What a long, strange trip it's been . . .

They say it takes seven years for every cell in your body to turn over. In astrology, 27 years is the period of the Saturn Return, something that was brought to my attention recently as I prepared to finish up my 27th year on this planet — an event that coincided almost perfectly with the realization, incidentally, that it had been seven years since I took a leave of absence from school and came to the Bay Area to study . . . other things.

What’s changed since then? In some ways, a lot, and in some ways, not much at all. I still work with many of the same artists and entrepreneurs I met when I first tumbled off the Greyhound Bus in Oakland. Many of them are still my closest friends. And many of them are still struggling with the same issues of what of means to be a creative person in the urban landscape as when I first set foot in their world.

Recently, an article published by economist Richard Florida, who edits Atlantic Cities, caused me to revisit my opinions on his theories about the creative class and how it interacts with the city. Writing that post inspired me to look up a piece I’d written shortly after returning to school – when I was still just getting to know the scene out here in the Bay Area – for a round table discussion about Urban Landscapes in America.

Surprising or not, the piece is just as relevant as it was when it was first written, despite (or maybe because of) the major economic reshuffling of the past few years.

Falling property values in much of the country have caused Florida to pull what many consider an about face from earlier writings touting the economic benefits of attracting artists, bohemians and creative workers to cities. Summing up the ways in which the crash will reshape America, Florida wrote, "We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try."

Critics took his words to be a death sentence for  cities – even those that had bought into the creative class meme – already facing decline. Meanwhile, land values in places like San Francisco have remained high and are unlikely to drop at any point in the near future, meaning that gentrification will continue to sweep through poor neighborhoods, minority neighborhoods, and culturally attractive neighborhoods alike. Does this mean a nation in which Florida's theories are no longer relevant, with growth continuing in already-bustling cities and decay the inevitable fate of contracting cities, regardless of where the creative class plants itself?

Quite the contrary. 

The main thrust of Florida's creative class theory is toward the development of profitable districts. He capitalizes on counterculture (the creative core) as a one-time resource to be mined and consumed in the building of attractive new urban environments for those who generate economic activity (the creative class). Here and elsewhere, I've challenged such a reductive view of the role creativity plays in cities by applying a 'renewable resource' metaphor, positing that creativity is part of a healthy urban ecosystem whose value is ongoing, integrated, and generative. Commodification of creative culture ultimately sterilizes it, while undermining and disabling those who generate it. Extracted all at once, it ceases to be a functional component of the urban ecosystem, building and storing human capital, digesting old into new, and contributing to a cyclical regeneration and invigoration of the landscape.

Worrying about whether creativity will provide an immediate bump to a shrinking urban economy feels dangerously like jumping back into old patterns – particularly the impulsion towards high-cost, transportation-intensive, low-density, single-family home ownership – which, despite proving to be destructive, have typically been measures of growth and progress.

In the wake of a crisis created by over-speculation, maintaining diverse urban eco-systems is key. The true value in Florida's creative class theory is not the shallow and mercenary conclusion that artists create hip, edgy neighborhoods ripe for development, but the underlying recognition that creative people, well, create. They come up with new forms, new synergies and new ways of using space – a useful characteristic in an expanding economy (as Florida's books are testament) but an even more crucial function when the economy is contracting. For places struggling, my message is: don't give up, give creativity full rein. 

In the study of evolution there is a concept called punctuated equilibrium, popularized by Stephen Jay Gould's analysis of fossil findings at the Burgess Shale. The theory argues that speciation – the development of new life forms – does not happen along a slow, gradual path, but rather, it occurs in short bursts following major environmental stressors. If the same holds true in cities, then reserving 'petri dish' neighborhoods, and space in all  neighborhoods, where new forms can incubate is particularly crucial following economic catastrophe, when pressure is sure to push innovation. Or, to put it more simply, as Florida does in quoting the Stanford economist Paul Romer,“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” 

Instead of just focusing on what generates dollars, new buildings, and more business, we should also focus on what generates livability and happiness — with equity, social justice, and sustainability as measures. Rather than struggling to keep building and growing in an unfriendly economic climate, we should take the time to discover the new ideas and efficiencies that will make cities, the second time around, more stable, diverse, engaging places. To me, this is the value of the creative people I live with, work with, and write about. And it is at its most valuable when it exists in natural symbiosis with the city around it - poor, rich, professional and not – rather then being shuffled endlessly to make room for the next most profitable urban monoculture.

Of course, close readers of this blog (and much of the Bay Area art scene) will already know that creative people do tend to generate value wherever they go — Dan and Karen, for instance, did in fact move out of their Hunters Point studio to take over the American Steel Building. Dan has since gone on to found Big Art Labs in Los Angeles, and under Karen’s direction, American Steel Studios has grown to a six acre facility housing more than 150 tenants engaged in art and entrepreneurship of all flavors. Meanwhile, Lennar lost the ‘49s contract to Santa Clara, but still broke ground (“officially” this summer, though work has been going on for years) on the extravagant new development that will reshape Hunters Point, and much of the city, by extension. Oakland, as chronicled elsewhere in this blog, is assimilating more and more artists, while struggling to mitigate the pressures of gentrification. The artists of the Hunters Point Shipyard continue to fight eviction and relocation in the face of development. And the Box Shop, run by Charles Gadekan, is not only hanging on but thriving – in fact, its lease was just renewed for another 8 years.

Every day, the landscape and culture of the Bay Area continues to challenge and affirm the creative individuals here. While sometimes the evolution is hard to swallow, even to a relative newcomer like myself — I have mixed feelings, for instance, about the photos of the Symbiosis Gathering plastered across the pages of Rolling Stone, and even though I am totally one of them, it’s easy to be annoyed with the ever-increasing waves of writers and designers camped out on laptops in coffeeshops — there is no denying that it’s always interesting. All in all, it’s a good time to be an artist in the Bay Area.

Hipsters, Creative Culture . . . and pretty much everything I have left to say about Richard Florida

Earlier this year, Jezebel blogger Doug Barry published an article titled So Hipsters Aren't the Economic Boon Some Urbanists Thought They'd Be, which basically blames Richard Florida for encouraging cities to bait armies of rakishly bearded and bespectacled youngsters with the promise of more bike lanes, causing them to descend in flocks, drive up rents, and leave no room – or available outlets, if we’re talking cafés –  for anyone else.

Now. I’ve been ragging on Florida since, if you’ll excuse the extreme hipsterishness of this claim, before it was cool. Truly. But it’s not for the reasons Barry suggests. It’s not because I paid him handsomely for a report (as, he points out, my hometown of Cleveland did) only to find – though I can’t find a seat, so full are the coffeeshops with all those new members of the creative class – my city still unhip and broke.

I happen to be a great believer in the creative class, as well as a coffeeshop-clogging member of it (though I usually wear shoes). But I don’t think it works as the sort of one-time catalyst Florida’s Creative Class series describes. My frustration with the economics-driven ideologies Florida has popularized over the years is that, even if they do manage to work in the short term, taken to their logical conclusion, they read like cookbooks for a linear process of cultural commodification that leaves cities gentrified and culturally bankrupt.

Florida has so effectively earned my ire because many of his insights are sharp and valid and smart money-minded people (in his consultant days, he was one of them) have listened to him and taken his words as panacea. With great power, Richard, comes great responsibility.

Since becoming editor of the Atlantic Cities, he's softened and refined some of the views that he held as absolute in his best-selling trio of books (he's had to; the bursting of the housing bubble messed with his predictions of prosperity for places that catered to gays, bohemians, tech workers and the like) and, more importantly, he’s begun to address a broader set of questions about cities that, while still yielding unpalatable views at times, nonetheless prove instructive.

The piece that kindled the resentment of so many Florida critics, causing Barry to craft a round-up of them all, was an analysis of talent clustering in major metropolitan areas. Nothing earthshaking, just the idea that smart, creative, educated people move to where other smart, creative, educated people already are. It's not a new concept, but Florida did include a new insight that his earlier work glossed over: this process isn't necessarily a good thing.

Small and medium-sized cities like Cleveland have long recognized the problem of ‘brain drain,’ seeking to amend it by attracting back home the newly educated youngsters who left for college with, among other things, the tactics Florida espoused in his height-of-the-economy series of books.

I don’t think those efforts are always as flagrantly disastrous as Barry, longtime Florida critic Joel Kotkin, and others have made them out to be. For instance, I don’t know if I’d agree with Cleveland’s Richey Piiparinen that

following the "creative class" meme has not only meant wasted money, but wasted effort and misdirection. Burning money trying to become "cooler" ends up looking something like the metropolitan equivalent to a midlife crisis.

In describing the hipster colonization of New Orleans, Jules Bentley writes

Blitzkrieg cultural imperialism allows previously under-Instagrammed areas of our city to fulfill their potential as playgrounds for the rich without the headaches of investment or community engagement. Never mind having a Starbucks on every corner-when your favorite high-concept boutique eateries can chase you around on wheels, you can go absolutely anywhere and still get the same $12 bacon and wheatgrass smoothie.

Aside from the fact that it centers on accusations of young urbanites trying to reform street food laws in secret solidarity with a Koch brothers funded alliance planning a Trojan Horse-like takeover of the city’s poorer districts by mega corporations sponsoring foodtrucks-cum-battering-rams filled with Jack in the Box employees . . . I think the main problem with criticisms posed by this article, and others like it, is a misguided conflation of “hipsters” and “the creative class.”

Without descending too far into a debate about what it means to be a member of a group more united by fashion sense than anything else (like Fight Club, the first rule of hipsterdom seems to be never to acknowledging one’s hipsterdom) it seems fair to point out that Florida’s writings predate most of what tends to be thought of as the unifying characteristics of the hipster epoch — a reliance on smart phones, the proliferation of apps and social media, the widespread acceptance of local and boutique foods, even the real tipping point of having a "Starbucks on every corner." But more importantly, these unifying characteristics don’t reveal much about the population’s actual likelihood to contribute meaningfully to the creative or innovative economy of a city.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the indicators of creative culture on which Florida based his analyses – participating in local music and art scenes, for instance, or appreciating an edgy coffeeshop – may have more accurately predicted economic growth than today, because they had to be actively sought out by their target population, signifying a sense of agency. Today, those same indicators have been swept up in a cultural trend that is much broader and more widely accessible, thanks to the Internet and social media’s ability not only to popularize, but to lend the tools needed for participation in, the movement. So, to give some truth the classic hipster aphorism – “I liked that [band/ book/ recipe for kale and quinoa salad] before it was popular” – it seems important to point out that what ten years ago was creative counterculture has today become mainstream pop culture.

Indeed, the Internet has accelerated the production and dissemination of culture so much that another one of those hallmarks of hipsterism – irony – has resulted as a built-in defense mechanism. If the value of a countercultural movement – sometimes likened to the paradigmatic form of creativity – lies in its ability to challenge the mainstream, and if the value of a cultural movement relies on its being unique and special, then adherents are seriously destabilized when any good idea or creative impulse carries with it the possibility of widespread and near-instant popularity. What to do to counter this phenomenon? Swaddle any earnest appreciation in a thick blanket of irony, pre-guarding against that tipping-point moment at which something becomes ‘too’ popular. It’s why no one who is a hipster wants to be called a hipster.

Put another way: it was said of mid-century cultural phenomena like Dadaism that the movement was dead as soon as you named it. Indeed, artistic movements have always defined themselves in opposition to what came before, with new culture overtaking mainstream culture. The process has just sped up so much that the new cultural trend emerges with its demise built-in, already opposing itself, lest its proponents be caught with their (skinny) pants down, still earnestly cheering for a cliché. Influenced, perhaps, by the same sort of thinking that led to intellectual property laws – who will invest in innovation if the profits can be immediately reaped by everyone? – many of these young people are better described, not as true creators, but as early adopters.

Whether it is sifting for indie music on Pitchfork or finding trendy new places to eat via Urbanspoon, the value in today’s cultural activities is tied to exclusivity, and thus to social media. It’s a catch-22: culturistas must rely on social networks to find and adopt new trends, but overexposure limits the value of those same trends. Like the planned obsolescence of the social media devices themselves, it results in ever-quickening patterns of consumption. And even when these instruments are used for the production of cultural artifacts, as in the case of an Instagram photo, it’s somehow a production that still looks more like consumption because it is mediated by a marketable product – specific apps and programs that churn out artistic ephemera quickly and easily – with minimal input from the ‘author.’ Even the fancy lattes, artisan foods, and hand-knit ironic tea cosies, which are actually crafted objects, are heavily influenced by forums like Craftster, Pinterest and Etsy that promote the rapid, iterative spread of a small number of original creative ideas.

But wait, you say. This is the open source movement. It is the other great defining movement of our time, and it stands in direct opposition to the miserly intellectual-property origins of the culture of early adopting that you describe.

It’s true – and the point here is not to knock the contribution of these creative forums overall. It’s to point out the difficulty of quantifying creative contributions as they correlate to specific contributors – all those hipsters in coffeeshops – because they are small, dispersed, iterative, and most importantly, aren’t necessarily reaped in the same place they are sown. Profits don’t enjoy the same linear relationship to creativity, and don’t contribute to economic growth in the same way as the invention of a single actor who can count how many units of revenue his particular innovation has resulted in.

Creative culture has become synonymous with hipster culture because the Internet has made easily available to nearly everyone with a creative impulse the raw materials, how-to’s and inspiration needed to produce the components of today’s cultural zeitgeist, adding to the movement’s content and momentum. That is, if industrialization made possible the mass consumption of culture, the Internet has made possible the mass consumption of creative culture.

The ease with which hipsters can count themselves as members of the creative class has earned them the derision of many, who call them (to use the delightfully rancorous language of the blog Die Hipster’s anonymous author) spoiled and lazy, “interlopers,” “trustfunders,” and “urban cupcakeologists.” Because hipster culture is all about easy access to and consumption of creativity, it is unlikely to reveal any true parity with the production of innovative ideas, and has earned an association with downwardly-mobile-by-choice enclaves of bacon-smoothie drinkers making bacon smoothies for other bacon-smoothie drinkers.

This all seems to support Florida’s newfound admission that the benefits of talent clustering do not really reach beyond the creative class, serving only, as Barry writes,

the sort of generically and passively progressive creatures that comprise the creative class — young, usually single, and hungering for a cool district to settle down while they work through the 20-something angst. Their service-based hipster enclaves underperform economically, and have little, says urban thinker Aaron Renn, "in the way of coattails." In other words, the creative class produces so little, that no crumbs fall from their table — there's barely enough for them.

Incisive though these critiques of angsty 20-somethings may be, they really miss the point of Florida’s theories about the creative class – the distinguishing characteristic of which, Florida has written, is that its members engage in work whose function is to "create meaningful new forms." That is, the people popularly conceived of as hipsters do not actually fit the definition of the creative core – artists, entrepreneurs and radicals – that Florida-believers are trying to attract.

That said, they are not unrelated to Florida’s hypothesis, and their influx into urban spaces is not an alternate history, without connection to Florida’s favored scheme of urban revitalization. Rather, it is a predictable by-product (made unexpectedly pervasive by the social media explosion) of a process designed to commodify creative culture, package it neatly, and mass-market it for a low, low price — low enough, the theory went, that after the ‘true’ creatives had come in and pioneered a cultural rebirth (living in warehouses and building prototypes in their garages), a second wave could swoop in and consume the neatly packaged culture in the form of trendy bars and galleries, adding to economic activity.

To clarify, Florida’s creative class does include people beyond the creative core. His theory assumed that after the avant-garde had moved in, other creative professionals – scientists, architects, even doctors and lawyers in some accounts – would follow. The first set offers truly creative culture, the second sees that culture as commodity and follows it, providing growth.

Hipsters have proliferated because they are easy targets for those who peddle creative currency. Though they are not necessarily doctors and architects, they fit neatly into Florida’s paradigm as cogs in the revitalization-gentrification engines that is meant to hum through depressed neighborhoods, sweeping the streets clean. So the frustration of the Die Hipster blogger and others is valid: rents are being driven up by urban youngsters, but the dispersal of ‘cool’ urban culture via digital channels means that their presence is not necessarily tied to real, productive contributions. Furthermore, the economy is no longer booming, leaving very few people able to afford living where they work — not the original population of the region, not the hipsters who are still being supported by their parents because they want to work in creative industries but, hey, it's a recession and they can't find jobs, and increasingly, (as Florida’s most recent analysis shows) not even those educated and skilled workers who are supposed to have been attracted by job opportunities and amenities that creative cities provide.

The important point about talent clustering is that it was meant to have acted liked that old bromide about the rising tide, improving wages and amenities for all workers in the region. Florida writes, "bigger metros bring powerful agglomeration effects; they have faster metabolisms and greater rates of innovation.” And while these factors do lead to higher pay across the board, the benefits are immediately negated as soon as higher housing costs are taken into account – a process that compounds itself as job opportunities attract more workers to the area, inflating housing costs still further. As Florida concludes, it is "not just a vicious cycle, but an unsustainable one — economically, politically, and morally."

It's a strange note for the economist to end on — not simply because it’s a conclusion he should have reached much sooner, given that policies he’s promoted tend to feed the process, but also because of the abject resignation of his words, given their contrast to his larger body of work.

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Map via Buzzfeed

So what’s to be done? As David Brooks' Op-Ed points out, economic policies aimed at wealth redistribution through taxation do little to reverse the financial disparity caused by talent clustering, which both he and Florida agree is brought on by the self-reinforcing sorting that higher education sets in motion. Furthermore, even those skilled, educated workers may not always be a boon to the metropolitan areas the flock to. In Portland, this article argues, a soggy sort of hipster lethargy has set in among the educated, saturating the place with limp arty types who barely pay taxes and are hardly worth the paper that their design degrees are written on . . . what gives?

Part of this sense of hopelessness comes from treating people as abstractions, statistical or psychological. Whether it’s numbers telling us these people don’t contribute, or just our own biases (there they are again, sponging around the recordshop midday), falsely conflating mental constructs with real people is never a good basis for policymaking. So even though hipsters as a ‘type’ may consume more than they contribute, individuals who have hipster-esque tendencies may still, fashion sense aside, be gainfully employed in any number of ways that do represent the real, catalyzing creative contributions Florida was talking about.  (Not to mention that fact that cupcake purchasing activity, sugary and trifling though it may seem, is economic activity nonetheless.) The best way to proceed, then, is to dispense with snarky in-crowd out-crowd hypothesizing about a set of people whose characteristics are so fluid that it could encompass half the population between 18 and 40. Furthermore, rather than trying to attract a class of people with the things they tend to like, in hopes promoting the things we think they tend to do, we must fashion individual policies that directly support the desired behaviors.

Rather than focusing on the marketability of creative culture to quickly line their pockets, the best urban developers and consultants will concern themselves with truly improving civic infrastructure and policy through both traditional and nontraditional means. Florida was right when he wrote that it’s not large-scale projects like museums and stadiums, but other measures of livability that appeal to the average worker. From daycares to dogparks, urban areas can do more to support not a trendy creative culture, but a real culture of creativity.

For instance, according to Florida’s talent-clustering hypothesis, the most highly educated people from the most elite universities will always self-sort to the biggest metropolises, regardless of where they gained their skills. If offering the most elite education does not help smaller cities, what should those that don’t have the appeal to retain these valuable human resources do? They should craft policies that support residents without the same kind of mobility. . . and since I’ve been on something of a community college kick recently, I’ll start there.

Despite being a much-hyped component of recent economic strategizing, the role of local colleges goes far beyond quotidian vocational training. Effective workforce development means not only tying the curriculum directly to the local job market, but strengthening and broadening the curriculum to develop whole-person creativity, adaptability and resilience. Meanwhile, cultivating town-gown relationships can take on a multi-faceted approach that builds tangible ties through service projects, inventive public partnerships, networking events and more. Students are a great resource to their communities, and leveraging them as such can establish valuable connections that last, encouraging graduates to stay. Of course, smaller cities can work on retaining graduates of their more elite institutions in the same manner, but by fostering strong education at the community level, they are essentially stacking the deck in their favor, investing in a workforce who won’t just pick up and move to the next hip town with the best single-origin brew. 

And speaking of six-dollar lattes, since they form such a basic component of the cultural movement in question, this is a good time to clarify the role of the café in Florida’s theory. Before coffeeshops were places to gather and revel in roasted-bean snobbery, they were just places to gather — and that’s what made them important. 

They were – and still are – alternative spaces in the original sense of Ray Oldenburg’s Third Place (social surroundings that are neither home nor workplace, but that serve a community function), but also fulfill cultural geographer Edward Soja’s conception of Third Space — the alternative to a traditional dichotomy of space as either ‘real’ (the physical, material world) or ‘imagined’ (the collected ideas, expectations, and social values that interpret the perceived landscape) by supplying an additional realm where the environment becomes ‘lived.’ That is, Third Space allows for the possibility of action and interaction, where values become physically manifest. For Homi K. Bhabha, whose work centers on postcolonial theory, this Third Space interaction between culture and material also represents confrontation between the oppressed and the oppressor. In this (real and symbolic) meeting place, the oppressed reclaim and reinterpret hegemonies built into the landscape by recovering space for their own use as places of creative exchange positioning itself against the status quo.

The need for such space has been popularly recognized – coffeeshops continue to proliferate and serve as incubators of creative exchange – and popularly embraced in emerging forms like co-working spaces, where the homage to Third Space is clear. The Internet has allowed an increasing number of professionals to work from anywhere, and in the absence of the corporation as organizing principle of the workplace, these new spatial forms have been multiplying.

Unburdened of the need to commute to a particular office, workers are free to create their own, as the convenience of proximity and pleasure of company dictates.

The potencies thus created are not only material – co-working spaces split costs of scanners, fax machines, large-format printers and other luxuries that the average freelancer couldn’t afford – they are also functional. Increasingly, these spaces promote not only the passive cross-pollination of ideas, as was their organizing principle just a few short years ago, but its active promotion. As they come to emulate hacker spaces, business incubators and creative collectives, they arm innovators with the tools and communities needed to shape prevailing culture, cementing their relationship to ideological Third Space. This year, the prevalent co-working space The Hub (with three locations spread between Berkeley, San Francisco and Oakland alone) became The Impact Hub, which bills itself as “a global network of people, places, and programs that inspire, connect and catalyze” — a ‘just what the doctor ordered’ for creative class champions.

The Hub Zurich is part of an emerging global network of collaborative spaces where entrepreneurs and social innovators come together to realize their ideas for a sustainable society. With dozens of locations, and more on the way, The Hub provides flexible work, meeting and event space to create a habitat for social innovation. Image via ConceptualDevices

Even absent such a blatant agent-of-change agenda, these spaces provide a valuable efficiency of resources which, in our ever-more-costly cities, has been slowly disappearing. Amenities like public libraries are lose funding (ironically due to pressures of the very same digital age that has promoted co-working). Maintaining both a volume and variety of these other Third Space-type resources is crucially important, as each – from Speakers Corners to marketplaces, bazaars to public parks – can serves a subtly different function. Libraries, for instance, seem to fill a similar niche as co-working spaces, but actually promote an entirely different mode, in an age where everything is instantly Googlable and Wikipediafied, of research, analysis, problem-solving and deep critical thinking.

As we continue to adjust to a permanently altered economic landscape, and expenses associated with urban living rise, greater efficiency of resources will become especially key to supporting those in core creative livelihoods, who are most-often self-employed and whose style of work involves some of the highest degree of sacrifice and risk. Artists and entrepreneurs must often try and fail and try again before they are paid for their work. They must often self-finance new ideas. And (as the main thrust of Florida’s creative class theory makes clear) there are countless instances in which they are neither the intended or the actual beneficiaries of their contributions. If developers and others stand to make money  – sometimes lots of it – from the commodification of creative culture, then promoting shared resources that can lower costs for those in the crucial, generative role is only common sense. Relieving pressure on people’s wallets allows them to not only stay in the relatively low-paying core creative fields, but also to reinvest the money they do have in creative pursuits that cause a ripple effect through the community.

Tulane Sociologist Richard Campanella describes urban renewal a la Richard Florida – what I call the gentrification-revitalization engine – in four steps:

The frontiers of gentrification are "pioneered" by certain social cohorts who settle sequentially, usually over a period of five to twenty years. The four-phase cycle often begins with-forgive my tongue-in-cheek use of vernacular stereotypes: (1) "gutter punks" (their term), young transients with troubled backgrounds who bitterly reject societal norms and settle, squatter-like, in the roughest neighborhoods bordering bohemian or tourist districts, where they busk or beg in tattered attire.

On their unshod heels come (2) hipsters, who, also fixated upon dissing the mainstream but better educated and obsessively self-aware, see these punk-infused neighborhoods as bastions of coolness.

Their presence generates a certain funky vibe that appeals to the third phase of the gentrification sequence: (3) "bourgeois bohemians," to use David Brooks' term. Free-spirited but well-educated and willing to strike a bargain with middle-class normalcy, this group is skillfully employed, buys old houses and lovingly restores them, engages tirelessly in civic affairs, and can reliably be found at the Saturday morning farmers' market. Usually childless, they often convert doubles to singles, which removes rentable housing stock from the neighborhood even as property values rise and lower-class renters find themselves priced out their own neighborhoods. 

After the area attains full-blown "revived" status, the final cohort arrives: (4) bona fide gentry, including lawyers, doctors, moneyed retirees, and alpha-professionals from places like Manhattan or San Francisco. Real estate agents and developers are involved at every phase transition, sometimes leading, sometimes following, always profiting.

Campanella forgets a major faction affected by the process – the poor and working-class (probably minority) residents who populated the neighborhood before the gutter punks moved in – but his summation nonetheless draws attention to a process that was at play even before widespread economic collapse caused urbanists to re-evaluate the merit of Florida's theories – the displacement of successive social groups in the name of economic growth. With the bursting of the tech and housing bubbles, many cities that catered to the creative class did failed to attain the promised prosperity, causing urbanists to discard Florida's theories outright – a move that is no less foolish than buying into them wholesale. Much of the research that made Florida's original work revolutionary focused on improving the real measures of livability that make cities attractive; the mistake was in thinking that  the road to economic prosperity followed a linear path from A: The Creative Avant-Garde to B: Taxpaying Professionals. Instead, Florida's revitalization-gentrification engine can be adjusted so that these players co-exist in a mutually nourishing and sustaining symbiosis, for they are all key to the prosperity of the city. 

Perhaps the most obvious, and most impactful, form of resource sharing is public transportation. According to Florida’s recent study, the biggest factor that counters the benefits of talent clustering is housing cost. Efficient public transportation offsets this in two ways: it allows people to distribute themselves to most effectively take advantage of the most affordable real estate that does exist, and it diminishes transportation costs, eliminating the need to own a car or, at least, pay for gas on a daily basis. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany, key players in the New Urbanism, argued in Suburban Nation that the necessity of travel by car is the single biggest impediment to middle-class home ownership. The book was published pre-recession, but the problem is still worth considering, as are some of the policies intended to offset it, such as the ‘location efficient mortgage.’ Beginning in 1996, Fannie Mae offered higher-valued loans in cities like Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, for homes located near public transportation – experiments that need re-evaluation in the wake of the housing crisis, but that, done right, may hold promise for smart growth in the future.

A different way to approach the same issue is through locally provided subsidies; city governments and nonprofit development agencies can offer a range of options for people moving into walkable and transit-oriented neighborhoods, and employers may even finance home ownership for employees who chose to buy homes near where they work. Programs run through nonprofit agencies and institutions in Detroit, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Cleveland have all created successful incentives for residents to live near where they work.

Shared resources and public amenities can take countless forms, and come from city administrations or the community itself (something that’s really prevalent in my Berkeley neighborhood). Obviously functional resources – like the healthcare safety nets, which will remain important even, or especially, as the country transitions to Obamacare – save people (and cities) money in the long by reducing the outsized costs associated with their inaccessibility. But providing community centers, parks and public spaces, and other low-cost non-essential services is important to healthy communities. The counter-argument, of course, is that relegating these amenities to the private sector encourages economic growth. But the truth is, in tough economic times, many people would simply rather stay home than pay $12 for a big-screen movie or $16 for an hour-long yoga class.

Low-cost leisure and cultural activities keep communities strong and engaged; they float people through the hard times that those in creative occupations are assured of, and that everybody has been feeling in recent years; and private-sector arguments notwhithstanding, they help diversify people’s daily routines and spread out the places that they spend money. This means that a relatively small initial investment (creating a public playground) can crate a large ripple effect (a mother and child leave the house when they otherwise wouldn’t, buy an ice-cream cone from the nearby street vendor, and see a new business that they would like to patronize later — a middle ground between spending $24 at the cinema and an afternoon in front of the TV.)

Another easy way to foster real creativity is to lower the barriers to entrepreneurship with incentives for small business owners, or at least resources that help them navigate the process of starting a business and cut through red tape. Creating initiatives that allow small, new businesses to occupy vacant storefronts on a temporary or trial basis, pop-up retail neighborhoods, and zones reserved for street vendors can all help a maybe-feasible business get off the ground, in addition to creating interesting, vital urban districts. Some cities have created consolidated resource centers that advise entrepreneurs while streamlining the process of applying for business licenses, obtaining permits, having inspections, and so forth.

Most of these suggestions have departed from Florida’s original creative class theory because they have more to do with actively shaping the way creative people interact with their city, rather than merely attracting them. This is not to discount the impact of policies that are attractive to a certain set of people, but again, this means breaking outside the bike lane.

Helping to create a city that is friendly to young singles is one great way, since after jobs, love is something most young folks are after. That means zoning in at least a few areas that allows for bars to stay open late and music to be played loud. It also means, again, focusing on transportation, since dating is a transportation-intensive activity. (And if its role in fostering emerging relationships seems trivial, consider this article.)

Sustainability is another emerging cultural value that speaks to young urbanites. Furthermore, it goes hand-in-hand with the coveted green economy that is supposed to move in where manufacturing moved out. If we are serious about answering the call to make sustainability a driving economic force, we can’t expect all of the momentum to come from the top – or get upset when that strategy performs with mixed results. Instead, it is crucial to welcome and support the type of innovation that leads to local, bottom-up projects that create change, and it stands to reason that creating more sustainable cities, overall, fits well with this agenda. Municipal compost pickup and municipal energy programs that at least partly subsidizes renewable resources are great ways to green a lot of city residents’ lives in one fell swoop – these things may sound unsexy, but (besides being responsible choices) do actually make a difference to the people they serve. Plus, providing these services creates additional jobs.

There are hundreds of other ways to foster a culture of creativity — and while economists can nitpick over whether any of the specific answers I’ve provided will really help communities, I argue that it’s less about looking at the numbers – which can always surprise and deceive us in the end – and more about envisioning the kinds of places we want. It’s about dreaming, and when dreaming is fully supplanted by statistics, it’s a sad day, indeed.

The case for creative placemaking: the Sustainable Cities Collective argues for urban swings and other interventions that make cities memorable.

Overall, it’s imperative that cities focus on improving those measures that ensure dynamic, innovative exchange in the long term, viewing creativity as a resource that shouldn’t be extracted and marketed all at once, but conserved, preserved, and fostered. This means supporting low barriers to entry to creative fields by supplying needed resources like the ones discussed above. But it also, and more importantly, means maintaining a space for creative culture in cities once the desired ‘revitalization’ has occurred.

So rather than judging the value of the creative class by its immediate ability to boost an area’s economy, focusing on whether creative culture can, in the short term, provide a resource that to be extracted and fashioned into a useful commodity (a la the material industries that Florida’s detractors claim must form the basis of a sound economy) it is better to think in terms of conservation — creative culture as part of the ecosystem of a healthy city, and as a resource to be conserved for the benefits it will continue to confer in the long term.

Berkeley: Local Paradise

Gurachi's interpretation of the author, hard at work in Cafe Yesterday. See more at www.berkeleybeings.blogspot.com

I have a friend who – because I’m about to reveal that he wears women’s clothes – I’ll call Alfonso instead of using his real name. Now here’s the thing about Alfonso: he looks fantastic in women’s clothes. In fact, I was trying to describe him to my mother one day, and I couldn't quite sum him up without mentioning it: he used to work in a bike shop but now he designs solar systems for a growing company. He’s got a giant mop of curly hair and is really good at random things like roller-skating. And he pulls off wearing women’s clothes better than anyone I know. 

This year, he went to Burning Man for the first time and wore a flowered women’s onsie. He introduced himself as Pancho Flora and didn’t take it off the whole time.

Now, here’s the other thing about Alfonso: he’s a professional who makes a good salary and basically has his shit together — probably as much as anyone I know.

But it's in a weird, Bay-Area-ish sort of way: he still goes to punk shows in garages and house parties that screen foreign films, much to the delight/consternation/self-admiration of the guests. Nothing makes him happier than free stuff, and taking advantage of things that don't cost money plays a large role in shaping his social landscape. He rides his bike everywhere and could be mistaken for a high-schooler by someone who didn’t know better. And he likes it all this way. He’s living the good life in very quintessential Berkeley fashion, to the point where, in describing Berkley to his mother, he says this: it’s like paradise.

And in a number of ways that might not be immediately obvious, it is. Sure, there are bike racks and bike lanes everywhere, and nice weather pretty much all the time, and trees that grow food right in people's yards. And there is, indeed, an abundance of free activities and resources here and in the larger Bay Area, ranging from slackline yoga workshops to movie nights to bike kitchens to soup kitchens, plus free clinics and mental health organizations and spaghetti dinners and the Berkeley Tool Lending Library, just in case you need to borrow a posthole digger.

But there's more: warehouses converted into performance and art space for circus schools and glassblowers, urban homesteading and hacker collectives that teach people real-world skills, and impromptu meet-ups, gatherings, and workshops all over the city, that are underwritten by the same can-do meets anything-goes attitude that is so common here . . . the one that allows people like Alfonso to exist and thrive, peacefully undisturbed as they head to work sharply attired in tight brown twill pants, black ankle boots with just the right amount of scuff, a sage green blouse with pheasants and pearl buttons (on the left), and a tweed vest. 

It's an attitude that I see every day, in new ways that surprise and delight me. If you live in Berkeley, or in a place like it, you already know about this kind of magic. And if you don't you're saying either, "I don't want that kind of magic; Alfonso sounds like a freak," or you're saying, "so what?"

Here's what.

Making space for the free, the unusual, the unencumbered in the day-to-day urban landscape is the same as making space for growth and progress. Because growth and progress stem from innovation, and innovation stems from weirdos being weird – and letting that weirdness, whatever its particulars, shine through.

Right now, I'm sitting in my neighborhood coffeeshop, Local 123, where I have never once failed to delay my work by entering a hopelessly interesting and esoteric conversation with a fellow café-goer. Mathematical modeling of sacred geometries in nature; early childhood development; last week, it was an architectural student who spent her youth traveling internationally as an equestrian vaulter. The week before, it was also an architect. I noticed him working outside in the courtyard on some beautiful colored drawings. We got into a conversation – it turned out, he had designed the coffeeshop, teasing its current form from the walls of an abandoned painters’ union, hence the name – and he promptly invited me back to his firm to interview with the three managing partners for a job.

And just moments ago, it was an unaffectedly outdoorsy looking fellow (flipflops, torn jeans, striped cotton shirt with world-may-care wrinkles and tousled blond hair that could perchance use a cut) who started rearranging the tables next to me and rolling up the glass garage-style door that faces the street. When I asked what he’s up to, he replied, “Meat.” In a snap he unpacked coolers of organic free-range pork chops, spareribs and sausages, hung a sign (“Highland Hills Farm”), and attracted a gaggle of similarly flip-flop clad urbanites to his pop-up market.

Why does this kind of thing happen so often in Local 123? And why does it happen around the corner in Café Yesterday, where amid the dozens of regulars who make their offices, no-doubt engaging in dozens of equally esoteric conversations, an entrepreneurial young story-boarder who calls himself Gurachi uses the spot to base Berkeley Beings, an online collection of sketches of the characters he encounters? (If he happens to draw you, he’ll snap a photo of the drawing to complete and post on his website, then hand you the original – all the while regaling you with an overview of his professional talents, which include weaving from just a few seed words – “princess,” “treasure,” “spaceship” – a tale to interest, should you happen to be one, even an A-list producer.)

And why, more importantly, does it not happen at oh, say, Starbucks?

I don’t know the specifics of the arrangement between the coffeeshop and the Meat Man, but clearly it is a coming-together that benefits both — the coffeeshop building its character and street presence and the Meat Man, a former building contractor gone save-the-world-type-rancher, attracting customers in the effortless sort of symbiosis that happens naturally. We got to talking – about the state of organic agriculture, world population growth, his latest project to document nontraditional farms across the region – and vowed to keep in touch. Now, to be sure, this is the “coffeeshop dynamic” that is frequently touted by urban theorists (a la Richard Florida), wherein people gather, ideas are bandied about, connections form, and prosperity blooms. But I’ve rarely seen it work so well in the trendy, pre-fab chain coffeeshops that are the obvious extension of a deep faith in this belief, plopped haplessly into urban developments with the vague hope of producing a similar sort of generative (or at least, robust economic) interchange.

So why is Local 123 better at fostering spontaneous cultural expression than the local Starbucks?  Well, for one reason, like truffles that only thrive wild in certain old growth forests, the climate for growth has to be specific and authentic. That is, what makes local coffeeshops unique – not just the Meat Man, but open mics, comedy shows, local art on the walls, dogs, live DJs and more – helps create an environment that caters to all types of creative exchange, even if it’s just vibrant conversation. The unique character of the space acts as a signal for participation, which is neutralized, sterilized, once that space is coopted and reproduced generically.

It’s like a major clothing label that may look at what “cool” (ie: countercultural) skateboarders wear, then copy it and re-market it for mass consumption. People may buy the product, but those people are rarely the ones who authenticated the look. Similarly, Starbucks may see what a dynamic neighborhood coffeeshop looks like, copy the couches and tables and art on the wall, and create an environment that mimics the original (and to be sure, they do – teams of corporate designers are scouting for new ideas to update that trendy vibe all the time) but the people who populated the original space are seldom the same as those enjoying the canned version on every street corner.

Landscapes that support the unexpected are not just about coffeeshops where anything goes, free events to attract artists and innovators, or free services support them when they're underpaid for their creativity. And it's not just artists and innovators who benefit from a diverse and fluid urban environment. It's that, in a sense, good communities turn everyone into artists and innovators. On every level that a community comes together to create, to serve, or to support, more connections are made, more inspiration is generated, more people find ways to connect in work and play, and happier, healthier, more productive communities are born.  Wherever there is open dialogue, people interested in what everyone else is doing, confident and passionate in what they're doing.

Berkeley certainly fits this model, with a unique urban fabric that seems open to spontaneous intervention by community members at all levels.

Just blocks from the two cafés, a self-proclaimed Junk Man oozes his wares onto the sidewalk most sunny days, displaying racks and racks of books, rounders of antique clothes, old tools, and an assortment of irresistible odds ‘n’ ends spilling from the bed of an antique truck. Chat with him for a minute, and you’ll find yourself pulled to the side of the house, where he propagates succulents, stores salvaged building materials, and displays collections of everything from old tin buckets to Corning Ware to sprinkling cans – all available to passer­­s by for a low, low price. Does the City of Berkeley bother him for his unlicensed and off-the-cuff business? “They used to,” he says, “but they’ve sort of stopped. They can see I’m not doing any harm.”

The City of Berkeley does still bother another longtime resident, sending him a $6,000 bill monthly for a garden of “rescued” plants that he’s allowed to overtake the sidewalks surrounding his corner home in an elaborate tangle of arches and canopies – mind you, the sidewalk is still perfectly navigable, it’s just covered by a bower of junipers and figs and resuscitated Christmas trees found abandoned on the curbs of Yuletides past. On his roof, the plot thickens: bins and buckets of composting avocado skins and eggshells from local restaurants cradle fruit trees sprouted from pits and seeds discarded at the local farmers’ market. Thick hedges of kale and collards support tangles of tomato vines, and bees oversee the whole mess, buzzing through their empire then retiring to a royal palace of whitewashed plywood to produce their golden elixir.

The architect of this magnificent streetside garden believes that food grown in the public right-of-way is an imperative, and when he takes groups of neighbors and schoolkids through the jungle he’s created, he’s teaching them, he says, not just how to grow food, but how to feed a rebellion – one which Berkeley is apparently none-too-keen to actually squash, seeing as all those unpaid six-thousands have resulted in no further action.

Then there’s the Gorilla Chorus (yes, it’s a play on words) that practices on Thursdays and Saturdays, doors flung open to welcome passers-by, just kitty-corner from my house. Their motto is that everyone can sing, and to be honest, they sound pretty good – key to this, I believe, is the generous basket of tambourines provided for those who may not be fully aligned corroborate their core operating principle. And their mascot is a barnacle. They claim he enjoys the music, and I hate to say it, but it seems true. When they get to really wailing, he extends feathery fronds from the top of his little stovepipe body and waves.

There’s a pay-what-you-can flower booth with a rusty mailbox nailed to a picnic table for donations, morning yoga in the median of a major thoroughfare, plus weirdos and musicians of all stripes milling about performing for spare change. A lady down the street has a sign nailed to her fence advertising a women’s spiritual support group on one day a week, and ceramics classes on another – simply stop on in. None of these things is, in itself, unheard of for any urban area, but the frequency with which I see it – even on quiet suburban-type Berkeley streets – never fails to amaze me. These are not the organized events pinned to community boards and posted on online calendars and listed in the weekly newspapers, though Berkeley has those too, in great numbers. This is a more homegrown phenomenon, a little more impromptu and raw. It’s the sort of thing that can’t be found on an iPhone app. It has to be discovered where it grows, sometimes in the most unexpected of places – and because of that, it touches every person in the community, making the whole shebang more connected, vital and, yes, just a bit closer to paradise.

City College of San Francisco: down but not out

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Ask the students, ask the faculty, ask anyone, really, who knows the institution: City College of San Francisco is one of the best community college systems in the nation. Just don’t ask the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, which last week chose to revoke the college’s accreditation for a host reasons having everything to do with politics and finance, and little to do with the actual quality of education offered.

Good community colleges make good communities. They serve as vital centers not only for students actively working towards degrees, but for a broad swatch of the population looking to uncover new talents and hobbies, improve professional capacities, stay sharp and engaged later in life, or simply learn for the joy of learning (and because, as studies show, learning about anything helps the brain grow better at everything.)

The loss of accreditation becomes effective next year, and though the decision is being appealed, it is a tremendous and unfair blow to an institution serving 85,000 students, which has been struggling to resolve funding issues, as I've already written, in the face of California’s ever-evolving budget crisis. In fact, finances have been at the root of the problem since even before City College was first put on sanction by the commission back 2012, the same time at which President Obama’s Statue of the union speech slashed at community education with a double-edged sword:

"States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets," Obama told the nation. "And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down." The policy outcome of this practical-sounding sentiment is what’s known in education circles as the “completion agenda,” which emphasizes numbers-based evaluations and focuses on providing services to students seeking to complete a degree – to the detriment of broader learning and community-based initiatives.

The nitty-gritty of Obama’s education policy forced local accrediting agencies to comply with the new agenda – ironically using affordability as a measure by which to determine accreditation, which is necessary for colleges to receive state funding (in addition to dictating whether students can apply for federal loans, apply credits earned to other institutions, and graduate with a generally recognized degree). So institutions undergoing financial hardship, regardless of the quality of their services, were subject to losing their state funding, resulting in – that’s right – financial hardship. 

The irony of the situation is that it is driven a close-minded focus on economic development — one that equips students with the bare minimum of skills they need to enter the workforce as quickly as possible. But this is only one model of economic development, and a flawed one at that. Developing whole, well-rounded individuals and fostering educational and cultural linkages among community members at all levels of education is the better, more far-reaching economic goal. And most importantly, the benefits can be reaped even before students hit the workforce. By treating the college as a community hub – attracting people for lectures, events, classes – and focusing on its impact on public space and community cross-pollination, economic gains become generative and enduring, like in this arts-focused re-imagining of an Oregon community college. It's an obvious next step from the 21st Century (21C) paradigm for k-12 education, an integrated education model developed at Yale University, already at play in 1300 schools across the country.  Replacing the community-centered function of these institutions for a narrow economic agenda, as even well-meaning and progressive prescriptions tend to do further marginalizes and alienates already disadvantaged students, robbing them of the chance to mingle and collaborate with a wider swatch of of population who may use the institution, despite already having achieved a high level of academic success, for enrichment and continuing education. And in removing enrichment-type classes from the curriculum (dance, art, general interest and humanities classes), community colleges not only suffer the loss of students of diverse academic backgrounds, they further restrict marginalized students from the benefits of a rich and broadly integrated education. 

The completion agenda goes hand-in-hand with other outcome-focused initiatives like Obama's controversial "Race to the Top" rally and the wider outcry to shore up performance in STEM subjects – a call to arms with similarly narrow economic underpinnings. Rather than focusing solely on predicting needs and frantically bolstering education for a changing job market, we can build strong, diverse educational communities (Sanford C. Shugart, president of Valencia College in Florida, calls this the "educational ecosystem") that emphasize creativity, non-linearity and strong analytical thought processes, which are adaptable to any shift in the job market. But not if we undercut our educational system, rather than taking advantage of all it has to offer. 

It’s not a new story for City College. It’s just one more symptom of an education system – and a larger society – which shortsightedly emphasizes quantitative over qualitative analysis, discounting the benefits of an engaged and educated community, both economically and, more importantly, socially.

Get involved at: www.saveccsf.org

City College Task Force to redefine 'Success'

My best friend from back East recently told me about NBC’s television show Community, now in its third season, which takes place in a Colorado community college and tells the story of an offbeat group of students: a lawyer suspended from practice, an aging millionaire, a straightedge and strait-A student with an erstwhile Adderall addiction, a football star, a single mother, and so forth.

If I were on the show, I guess I’d be the studious and serious Annie Edison – not because an addiction to prescription study aids caused me to have a nervous breakdown and jump through a plate-glass window, but because I am not, according to a task force assembled to review educational and financial policy at City College of San Francisco, the community college "type."

I take classes at City College, despite already having a degree from a well-regarded university back East, and I love it. I have amazing teachers whose dedication to their jobs measures up to anything I experienced during my undergraduate career. But if the Student Success Task Force’s agenda passes in Sacramento this spring, my access to these opportunities will be targeted — along with that of many other students who don’t fit into the task force’s streamlined model of successful community education.

The SSTF has assembled an eighty page document recommending that sweeping changes to the funding model of California’s community colleges be passed in state legislature. The intention is to make more funding available for “typical” community college students – those on the fast track to their Associate’s Degrees or to transfer to a four year institution – but the point (one that NBC's comedy makes lavish use of to draw its laughs) is that community college students are rarely typical.

The recommendations are meant to support full-time students, but even among students who have the same goals in mind as the task force – an AA or transfer – the ability to attend classes full time is rare. Many students can only take a partial load because of work or family obligations; students struggling hardest to make ends meet, working multiple jobs, are those most in need of the funding the SSTF would deny part-timers. In addition, there are those who want to improve their skills in order to find work or do a better job in the work they already have — goals which will ultimately serve to boost the state economy, which is, of course, where the motivation for the task force’s recommendation lie in the first place. There are older citizens looking to stay sharp and expand their horizons, there are high school students seeking enrichment — and yes, there are those, like me, who are simply there to be educated. After all, that’s the whole point of a “community” college in the first place, right?

In addition to eliminating state funding for any student not transferring to a university within a strict two-year deadline (regardless of that student’s residency),  the report recommends eliminating non-credit courses, creating a one-size-fits-all placement test system, and cutting down on any course offerings which don’t feed directly into a degree-granting program.

These changes would not only be detrimental to students who see ongoing education as a vital part of a fulfilling life, and to professionals seeking to develop their skills, but to the degree-seeking students themselves. They would lose the opportunity to interact with a wide range of students from all sorts of educational and professional backgrounds. They would lose the opportunity to supplement their core courses with a wider and more enriching curriculum, and they would lost the opportunity to participate in a system of community education that values learning for learning’s sake – not because a degree or a job depends on it, but because it makes us better, fuller human beings. 

Staking Their Claim: Urban Homesteaders draw the (intellectual) property lines

Ruby Blume, co-author of Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living  was sent a cease-and-desist letter claiming that the term "urban homesteading" was a registered trademark of the Dervaes Institute in Pasadena.

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Ask anyone who's ever raised a barn or bee'd a quilt: farming is about community, wherever it can be found. For the isolated homesteaders who spread out across the American West, community often meant traveling long distances during the spring planting or the fall butcher and harvest. Groups of men would traverse the prairie between often-sparse settlements (the Land Ordinance of 1785 implemented a standard survey wherein the minimum parcel was one square mile or 640 acres; by 1800 the number was halved to 320 -– still unweildy, but a good bargain for the $1.25, payable in four installments) to reach out to their neighbors and lend a helping hand.

For the most part, today's homesteaders must counter a different type of isolation – asphalt not grass and sky – which is why, for years, the Internet has been the second home to a steadily growing network of urban farmers who till their carrots and tap away on their keyboards about the experience.  

Sharing knowledge is a crucial element of the homesteading experience, to keep trial-and-error from becoming trial-and-travail. So it's understandable that pastoralists the blogosphere over erupted in rage and hurt this February when the Dervaes Institute – a long-time and, for some, much loved Internet presence and self-proclaimed authority on the subject of urban farming – sent not-quite-cease-and-desist letters to sixteen other institutions and small businesses. The letters forbade their recipients, all of whom were becoming established voices in the homesteading community, from using the term “urban homesteading” without designating it as the Dervaes’ intellectual property.

The Dervaes – Jules and his three grown children – have farmed their family-operated organic plot in Pasadena for more than twenty years, and have documented their journey online (formerly at www.PathtoFreedom.com, now at www.UrbanHomestead.org) since 2001. The institute’s first attempt to trademark “urban homesteading,” was denied in 2008, but thanks to an epic two-year struggle with the US Patent and Trademark Office – easily tracked on the PTO’s website – their masthead now boasts a big, round “®.”

But that may soon change. As of today, when San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation posted notice of a petition filed to fight the Dervaes’ bogus claim, all signs point to two years wasted.

In an email this morning, Corynne McSherry, the intellectual property director at the EFF, wrote that the filing is the crucial first step necessary to (as one group of Facebook users demands) “Take Back Urban Home-Steading(s).” Why the awkward spelling? Because right now, those Facebookers can’t say “Urban Homesteading” either.

In addition to targeting fellow urban homesteading organizations like the Denver Urban Homesteading agricultural center and the Institute of Urban Homesteading founded by Oakland local Ruby Blume, the Dervaes sent DMCA complaints – which, incidentally, apply to copyrights, not trademarks – to Google and Facebook demanding they block pages that use the term. A number of pages have been disabled, but new ones urging community members to “Dump the Dervaes” quickly filled the void.

One of the Facebook pages taken down was Blume's. She was using the social networking site to publicize a new book, co-authored with Rachel Kaplan, called Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living. In a phone interview this morning, Blume said that she neither learned from, nor knew of, the Dervaes Institute until shortly before receiving two separate letters from the Dervaes – an informal notice directed toward her Oakland homesteading school and a formal cease and desist sent to the publisher of her upcoming book.

The crash-course version of trademark law hinges on whether the terms in question are “generic” and “merely descriptive,” or whether they have become – as the Dervaes claimed to the PTO – distinctive of the company’s goods and services. With the dubious claim of “substantially exclusive use” of the terms, the Dervaes managed to squeeze into the supplemental trademark registry for educational purposes – a status that does not confer many rights, according to an EFF spokesperson  . . . and certainly not the right to prohibit Blume and others from using the term in a general sense.

“I learned about urban homesteading from a vital urban homesteading community in the Bay Area,” she said. “The Dervaes Institute wasn’t on my radar at all.”

But now the Dervaes are on everyone’s radar, and they seem to have overdosed on the attention they so desired to secure; I tried to get in touch for a comment, and was apparently not the first – I met with an artistically composed review from an answering machine chock full of reporters' messages, accompanied, at pointed interludes, by the machine’s mechanical “message erased” notification. Thou

gh attempts to protect what they see as their own intellectual property may have backfired personally, the Dervaes debacle actually brought the urban homesteading community much closer together, in Blume’s opinion. She sees it as a rallying point in a movement that is centered on pride and sharing – the reason why so many people from disparate places came together so quickly on the issue.

“When April Krieger started the Take Back Urban Home-Steading(s) page,” Blume said, “over 1,000 joined in the first day.”

What Blume describes as a micro-revolution merely reinforces the values of self-reliance and community support that urban homesteading teaches.

“They’ve really put urban homesteading on the national map,” Blume said. And along with it – judging by the popularity of the newly re-christened Facebook page – Blume and Kaplan’s upcoming book. 

Though the Electronic Frontier Foundation has formally filed its petition on behalf of a different set of authors, Kelly Coyne and Eric Knutzen, as well as the publisher of that duo's 2008 work The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the City, Blume and Kaplan are likewise at the center of the controversy. Even making it out of the publishing house, their forthcoming book made it onto Wikipedia’s brand-new urban homesteading page.

But for Blume, Kaplan, and all the others who rallied around the Dervaes trademark dispute, publicity was the last thing on their minds.

“Being urban homesteaders is very much about our humanity,” Blume explained. “It’s our birthright to grow and preserve food.  We’ve been doing it for millennia. The possibility that it might be taken away is just so against the feeling of the movement. Sharing resources and ideas, that’s what it’s all about.”

Kaplan agrees.  In addition to co-authoring the book, the Petaluma resident has worked with community reliance organization Daily Acts to shape the Homegrown Guild, a group committed to dispersing knowledge and hands-on assistance among its hundreds of members.

“We share information like we share bounty,” Kaplan said. “Our job is to keep inspire one another to keep raising the bar.”

The co-authors, who met over 20 years ago as members of San Francisco’s Mission art scene, wove a broad yet intricate guide, with Blume providing the artwork and photographs as well as some of the more nitty-gritty how-to’s, and Kaplan producing the bulk of the writing, or what Blume describes as the “why-to.”

Nearly every aspect of their collaboration was fortuitous. Blume had been approached by several publishers to produce a book – something she realized she “didn’t really want to do” at the expense of her teaching. At the same time, Kaplan, knowing nothing about the potential book deal, looked up Blume with her own ideas about writing a book.

The pieces fell into place, and a partnership was born. At its heart, Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living is about cooperation – perhaps the Dervaes should pick up a copy.

Pick up a copy yourself at the following Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living book launches:

Ecology Center

April 14, 7 p.m.

2530 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley

www.ecologycenter.org

Modern Times Bookstore

April 27, 7 p.m.

888 Valencia, SF

www.mtbs.com

The Path of the Urban Indian

On tramping through the woods as a kid, reconciliation, and the new urban frontier . . .

To explain where the name “Urban Indian” came from — and why, as a white, Jewish girl lacking a speck of Indian blood, I feel the right to claim it — we'll have to start with a childhood rooted in the not-so-vast wilderness of suburban Cleveland, Ohio.  Growing up, my family’s primary signs of affiliation with the Tribe were parsimony, unmanageable curly hair, and a love of things fried in the name of religion.  So though I was given a Hebrew name —Shoshanna, which means lily — it was not to honor a dear departed relative (as per Jewish tradition) or because anyone had visions of a delicate retiring beauty, tinged with a pale blush.  Which is good, because I turned out to be more often brash, bruised, and unlikely to be tinged with anything but dirt.

No, my mom named me Shoshanna because she thought it sounded like the Shoshone people of the Western United States — the tribe from which Sacajawea, the celebrated interpreter for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, was captured as a youth.

In my own youth, I was quite happy to live up to the romantic image of what I thought my name connoted: I tramped through the woods, caught tadpoles, built houses from sticks, and coerced my young playground-mates to grind up rocks of different colors, mix them with water, and paint their faces.  I was astounded to meet my literary double in Sharon Creech’s Newberry Award-winning book Walk Two Moons — the main character Salamenca is so-named because her mother mistook it for the name of her great-grandmother’s tribe — the Seneca.

I shared with Sal a well-meaning if misguided vision of what emulating my namesakes might entail: treading lightly upon the earth, living frugally off the fruits of the forest, and perhaps even casually passing the time of day with wild beasts both fearsome and cuddly — in their own language, of course.

All of this is surely to the consternation of plenty of real American Indians, and the scholars, Indian and not, who strive to understand and preserve their history. But then, it is also much in keeping with a long tradition of pasty and bewildered Europeans on this continent — one that we struggle, even today, to address and remediate.

Take the word “Indian” itself.

It was used, generally unchallenged, well into the 20th century (the American Indian Movement was self-christened in 1968) despite the fact that the term was long understood to be a misnomer. At the time when Columbus bumped haplessly into the Antilles, he’d been looking for the "India" he knew to be the provenance of valuable spices; the name was often applied to the entirety of South and East Asia, and on some maps of the time, it referred to basically anything that wasn’t Europe.  Needless to say, the “Indians” were so-called upon the mistaken belief that Columbus had hit his intended mark, and the name stuck.

After the civil rights movements, “Native American” became the preferred term because many felt that “Indian,” in addition to being the result of serious geographical discombobulation, had accrued an unshakeable set of pejorative undertones.

But then, “native” has a storied and troublesome past of its own, raising plenty more objections, which have spawned a plethora of additional phrases, each accepted by some and deplored by others to the point where we’re tongue-tied with the task of distangling our language from the social histories it preserves and, indeed, generates. In such a context, using the term Indian to describe my own urban wanderings may seem frivolous at best. But stay with me.

The battle over terminology is a valid one.  Our language patterns fossilize old power structures, but also create a template for the construction of new ones — often with far-reaching, if not immediately obvious, effects.  

In this country, one of the most enduring examples of this phenomenon has been described by geographer William Denevan as the Pristine Myth. It is the idea that the pre-Columbian Americas were "natural" — empty and untouched, save for a mere smattering of natives who stirred nary a leaf, living in a prelapsarian paradise free from the ills of modern mankind — wait, that sounds a little familiar.

So what exactly is the problem with the romantic, if naive, bent of this fantasy that so stirred me as a child?

One problem with this idealized vision is that it is simply wrong. Denevan and others have fully discredited the notion, showing how the landscape European explorers first marveled at was, in fact, extensively shaped by human populations — in numbers far exceeding what scholars would generally acknowledge for the next several centuries.

But the Pristine Myth goes beyond a merely whimsical re-rendering, supporting a number of crucial biases: the view that the land was unused and there for the taking, and the suggestion that the decimation of Indian populations following European settlement was less extreme than it actually was. It fails to acknowledge the very real needs and desires of native populations who, historical accounts have shown, traditionally warred with other tribes, stole from each other, hunted some animal populations so unsustainably that they at times risked starving themselves, and made eager use of technologies from Europeans (like guns, metal, and horses) that made their lives more convenient, even at the expense of the natural world. 

The false dichotomy between greedy, disruptive white man and the noble savage creates a difficult paradox for indigenous people today, whose political will may run counter to our deep-seated romantic notions.  Furthermore, this sort of schism between reality and fantasy makes it difficult, despite even the best intentions, to remediate troubled pasts, by falsely invoking some identifiable point from which we can measure the damages, and some irreproachable ideal to which we can return.

When John Muir famously effused on the beauty of the Yosemite Valley, the “natural” churches that so moved him were grassy meadows that had been maintained by very real, very extreme human intervention. Over time, environmental advocates seeking to uphold Muir’s dedication to preserving the immaculate landscape found themselves with quite a dilemma: their ardent protection of the lands had, in fact, begun to destroy the very scenes which drove Muir to such heights of religious ecstasy. Without the periodic burning practiced by native tribes, the grasslands had succumbed to the natural cycle of forestation, and trees were creeping in and squishing out those lovely sun-filled meadows. Now the movement was in a pickle. Restore the land, yes, but restore it to what? Muir’s vision? A truly wild state? What type of intervention was preservation, and what was degradation?

Humans and landscapes have complex, intertwined pasts, just like humans and other humans. Though understanding these pasts can be key to healing them, there may be times when finding footing amid forever-shifting historical accounts is less important than taking stock of where we are now and figuring out how to go from there — even if it means approaching bigger questions of truth and justice by addressing more granular, even prosaic, matters first: are we enabling a diversity of species to thrive? Preserving cultural autonomy and promoting economic prosperity for those who need it most? Are we holding extinction at bay? Advocating for clean air and water?  Leaving something breathtaking for our children to see? 

One way forward may be to borrow from the emerging study of political ecology, which seeks to understand the complex interplay between socio-economic structures and the natural and cultural landscapes in which they are set. One of the field's leading voices, Paul Robbins, has introduced the concept of the Hatchet and the Seed: a methodology that emphasizes not only exposing and pruning away — deconstructing — the myths the prop up many of today’s undesirable social and environmental realities, but also using our knowledge to plant new and better realities.

Political ecology can be a practical means to explore the legacies of, and make amends for, the complex histories between postcolonial cultures and the populations they have marginalized in the quest for land and resources. But it is a field that aims for a moving target — a productive, sustainable relationship with nature, and with each other, is best described as a dynamic equilibrium, a balancing act that requires constant reevaluation, innovation, and compromise.

This is not to negate the very real need for serious inquiry and reparation in this country — many have called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission modeled after the one that followed the dismantling of Apartheid South Africa, and I don’t think it would be a bad idea. But we must also recognize that talking about the past — reconstructing our notions of what happened or refining the terminology we use today — will not alone move us forward.

In Twelve Step programs, there is the concept of living amends. Some things you just can’t apologize for, and you can’t truly take back. Instead, you must simply change how you live, do better as you go along. And — this is where I’m sure to get myself into trouble — I say, if holding onto our romantic notions, just bit, helps us do that, then why not?

Increasingly, experts in fields ranging from architecture to zoology are making the case that cities hold the key to a more just and sustainable future. While they have always created efficiencies in housing, transportation, and energy consumption, it is the relative novelties of electricity and, oh, say, sewage treatment that have made them infinitely more livable than they were even a short hundred years ago.

Meanwhile, those aspects of life affecting population and environment on a global scale that have always fallen under rural purview — agriculture, for instance — are increasingly manipulatable by city-dwellers, either indirectly through choice in the marketplace, or directly through bourgeoning interest in urban foraging, home cooking, preserving, community-supported agriculture, and the thriving urban homesteading movement.

We needn’t each of us own a hundred acres in the woods — indeed, this would be the biggest ecological and political disaster of all — to honor the values we ascribe, accurately or inaccurately, to the first people of this land. “Real” or not, those values, applied today, can help overcome the obstacles of land and resources that have germinated over time into stories of oppression and destruction.

Frederick Jackson Turner famously expounded on the importance of the frontier in defining the American spirit of gumption and pluck. He delivered his thesis at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (officially, the World’s Columbian Exposition, held to honor the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America), at what he saw as the end of an era. In the 1890 Census, just three years earlier, the US government had declared that there was no longer a discernable line between civilization and the savage, untamed wilderness — the frontier was dead.

Since then, many things have been dubbed “the new frontier,” not the least significant among them urban America itself. The retreat from this country’s urban centers in the second half of the twentieth century did, undeniably, leave untamed jungles of despair in many places. In this context, the term “urban frontier” has been used for many purposes. Some have been brash and mercenary, resulting in the wholesale re-development of city districts where another solution may have sufficed. But many have been less dubious, and even valiant: sensitive, fine-grained approaches to urban renewal, incentives drawing energy back to the urban core, and the many not-insignificant grassroots efforts to create urban culture and prosperity at street level.

Amid this new wave of exploration, we might do well to think of ourselves not just as Urban Settlers, but also as Urban Indians. Cities are ecosystems, webs as tenuous as any forest or meadow, and change — plucking any string — can have dramatic results, both good and bad. It is crucial that we understand issues like gentrification, attendant to this new wave of Manifest Destiny, and recognize the impacts upon all city dwellers — after all, urban landscapes, even those ravaged by disinvestment and disenfranchisement, are no more “empty” than were the forests and plains of the frontier. “Urban Indian” is my nod to the past, a reminder to stay humble, move slowly, tiptoe where necessary, through landscapes that each have a unique ecology, a matchless balance of triumphs and challenges.

And, problematic as the term may be for some, I think there is something deeply evocative about it. “Urban Indian” calls upon us all to live — among skyscrapers or suburban lawns — more like we imagine Indians of the past living among the trees: with creativity and parsimony, attention to our surroundings, a sense of pride and self-reliance, abundance wrought by using what is available and wasting little, and above all, joy in simple things and in each other.

As for why this blog isn’t called “Urban Native American”? I’ll let Sharon Creech answer that one through Sal’s mother, the character who shares so much in common with my own mom: “My great-grandmother was a Seneca Indian, and I’m proud of it. She wasn’t a Seneca Native American. Indian sounds much more brave and elegant.”