Creative Class

Witold Rybczynski ponders green urbanism:

The problem is easily stated. In 1950, the global emission of carbon dioxide was 6 billion tons a year. Thanks to population growth, urbanization, the expansion of wealth, and massive industrialization around the world, by 2008 this has increased fivefold to 30 billion tons a year. Assuming that nothing is done to reduce emissions, by 2058, they will be 60 billion tons a year. Thus, to reduce global warming, whose effects are already beginning to be felt, it will be necessary to take drastic measures just to stay at the present level, never mind actually making real progress. For example, to reduce the number of coal-fired generating plants, nuclear capacity in the United States will have to be doubled. To reduce car emissions, either Americans will have to drive half as many miles per year or cars will have to be twice as efficient. Buildings will have to use 25 percent less electricity …

Even assuming that anything at all gets built in the coming economic depression—during the Great Depression of the 1930s, building construction virtually halted—creating new cities and reconfiguring old ones will take many decades. We don’t have that much time.

There’s a great post by Edward Glaeser (in the Economix blog of the New York Times), titled “New York, New York: America’s Resilient City.”

In it, he describes how New York has managed to avoid the decay that has afflicted many large older cities, and, after a brief downturn in the 1970’s, came roaring back as arguably the most influential single city in the world.

His explanation? In a word - “smart people.”

“New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city. “

Glaeser continues, describing why dense cities succeed…

“They thrive by enabling us to connect with each other, which then promotes learning and innovation. The current downturn will only increase the returns to being smart, and you get smart by hanging around smart people. As long as New York continues to attract and connect those people, the city will continue to thrive.”

Now here’s what every city planner wants to know. Is this replicable? Can this success be engineered or encouraged, and are the effects measurable in 10 years, 20 years, a lifetime?

Does anyone have successful examples of campaigns and projects to replicate this resilient infrastructure? Or perhaps, examples of some cautionary unsuccessful attempts?

Best wishes to everyone for a creative and fruitful New Year!

More than 95 percent of the world’s population lives in less than 10 percent of the earth’s land area, according to a new study and map by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and published in the World Bank’s World Development Report 2009. The research conceptualizes the world and its cities in terms of accessibility and connectivity measured as proximity and travel time to 8,500 major cities worldwide. Here’s the map.

And here’s a summary of the study in Science Daily:

[H]uman population is more concentrated than ever before. Europe’s urban sprawl gradually fades as we move eastwards into the steppes of central Asia, soon to re-emerge into the dense networks of people and places in India, China and Japan. The attraction of Australia’s coasts is dramatically revealed, while North America appears to adopt a grid system not just for its streets and road networks, but for distribution of the cities themselves.

Cities exercise enormous control over national economies - even the global economy. They provide jobs, access to the best cultural, educational and health facilities and they act as hubs for communication and transport. Of course, they also cluster massive demands for energy, generate large quantities of waste, and concentrate pollution as well as social hardship.

By using travel-time as a unit of measurement … the map represents accessibility through the … concept of “how long will it take to get there?â€� Accessibility links people with places, goods with markets and communities to vital services. Accessibility - whether it is to markets, schools, hospitals or water - is a precondition for the satisfaction of almost any economic need. Furthermore, accessibility is relevant at all levels, from local development to global trade.

More here.

That’s the question Karrie Jacobs asks after visiting the two cities (via Planetizen):

The question was harder to answer than it might seem. Clearly, she would hate much of the heedless tower mania. But the real answer would hinge on whether she regarded Dubai’s increasingly sophisticated approach to mixed-use place-making as an improvement over the sterile environments churned out by the urban planners of the 1960 …

After my return to New York, I received an e-mail about a new development called Jumeirah Gardens, a huge, upscale, master-planned community. Most of what I’d seen in Dubai had been built on open desert or land reclaimed from the sea, but this was a classic urban-renewal scheme, one calling for the demolition of Satwa. A number of accounts, none of them official, estimated that between 100,000 to 150,000 people would be displaced.

Time Out Dubai reported on the development in May: “‘These low-quality villas and the ­illegal inhabitants they house simply can not continue to exist so close to Trade Center, Sheikh Zayed Road and the heart of the city,’ our source confirms. ‘Not in such prime real estate.’� A more recent article in the Gulf News was accompanied by the kind of spectacular architectural renderings that are pro forma in Dubai, and it noted, “The development will redefine living in one of the most popular neighborhoods of Dubai, currently undergoing demolition to pave the way for the new project.� Redefine living in one of the most popular neighborhoods of Dubai? The plan for Jumeirah Gardens made me wish a Jane Jacobs could rise from Satwa.

And then there was Shanghai. In October I spent a few days in a hotel in Pudong, the district of jumbo office towers that began construction in the 1990s. I was taken on a whirlwind tour of the city’s architecture. One of the supposed highlights was Xintiandi, an enclave of preserved tenements converted to a shopping mall with the help of an American architect who drew his inspiration from Faneuil Hall. It struck me as strange that this was regarded as a premier example of preservation: it would be like taking a first-time visitor to New York to the South Street Seaport. But preservation of any sort, even the kind that turns authentic neighborhoods into malls, was the exception rather than the rule. Everywhere I went, new towers were rising and old low-rise neighborhoods were coming down. No sign of Jane here, either.

On the way to Shanghai, I stopped in Hong Kong, a city where real estate development is one of the main industries, and where the government derives much of its revenue from leasing property and selling development rights. There I caught up on the latest: another harbor scheme with more reclamation and a new waterfront highway, and still more massive luxury high-rises eating away at some of the city’s best-loved streetscapes …

Of course, what Dubai, Shanghai, and Hong Kong have in common is a top-down approach to development. Dubai has a hereditary ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. The United Arab Emirates held its first ever elections in 2006, but they’re only open to a tiny fraction of the population. …In the West, we envy China’s ability to build on a monumental scale—the Bei­jing airport! The Bird’s Nest! A subway system quadrupled in size in five years!—and completely change the face of its cities, but residents don’t seem to have a role to play in how their cities are remade, aside from getting out of the way. In Hong Kong, public participation is carefully rationed, and recent protests over the demolition of beloved landmarks—such as the Central Star Ferry Pier and the Queen’s Pier—are a subset of a larger movement advocating open government.

[I]t’s revealing to see what happens in cities where there is no Jane. Because what these people are really talking about when they complain about the Jane Jacobs mentality is democracy, the inconvenient fact that we live in a society where ordinary people can have an impact on the political process.

The economic crisis is having highly uneven geographic impacts. Detroit for one is being hammered. David Crary and Corey Williams of the Associated Press provide a detailed look.

The jobless rate has climbed past 21 percent, the embattled school district just fired its superintendent, tens of thousands of homes and stores are derelict and abandoned … “It’s a depression — not a recession,” McDuell said, with the authority of someone who has lived through both. “It will get worse before it gets better.”

Money quote: “Even with no hurricane or other natural disaster to blame, Detroit has — by many measures — replaced New Orleans as America’s most beleaguered city.”

A new book by a team of urbanists from the London School of Economics examines how seven older industrial cities in Europe have worked to reinvent themselves. Here’s one recent summary (h/t: Karen King).

The cities - Sheffield and Belfast in the U.K., Bremen and Leipzig in Germany, Turin in Italy, Bilbao in Spain, and Saint-Etienne in France - were all industrial behemoths of the 19th century… Each of the seven subject cities used differing combinations of strong local leaders, businesses, universities and community groups, to invest in downtown neighborhoods and housing and reposition their towns for the high-tech age. Saint-Etienne’s derelict former arms factory became home to a cluster of clever new engineering companies. An advanced technology park with 6,000 new jobs helped recast Bremen as a hub for science. Crucially, the cities developed local initiatives to raise workers skills and provide access to new jobs. Mass transit systems got an upgrade, too. Saint-Etienne, for instance, laid on a new downtown tram line for locals. Officials also polished their cities’ cultural and public spaces. Local government funding in Bilbao, for one, helped transform a derelict patch of riverside into a cultural landmark, with the voluptuous-looking Guggenheim Museum at its center. The returns have been eye-catching. Unemployment dropped in all but one of the towns between 1990 and 2005. After dropping since the 1970s, the populations of five of the cities began recovering between 2000 and 2005.

Today, CEO-Read announced it’s “100 Best Business Books of All Time.” Among the top 100, The Rise of the Creative Class.

Congrats, Rich!

How has The Rise of the Creative Class shaped your area’s approach to community and economic development? Has the book changed your perspective on creativity and talent management? How? Share your stories with our team.

To learn more about the guide for the top 100, click here. The guide is set to be released in February 2009.

Spacing Toronto on “Kingwell versus Florida?” That’s Mark Kingwell, my distinguished University of Toronto philosophy colleague and author of among many other things Concrete Reveries. I’ve not met him, but I like what Kingwell has to say and find myself more in broad agreement with the issues he cares about - social justice among them. I’ve long been fascinated by political philosophy. I took a good dose of it as an undergraduate, and I like to think social contract theory, Hegel and Marx and a little bit of critical theory inform my own work, though my last “foray” in the field was a paper I wrote on Habermas at Rutgers in 1979 which won a small undergraduate paper award. We’re lucky to have a philosopher of Kingwell’s stature weighing in on cities and urban issues. Kudos to Spacing Toronto - one of the best urban sites out there, the writing and coverage are first rate; and the comments consistently as good or better than any around the blog-sphere- for providing some nice context on our different approaches and perspectives. I think they got it about right. It’s healthy when a university and a community are home to different points of view, different analytical approaches, and different emphases. For me it represents the flourishing of a distinctive “Toronto school of urbanism” - descending from Jane Jacobs but evolving from the very real material conditions, issues and challenges facing Toronto in the world economy. For someone who worked in isolation for too long, it’s a real privilege to be part of a city where so many people care - and think deeply and carefully - about urban questions.

Not to be outdone by Wall Street, auto execs, homeowners, or governors, U.S. mayors are making their grab at federal CYA funds today. Hard to see a silver lining here, but check this snippet in the article by T.W. Farnam:

A delegation of mayors, including Michael Bloomberg of New York and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, plans to ask the federal government to distribute funds directly to cities instead of going through state governments. The group is set to present a list of more than 4,600 infrastructure projects that they say are “ready to go.”

Tom Cochran, executive director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which is organizing Monday’s event, said the next administration has signaled that it will coordinate financing for projects for an entire metropolitan area instead of dealing with cities and suburbs separately.

Not sure what the mayors will walk away with and how much it will cost those of us who pay taxes and invest, but glad to see that ‘Metro’ Policy may be replacing ‘Urban’ Policy.

Columnists like Stanley Crouch hope that Obama’s win will renovate the content and style of hip hop music. Throughout a recent article he takes hip hop modes of fashion to task and, by extension, the more identifiable affectations of urban culture. With his win, Crouch hopes that Obama will shift trends:

On the pop cultural end, Barack and Michelle Obama’s worldliness and common sense will greatly diminish the national appetite for and the defense of those who proudly commit intellectual suicide by submitting to anti-intellectual stances and the surface styles that repel across all ethnic lines.

At the same time, Obama is considering creating an Office of Urban Policy, hopefully to replace the ailing/failing HUD. Obviously the connection to urban America he developed as a community organizer in Chicago doesn’t stop at the White House.

With Jay-Z and Beyoncé rumored to be performing at the inauguration, and Obama’s now infamous hip hop mannerisms (brushing his shoulders off, the “fist-jab” - as Fox News so adeptly termed it - with his wife, etc.), and the overwhelming support from the urban music community bolstering his win, one has to wonder what role the hip hop community will play in this new office.

While Crouch is holding out for a great shift in urban culture, one has to wonder about the wisdom of that wish. Everyone can agree that Obama is a great role model to urban youth and urban culture in general, but hoping for this seismic shift is glib and doesn’t acknowledge the critical perspective that urban cultural practitioners can and regularly do bring to the discourse on cities. Obama as cultural-consensus-maker might not be in the best interest of the urban discourse. As in intellectual, he might be more interested in working with difference than in drawing it toward his position - collaboration as opposed to consensus.

University of London PhD candidate Markus Miessen examines the potential of a new type of collaboration in a phenomenal article:

An alternative model of participation within spatial practice will be rendered, one that takes as a starting point an understanding of participation beyond models of consensus. Instead of aiming for synchronization, such model could be based on participation through critical distance and the conscious implementation of zones of conflict. Through cyclical specialization, the future spatial practitioner could arguably be understood as an outsider who–instead of trying to set up or sustain common denominators of consensus, enters existing situations or projects by deliberately instigating conflicts as a micro-political form of critical engagement with the environment that one is operating in.

From a policy perspective, what does Obama need with more people like him when he’s trying to address a different demographic? Instead of encouraging urban youth and urban culture to emulate him, wouldn’t it be more useful for him and for them if on-the-ground representatives from urban culture could advise as post-consensus collaborators to help enrich future urban policy? Is there intellectual wealth in the distance between Obama and the “anti-intellectual stances and the surface styles that repel across all ethnic lines”?

And now, as always, some music.