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Corporate brand imagery as kudzu. Great points.
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The logo-ing of our cities and neighborhoods is this process in reverse. Instead of borrowing the ambiance and associations of a place, the product infests it with its own characterless generica, diminishing and voiding out its authentic qualities. The omnipresent logos, like a kind of corporate kudzu, cover and conquer all.
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This is really interesting (and not good). Religious people are less mobile. Poor people are less mobile. Poverty and religiosity is making the US stuck?
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If mobility was once considered to be a quintessentially American attribute, it is now one that only an elite sliver of the population can lay claim to. It is both a significant shift and a sobering one.
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Well, the old CBD - Central Business District - (as a monoculture of urban downtowns) sure seems to be taking a back seat...
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All of this is leading to something of a convergence across America’s best neighborhoods, a morphing of what we used to think of as suburban versus city life. More and more of our most desirable suburban communities look more like cities, with bustling town centers alive with pedestrian life, while our best city neighborhoods have taken on many of the characteristics we used to see as the province of suburbs: good schools, green spaces, safe streets, and family life.
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Brilliant analysis of class in America today, using Paul Fussell's 1980s work as springboard, and touching on Maslow, Bill Bishop, and Richard Florida along the way.
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It’s not just that Romantic Selfhood—Walter Pater’s notion of burning with a “hard, gemlike flame,” which is the true emotional underpinning of bohemia—has become commodified. Fairly harmless is the $4 venti soy latte purchased amid Starbucks’s track lighting, Nina Simone crooning, and a story about Costa Rican beans that have sailed around the world just to see YOU! It’s that Selfhood has its own berth now in the psychiatrist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” a generational shift presaged by American sociologists who, as early as the 1970s, posited that, while hungry people are concerned about survival, those who grow up in abundance will hunger for self-expression. In the relatively affluent post–Cold War era, the search for self-expression has evolved into a desire to not have that self-expression challenged, which in turn necessitates living among people who think and feel just as you do. It’s why so many bohemians flee gritty Los Angeles for verdant Portland, where left-leaning citizens pride themselves on their uniform, monotonously progressive culture—the Zipcars, the organic gardens, the funky graphic-novel stores, and the thriving alternative-music scene. (In the meantime, I’ve also noticed that Portland is much whiter than Los Angeles, disconcertingly white.)
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More from Richard Florida, who's currently promoting his latest book, The Great Reset, in interviews and articles. In this interview, the emphasis is on shifting our perspective about "service" jobs:
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What is the future of service jobs in the next decade? How should these workers look for better opportunities?
We will still have about 10 percent of our population making things because we like to use things. But we can make some personal service jobs into professional ones, like the guys who run the designer cupcake shops or high-end cheese shop or the designer food cart. Another example is my dad, who only has a seventh-grade education. He was good with his hands. He could work up his way up in a manufacturing plant. Service companies have the same type of structure. My dad became a foreman, and then a plant supervisor. He made a decent living and used to wear a blue collar and a white collar. He still went to the factory every day, but he went to meetings. That same example could be applied in the rush to build green buildings. If you think about who knows the most about a building's energy, well, it's the janitor who would adjust the heating and cooling systems and know about the insulation. Why do we only think of the janitor as the person who sweeps the floors?
By getting people more involved in continuous improvement in companies, the country will value service more.
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Half hour podcast / interview with Richard Florida talking about the Great Reset, which exerts certain pressures or forces:
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Among these forces will be:
* new patterns of consumption, and new attitudes toward ownership that are less centered on houses and cars
* the transformation of millions of service jobs into middle class careers that engage workers as a source of innovation
* new forms of infrastructure that speed the movement of people, goods, and ideas
* a radically altered and much denser economic landscape organized around
* "megaregions" that will drive the development of new industries, new jobs, and a whole new way of life
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Op-ed by Richard Florida, written for the Toronto Star (republished on Florida's Creative Class site). Conclusions apply to most urban areas:
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Toronto and its extended region need to grow. Our mega-region, which spans Montreal to Waterloo and across the border to Buffalo and Rochester, is home to 22 million people and generates $530 billion in economic output. But we are dwarfed by the truly gargantuan mega-regions surrounding New York and Chicago, which each produce roughly $2 trillion in economic output annually. Bigger cities and bigger mega-regions have faster metabolisms and bigger markets, and they are more innovative. Greater Toronto has to increase its size and scale fast. But adding more people — even 2 million people by 2031, as the Greater Toronto Marketing Alliance anticipates — will not be enough. We have to borrow size by expanding our borders..
But we have to grow differently. Over the past several decades we have grown bigger but not better, by throwing up cheap condo buildings downtown and creating the worst kinds of suburban sprawl with car-dependent, un-walkable and some would say almost unlivable over-sized housing and related developments, while destroying some of the very best farmland on the planet. We need to grow smarter and greener as we grow bigger. That means increasing density and remaking our suburbs around transit and as mixed use, walkable and livable communities.
We’ll need new infrastructure that can connect the far-flung pieces of our mega-region and make it more of an economically integrated whole. That means investing now in high-speed rail, which would cut travel time from Toronto to Montreal to just over two hours. It would make Waterloo, with its world-class high-tech cluster, a veritable suburb with an easy commute of under a half-hour. High-speed rail could even help reposition ailing Windsor as part of the Greater Toronto economy by cutting travel time to just 90 minutes.
Could it be that our stable housing market might blind us to the bigger housing reset going
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"While there are 191 nations in the world, just 40 significant mega-regions power the global economy. Home to more than one-fifth of the world's population, these 40 megas account for two-thirds of global economic output and more than 85% of all global innovation."
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Interesting idea: that mega-regions are actually more significant as drivers than nation-states when discussing economic competitiveness.
Great 'Captured Perspective' blog post by Peter Boumgarden, who comments on Richard Florida's Atlantic Monthly piece:
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"...cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.
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What this means is that cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.
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What this means is that cities are not just portfolios that emerge segmented for risk, but also social entities that respond positively to this differentiation with increased generativity. Cities are not only portfolios, but also social entities where diverse individuals interacting results in additional benefits for the growth of that city, over and above the lower risk of economic failure. In this way, a city might best be conceived a social portfolio.
What you have in a city like Detroit (or unfortunately, many mid-major Midwestern cities, St. Louis included) is a poor social portfolio- resulting from a significant lack of industry diversity, and a lack of concentrated interaction among any diversity. Taken together, these cities are both at higher risk of collapse given the right conditions, and a lower ‘risk’ of growth and innovation.
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The only way toward long-run and sustainable recovery is a dramatic change in where and how we live. What ultimately got us out of the Long Depression of the late 19th century and the Great Depression of the 1930s wasn’t just new technology, or creative destruction, or government spending, it was a phase-shift in the way we live - in our economic geography. The recovery after the Long Depression took shape around the rise of the industrial city and its streetcar suburbs. The recovery after the Great Depression was powered by suburbanization. We need a massive shift not just in our infrastructure but in our housing system.
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The only way toward long-run and sustainable recovery is a dramatic change in where and how we live. What ultimately got us out of the Long Depression of the late 19th century and the Great Depression of the 1930s wasn’t just new technology, or creative destruction, or government spending, it was a phase-shift in the way we live - in our economic geography. The recovery after the Long Depression took shape around the rise of the industrial city and its streetcar suburbs. The recovery after the Great Depression was powered by suburbanization. We need a massive shift not just in our infrastructure but in our housing system.
Richard Florida on how the financial crash will affect specific geographical locales and cities in the US / in North America. On NYC, he notes that its diversified economy - even though it's home to Wall Street, which may well be moribund if not dead already - will see the city through the worst of it.
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The great urbanist Jane Jacobs was among the first to identify cities’ diverse economic and social structures as the true engines of growth. Although the specialization identified by Adam Smith creates powerful efficiency gains, Jacobs argued that the jostling of many different professions and different types of people, all in a dense environment, is an essential spur to innovation—to the creation of things that are truly new. And innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant.
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In 2005, I asked a top-ranking official at a major investment bank whether the city’s rising real-estate prices were affecting his company’s ability to attract global talent. He responded simply: “We are the cause, not the effect, of the real-estate bubble.” (As it turns out, he was only half right.) Stratospheric real-estate prices have made New York less diverse over time, and arguably less stimulating.
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Florida points to an article that smacks down cities (it claims that historically they've been "death traps") and asks for reader feedback. I left a long comment.
Richard Florida makes the argument that Fordism -- or Fordist thinking -- lies behind some of our economic woes at present, and that we have to get past that paradigm. I left a comment re. this article ( http://www.wsoctv.com/automotive/17945476/detail.html#- ), "Falling Gas Prices Jump-Start GM SUV Sales; Automaker Puts Texas Plant On Overtime Amid Other Closures," published a week ago (11/10/08). The automobile industry shouldn't be bailed out without significant guarantees from the industry that it will embrace environmentally progressive goals.
Fascinating (possibly scary?) piece by Florida on how Obama's win could still fan the flames of an ugly backlash from the right that may be more convulsive and destructive than the current economic / financial meltdown. Florida factors in some data around demographic changes due to the creative economy (linked to democratic/ Obama politics), to paint a picture of a potentially very divided country.
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When people like Colin Powell say Mr. Obama is a “transformational figure,” they’re suggesting that an Obama administration can somehow heal the deep divisions within the American electorate and move the country forward, the way Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression. And certainly projected Democratic majorities in Congress make that kind of transformation appear plausible.
<!-- end #inTP -->I wish that would happen. But I doubt it will, and the reason is simple: The divisions run too deep. The realignment that propelled and kept FDR in office is not happening today. American politics is distinguished today by shifting electoral coalitions, candidate-centered elections, and what some political scientists call de-alignment. America isn’t just suffering from political polarization, but a burgeoning economic divide and class war.
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Since then, 20 million jobs in the creative sector have been created, and the ranks of what I call the creative class have grown to 40 million - nearly a third of the work force. That group has become powerful in American politics, and it is squarely behind Mr. Obama. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently reported that Republicans have all but lost creative professionals working in law, medicine, and high technology.
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A sobering assessment of current bail-out strategies and why they could well fail, by Martin Kenney.
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when the Treasury/Fed say they will bail out banks, they only mean a few key banks and leave the rest to their own devices (there is evidence for this suspicion as the large regional banks such as Sun Trust and Zion did not participate in the huge rally on Monday). So, which banks will be bailed out? My guess is Goldman Sachs (Paulson and Robert Rubin’s ex-employer), Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and a few others (did Wells Fargo buy Wachovia so that it could enter this charmed circle?). P.S. - We now have confirmation of which firms are being bailed out: JPMorgan, Goldman, Citi, BoA, Wells Fargo, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, State Street Bank [thank you Barney Frank], Bank of NY Mellon [thank you Hillary and Schumer].
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The forces of globalization are still underway and, as many of have been saying, they are putting downward pressure on incomes in the developed nations, which, of course, are the consumers of the products of the developing nations. A small telltale of this, IBM announced dramatically increased profits on only slightly higher sales. My guess is that these profits were made by substituting low-cost developing world service providers for their high-cost developing nation employees. This dynamic will continue putting pressure on wages in the developed nations and contributing to a deflationary dynamic.
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Great entry by Richard Florida, which underscores the connection between suburbanization, reliance on cheap gasoline, consumption, and using housing/ real estate as a "piggy bank" that one could always raid to get money to buy more stuff. See entry, and annotations/ highlights.
I added a comment, in response to an existing comment by Wendy Waters, and then a second one in response to Kwende Kefentse.
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Most experts agree this is the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. The stock market is down almost 25 percent so far this year. Housing prices in the United States are off more than 20 per cent since their peak in 2006. Manufacturing output is falling and consumer confidence has slipped.
<!-- /Summary -->Martin Feldstein, former head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, past chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a Harvard economics professor - usually a voice of calming reassurance - wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Sliding into recession, monetary policy already at maximum easing, and fiscal transfers impotent … an unenviable situation, to say the least, for any incoming president.”
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Where did this financial mess come from? And what does it mean?
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Why does one too often get the impression that publications like The Tyee are fighting a rear-guard and even anachronistic battle? That somehow, somewhere different patterns are emerging, which its journalists just don't see, preferring instead the familiar world of what they knew "back in the day"?
This is one of a series of posts by Florida in response to an article by Paul Krugman, who is sceptical of Florida's theories around mega-regions powering the world's economic engines. Lots of interesting ideas here.
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It is also increasingly clear that urbanization, in general, is an important component of productivity. Careful studies of US-Canadian regional productivity and competitiveness by my colleague Roger Martin and the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity show that urbanization is a key component of the difference. Anyway you slice it urbanization is important to economic growth.
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agent-based models which show how clusters, then cities, then metros and then mega-regions form based on these human capital externalities.
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Richard Florida quotes from a WSJ article (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120425355065601997.html) that describes how successful Finnish high schoolers are compared to other students in other countries. I left a very long comment on this entry, as it's a topic obviously close to my area of concerns.
Click through to read Florida's post, and the numerous comments this one generated.
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High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don't start school until age 7.
Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're way ahead in math, science and reading -- on track to keeping Finns among the world's most productive ...
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Add Sticky NoteFinnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000 ...
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Yule Heibel on 2008-03-02Taylorization in public (and private) education hasn't allowed students to leap into post-factory economies. The factory model of education deserves to get the boot.
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Florida points to two techologists, one SV-based (Michael Arrington), the other now once again Seattle-based (Glenn Kelman), having a bit of a dust-up over whether one region/ city is better than the other. Robert Scoble also weighs in, as do several others. Of particular interest is that Crosscut today also published Margaret Pugh O'Mara's article on the Seattle - Silicon Valley comparison. I commented here (and in Crosscut).
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I have at least 3 friends who are former teachers. They all said they left because "I loved the kids and teaching. I hated the union, the mandatory testing, the bureaucracy."
My wife's sister and her husband taught at a rural California school. They're avid birders and every year as part of science would take middle schoolers to the Klamath refuge to look at migrating waterfowl, bald eagles, etc. The kids loved it. But when No Child Left Behind came along they were told to stay in the classroom and teach to the tests.
Combining the Finnish model with the City as Classroom ideas of the Remixing cities would probably do more to reform education than another decade of blue ribbon studies.