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.

Florida resetting our economic default status

Economic-development guru Richard Florida has a new book out. Called The Great Reset – with a nod, I hope , to Kurt Andersen’s 2009 work about the current economic crash, Reset — it’s Florida’s look at what this enormous change in our national financial circumstances  could bring about in our terms of economic-development trends such as home-ownership and geographic fluctuations in population. To get a taste, take a look at this interview of Florida by Conor Clarke in the Atlantic.

Arts education gets – and begets – attention

The struggle to discover a causal relationship between arts-related learning and improvements in general cognition continues.

This may seem an abstruse issue, but it has all sorts of real-world ramifications: For decades, and especially for the most recent one, evidence for and against the arts’ effect on children’s brains, behavior, test scores, career potential and general happiness and fulfillment has swayed school systems, national agencies, foundations, state and local governments and the entire national economic Zeitgeist.

Creativity is the buzzword of the era in economic-development circles, thanks largely to Richard Florida and his “creative class” theory about what’s making some cities grow and others shrink. And what moves the economy these days is what moves the politicians, from your local councilman on up to the White House administration. So it may matter a lot that Michael I. Posner, a Dana Foundation grantee and a psychology professor at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College, finds that arts training – not just exposure to arts, but actual practice of them – increases children’s ability to pay attention to  other subjects and tasks.

Hopefully, that will include picking up their dirty socks.

For more recent findings on arts’ influence on the brain and education, check out the Dana Foundation’s related news roundup.

From the arts hearing: signs of progress and one epiphany

The numbers are grim. Artists suffering unemployment at twice the rate of other workers. Ten thousand nonprofit arts organizations nationwide in real danger of closing and taking 260,000 jobs with them. Arts and artists losing more of their tiny piece of the nation’s 40-percent-smaller philanthropic pie to other causes such as health, while ticket-sales drop, forcing severe cost reductions including lay-offs.

And yet, scary as the information was that emerged from yesterday’s House Education & Labor Committee hearing on the impact of the arts on the economy and employment, it may not impress an American public that’s been listening to the sound of the world collapsing for months now. Bad news is everywhere – with banks failing, the stock market falling down a mine shaft, the newspaper industry dying and real estate worth about as much as Confederate dollars, the arts industry’s plight probably doesn’t seem any more important than the retailers’ or automakers’ or the airlines’. All of us are, or have friends, in trouble.

In fact, the American public may never fully understand just how stunning this hearing was – not because it revealed an arts industry in financial crisis, but because it revealed one with an economic, social and political clout that artists and their supporters could hardly have imagined even 10 years ago.

For generations – centuries, really - artists in the Western world have been despised as vagrants and low-order servants, shiftless eccentrics, dreamers, emotional basket cases and addicts, at best impractical and at worst morally dangerous. Their work may have been enjoyed, even prized, but they themselves seemed permanently marked as a kind of untouchable class by both the wealthy holders of power and the starchy keepers of bourgeois industry and respectability.

In 20th-century America, the public’s perception of artists as elite beggars, drains on the public and private coffers of prosaic, hard-working citizens, kept artists and their enterprises largely exiled from the circles of civic and economic influence – as generally disregarded as women by the bluff, tough, masculine money-makers and political power brokers.

And now? In the last decade or so, through the hard work of advocates, agencies and artists themselves, arts and culture  have begun to be more widely recognized as the vital economic and social forces they are. Giant money-generators and employers, irreplaceable educators, international ambassadors, community unifiers amd developers - the arts have been discovered to be all of these. And more: the key, along with all other creative professions, to our economic future.

How did they get to this point and how they should go on? The answer to both is education – not just the formal education of our children, which is indeed crucial, but the education of the public. Research, from RAND reports on the value of arts in schools to the economic-development studies of “The Rise of the Creative Class” author Richard Florida, has provided the tools; indefatigable public-awareness campaigns by leaders from Americans for the Arts down to local arts-council directors have provided the force. Slowly for a long time and now, at last, rapidly, they have been wearing away the blinders and barricades that have kept Americans from seeing the truth about the arts.

After perhaps a thousand years of advocates trying to persuade Western societies that art was valuable because it was good for the spirit, we’re seeing  two completely practical themes – the job-training benefits to children and the financial benefits to local economies - completely change how community leaders think about the arts.

Artists need not be afraid that positioning their work as a kind of grease for the wheels of capitalism will result in art losing its true value. Those capable of being moved by art always will be. But it’s absolutely essential that the very many who believe art has nothing whatever to do with them come to understand that art is, at least, important to their own prosperity. Their education must progress.

Luckily for advocates whose job it will be to continue that education, actor Tim Daly has discovered the next significant tool: technology.

America is in love with technology as an economic driver and as entertainment. And as Daly pointed out during his testimony at yesterday’s hearing,  ”Without art, there’s no iPod.”  It was a moment of head-smacking epiphany for some of us – what he meant was, without design, without artistic content, our beloved music players, computers, flat-screen TVs, CDs and DVDs would never have come about. No one would be scrambling to get cell phones with camera, game and internet entertainment functions or satellite radio with a zillion music stations or Wiis with their lifelike sports experiences or endless other products that those with artistic and creative skills have made more imaginative, exciting, effective, comfortable or beautiful.

Daly’s is a message that the American public – and American businesspeople and politicians - will understand: The arts create the cool, money-making products we want. Other ideas will likely emerge from the Education & Labor hearings this spring, but even if none did, this one might be powerful enough to take the arts movement to a whole new level.

It’s a fit: Creative-conference promotion gets Brand management

Stephen Brand believes in creativity. And what he believes about it  is that there’s little good in having an idea if you don’t do anything with it.

  Brand has found a place to work that’s all about both getting ideas and putting them to work. The first president of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio – who also served as Innovation Fellow at NorTech, Cleveland’s technology-based, economic-development association,  and earned an executive doctorate from Case Western Reserve University by studying the early childhood influences of successful inventors – has landed at the Creative Education Foundation in Amherst, Mass. 

CEF specializes in helping people learn creative and effective problem-solving techniques. As the foundation website explains, “Every day principles fostered by CEF programs are helping someone, somewhere in the world develop new products, make business operations run more profitably, restructure organization and agencies to become more effective and less encumbered, reinvigorate economies, make improvements in our schools, revitalize communities and replace ineffective methods and systems with new, more workable ones.”

Through the Journal of Creative Behavior, which it publishes; a youth-outreach program; awards (“Creative Class”  economic-development guru Richard Florida won CEF’s 2005 Sid Parnes Pioneer Award); and the annual International Creative Problem-Solving Institute, CEF has been trying to get people to innovate since the 1950s.  

Brand, who recently moved to western Massachussetts, was out driving one day about a year ago when he saw the CEF sign and thought to himself that he ought to be working there, he said. He’s currently helping the foundation promote its next CPSI conference, called the Revolution of Creativity, in Boston this coming June. And it sounds like man was matched to task by some Heavenly Headhunter, because CEF teaches what Brand has been practicing for years. 

Creative problem-solving is not so much like the flashes of inspiration that lead geniuses to make great art, he noted, as like a means of organizing your ideas, and following a process of deductive reasoning to a solution.  With regular mortals, Brand said, “All you need to do is lead them through a journey from A to B to Z.”

But  imagination is required and Brand thinks the times have never been better for putting it to use. Instead of being worried by the recession, he said, “I’m excited about it. This is a great opportunity for innovators.”

He also thinks it’s vital for businesses - nonprofit and for-profit alike – to keep innovating.  (“The traditional nonprofit model will not work into the future. Period.”) But most do it only when times are bad and their companies are in crisis. Instead,  they have to innovate even – and maybe especially – when times are good.

“They’re crazy to be happy when things are fine,” he said, pointing out that Starbucks, for instance, rested on its laurels and look what happened: Competitors such as McDonald’s got smart, took away customers who wanted fancy coffee without the groovy sit-down-coffeeshop experience and high prices, and by the time Starbucks woke up and smelled the,  er, you know, it had lost so much business, it had to close 600 stores. 

Education is crucial. “We have to teach the next generation of innovators and problem-solvers” instead of just training young people for assembly lines, Brand said.

That’s where CEF tries to help. And how exactly does it teach these skills? Stay tuned. 

Their city was gone … creative. Yours, too?

Tourisme Montreal / Stephan Poulin 

Creativity has the power to change the whole world. But first, apparently, it’s going to change the way city leaders brand their burgs.

In Montreal – where they clearly can sense the power of  “Creative Class” economic-development guru Richard Florida  even a whole Canadian province away from his new base at the University of Toronto – someone has assayed a claim on the designation “city of creativity.”

(This is a bold gambit and seems rather creative in and of itself, if for no other reason than that none of the several cities Florida has adopted and quitted in rapid succession had the smarts to position itself as the “city of creativity” before he moved on. Perhaps Montreal hopes to woo him next, to keep him in Canada so thousands of Great White Northerners who stay in Florida every year can finally enjoy having a Florida stay with them.)

Montreal might deserve such a title. A city of  historic interest and visual appeal, it can claim a wide array of cultural activities, including major fim and music festivals, the widely known Just for Laughs comedy festival, the home base of Cirque de Soleil, four universities, a lot of research and development, an indelible French heritage and the food to go with it. It’s also gay-friendly, one of Florida’s key standards of creativity measurement.

But many cities could say the same - just not in French or even with a good fake accent. 

What’s interesting about all this is not which metropolitan area can feel the most justified in calling itself creative, but that so many suddenly want to. Florida can certainly take credit for having turned local governments on to the economic benefits of attracting creative people with amenities and activities that keep them stimulated, happy and working hard in desirable and inventive new industries.

More important, though, awareness of creativity and its benefits has at last started to permeate the flinty shell of North Americans’ traditional value system, the segregated one that thought the only valuable kind of inventiveness was scientific, technological, artisanal, commercial, male and straight and that any other kind of imaginative pursuit – especially the arts – was frouffy claptrap or treacherous sensory seduction and thus the work of the devil and/or women.

We are recovering Puritans. And as we get better, so will our economy and society.  Maybe soon, Montreal will have to duke it out with every other municipality on the continent for the name City of Creativity.