Carolyn Jack
Editor and CEO, Geniocity.comA project of The Genius Group LLC
Creative Nerve
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.
Grassroots: The agent of green change
How do you systematically redesign a place that’s already filled up and covered over with stuff you may not want, but can’t easily get rid of? The answer is: Maybe you don’t. And that’s no fun to hear when all you really want to do is level the mess, haul the rubble away and start all over.
I talk not of teen bedrooms, but of whole cities and regions. It’s hard to drive through any older population center and not feel as if a good mass implosion were the only answer for all the crummy parts, followed by an invitation to some latter-day Baron Haussmann to come in and reshape the whole metropolis from the sewer pipes on up (ignoring the distasteful fact that you’d also need an Emperor Napoleon III to decree and pay for the whole project on the backs of the working poor).
But Terry Schwarz thinks that’s the wrong approach. The interim director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative , who’s been working on Cleveland’s land-use and environmental problems with Neighborhood Progress, Inc. and the City of Cleveland as part of the Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland project, suggests that the grassroots are literally and figuratively the answer.
She sees good change coming to cities such as Cleveland in two ways. One is the actual grassroots: developing a flexible framework of strategies for returning key areas, such as watersheds, to the green states and purposes nature intended, so “we can more easily adapt, grow and shrink.” Two is the metaphorical grassroots: Within the framework, giving ordinary residents the freedom to experiment with ways of cleaning and greening their own lots and reconnecting their neighborhoods to the changed spaces around them.
Land reuse thus becomes – you saw this coming – organic. But it’s not the same thing as just letting the city “return to nature,” Schwarz says.
Thousands of people still live there and can’t be displaced like heads of lettuce just because you need to clean the refrigerator. Plus, grand plans are hugely expensive, logistically complicated and obstructed by people’s ownership of – and emotional ties to – their property. They also can’t anticipate every circumstance and end up being rigid impediments to good sense and individual initiative.
So engaging everyday people in the process of creative change becomes essential – and an opportunity for innovation on every level. (Schwarz reports that a visiting Environmental Protection Agency member took a look at Cleveland and exclaimed, “This is an ecological-restoration bonanza!”)
More than 50 small pilot projects are already underway in Cleveland neighborhoods, Schwarz says, and they range from restoring a tiny bit of prairie to phytoremediation (planting therapeutic species that will, for instance, clean the soil of heavy metals such as lead) to landscaping on vacant lots to make city blocks look cared-for and so reduce crime.
Schwarz sees Cleveland’s encircling “Emerald Necklace” of parks eventually turning into a larger green network, an “emerald web” of restored watersheds and tree canopy connected to strings of neighborhood green patches. Though removing structures and creating a lot of green space sounds like a danger to the density a city needs to support public transit and other essential services, Schwarz calls it “managing decline in a way that actually promotes growth” – and cites the city of St. Paul, Minn., where the restored wetland that replaced a failing mall proved so attractive and desirable a spot that new homes were built around the edges of it.
Among planners and environmentalists, there’s a fair amount of argument about what will work best. But as Schwarz notes, the damage to places like Cleveland has already been done; it’s never going to be 1910 and the Midwest’s industrial heyday again. So such cities will have to create the best outcomes that they can with the hands they’ve been dealt.
“We will have to choose,” she says. “We have to take some risks. There is no model. We have to be the model.”