of the creative economy, increased occupational differentiation and what Ronald Inglehart dubs the rise of post-materialist political values.  Columbia University's Andrew Gelman has been at the forefront of tracking the political implications of income and occupation.

Shades of Robert Moses

So you thought urban renewal and the destruction of neighborhoods  and tearing down of historic buildings was a thing of the past. Think again: Not in New Orleans. CNN reports:

Protests against a City Council plan to tear down low-income New Orleans housing turned ugly Thursday, with police using pepper spray and stun guns to clear a crowd angry they weren't allowed into City Hall for the vote.   The City Council voted unanimously to greenlight the demolition of the city's four largest public housing developments, saying they are too damaged by Hurricane Katrina to allow residents back into them. But many in New Orleans, including former residents of the developments, say they fear the local and federal governments will not guarantee similarly affordable housing be built in their place -- calling the demolition an effort to move poor people out of the city. At about 11 a.m., several protesters were dragged out of council chambers after scuffles broke out among people who packed the room, and members of the crowd booed council members and shouted insults at them. About 30 minutes later, hundreds more protesters angry that they weren't allowed into the meeting began rattling an iron gate outside City Hall.

New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ouroussoff writes:

[I]t is the government’s tabula rasa approach that evokes the most brutal postwar urban-renewal strategies. Neighborhood history is deemed irrelevant; the vague notion of a “fresh start” is invoked to justify erasing entire communities. This mentality also threatens other public buildings in New Orleans that can be considered 20th-century landmarks. If the government gets its way, a rich architectural legacy will be supplanted by private, mixed-income developments with pitched roofs and wood-frame construction, an ersatz vision of small-town America. That this could happen in a city that still largely lies in ruins is both sad and grotesque. ...

In an eerie echo of the slum clearance projects of the 1960s, government officials are once again denying that these projects and communities can be salvaged through a human, incremental approach to planning. For them, only demolition will do. ... If the urban renewal projects of the 1960s replaced decaying historic neighborhoods with vast warehouses for the poor, HUD’s vision would yield saccharine, suburban-style houses. And the situation is likely to get worse. The government has identified some other historically important public buildings for demolition as part of its push for privatization. Charity Hospital, an Art Deco structure built downtown in the late 1930s, was abandoned after Hurricane Katrina, and its fate is uncertain. ... The Thomas Lafon Elementary School, a sleek Modernist structure from the 1950s, is destined for the wrecking ball. And there has been talk of tearing down the Andrew J. Bell Junior High School, an elegant French neo-Gothic building completed in the late 19th century.

Blow after blow, in the name of progress. Cast as the city’s saviors, architects are being used to compound one of the greatest crimes in American urban planning.

Microclimates of Innovation

The always insightful Ken Jarboe points to this New York Times article on technology and traffic in Silicon Valley:

Nir Zuk, its founder and chief technology officer, notes that Palo Alto is synonymous with high-tech innovation, and he was living there when he came up with the name. “But in Silicon Valley, you locate a company where the engineers are,” he said. “You would never locate a networking company in Palo Alto.” ... [A] look at the microclusters within Silicon Valley demonstrates the business relationships, the social connections and the seamless communication that animate the region’s economy. It also suggests the human nuance behind the Valley’s success and shows why that success is not easy to copy, export or outsource.

Jarboe adds:

Similar to the microclimates that determine the locations of the wineries, these microclimates are  a "collection of remarkably local clusters based on industry niches, skills, school ties, traffic patterns, ethnic groups and even weekend sports teams."

All surrounded by the macroclimate of openness to new ideas and people of the greater Bay Area.  It's time to look more closely at the intersection of these micro- and macro-climates for creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Real Guitars R 4 Old People [Guest Blogger: David J. Miller]

The always politically incorrect, yet sharp South Park uses Guitar Hero to offer some insights into young, creative class consumers and their reality (the digital world). Enjoy the clip. (posted by David) 

Urban Sound System

Carrie Brownstein over at NPR's Monitor Mix:

Great music transcends the spot on the map from which it springs forth. But music also captures the nuances and sensibilities of people's lives in a specific place or even becomes a reflection of the city or State itself. Our local bands might be the best example of who we are right now or of who we want to become, or maybe not at all. They might live in Portland and sound like they're from Manchester. So, it's not just the bands who reside in our cities and towns, or who transplant themselves there, that make up the noises that represent our topography or our internal and external landscapes.

Brownstein asks: What musical sounds, what bands, what songs, exemplify the places you inhabit? What say you?

Who Gets It

MayorTV has a series of video interviews with the mayors of Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Rochester and Salt Lake City who discuss the need for an urban agenda and in some cases their own preferences from president (h/t: Brian Knudsen).  Where Blog writes:

What this seems to suggest is that day-to-day life for most Americans has little or nothing to do with the "hot-button" issues that presidential candidates are so concerned about. Abortion, gay marriage, and the Iraq war, while all important in their own ways, are by no means the issues that have the greatest impact on this country, yet they receive a greatly disproportionate amount of attention in the media because they are easily polarized issues, and thus much easier to sell. Meanwhile, people struggle every day with crime, education, drugs, and economic issues that go largely unaddressed.

Is Detroit Starting to Revive?

The New York Times thinks so.  Money quote:

"It has been 30 years of a strategy that says if we revitalize downtown the rest of the city will follow,” said Kevin Boyle, a Detroit native and professor of history at Ohio State University, who has written extensively on the city. “And that is simply not true.”

Part of the effort is to build a "Creative Corridor" along Woodward.

We're headed there for the holidays.

Diasporas, In and Out

In the ongoing dialogue over which matters more the Chi or the Pitts, Where Blog argues that:

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. ... 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.

Their dialogue focuses on what you can think of as an "out-diaspora" - leverage ex-Pittsburghers (or name your city) elsewhere as sources of ideas or even attract them back home. It's a useful and important notion. In doing the research for Who's Your City, I came across many examples of extremely successful people who in their middle years expressed their desire to and sometimes did move back home.  But as I also point out, no matter how good a community is at leveraging its out-diaspora and attracting some back, the numbers can't add up - you'll never attract back as many as you lose. That said, there are many other useful roles such an out-diaspora can provide, and BurghDiaspora and others are right to focus on it as one of a number of leverage points.

But my main point is, most North American cities - and certainly Pittsburgh - have extensive "in-diasporas" - that is in-migrants who have chosen to live there - that may provide even more leverage. These include students, the sub-group of foreign born students, domestic in-migrants and foreign-born ones as well. As Annalee Saxenian's research has pointed out these in-diasporas are a central element in the growth, evolution and globalization of Silicon Valley. This to my mind is the even more critical element in people globalization for regions.

How can regions begin to leverage and use their in-diasporas?

Spiky Income

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is this graph from Afferent Income (via Kevin Drum) worth a whole lot more. The graph tracks U.S. income inequality between 1979 and 2005 charting the share of national income going to various groups. Look at the spike showing the rise in the share going to the top 1 percent of households over this period.

Chi-Pitts, or Vice-versa

Over at Where Blog, Brendan writes:

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 mega-cities 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 participate in. Megacities, then, needed to draw in new talent from surrounding smaller cities.

The entire post is on point; Jim Russell responds here.  Brendan is onto something.  What globalization has done is to globalize and integrate the the city-system.  Once upon a time, city-systems were national. They had  core cities like New York,  London, Paris or Tokyo and then a set of second, third, fourth and so tier cities all organized around industries and geographies.  As production and innovation has spread around the globe, the city-system has been stretched out, and national systems have given way to an increasingly global one. Technically speaking, these national systems have always followed a rank-order or Zipf distribution; that distribution, our research suggests, is now taking shape globally, forming a global rank-order distribution of cities.

Functionally, what is happening is that certain key functions of the old national city-systems have been shifted up the chain. Chicago has indeed taken over financial, service, and professional functions from a whole host of second and third tier cities - Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Toledo, and so on.  Washington DC has benefited from the same sort of trend, and is some ways has become a "suburb" of New York in providing these functions.  Atlanta plays a similar role in the southeast. 

But, as Brendan adds, the real question is that competition is growing throughout the global city-system.  In other words, the same kind of dynamics that have confronted Pittsburgh and Detroit in the past several decades may some day come home to roost for Chicago.  My team's analysis suggests that Chicago may have some real vulnerabilities.  In contrast to New York, LA and San Francisco, which have real locational advantages in key economic sectors, our analysis of occupational clusters suggests that Chicago has few if any, other than those associated with O'Hare and air transport.  For the time being, it has found a reasonably comfortable niche, providing regional services to its mega-region and serving as a regional talent magnet. But the laws of motion of global capitalism leave little doubt that sooner or later the ante on both of these fronts will be upped.

Superstars and Talent

Chris Dillow has a fascinating post on this issue (pointer via New Economist):

Start from the premise that talent is initially unknown, and can only be revealed by working with expensive equipment. So, for example, we can only find out if a manager is any good if he's in charge of a big venture, or if an actor has box office appeal if he's in a mega-costly film. It is, therefore, very expensive to learn who's got talent and who hasn't.

What's more, people with talent cannot offer to share this cost with employers, either because of lack of cash or risk aversion: people don't pay for the chance to become bosses or film stars. In these conditions, what's scarce isn't talent, but revealed talent. There might be loads of people with the ability to be film stars or bosses, but only a handful get the chance to show what they can do.

This study by Berkeley's Marko Tervio shows why.