A different way to shrink ailing urban areas

Depressed? City or region in trouble? Can’t get anyone to take any significant creative risks or pay attention to anyone outside the old power elite?

Read http://www.gcbl.org/blog/richey-piiparinen/cleveland-do-we-have-future-if-we-never-leave-our-past.  Then let’s overthrow failure.

It’s a thin line between rave and create

Update in the research on similarities between creative people and schizophrenic people: Their dopamine systems look alike.

For centuries, people have equated extreme creativity and artistry with madness – or at least weirdness – in ways that have allowed societies to stigmatize and marginalize those whose powerful imaginations gave them conceptual ability and vision very different from others’.

So I have to wonder if this research will reinforce that prejudice or eventually show us that the difference between mental illness and the capacity for great creativity is one of some slight but detectable physiological quirk, like being born with synesthesia because the nerves of your color-perception and mathematical-understanding regions of the brain happened to cross. 

And could doctors undo it? Would the “sufferers” want them to?

Will Cleveland step up to this creativity summit?

 If Cleveland held a creativity summit, would we hear any really new ideas? And if we did, would we be brave enough to try some of them?

That’s become the big question here in Geniocity.com’s home city: Not just whether or not we’re capable of thinking big, but whether or not we’re capable of actually taking the risks necessary to bring about change.

That’s an issue shared by other places around the globe where people who glorify the long-dead past have turned their minds and spirits into museums of outmoded thinking. But it seems especially bad in Beaver Cleaverland, where an apathetic and insecure/defensive population has led to an entrenched, clubby, self-protecting, unimaginative and largely ineffective leadership, turning the city and its sphere of influence into a perpetual 1957.

In spite of all the energetic  individuals working hard to reinvent the place, Cleveland is timid. Stodgy. We won’t try anything unless everyone else has already tried it first and proved it’s safe, which means that by the time we get around to adopting something “new,”that thing is often already as passe as … 1957. That goes not only for big civic change, but also for small changes of all kinds in schools, businesses and neighborhoods.

And still, those energetic individuals don’t give up. Kay Shames is one of them. She’s head of the Center for Arts and Innovation at Cleveland State University, which is co-hosting an actual Cleveland creativity summit 9:30-11:30 a.m. Monday, June 7, downtown at the Idea Center, 1375 Euclid Ave.

Called the 2010 Creative Voices Summit, the gathering is free and open to the public, which will be invited to participate in the discussion moderated by Edward Hill, dean of CSU’s Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, and including a panel made up of Ronald M. Berkman, CSU president; Carol Colletta, president of CEOs for Cities and host of National Public Radio’s Smart Cities program; Terry Schwarz, interim director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative; and Joseph P. Riley Jr., mayor of Charleston, S.C.   

Shames says she’s “hopeful” that the summit will result in real debate about real emerging ideas. “We’re not using a sort of Richard Florida build-it-and-they-will-come creativity” as the summit’s basis, she says. Instead, the event will emphasize education and the arts as agents of the city’s future and explore basic issues such as whether or not Cleveland is really plugged into the creative frontier, what we should invest in, what should we build in order to grow and diversify. 

Those are good questions. Let’s hope, along with Shames, that the answers we get from our creative leaders and ourselves aren’t warmed-over ideas from other cities or versions of the same old Cleveland reliance on foundations, political-machine operatives, a handful of big-biz types and a few wealthy families to do our “thinking” and “daring” for us.