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Extreme Urban Makeover

Some days, don’t you just want to level everything and start over? All the hideous dead buildings. The cratered concrete. The rusted, sagging chainlink, the miles of cockeyed telephones poles, the trashy billboards. Every graffitti-ed and decrepit factory, warehouse, and weedy parking lot. The whole wretched, mad scribble of ill-planned, ugly roads and ruined waterways.

All of it — the whole Augean stable — gone. Nothing but trees, meadows, rivers and lakes left behind. It’d be tempting never to build anything at all again where the vile mess used to lie. 

But urban renewal isn’t like lawn replacement. Killing off cities in order to heal them has the unfortunate side effect of destroying people’s homes, neighborhoods and workplaces, which they need no matter how unspeakably awful those places are. (So, historical preservationists, you can put your beta blockers down now.)  

Alas, urban renewal also isn’t usually like landscaping or any other kind of well-planned design.  It happens in odd patches as bits of money become available for isolated efforts that are usually the pet projects of influential people hoping to gain even more power and money or to secure their civic legacy. Few urban communities would want or be able to afford the comprehensive plan — not to mention the political repercussions of totalitarian-level eminent domain - that French emperor Napoleon III commissioned from Baron Haussmann for the redesigning of Paris.   

Yet the fact remains that most cities have grown up with hardly any long-term, big-picture planning at all.  And in spite of that and their varying amounts of human and infrastructural misery, some of them are great places that you’d love to visit or live in.  

What makes the difference? What do the world’s greatest, most enticing and creative cities have in common? Here are a few things:

Physical beauty, including: an arrestingly gorgeous natural setting; flower gardens and parks; striking architecture, often with some intriguing native or period style influencing a lot of it (pagoda roofs, barrel tiles, half-timbering, Gothic arches, Victorian gingerbread…);  at least one unique, amazing structure that has become the city icon: the Eiffel Tower,  the Golden Gate Bridge, the Chrysler Building, the Forbidden City, the Christ the Redeemer statue; and vivid, colorful and/or highly imaginative art everywhere, whether fine or folk

Fascinating history: Great cities have great stories to tell about how they were founded, settled and fought over; how and why they grew; and what colorful people played notable roles; and these stories are told through the unique look, structures, cultures, and activities of these cities, as well as through their languages, beliefs and common knowledge    

Activity:  Economic, of course, as a well-employed city is usually a better-cared-for and happier city, but also interesting occupational activity (shoe design, rickshaw pulling, stone carving, ship-building…) and, especially, outdoor activity: bustling shops and cafes; street vendors and performers; crowds of people going to work, school, religious services and cultural events, playing in the parks; attending festivals and political events. In other words, nonstop evidence of thousands or millions living visibly busy, rich and varied lives

Atmosphere and strong local identity: All the above help create these two things, which are linked but not the same. A great city is like a well-adjusted person — unafraid to be itself, whatever that self is. And though some communities, like some humans, will naturally appeal more to the rest of world than others because of luck in looks or wealth or lifestyle, so no community will rise to the top if lacks confidence in its own instincts and value.

The wishy-washy, the imitative, the fearful are going nowhere. And if your city is one of those – if leveling it sounds easier than living in it anymore – then it’s probably not the kind of place in which normal, small-scale creativity will work much change.

No, your city needs radical creativity. Monumental creativity. Something huge, showy and preferably not at all useful that will shock and delight the world and make it want to come see for itself. Your city’s really creative people – the ones with both ideas and guts –  need to choose  a huge, amazing project and get it done through sheer force of will. 

Turn all the bridges into giant, glowing, winged dragon sculptures? Train climbing roses up every bare wall and fence in town? Connect all the tall buildings with Christmas-lighted working zip lines? Convert a central downtown space to a huge outdoor concert/movie stage with performances 24/7?  Take all the broken concrete and glass and build a fabulous mosaic light-tower at the edge of your lake or river?

With what radical act of creativity would you like to transform your city?

Sucking it up for creativity

So if panel discussions don’t increase a city’s creativity (and they don’t), what does?

The usual suspects have had lots of chances to weigh in on this topic over the last, oh, 10 years or more, and they’ve mostly cited concepts such as lowering barriers, developing new skill sets, encouraging  collaborative brainstorming and shared projects, advancing the arts and artists, aggressively attracting and/or growing high technology companies, investing in mixed-use real estate projects, and a lot of other “pieces” formulated “around” creativity and its henchforces of education and economic development.

Those white-paper approaches have produced certain civic benefits in a lot of places, but a boiling overflow of creativity isn’t one of them, at least not where I live.  My metro area is no showplace of imagination- it’s desperately poor and ailing, a shocking stage-three hospice case  of shabby, empty buildings, cratered streets,  unemployed adults, endangered children, political ineptitude and venality, apathy and inertia, a culture of bland cowardice, and widening rings of smug and bunkered suburbanites. 

That’s in spite of all the individuals trying hard to change it.  So there must be something else cities need in order to be centers of creativity.

I think it’s guts, pure and simple. Collective guts of all kinds: the community courage to believe there is a better way; the rare and constant commitment to trying something different; the refusal to let bad circumstances, red tape and/or narrow-minded people  kill the inspiration and the effort; and maybe most important of all, the sheer bravery of making the effort to think.  

Imaginative thinking takes work, especially in groups. It means not allowing yourself to choose the easy out, the known model. It means being fully alive and alert instead of opting to pleasantly stupefy yourself with the same old comfortable crap that keeps masking the problem the way another bag of barbecue chips makes you feel fed when you’re actually dying of a vitamin deficiency.

So if we’re going to make our cities creative, I think we’d better develop our inner six-packs. What do you think?

What makes a city a center of creativity? Probably not panel discussions….

 For an event that purported to be about imaginative thinking, the 2010 Creative Voices Summit held Monday at Cleveland, Ohio’s downtown Idea Center was a thoroughly left-brain kind of exercise.

A panel of experts opined, dissected, compared and contrasted. The moderator probed. The audience queried and deduced. And everybody analyzed. 

The final score? Statistics cited: 7. Problems rehashed: 26.  Models examined:  832. Original ideas: zip. As panel results go, not surprising , but still profoundly frustrating for anyone who had dared to hope that a big roomful of city arts, education, design and urban-planning whizzes would  produce the kind of radically inventive brainstorming that everyone in attendance seemed to believe troubled cities need.

If such a hopeful person had stared at the crowd a bit more shrewdly, he/she might have realized that the summiteers were nearly all heads or staff members of traditional institutions such as universities and schools, government  bodies and nonprofit arts organizations: in other words, bureaucracies. What do bureaucracies famously do best? Rely on safe precedent. Construct microscopically detailed, obstructive rules and processes that generally cause at least as many problems as they solve. Exhaust people of  vision and initiative by miring them in tar pits of technicalities and other senseless requirements. Thwart creativity.

Yet leaders of bureaucracies are the ones who routinely get called up for committees and task forces and and civic discussions dedicated to effective problem-solving. And what do they do when they get there? Talk in buzz phrases such as “human-capital development” and “right-sizing” and “paradigm change” about what the problems are and what models have been successful in other places. 

Is there really anybody left who doesn’t know what the problems are? Some hibernating moles who haven’t heard the circular litany of joblessness, poverty, horrific schools, crime, empty/decaying buildings and homes, lead poisoning, brownfields,  strapped governments, failing or fleeing corporations, brain drain, joblessness … ? Anyone in the Rust Belt who hasn’t heard that Austin/Seattle/Providence/Philly/Chicago/anywhere but here has a creative solution that our pathetic burgs need to borrow and replicate?

Does it make us creative to borrow someone else’s idea?

To be fair: As panels go, this summit’s was well intentioned and rather better than usual. It featured  Terry Schwarz of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative and Mayor Donald Plusquellic of Akron — two of  Northeast Ohio’ s  more adventurous and witty civic activists — as well as Carol Coletta of CEOS for Cities and the National Public Radio show Smart City, and Ronald Berkman, the new president of Cleveland State University. Edward Hill, CSU’s lively and peripatetic dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs,  moderated the event, which was presented by the CSU Center for Arts and Innovation and ideastream.

“Around” the summit topic — as bureaucrats currently love to say — of what it means to be a creative city, a few tangy quips were made. During a lengthy debate about the possible inherent snobbishness of Richard Florida’s “creative class”  phrase and whether it implies that those not belonging to it are perforce part of an “uncreative” class, Plusquellic joked, “We do have an ‘uncreative class.’ They listen to Rush Limbaugh.” Schwarz compared the current “authenticity” fad (the conviction that unique old buildings, independent shops and restaurants, homegrown talents and a city’s own heritage are de facto better and more desirable than chain enterprises, cookie-cutter office parks, etc.)  to middle school, where everybody absurdly obsesses about being cool. She also delivered the best line of the whole event in an exchange with the notoriously out-of-the-box Plusquellic, serenely noting, “I believe in recklessness as an aspect of public policy.”

But in spite those two, the Creative Voices Summit resulted mostly in the kinds of self-defeating contradictions with which Cleveland has become synonymous. The impulse to encourage toleration of new ideas and enlist the creativity of the entire community ran up against the  conventional wisdom about playing to the area’s strengths, a policy that has so far encouraged Northeast Ohio leaders to put all their financial eggs in the basket of  bio- and Internet technology, much as they did with the basket of steel 100 years ago. The recognition that improved education is a must for creativity and economic success got tangled up with the notion that other cities have succeeded creatively in spite of terrible school systems. The idea that creativity works best when it isn’t forced to be product-driven disappeared in a wave of enthusiasm about timely commercialization.

So even though the panel learnedly and entertainingly re-revealed all the problems that Rust Belters know they need to creatively address, not  a single imaginative solution – not one original, takeable step — was suggested by anybody. Well, maybe this will count: Instead of holding panel discussions, why not convene local artists, scientists, engineers and philosophers  in a room, give them a specific problem to solve and 24 hours in which to do it? For the cost of some box lunches and a bottomless coffee urn, you’d probably get some real — and really creative – solutions.