Education: STEM . . . or flowers?

STEM is gaining steam as the new educational mantra, with everyone from NASA to the President to the Boy Scouts of America championing initiatives to help strengthen America's foundation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Though the message about strengthening America's competitive advantage in a global economy often comes off as vaguely xenophobic (implying elite armies of technophilic Asians marching overseas to steal our jobs) the point is duly noted: Americans, depending on who you listen to, have been falling behind in math and science education – actually, education in general – for years, and now that our economy has fallen behind as well, it's time to fix the two problems – together, obviously.

I'm sitting in my favorite coffeeshop researching Obama's Educate to Innovate campaign to pick apart the particular failings of a merely instrumental approach to tech education, when I hear the following words:

Mere technological solutions don't fix anything. Students need to cultivate heart, compassion, humanity . . .

It's a little strange, because I'm right in the middle of an Alfie Kohn article titled "Against Competitiveness," explaining that the utilitarian, economics-is-everything, us-versus-them approach to bolstering school -- and by extension, student -- "performance" actually harms education and inhibits future economic growth by limiting creativity and entrepreneurship. Then comes the reply:

Students are stuck in the stimulus reward framework - how do we get a good grade in this class?

At this point, it's pretty weird -- I feel like the table next to me is having a conversation directly with the scholar writing from his tiny office inside my computer screen (what, he's not in there?) which is coincidental even for Local 123, the progenitor all untold numbers of serendipitous meetings and fruitful conversations. 

The speaker continued, explaining that he would have his students reflect on the habits and incentive structures that motivate them, and how that would differ once they had to start going after jobs

'Don't feel like I'm going to fire you -- that's what's going to happen in six months when you get out into the workforce.' 

He explained that right answers and wrong answers wouldn't matter any more, that being afraid to ask questions would result in the kind of fatal errors that ended careers, that being robotic, in general, would just simply not serve.

At this point, I turned around and introduced myself.

It turns out, he and his table mate are both science teachers in Berkeley; one for the high school and one for Cal. The larger, hairier one, who teaches Stat Reproduceability and Collaborative Data Science, pointed out the competitiveness and reward-driven systems aren't only problems for students, but for "science in general -- we just want to get shit done, publish papers, you know. There's no incentive for reproduceability because no one's going to try to reproduce your results. The publication pressure is so huge that no one is repeating experiments at all. They all want to discover something new. Which is great and all . . . but without repeated testing, we don't know if any of these discoveries are actually true."

We chatted for a while longer, and I asked how we could be begin to change the paradigm. Well, I couldn't have made it up any better myself: both teachers emphasize a collaborative learning environment, where they make use of teamwork, creative technology approaches and . . . wouldn't you know it . . . art. They were looking for more ways to get students in the shop, prototyping, building ideas and just having fun together as a community. 

Taking the science and aiming it at real-world goals and problems involves the type of problem-solving and consensus-building -- not to mention, repetition after failure after repetition --  that takes science out of a theoretical, competitive, finish-line - oriented framework, and into a creative, iterative, collaborative . . . sure, I'll say it . . . "art form."

For anyone looking for more information on positive interplay between arts and technology, check out stemtosteam.org.

Or, for a more fun and practical and collaborative approach, contact me directly, as I am often able to assist in involving interested students directly in learning hands-on skills through the shared shop spaces in which I work.

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.

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.