creative_cities - Yule Heibel on Diigo

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"Trading Places" by Alan Ehrenhalt (The New Republic)

Interesting article (which incidentally puts Vancouver front & centre), blogged by Richard Florida at Creative Class: the subtitle is "the demographic inversion of the American city." It's about how the "inner city" and its "inner city suburbs" are now desirable (and expensive) places to live, creating a 24/7 downtown (desired & theorized early on by Jane Jacobs, eg.), while the less affluent (ok, the poor!) are forced to live on the outskirts (suburbs). This used to be called "gentrification," but Ehrenhalt points out that it's a much more complex process than just that.

Haven't read all the comments to this article, but it starts with some excellent ones -- intelligent observations by readers.

Tags: cities, downtown, creative_cities, suburbs, gentrification, trends, urbanization, urban_renewal, demographics on 2008-08-04 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.tnr.com

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.
Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us.
Before September 11, 2001, the number of people living in Manhattan south of the World Trade Center was estimated at about 25,000. Today, it is approaching 50,000. Close to one-quarter of these people are couples (nearly always wealthy couples) with children. The average household size is actually larger in lower Manhattan than in the city as a whole. It is not mere fantasy to imagine that in, say, 2020, the southern tip of Manhattan will be a residential neighborhood with a modest residual presence of financial corporations and financial services jobs. What's happening in Lower Manhattan isn't exactly an inversion in the Chicago sense: Expensive condos are replacing offices, not poor people. But it is dramatic demographic change nevertheless.
If you want to see this sort of thing writ large, you can venture just across the Canadian border to Vancouver, a city roughly the size of Washington, D.C. What makes it unusual--indeed, at this point unique in all of North America--is that roughly 20 percent of its residents live within a couple of square miles of each other in the city's center. Downtown Vancouver is a forest of slender, green, condo skyscrapers, many of them with three-story townhouse units forming a kind of podium at the base. Each morning, there are nearly as many people commuting out of the center to jobs in the suburbs as there are commuting in. Two public elementary schools have opened in downtown Vancouver in the past few years. A large proportion of the city's 600,000 residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown.
We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.

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U.S. News and World Report on Who's Your City? (Richard Florida and The Creative Class Exchange)

"Choosing a Place to Live - Why it's as important as picking a spouse" (interview by Bret Schulte with Richard Florida, published in U.S. News and World Report); excerpts: "You have to understand that economic activity isn't spread out. So there's a trade-off we have to make between furthering our career and finding a lifestyle that fits us. (...) If you find a place that fits you, it gives you more energy. People have always been attracted to aesthetics. The other thing is infrastructure. Maybe you like to go outside, or ride your bike. Those things are critically important. What people are saying is they are not going to be fulfilled in a place that just has a good pipe system. They want to live in a place that gives them excitement and energy."

Tags: creative_cities, flatness, interview, richard_florida, spikiness on 2008-02-15 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromcreativeclass.typepad.com

The world is not flat, says Richard Florida, contrary to the bestselling book by New York Times writer Thomas Friedman. Florida, author of his own bestselling book, The Rise of the Creative Class,
and a professor of business and creativity at the University of
Toronto, argues that while Friedman is correct in saying that
technology has reshaped the world, it has not created a level playing
field. With newly accumulated data to back him up, Florida argues in
his upcoming book Who's Your City? that the world is, in many
ways, spiky—with population, opportunity, innovation, and money
increasingly coalescing in metropolitan areas worldwide. That means
pursuing a career and staying close to family and friends are often at
odds. Deciding what makes you happy, he argues, must go hand in hand
with deciding where you want to live.
So, in a sense, as you go up the ladder, the world
got more and more concentrated. Then this idea came to me that the
world is not flat. It's spiky.
The most important
dimensions of the world's economy continue to concentrate.
As our cities grow they get faster and
faster, better and better, more and more innovative. Some don't, and
they die. That's why economic activity spikes, because of these
conglomerations of energy and talent.
You go so far as to call the spiky world "tricky and even treacherous."

Right. We can see it in this election. It's really giving rise to class
conflict. We are starting to see a backlash against cities, and a
backlash against people who live in them. Urban conglomerations are the
single most important thing to our competitiveness, yet people won't
talk about it. And the second thing that worries me is we're unable to
talk about those being left behind. We're stuck in a stalemate. I would
like to see everyone live better.
Do people realize their happiness is closely linked to place?

Absolutely not. People don't even think about it. But when you ask them
you begin to discover their place is a critical contributor to their
happiness. Generally speaking, place tends to the positive side of the
happiness ledger. That was surprising to us. When we asked people about
the source of stress in their life, place came in last. If you find a
place that fits you, it gives you more energy. People have always been
attracted to aesthetics. The other thing is infrastructure. Maybe you
like to go outside, or ride your bike. Those things are critically
important. What people are saying is they are not going to be fulfilled
in a place that just has a good pipe system. They want to live in a
place that gives them excitement and energy.

Most Admired Knowledge City -- MAKCi -- Awards

- the English in this PDF is really difficult to plow through -- you can tell it was written by non-native speakers, who commit all the sins: bureaucratic language overly reliant on passive voice; overburdened sentences that (due to passive voice) avoid having a proper subject; academic pedanticisms, etc. But otherwise possibly a useful reference (maybe). Via CEOs for Cities.

Tags: creative_cities, knowledge_cities, makci, reference on 2007-12-31 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.worldcapitalinstitute.org

BankART: Creating Art Spaces in Yokohama: PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”

- description of re-purposed spaces (esp'y banks no longer in use) for creative space (Yokohama)

Tags: architecture, creative_cities, creative_spaces, japan, ping_mag, redevelopment, repurposing, yok, yokohama on 2007-12-28 -All Annotations (0) -About

more frompingmag.jp

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$120 million for culture is money well spent

Tags: canada, cities, creative_cities, cultural_support, cultural_tourism, municipal_funding, richard_florida on 2007-11-14 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.canada.com

If culture really is a driving force behind the economic development of Montreal, as Premier Jean Charest claimed yesterday, it is about time the city, province and federal government put real money into it.
The news that Montreal's Quartier des spectacles is to receive $120 million from the three levels of government should be applauded.
Montreal has been diligently trying to fashion a cultural identity that will set it apart on the world stage. Such an ambitious plan cannot be accomplished without help from outside.
Montreal is hardly alone in seeking to make the most of its cultural attractions and sense of creativity. Cities around the world are in brisk competition with each other for the kind of well-heeled tourist who travels for cultural experiences, whether art, sculpture, music or architecture.
Investment in culture can reap enormous dividends for a city. Bilbao was largely unknown outside northern Spain until the Guggenheim Museum built its extraordinary stone, glass and titanium museum in the Basque city. Within three years of its 1997 inauguration, the museum had prompted a 54-per-cent growth in tourism.
Similarly, the Eden Project, an environmental complex in Cornwall in Britain, has added more than $1.5 billion to the local economy and attracted more than 7.5 million tourists in five years of operation.
For a city's own residents, investment in culture offers what are often considered intangible benefits, a heightened sense of pride and the feeling of living in a stimulating environment. A city that enjoys the support and esteem of its residents and politicians becomes a place able to attract investment and boost employment. Success engenders success and in the end there is nothing intangible about additional investment and more jobs.

Yule Heibel's Bookmarks tagged creative_cities → View Popular

"Trading Places" by Alan Ehrenhalt (The New Republic)

U.S. News and World Report on Who's Your City? (Richard Florida and The Creative Class Exchange)

Most Admired Knowledge City -- MAKCi -- Awards

BankART: Creating Art Spaces in Yokohama: PingMag - The Tokyo-based magazine about “Design and Making Things”

$120 million for culture is money well spent

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