It has been too long...

It has been a long while since I have written anything on these here pages. I thought about writing, and how I had to write something extremely profound to make up for the two months of nothingness. Then, I realized that a) so few people read this and b) no one cares, whether they did read, would read, or have read in the past. Therefore, no proclamations of trying harder or grand hopes of writing more.

What pulled me out of my blogging slumber, you ask? Well, this story (h/t: Creative Class) from CNN about the failure of suburban housing and the return to "walkable" urban neighborhoods. This hit especially close to home, considering I study the effect of the built environment on health (and walking in particular) and residential choice. Naturally, I was intrigued. In particular this tid-bit caught my attention:

This change can be witnessed in places like Atlanta, Georgia, Detroit, Michigan, and Dallas, Texas, said Leinberger, where once rundown downtowns are being revitalized by well-educated, young professionals who have no desire to live in a detached single family home typical of a suburbia where life is often centered around long commutes and cars.

Instead, they are looking for what [Christopher] Leinberger calls "walkable urbanism" -- both small communities and big cities characterized by efficient mass transit systems and high density developments enabling residents to walk virtually everywhere for everything -- from home to work to restaurants to movie theaters.

Leinberger reports that 40% of people from selected metro areas want to live in walkable urban neighborhoods. On the one hand, I think that is about right and maybe even a little low. But, on the other, of course people want to live in walkable neighborhoods; but if I asked if they wanted good schools, good city services, and convenient transportation they would also say yes. The real question is, how high of a priority are walkable neighborhoods compared to the other desires of homeowners -- and given that it is very difficult and costly to build, from scratch, a "walkable" neighborhood (at least compared to suburban expansion) it is necessarily a limited market of people who would be able to afford such locations.

And, finally, let's not forget that there is one thing that is not mentioned at all in this article - race. I think that people want to profess strong egalitarian motives and racial composition does not matter as much to younger people as it does to older, but it matters. Places like the Kentlands in Maryland so that suburbanites can have it all - a suburban house, excellent schools, lots of space and the ability to walk to the grocery store without having to deal with the problems of the poor, largely minority populations of not only D.C., but also older suburbs like Silver Spring and Rockville. Of course, then the city or state government will just pay a ton of money to completely tear down and rebuild the place -- and in the process remove any "undesirable" elements.

And, as a final note, I thought that I should share reader NewWorld's insightful comments:

This is just another of countless examples to show that man cannot govern themselves (Jeremiah 10:23) The Bible teaches that God's government, ruled by Christ, will intervene in earth's affairs and repair the damage done by humans. This government will solve housing problems, economic issues, food shortages, end crime, violence and all abuses and injustices, prevent natural disasters, end sickness and even death.

We have much to look forward to!

The Future of the Urban Revolution

In the most recent issue of City & Community, Neil Smith has a stinging critique of Lance Freeman's book, There Goes the 'Hood. Smith, a devout marxian and among the most prolific scholars on gentrification, takes umbrage to the fact that Freeman supports the idea that gentrification might not be a horrible thing. Smith argues that the book is poorly researched and written and takes a few really low blows at Freeman, which include making the claim that Freeman is shilling for his employer, Columbia University by covering up Columbia's expansion plan (which I have discussed here before):

Freeman, who is employed as an urban planner by Columbia University—one of New York City's top five landlords—laughs off Harlem residents’ long-term suspicion about Columbia's encroachment into the neighborhood as an urban myth. He inexplicably omits any mention of Columbia University's plan, unveiled in 2005, to "develop" a huge swath of West Harlem over the objections of many local residents. Freeman "sees" none of this.

The first thing to mention is that it is unfair to hold Freeman accountable for something that was not present in his fieldwork. Freeman's book was published in May 2006. While early signs were evident of the West Harlem expansion, Smith himself acknowledges that the plan was not unveiled until 2005. Because of the length of time it takes to turn fieldwork into a publishable manuscript and a manuscript to a book, there is a good chance that Freeman was done with his fieldwork well before the plan was unveiled.

Perhaps more troubling, however, is the fact that Smith—who works cross-town at the CUNY Graduate Center—is somehow saying that Freeman is a shill for Columbia's expansion plan. That, somehow, because Freeman works for Columbia, he is trying to sweep these inconvenient details under the rug to protect his employer. While Freeman's account is certainly not a pull-no-punches kind of account, to insinuate that Freeman is a mouthpiece for his employer seems to me to be unfair.

While Smith is certainly a confrontational character (see, for instance, his academic debates with David Ley in the late eighties here and here), it seems like this critique was a little bit over the top. Especially for somewhat who has admitted, half-jokingly, to being a "bourgeois marxist" at a talk he gave in Ann Arbor last academic year. At the same lecture, an audience member asked Smith what he thought should be done about the strategy of spatial expansion of global capital. He wasn't sure - the best thing that he could come up with was to attempt to create co-ops in cities so that people could have a democratic stake in their own housing.

This is a noble aim. But, it is also incredibly short-sighted and fails to recognize the complexity of such issues and, particularly how they are tied to race, in the United States. Smith takes a swipe at Freeman here, too:

For Freeman, gentrification scholarship has been hijacked by an untoward focus on class, whereas in his neighborhoods, the issue is race. Once the focus is changed to race, he avers, we can see gentrification in a new register. "From the ground up," gentrification in Clinton Hill and Harlem are certainly mixed, but overall a good thing. Once we see that gentrification in these neighborhoods actually retains their blackness and that class is a minor issue, we can start to love gentrification.

In a typically orthodox marxian way, race is relegated to the "superstructural" niceties that are really class-based. Having read Freeman's book, nowhere does he say that class is not important; he does make the argument, and perhaps takes the argument too far, that class has been privileged in academic debates of gentrification more than race. Freeman, however, does something that Smith refuses to do: he tried to develop the book to be academically rigorous, publicly interesting and to develop real policy solutions that could be implemented. I will take it for granted that Smith, being the true marxist that he is, sees the capitalist state as inevitably interested solely in the demands of the corporate elite. Even so, to argue that the best thing, on a real political level, to confront gentrification is to develop co-ops so that people can feel a stake of control is neither calling the revolution or engaging with the current policy situation. Especially since the history of people owning and controlling their own property in this country is some of the most blatant and disgusting racism ever demonstrated, Bull Conner's dogs notwithstanding.

Smith does reveal some issues with Freeman's book that are worth pointing out. Freeman does not develop his methodological approach very fully. It is difficult to tell from the book how Freeman selected his interviewees. I also noticed that the book was more heavily tilted towards the "black bourgeoisie" more than the working class residents of Clinton Hill and Harlem. At the same time, however, I commend Freeman for trying to engage with a larger audience of academics and activists. And, while he does take a somewhat sanguine view of gentrification, he does not—either in his book or his widley cited academic article—argue that gentrification is an unqualified good that has no costs. He argues that inflating real estate costs due to gentrification pose a serious threat to long-time residents in neighborhoods and that gentrification can destroy the community bonds among those residents.

The real problem for me, however, is the review misses the broader aims of the book. Freeman's proposals are actually in line with a philosophy of fair redevelopment and advocates vigorously for ways to guard against the potential havoc wreaked by gentrification. Besides his policy proposals to regulate rent (and, Freeman is a strong advocate for rent controls), Freeman actually argues that the best way to promote positive urban development is through Alinsky-type organizing. If Smith can't get behind that, or even bother to mention it in his review, I'm not sure how far the marxian notion of the urban revolution is going to get.

White People Like Gentrification

Or so I'm told:

In general, white people love situations where they can’t lose. While this does account for the majority of their situations, perhaps the safest bet a white person can make is to buy a house in an up-and-coming neighborhood.
...
They are like a modern day Lewis and Clark, except instead of searching for the ocean, they are searching for old properties to renovate.

In a few years, if more white people start moving in, these initial trailblazers will sell their property for triple what they paid and move into an ultramodern home.

Credibility or money, they can’t lose!

Although written to be funny (and succeeding quite well in this regard), it is scary how close this actually is to the truth for a lot of places. In fact, minus the part about Giuliani booting all the homeless people from public places, this post does a pretty good job summarizing Neil Smith's take on gentrification.

(h/t shakha)

Consumer Cities

Part of the reason that I got interested in studying gentrification is its importance in shaping American (and, as I am finding out world) cities. It is a fascinating location of a whole bunch of fundamental theoretical debates. And I don't mean "theoretical" in the sense of academically removed ivory tower stuff, but real fundamental debates about the underlying social issues facing American society. Gentrification, and the debates surrounding gentrification, narrow in on fundamental questions about the role of public financing for housing, jobs, education but also issues surrounding the environment, diversity and the role of public and private institutions in the development of new political ideas.

But, there are times when I find it uncanny how well timed things are. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, I was discussing Lance Freeman's book in the context of the paper that I was am writing when the next day the AYR published a review of it. But, today I found something that is probably even more directly relevant. From the Creative Class Group (Richard Florida's consultancy business), there was a link to this article in the International Herald Tribune. It is discussing the role of demand-driven location decisions in the economic development of cities and how cities can cater to those demands. There was one particular part that caught my attention, however:

The number of these "consumer immigrants" - those moving back to the city seeking a better quality of life - is relatively small compared with the hundreds of thousands of poorer economic migrants who traditionally head to the inner city.

But the "consumer immigrants" have a special significance because they are rich. They are the wealthy, educated, creative types that Bloomberg wants to engage with in his PlaNYC, his initiative to ensure that the extra million souls he predicts will arrive by 2030 do not produce an unlivable crush in Manhattan.

He is pushing for a congestion charge to cut traffic and pollution, plans an all-hybrid taxi fleet, wants to plant one million new trees, and would like to make sure that every New Yorker lives within a 10-minute walk of a park. These are all innovations that the upper-middle classes increasingly take for granted.

In his reinvention of New York as a greener city, Bloomberg may have drawn comfort from the cover story of New York magazine this week. It showed that, despite the city's grime and noise, New Yorkers are among the healthiest in the country.

Interestingly, this is precisely the conversation that I am responding to in the paper that I am currently writing (vainly, it seems — though seeing this gives me hope that the issue is important). There are several critiques that I have of this and I outline them below.

First, it is true that the number of "consumer immigrants" is vastly outnumbered by the number of "economic migrants" nation-wide. But, the thrust of this argument assumes that assumes that the "poorer economic migrants" are not simultaneously consumers or may desire nice places to live^[1]. And, wouldn't the economic payoff of those vastly numerically more numerous migrants be, overall, a greater economic boom to the city if it captured that demand?

Second, the initiatives that Bloomberg is proposing are seen, in many ways, as very progressive causes. And, I would argue that they are in fact very progressive causes. The problem is that the solutions are not. They reflect, in a certain way, the return of a New York tradition: the Rockefeller Republican. The effect of congestion pricing is also going to mean that places like Home Depot, Costco, etc. are going to be able to write off the extra overhead costs, but the smaller business person who relies on delivery to Manhattan is going to face a signficant reduction of profits. I in principle I agree with the fact that we need to reduce the use of cars; however, the recent subway problems after the flood indicate that money might be better invested in the mass transit system. Same with the "greening" of the taxis: Bloomberg ain't payin' for it - he's making the taxi drivers do that.

Finally, and I think that this made me the most irate, it might be true that New Yorkers as a whole may be becoming more healthy. But, let me offer an alternative explanation beginning from the premise of this article that more rich people are moving to the city. More rich people are moving in. Rich people tend to have better health than poor people and rich neighborhoods have better health than poor communities (net of individual differences in income)^[2], therefore, it may simply be that the sick people are dying or being pushed out. The implied assumption in that statement is that all New Yorkers are healthier but, in fact, it may just be that New York residents are richer - which is the very point of this article.

There are reasonable debates to be had about whether the "consumer city" is good or bad public policy and I would be interested to hear what people think about these proposals. While the environmental effects and social mixing of diverse cities are important, we also have to think about policies that are fair to the service-workers and current residents that provide the cheap labor that makes the "consumer city" possible. Furthermore, we also have to see that the demands and needs of all city residents are met and not necessarily pander to the few rich "consumer immigrants" that might move to the city.

Ah, so much here -- so I am going to go finish this paper now and let you know what I find out about these issues...

Related:

• The "Tolerant" Creative Class
• The New Class Struggle
• Race & Redevelopment I: Gentrification

^[1] On another note of language, it is interesting how this argument might be able to recast the immigration debate — or if it will be used to recast the immigration debate.
^[2] A. Diez Roux, 2001. (For propriety's sake I should mention that I work on a project on which Ana is a co-PI)

Awfully Close to Home

Walking down the street last night, I found out that my neighborhood is going to be graced by the presence of Union Market. I had no idea what a Union Market was, so I went to their website to find out:

We are a neighborhood specialty food market—a one-stop shop for the best in fresh, prepared and gourmet foods. Union Market is a new enterprise that is a product of cooperation between the former Management team of one of New York's most prestigious food outlets, Gourmet Garage, including Mr. Marko Lalic (Former General Manager of Gourmet Garage SoHo), Mr. Martin Nuñez (Former Corporate Director of Operations and General Manager of Gourmet Garage 7th Avenue, West Village) and New York food industry veteran Mr. Paul Fernandez. Utilizing our combined experience of over forty years in the specialty food business, we developed the concept for a store that is Your Neighborhood Source for Fine Foods. That store is Union Market.

Sounds like it is not much more than a specialized version of Whole Foods. Though, I will give them this—rather than raze an entire block of existing units, they did just knock down walls between three adjacent storefronts to build it. It isn't going to be a giant gourmet big-box, but it does mean that "South Slope"^[*] has officially hit the yuppie radar screen. I guess it shouldn't be that surprising given that posts have been published about the southward creep of restaurants even after the original expansion of restaurants in the area, but I guess that the Union Market feels much more corporate than many of these other restaurants, food stores, etc. I'm just hoping that it doesn't expand too quickly in the next year and force us to find a new place. On the other hand, it would be valuable experience that I could chalk up to "participant observation."

^[*] South Slope is the southern most part of Park Slope. According to Wikipedia (which, I believe to be the most reliable source for things like this), "South Slope" does not exist as a formal neighborhood. However, as an indication for its in-between status as a designation not quite yet captured by the local real estate market, the Wikipedia entry for Park Slope (permanent link to revision) "South Slope" is mentioned as a bordering neighborhood that has become consumed by "greater Park Slope" as real estate agents have become "increasingly generous about the borders of Park Slope". ^return

ASA, etc.

This past week has been super crazy. I was attending the American Sociological Association annual meetings (which have received extensive coverage at Inside Higher Ed this week). This largely meant catching up with friends and going out to LOTS of meals and coffees, etc. Having felt very out of place at other conferences I have gone to in the past, the combination of moving away from Ann Arbor and having friends who have jobs and are no longer at Michigan made me realize that the real value of these meetings is being able to catch up with old friends. The combination of catching up with old friends and having the ability to commute to the meetings made this one especially enjoyable, but I can see how they will be great in the future as well.

Not all of this was non-academic thrills. I got to see several presentations that were excellent. Probably the most helpful was one where several journal editors provided tips to help get manuscripts published. For those who are interested, an excellent low-down is provided by anomie. It was really helpful thinking about how the actual nuts-and-bolts of this profession work. I also went to a really interesting session on urban sociology that included a paper about bars and nightlife in the Lower East Side. I decided after that talk that I really screwed up trying to develop my "project" (a.k.a. the dissertation - but somehow I heard a lot of people call it that this weekend) and should have come up with something that would allow me to go out to bars and qualify it as research. The paper was actually really interesting and relates to a more quantitative project that we were looking at possibly doing, so that was pretty cool. The other papers in the session were also interesting.

Since I have been so absent, I need to get my nose to the proverbial grindstone. But, since Dave and I were discussing the Columbia expansion project, I thought that I would pass this article about the project. Following the links provides a really good picture of what is happening regarding the "Manhattanville" or "West Harlem" project (depending on whether you would like to side with the University or with the Community). It was an interesting read regarding the role of universities in their communities, especially when those communities tend to be more poor, less white and have less political power than the university administrations.

How Timely

Today, in the Atlantic Yards Report, there is a review of Lance Freeman's book that I referenced yesterday. The Atlantic Yards Report is a blog dedicated to coverage of the gigantic development company ForestCityRatner's Atlantic Yards Development Project which is going to put expensive condo towers smack-dab in the middle of Brooklyn's downtown. The author of the blog, Norman Oder originally started his coverage in this NYT article and has expanded to cover development in much of Brooklyn.

It is a great review to read because Oder knows the Clinton Hill area that Freeman studies and so it is an interesting take on what Freeman says. I am a little disappointed that Oder didn't bring up Freeman's "political" solution (in addition to the more policy-wonk solutions) of active Alinsky-style organizing, but it still does not detract much from the review.

Race & Redevelopment I: Gentrification

In light of my recent epiphany that I need to figure out a way to make my research relevant and interesting, I am posting my first entry concerning one of the topics that I am researching: who would consider moving to redeveloped neighborhoods in Chicago and why would they consider those neighborhoods. This is the first section that describes the central role that "gentrification" has played in framing the debate.

The term “gentrification” was coined by Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe the process of working class Londoners being displaced by the wealthier “gentry” and changing the face of London as people knew it. The term, over the next four decades has been used widely in academic research as well as finding its way into the popular press and everyday vernacular. The popularity of the term as well as the subject probably has a great deal to do with the fact that the process is one that is incredibly visible. Cities, particularly those in the North American industrial “steel-belt” across the Great Lakes and Northeastern regions, were declared to be doomed in the late 1970s and 1980s. Although the reasons why cities were following this trajectory has been a cause of great debate, and included some combination of economic transformations from a manufacturing to service-based economy, the racial segregation of metropolitan areas and the concentration of poverty, there was a fairly universal agreement on the fact that cities were in a state of despair. Throughout the 1990s and the first years of the 21st century, however, many of those cities formally thought to be doomed have seen a resurgence with residents coming “back” to cities.

Perhaps it is because people’s homes and neighborhoods have such an intrinsic value to them as to make them “a special sort of commodity” ^[1] that so much attention has been garnered by the transition of neighborhoods from poor to rich. Or, perhaps it is because the polar change in this transition was so unexpected from what was predicted in the 1970s and 1980s for American urban centers. Yet, the fact is that gentrification has taken one of the leading roles in understanding urban theory both academically and in every-day life.

And, while most evidence points to the fact that migration to suburbs has outpaced that to cities, it seems appropriate that gentrification should be a major component of urban theory given the fact that it is such a visible and recognizable feature of contemporary urban contexts. But, in absolute numbers, gentrification is not a trivial occurrence, either. Two researchers, Elvin Wyly and Daniel Hammel, have found that the size of the "urban underclass" which guided much academic and political debate in the 1980s and 1990s (think: welfare reform), is about the same size as the number of people involved in gentrification.

But, I think that another key element to understanding gentrification in the U.S. context is the fact that there is a strong racial component to gentrification in the United States. As the national economy of the U.S. shifted from a manufacturing to a service base, U.S. central cities were not only divided economically, but also racially. Because of explicit racial policies of And, while many people claim that this is largely due to white flight following the urban riots in the late 1960s, the process actually began much earlier and simply increased the rate at which white flight was occurring (for a great analysis of the 1967 riot in Detroit, read Thomas Sugrue's Origins of Urban Crisis). Whether this racial division was the direct consequence of urban economic restructuring or was primarily the result of high levels of racial segregation in most northern and eastern industrial cities is a matter of debate. What is true, either way, is that the poor urban residents in most northern and eastern cities that are likely to get displaced in the process of gentrification are African Americans. In fact, the perception that white people displace people of color as a process of gentrification is so pronounced that two researchers studying predominantly African American neighborhoods where gentrification is occurring noted that their informants mark the existence of gentrification to the time that they saw white people buying houses in their neighborhoods^[2].

While gentrification is certainly an important component of the urban environment that needs to be understood to fully comprehend the contemporary development of urban environments, I argue that it is important that gentrification not become the only lens through which urban development is considered. The paper that I am working on currently describes why I think that this is the case and how, in some ways, thinking about gentrification—particularly the context in which gentrification is viewed in the U.S.—can be problematic both for understanding what is shaping residential choices among metropolitan residents and it limits the possibilities of potential urban reform. I am working on writing that part up now, and so will let you know why I think that this is the case in a following post.

[1] Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. 1987. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place. Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press. [return]
[2] One of the studies is an article written by Mary Pattillo (for those interested, I have included the entire citation) who studies the North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood in Chicago. She has very recently published a book, Black on the Block, expanding on that study and which I have not yet had a chance to read. The citation for her article is: Pattillo, Mary. 2003. "Negotiating Blackness, for Richer or for Poorer." Ethnography 4(1): 61-93.
The other study was conducted by Lance Freeman who studied communities in Harlem and the majority-black neighborhood of Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. If anyone is interested in urban issues and wants to read an incredibly written book, I would recommend it to anyone: Freeman, Lance. 2006. There goes the 'hood : views of gentrification from the ground up. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.[return]

The "Tolerant" Creative Class

While I certainly find this clip from Colbert Report entertaining, I also find it deeply troubling. On the one hand, Stephen Colbert is joking around about trying to find "gay/lesbian, bohemian, and artistic" people to move to their neighborhood, but on th other, there are certainly people who take this seriously. In and of itself, I don't think that it is necessarily troubling that this is the case, but the commodification of gayness is disturbing, to say the least. The commodification of gayness blunts the real political message of tolerance; gay people are assets to a community economically and, therefore, should be accepted on economic grounds. While I am certainly more pragmatically-minded than many of my friends, I find it deeply troubling that people are accepted only on account of their economic advantage to a city. While I think that Florida's point is that diverse communities fare better because they are diverse, measuring openness to diversity by the sole metric of acceptance of gays, lesbians, bohemians and artists is a deeply disturbing metric of tolerance that has the effect of fetishizing gays and lesbians as a metric against which to measure one's own diversity.

This openness to diversity is also not everything that it is purported to be. For instance, in the preface to the paperback edition, Florida's own evidence shows that five of the ten most creative regions ^[1] are also in the top ten in terms of income inequality. Furthermore, Florida himself acknowledges that "diversity" does not always mean people seeking open communities:

Some of my critics like to argue that many people who work in high-tech industries tend to be blandly conservative and prefer homogeneous communities and traditional lifestyles of the sort found in middle-class suburbs. They find evidence in the fact that so many high-tech people line in suburban enclaves like northern Virginia, the heart of Silicon Valley or the Seattle suburbs. My response is simple. These places are all located within major metropolitan areas that are among the most divers in the country and offer a wide array of lifestyle amenities. In face, these places are themselves a product of the openness and diversity of the broader areas. Had the Silicon Valley-San Fransisco area not been receptive years ago to offbeat people like the young Steven Jobs, it could not have become what it is.^[2]

Unfortunately, however, it seems like Florida wants to argue from two perspectives that don't quite fit. On the one hand, he is arguing that diverse neighborhoods are the important important level of analysis to consider when talking about creative people and that these mobile creative communities should gain a class consciousness because they understand the reshaping of the world better than those who rely on neighborhood social networks and "old world" institutions like labor unions. However, when people point out that the very "creative class" he is talking about settles in homogeneous suburban enclaves (and, in many cases further racial and economic segregation, more on this later if I have time), he simply says, "oh, it is the metropolitan area that is the most important level of analysis."

This is not to say that I disagree with him. I think that the "creative class," or, more specifically, people employed in the creative/high-wage service professions that he identifies do look for tolerant places to live. But, I am not sure that it is the search for this creative "diversity" that drives the changes as much as the economic realities that help shape where those jobs exist. While people are certainly more mobile than we were a generation ago (I say as I am "telecommuting" from New York to Ann Arbor), there are still economic factors that are at play well beyond the search for gay, bohemian and artistic communities. Housing prices for instance, have gotten to such a point that you either have to live in extreme suburbs or pay exorbitant prices to live in established neighborhoods in the city. Therefore, artists and bohemians look for places to live that are less expensive but might not be acceptable to a mainstream population. Where are these places? Often in areas that have seen decades of systematic disinvestment and are almost always poor and most of the time predominantly communities of color. So, while Wicker Park (Chicago), Clinton Hill and Harlem (New York), Adam's Morgan (D.C.) might be more tolerant towards gays, they certainly didn't accept mingling with the poor or an integrated neighborhood. But, this is where it is convenient to note that Chicago, New York and D.C. all have large, multi-ethnic populations at the metropolitan level.

While I don't find Florida's work repugnant or un-academic (which are charges that I have seen or been implied in work that I have read), I think that it is occasionally sloppy in its inferences. This would not be so bad except for the fact that growing inequality is incompatible with the understanding of a place as "tolerant" outside of a very narrow frame of what it means to be "tolerant." And, if we are to take seriously Florida's call to action among the creative class to find ways to reduce this inequality (in the conclusion of Rise of the Creative Class, then we must also question what it means to be "tolerant" and accept that class-based and race-based tolerance are also important notions towards a "diverse" city.

^[1] Of regions with at least 1 million people. return
^[2] Rise of the Creative Class, p. 233. return

The New Class Struggle

For those of you who have missed my witty blog posts (yeah, yeah, I know &mdash what witty posts), it has been a work-filled, blog-free week. I have buried my head in the books in order to try and finish a draft of a paper by next Tuesday. The upside is that I have had a chance to read some really good material on the changing nature of the city; the bad is that I have neglected you, dear readers. It also means that I don't have much more to talk about than what I have learned about the changing nature of urban life.

I noted, that I was reading Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life". In Rise of the Creative Class, Florida tracks what he perceives to be a fundamentally important shift in the nature of class relations following the changes from a manufacturing to an information economy. While this is a tried-and-true topic, Florida's concentration on the nature of work in the new economy itself provides a novel analysis that leads to interesting conclusions on the implications of this change in work on the transformation of understanding class as an analytical category. In doing this, he is part business-school professor and part modern-day Karl Marx calling for a class consciousness of the new "creative class."

His analysis is based largely on large-scale datasets from the Information Week annual salary survey data and the Occupational and Employment Statistics Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In addition, he cites interviews with members of the creative class, but does not describe the method for these interviews, which constitutes one of the greatest weaknesses of the book.

Based on this analysis, he argues that the shift from the old manufacturing-based economy to the contemporary economy is due to a rise in the importance of creativity and, thus, calls this economy the "Creative Economy" which was created when

Bohemian values met the Protestant work ethic head-on, and the two did more than survive the collision. They morphed into a new work ethic—the creative ethos—steeped in the cultivation of creativity. People from software developers to circut designers could now work as creative people, coming and going virtually as they pleased, taking breaks to excersice, working to baring rock music if they so desired. p. 207

The tension that Florida sets up throughout the book is the dichotomy between "organizational" culture versus "creative" culture. The former crushes the soul of workers, both blue collar line workers and the white collar Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Because of the nature of work in the creative economy, Florida argues, different patterns of work are necessary and people in this new economy need to be able to express this creativity. This means that corporations need to provide amenities more than salary, cities need to provide the kind of cultural nourishment necessary for this new class of creative workers and workers themselves need to adapt to rules of the new economy. Working for a single corporation is no longer the norm partly because of layoffs and mistrust in companies, but mostly because workers want to express their own creativity and therefore look for different projects.

Although there are interesting discussions discounting conservative hand-wringing over hedonistic culture and implications for organizational culture of companies, I am most interested in his understanding of the changing nature of community due to the "rise of the creative class." He argues that the new class has much less of a tie to traditional mechanisms of social capital such as community groups, labor unions the Rotary Club, etc. in favor of less organized modes of community offered by bars, restaurants and other places creative people can meet and build informal ties to each other. According to Florida, they seek out diverse communities that are often signified by the acceptance of the TBLG community the same way that people, when selecting to work, choose companies that offer domestic partner benefits, even if they, themselves are not a gay man or lesbian woman. But, adapting to these new kinds of lifestyles driven by the new economic conditions of a transformed work environment for the creative class leads to the need for new models of community. As Florida says,

Strong communities, not any institution within them, are the key to social cohesion.

Unfortunately, Florida does little to provide insight into building this community. His conclusion on the nature of cities and communities is that cities need to invest in this new class of workers and and he channels Marx to argue that

being newly emergent, the Creative Class does not yet have an awareness of itself, as a class,...is needed. p. 315 [emph. in original]

He argues that a new kind of politics will be needed in order to provide things like healthcare that were once provided by employers but now, with the increased fluidity of careers, needs to be portable and national, if not international. He argues that something like a union would be good, but that this new class is too disparate to be able to be organized. And, besides, organization is the natural enemy of creativity and must, therefore, be quashed on its own. Florida acknowledges that the challenges facing the creative class require organization, even if they are new models of organizing. Unfortunately, he provides no guidance in ways that bottom-up solutions could be developed.

Instead, he tends to focus on the top-down policy changes made by politicians. And, these conclusions are problematic on several fronts. First, his "gay index" is highly problematic. This is an argument made elsewhere, and, as I say there, I think is actually the result of his rhetoric more than his actual analysis. The second implication is that the kinds of policies that he is advocating have the effect of increasing inequality. I honestly believe that he does not intend for this to happen, in fact one of his calls to the new class is to overcome inequality between the working and service sector and the new "creative class", but the problem is that his rhetoric is very imprecise. While his conversational style makes the book engaging, it also betrays some of the more careful language of traditional academic books and can lead to problematic policy implications. For instance, the Michigan Cool Cities program has directed money towards projects that don't address the need of better educational systems and skill-building among youth to become part of the creative class towards projects that are, in essence, more tax breaks in an attempt to potentially draw this creative class from elsewhere. Lastly, I am troubled by his lack of attention to what happens to the service and working classes in this shifting economy. At several points throughout the book, Florida points to the need to understand that there are, as one section is titled "New Divides" (p. 281), in class structures. But these epiphanies often come at the end of chapters and are quite literally written as afterthoughts that are tacked to the end of sections, chapters and the book. What solutions does Florida have, for someplace like Detroit, to grow the prospect of a creative class rather than scurrying about chasing after the existing creative industries and professionals?