New Geography

Author: Richey Piiparinen

  • Rust Belt Cities: Invest in Odysseus, Not Barney Fife

    Given its legacy of shrinking, the Rust Belt has issues. The issues arose naturally, and relate to the fact things leave, or that so much has left. Particularly, when things leave, the mind—both the individual and the collective city mind—can get protective and restrictive. Neediness arises. The smell of desperation ensues like a pall that can tend to hang over cities, influencing decision making on all levels.

    Enter “brain drain”, or that term coined to refer to the outmigration of an area’s educated citizens, particularly it’s young. You know the drill: Johnny goes to State college, comes back home for a spell, but then leaves Cleveland, Ohio for Chicago or New York. That is brain drain. And city leaders hate it, spending billions of dollars to stop it—often at the cost of coming off ridiculous, lame.

    For instance, in Pittsburgh, there was a civic booster campaign thought up to keep educated folks from going. It was called “Boarder Guard Bob”. According to researcher Chris Briem, “Bob” was a Smokey-the-Bear-type of public service announcement made into a Barney Fife character, with the billboard-size messaging of “Bob” intended to “stop young people at Western Pennsylvania’s borders before they had a chance to leave for other cities”. And while this particular retention strategy (luckily) never went to print, various “plug the brain drain” strategies persist in one form or another at exorbitant cost to taxpayers.

    But beyond the near-pitiful messaging, there are major problems with the brain drain approach, especially from an economic development perspective. For example, when, as a community, you are intentionally telling your citizen’s not to go, you are asking them to sacrifice personal development for the benefit of a place. To this point, my colleague, Jim Russell—a leading thinker in brain drain boondoggles and blogger at Burgh Diaspora—says it best, stating: “Discouraging geographic mobility is the same as restricting access to higher education”. In other words, it’s like telling Johnny to stick with his high school diploma so as to forego leaving the community for a 4-year degree.

    What’s more, getting people to stay put does little to grow a local economy. In fact it hurts it. Because leaving home is often a rite of passage. It develops a person. I mean, can you imagine if there was no odyssey in the epic Odyssey? If so, Odysseus wouldn’t be the changed man with perspective and experience as he was when he returned back to his homeland, and so there’d be no “there” there. In this sense, the Rust Belt needs to engage their young to embark on their own “Hero Journey” if only to gain skills and broaden geographic connections. This is international economics 101 (see China, India, Brazil, etc.). It should be a domestic economic priority for the Rust Belt, and it would be if only the Cleveland’s of the world could let go of the protectionism that defines their longstanding existential fears of shrinking into one big pile of ruin porn.

    Of course confidently encouraging outmigration is part and parcel with an understanding that many expats will “boomerang” back. But many are, and at a faster rate. To wit: as the alpha cities of the America like NYC get too expensive or creatively-class cute, many Rust Belt refugees are pivoting back from a certain left-wanting lifestyle if only for the opportunity, tradition, and honest-to-god reality that is “Rust Belt Chic”. And when they do, they often become “economic ass kickers”, which is term Russell uses to exemplify the fruits of the Hero Journey that is not only individually experienced, but felt in the local economy as well.

    Take Sean Watterson, the co-proprietor of the wildly successful restaurant the Happy Dog on Cleveland’s Near West Side. He moved back from D.C. because, according to a recent Plain Dealer article, “Cleveland-ness is like Polish-ness or Irish-ness. It’s an ethnicity”. Here, Watterson not only runs a great hot dog business, but uses his establishment to advance a circulation of ideas by hosting a variety of events like “Life, the Universe, and Hot Dogs”, which is a series hosted by researchers from the Institute for the Society of Origins. Another big hit is the live performances by members of the Cleveland Orchestra called Classical Revolutions.

    Cool sounding events, sure. But there is more to it than that, as such happenings spark cross-fertilization between parts of Cleveland—the blue collar West Side and the intelligentsia of the East Side—that have long been divided, often at the cost of Cleveland as a place of cultural and economic innovation. And how exactly does Watterson’s own “Hero Journey” come into play in his self-stated goal to break down barriers “between east and west and between high culture and low culture”? It likely relates to the fact he experienced experience outside of a legacy city bubble that enabled him to see and cross bridges that others have difficulty envisioning.

    Now, does this mean that cities simply need to let people leave to prosper? Obviously not. If the place expats are boomeranging back to is stagnant and disparate, with openness and connection disabled by a collective insular mentality that: “that’s just the way things are done around here”, well, the boomeranging effect won’t hold. And the economic ass-kickers won’t ass-kick.

    The goal, then, of cities should be on fostering return migrant connections, or to know who they are, why they are there, and to help get them together so that their collective unchained perspective can pop bubbles of inert status quo. This need is real. For instance, take this first-hand return migrant account published in Rust Belt Chic by Dana Marie Textoris:

    Funny how your location-based identity, your physical and mental place in the world, can flip like a switch: Before I was a Clevelander managing to make it in San Francisco….right now I feel a lot like a San Franciscan stuck in Cleveland. In either place, I felt just a little bit Other. A bit of a novelty. Just a tad on the outside looking in. Where does that leave me? Where is home? As I type this, I realize, with sort of an internal groan, that the place I’m left in, the guide to what I’m searching for, is probably just right here, inside me, where my two lives — West Coast and Midwest — are now combined. I’m not really a true Clevelander anymore…I’ve picked up way too much San Francisco for that. The balance I’ve become, a little of this and that, is just what I’m hoping I’ll find, one day.

    So, to all Rust Belt cities—this is where your attention must be turned: not on the ones who are leaving for good reason, but on those returning who have not left for good. They have brought the path of their self-discovery back to your doorstep.

    Don’t close the door by screaming at the backs of others.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.

  • “Livability” vs. Livability: The Pitfalls of Willy Wonka Urbanism

    livability: (livable) fit or suitable to live in or with; “livable conditions”.

    “Livability” has been a buzz word in city development for some time, and for good reason, as who doesn’t want livability, outside the zombie cohort? Things get hairy, though, when “livability”—as an economic development strategy—gets unpacked, because questions arise: “Livability” for whom? “Livability” at what cost?

    Making a city “livable” these days largely means appealing to a select group of folks so as to form “an attractive economic place”. This notion of “livability” really came on in the late 1980’s, and was done under the presumption that certain cities offered higher quality of life, read: better lifestyles. For instance, in 1989 geographer David Harvey wrote that cities need to “keep ahead of the game [by] engendering leap-frogging innovations in life-styles, cultural forms, products, and service mixes…if they are to survive.” This was a radical departure from previous societal efforts to make quality of life a priority (think: pollution remediation) in that “life” was swapped out for “lifestyle”.

    You could argue, then, that the original sin of “livability”-driven economic development begins right there. Namely, the emphasis will not be on the people of a city, but on potential consumers, particularly high-valued consumers with means, subsequently referred to as the “creative class”. As for creative class wants? They are, according to Richard Florida, “[an] indigenous street-level culture – a teeming blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros…” In this sense, the idea of “livability” gets precariously slimmed out.

    Nonetheless, this thinking has penetrated mainstream economic development, with cities attempting to one-up each other in their want to attract a slice of the “livability” electorate. The consequences have become predictable: more comfort for some, less comfort for most.

    ***

    Perhaps the city most famous for livability-driven economic development is Portland. It is America’s amenity apex, and a recent study showed it attracts the young by the boatload due to a certain leisure-lifestyle it affords.

    For example, from a recent article entitled “(P)retirement’s new frontier”, the author interviews a 36-year old who is “underemployed on purpose”, as well as a couple who quit their jobs in Austin, sold their car, and have backyard chickens, yet now feel “much richer”. Such folks are referred to by economist Joe Cortright as “lifestyle entrepreneurs”. Part of this entrepreneurial output, touched on in the article, is a website called Badass that rates Portland neighborhoods for amenities like pinball machines, food carts, and access to bike lanes. At times the article reads like Portland was dreamed up by Willy Wonka.

    Here, I half kid. From a description of the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, notice the parallel themes: the Peter Pan motif, an escape from an unsatisfactory reality, and the promise of limitless sensory and savory experiences:

    The Chocolate Room is designed to look like an outdoor landscape complete with trees, flowers and a waterfall, but Wonka has made the entire scene out of candy and chocolate. Charlie and the other children see some doll-sized human beings in the Chocolate Room, and Wonka explains they are Oompa-Loompas whom he saved from the dangerous country of Loompaland. The Oompa-Loompas agreed to work for Wonka and live in his factory in exchange for a safe home and an endless supply of their favorite food, cacao beans.



    Courtesy of Knotworkshop

    Swap out the over-educated and underemployed for the Oompa-Loompas, chocolate for lifestyle amenities, and the Chocolate Room for the concept of “Portland-as-place”, and you got yourself a sequel. But there are problems with such city building: it’s too often defined by the ephemera, or that “transitory matter not intended to be retained or preserved”. And while the ephemera aren’t building blocks to economic growth—but instead represent America’s tendency to fix hard structural deficits with the airy promises of the pleasure principle—they are nonetheless a main cog in the modern day city-making machine. From an article entitled “Placemaking Revolution: the powerful role of ephemera and the arts in our cities”:

    Coletta addressed the question of how ephemeral events can have lasting impacts in cities. “I think you can do temporality with regularity. Some temporary events are so powerful that they stay in the memory for a long time, and spark the imagination.

    But I would argue that now more than ever we need less fantasy in city building than we do reality—as reality can’t keep being handed off to folks who are unable to consume their way to imagining existence as anything but decidedly not livable.

    ***

    “Livability” backlashes are becoming increasingly common across the country. For instance, a piece in Crain’s Chicago questions whether Chicago’s catering to the global creative class is worth the debt it is incurring, and whether the split between the amenity-rich rich neighborhoods and the amenity-poor poor neighborhoods is worth the investment, particularly given the record levels of violence that is tearing parts of the city to pieces. And while Mayor Emanuel’s bike-pathing of the City moves forward because “he wants all of [Seattle’s] bikers”, libraries are closing, red light cameras are ubiquitous, taxes are rising, and the city has a police manpower shortage of 1,000 that can’t be plugged because there’s no money. In fact things are so desperate that the City recently turned to Twitter to fight crime.



    Stop-The-Violence Campaign in Chicago. Courtesy of Metropolis Coffee

    In New York, the President of NYU is under a vote of no confidence for his plans to extend the creative classification of the campus into Greenwich Village. And while this has been ongoing—for instance, one commenter in the book “While We Were Sleeping: NYU and the Destruction of New York” states “There are days when I feel like I’m stranded in some upscale mall in Pasadena”—the recent city-sanctioned plan to bulldoze and “mix use” a residential neighborhood for “livability” purposes in order to “attract ambitious students and faculty to sustain the region’s economic base and quality of life” has pushed faculty and the community over the edge.

    Perhaps not coincidentally, the plan—and fight for it—comes at a time with Richard Florida joining NYU as a Global Research Professor, with the President commenting on the unison this way:

    There is a certain symmetry here: Richard Florida is joining NYU…at a moment when the University has begun responding to the forces that give rise to his most trenchant insights.

    Even in Portland, the “livability” backlash is present. A September 2012 article entitled “Portland’s livability conflicts: Contradictions of affluence and affliction” states:

    With its tree-lined streets, bike paths and transit options, Portland is beautiful and very safe. But behind that facade, Portland is also a city of contradictions.

    These contradictions, according to the author, involve the discordance brewing between the poverty and “alarmingly large number of hypodermic needle” situation on one hand, and the topographical layering of that “everything is fine” sheen that remains intact for many coming to seek it.

    Others in the community are questioning the theory of livability-driven economic development in its own right. For instance, in a piece entitled “The Portland Question: Livability or Job Growth?”, the author notes the growing worries in the region as to the path Portland is on:

    Last year, Portland’s own catalyst for economic change, the Portland Development Commission, warned that the city’s traditional focus on livability projects such as streetcars and housing had not delivered the job growth needed to stay competitive. That’s a strong statement considering that livability has become what largely defines Portland’s character.

    ***

    Taken together, perhaps it’s time for city leaders and citizens alike to take stock in how cities are being made, and for whom the making is focused. In fact maybe it’s time to drop the “livability” gimmicks that define Willy Wonka urbanism–or to squeeze “the style” out of “lifestyle” so as to expose the highest priority, the highest necessity: which is life.

    So, you wanna make your city “hot”? Then cook the irons of affordable housing, mobility, education, and solid jobs.

    Or, you know: livability.


    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.

    Kauffman Performing Arts Center photo by Bigstock.

  • Born Into Ruin: How the Young are Changing Cleveland

    It’s true. I am not happy all the time living in Cleveland. But I don’t want to be happy all the time. That’s unnatural. Said Nietzsche:

    “Sometimes, struggles are exactly what we need in our life. If we were to go through our life without any obstacles, we would be crippled. We would not be as strong as what we could have been.”

    Cleveland is a struggle. But that is how I know it. That is how many Clevelanders in their 20’s to 40’s know it. We didn’t know the city of Mr. Jingeling and Bob Hope—the city of a near million—the “Best Location in Nation”. No, we knew Cleveland on its knees. We knew Cleveland praying. But being born into post-industry is a good first lesson. Life is an obstacle. Cleveland prepares you.

    For what?

    Bullshit, or at least the proclivity of it.

    Aspirations abound now. If you were only creative enough, rich enough, worldly and knowledgeable enough, then: you can become something, a star—evolved from your basic beginnings. Fine. But it’s this ambition-before-all-else mindset that has also extended our eyes from our feet, or our aspirations from our selves, and so for long the country has left its principles behind to build castles in the air with no foundation. Consequently, our culture—our sense of being from somewhere, of bleeding the aesthetic of someplace—has taken a hit. It’s no surprise, then, that our castles keep falling down into a pile of broken promises that never seem to be able to feed, clothe, or employ us properly.

    To hell with it. Time to be proud in the gift of being grounded. It is the only way up.

    Grounded. It’s how we are grown here in the Rust Belt. For you see it everywhere: the reality of things. You see it in the cracked sidewalks, and in the seriousness on the faces of the people all around you. You see it in the empty brownfields behind chain link fences. Yet there is a comfort in the Rust Belt aesthetic, one tied to the fact there’s little pretentiously precious. From the bodies we are built with to the handshakes we make to the food we eat to the buildings we see, shit is heavy here. And it’s a ritual you learn simply by living on Rust Belt ground.

    I am watching this unfold first hand with my 2-year old daughter. You see, I have a place near the rail ties, and each time the train rides through my girl runs to the window to see the power of the “choo choo”. I watch her with a smile as she watches with awe as the force of the box cars enter our bodies through the vibrations coming up from the ground. She is becoming Rust Belt, I think. I do this every time this happens.

    But this groundedness, this Rust Belt-ness, it’s not a settling or a lack of aspiration, but rather—for Clevelanders populating the city that never knew its heights— a chance to look around and see nothing but work to do, and an opportunity to do it. There are a lot of fresh eyes around. The city psychology is changing. And I think this may save Cleveland, because people are no longer waiting for Cleveland to save us.

    This is happening all across the Rust Belt. For instance, Detroit native Bill Morris recently wrote about his trip back to Motown to “see that Detroiters had stopped waiting for salvation from above – a new auto factory, a new government program, a new housing development – because they were too busy saving themselves down at street level.”

    Morris goes on to interview Jack Kushigan, a Detroiter who grew up working in the family’s machine shop before moving to San Francisco and then back. He writes of Kushigan:

    I met him in the woodworking shop he’d set up in a church basement on the city’s hard-hit East Side, where he was teaching neighborhood people how to make furniture out of wood harvested from abandoned buildings, a virtually limitless source of raw materials. “Detroit for years, during its decline, has been hoping for a Messiah,” Kushigian told me. “Detroit has finally given up on that. A lot of people in Detroit have a fire burning inside them that I don’t see anywhere else. My feeling is that the Messiah is us.”

    I feel the same thing is happening in Cleveland. The work the young people are doing. The fact they are entering the broken dreams of past generations with no illusions, little skeletons, but with a determination that comes with being grounded. And it is this kind of collective turn-the-page energy that will end the endless recent history of our decline.

    Call it the benefit of struggle, or of not having your castles yet crumble because you’d been born into the ruin.

    This piece originally appeared on Cool Cleveland.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.

  • No Reservations Cleveland

    There is a new video out marketing Cleveland and a new slogan: “Downtown Cleveland: It’s here”. Now, I struggle with critiquing it. One the one hand, I get its energy and optimism: the energy in Downtown is palpable, real—there is a bit of a youth movement to the core—and hence the compilation of images, sounds, and narratives that are trying to capitalize and communicate what is going down.

    On the other hand, I see it as another missed opportunity. The message reads blasé. Tastes like a spoon of new car smell. In fact it could be about anywhere—Nashville, Cincinnati, Tampa, etc.; that is, instead of exposing what Cleveland really is and what’s unique about it, it’s distinctiveness as an attraction is buried in amenity-driven microphone-ing that screams we have sports teams and a casino and restaurants and the yet-spoiled exuberance of the young. But when you think about Cleveland—I mean honestly think about Cleveland: about its guts and soul and heart and people—is this the kind of stuff that comes to mind?

    Of course not. So why do it?

    Firstly, it speaks to a larger method of city revitalization that has been running America for some time. Here, the creative classification method entails imposing a rather homogenous, universal cool over a given city topography. Glitz, glamor, glass condos, and sports heroes. Bike paths and food trucks. Millennium Park Jr.’s. Etc. But with this whitewashing comes the chipping away at Cleveland’s Rust Belt soul. And it is this soul, mind you, that is a real attraction. After all, what is so hot about going everywhere when you can go somewhere?

    And yes: Cleveland is a somewhere and has a something. This thing is part cultural, part aesthetic, part historical, and part a consequence of having to go on in the face of adversity. It is part wit, part ironic, part self-deprecating, but also part stand your ground in the defense of where you came from. And it’s all real, not ephemeral: our distinctiveness arising less from donning another city’s success than stripping naked and showing our nuts and bolts. Our warts. Our knuckles and heart.

    Secondly, and this speaks to the marketing machine in general, but outfits that produce messaging at this level just cannot get beyond the culture of the boardroom from which the message emerges. Corporatism repels risk. And this not only relates to branding professionals but also to the customers seeking the brand. It’s like everyone knows their audience and their audience is everyone. It’s all about that one type we want, they say, and we want thousands of them. It is a safe strategy, riskless. But Cleveland doesn’t need safe. Playing it conservative has just kept us secure in our knowledge that we are always revitalizing. Instead, step outside, show your face to the world, as branding is and always has been about differentiation. But to do that you need to be aware and secure in knowing what makes you different.

    It is alright. People will like you. And if they don’t, so be it. The coolest will. Said Anthony Bourdain in his “No Reservations: Cleveland” trip:

    I think that troubled cities often tragically misinterpret what’s coolest about themselves. They scramble for cure-alls, something that will “attract business”, always one convention center, one pedestrian mall or restaurant district away from revival. They miss their biggest, best and probably most marketable asset: their unique and slightly off-center character. Few people go to New Orleans because it’s a “normal” city — or a “perfect” or “safe” one. They go because it’s crazy, borderline dysfunctional, permissive, shabby, alcoholic and bat shit crazy — and because it looks like nowhere else. Cleveland is one of my favorite cities. I don’t arrive there with a smile on my face every time because of the Cleveland Philharmonic.

    A friend recently commented to me that authenticity and grit can’t be marketed. Well, check this new video out from Memphis. They got it. I get a feel for who they are. And it makes me want to check the city out.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic, where this piece originally appeared.

    Cleveland nuts photo by Flickr user The Cleveland Kid.

  • Faking It: The Happy Messaging of Placemaking

    Picasso said “Art is a lie that tells the truth”. Nowadays, there’s less truth to that, as the creative process is increasingly about prettying up and papering over what’s broke.

    More on that shortly, but first, about the breakage: it’s legitimate. Said Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz in a recent NY Times piece that plain-talks our economic conditions: “Increasing inequality means a weaker economy, which means increasing inequality, which means a weaker economy.”

    That assessment—from a very smart man studying the problem—isn’t good. But in the American feel-good milieu you wouldn’t know it: “We’re coming out if it.” “Tomorrow is forever.” “Start-ups will save the U.S.” Etc. And while tone deaf, this kind of brushing off of problems isn’t new, but part of what social critic Barbara Ehrenreich refers to as America’s “cult of cheerfulness”, and it’s a “cult” that has spawned a longstanding and growing American feel-good industry.

    Recently, researcher Jeff Faux—in his book The Servant Economy: Where America’s Elite is Sending the Middle Class—says the feel-good industry has disarmed social urgency and unrest with “cheerful denial”, particularly as it relates to declining standards of living. Faux writes:

    [T]he positive-thinking industry has gone from publishing self-improvement books and training sales people to smile even when they don’t feel like it to loosely constructed system of social engineering that distracts and discourages Americans from dealing with what is happening to their society.

    This form of social control is wide and far-reaching, ranging from the smiley face Wal-Mart logo to motivational seminars for laid off workers that spoon feed a “can do” attitude like it’s castor oil, regardless if it is the context that really “can’t.” Increasingly, cheerful denial has become the purview of artists and designers; that is, instead of using aesthetics to tear down—like did Picasso, Duchamp, and Matta-Clark—we use aesthetics to prop up.

    Enter placemaking, or that medium of developing “place” in our cities through shared efforts of artists and designers alike.

    Placemaking does a lot of good. Parks, festivals, and various urban design interventions can create for a myriad of positive attributes related to happiness, worth, and reinvestment. But placemaking in its pervasive search for vibrancy can often come off as Pollyannaish, or yet another means at happy messaging. At its worst, placemaking not only distracts from pressing concerns if only to provide a place to collectively clap, but—when done in exceedingly high rent spots continuously immune to economic downturns—can also serve to reinforce the bubble mentality of the elite.

    One needs to go no further than America’s cultural capital, New York City, to see this operating. For instance, in a recent article called the “How Rust Became the New Urban Luxury Item”, the author talks about how the aesthetic of rust is being remade from a reality into a motif. The new billion-dollar Barclays Center was made rusty on purpose, and a new section of the High Line—the park made from an abandoned rail line—will most certainly retain its wear, with its decay polished if need be.



    Courtesy of Techcat

    Why is this occurring? The author writes:

    [R]ust has become fashionable. It’s a sign of street cred, kind of like the pre-fab holes in a pair of $500 designer jeans…

    …The kind of rust you find on the Barclays Center and in the refurbished High Line park is a luxury item. In places like Cleveland and Detroit and the parts of New York without corporate sponsorship, rust is still just rust.

    There is a lot of truth there: rust is still just rust in places that have come to exist in post-industrialization, but for others: rust is luxury, rust is christened from the landscape of one’s hard times up to the decor of the powerful’s play areas.

    On one hand, there is nothing new here. Beautification efforts to attend to social ills is a longstanding method of inflicting good feelings over hard realities. There was the City Beautiful Movement, the Urban Renewal Movement, etc. But what’s rarer is the fact that the aesthetics of disinvestment—in this case rust, and its “hard time” connotations—are being brought in to “dirty” the pretty up. In other words, by “street cred-ing” spaces for the elite, design is used to legitimize the extravagant via images of the honest-to-god consequences of the all-too every day.

    The problem of course is that it elevates how things look and feel in places like the Rust Belt into a luxury status. But in reality, the Rust Belt has been anything but. And while rust is a genuine and pulsating aesthetic in post-industrial America, it is more so akin to the look of a scar: or a character-molding image of resilience that’s now part of the culture’s flesh, and as such can come off as lame when it’s fabricated to make the appearance of something look “harder” than what is.



    Courtesy of Vagabondish

    Of course this adopting of the Rust Belt aesthetic is but part of a cultural authenticity movement that has been going on for some time. People are tiring of the flighty, ephemeral, and the rootless. People want reminders of where America came from and the fight it has in it. But designing for authenticity, according to scholar Jeanne Liedtka, is not only foolhardy—“the authentic emerges; it is not summoned…”—but yet another indication that America is spending more energy on faking it then fixing it.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. This piece originally appeared at his blog.

    Happy smiley photo by Bigstock.

  • Cooling Off: Why Creative California Could Look to Western New York

    Sometimes the stakes are bogus, sometimes the fast lane hits a fork.
    Sometimes southern California wants to be western New York
    –Lyrics from Dar Williams’ song “Sometimes California Wants to Be Western New York”.

    For long, making cultures and making people have been deemed outmoded. It is largely a knowledge economy. And since knowledge has been diverging into “spiky locales” known to be hotbeds of innovation, consider it a double whammy, as most of the relevant geographies are on the coast. The middle of the country is thus irrelevant if you care to survive. It is a man with a pitchfork in a sea of MacBook’s and iLife’s.

    For instance, in Edward Glaeser’s 2007 City Journal article he asks: “Can Buffalo Ever Come Back?” Glaeser answers quickly, “Probably not—and government should stop bribing people to stay there”.

    It’s true that many cities in the Rust Belt, Appalachia, Iron Range, Great Plains and the like have declined. Many people left. We all know why: jobs mostly, the weather a bit, or too damn depressing—the vacancy and all. We also know that the “flyover country’s” crème de la cream migrated to those gathering pools of talent like San Francisco, Boston, New York, Portland, and the Midwest’s own: Chicago. The reasons this was occurring was because (1) these places were “cool”, and (2) the cluster of talent created for innovation milieus because all the big brains colliding made big ideas, which made products not near the death of their life cycle like, for instance, iron or ovens.

    But suppose we are on the cusp of this divergence changing into a convergence of talent spreading back out into the heartland. In short, maybe these spiky locales are overheating, thus releasing “cool” elsewhere, not to mention the freedom to create. The following explains how and why this scenario could unfold.

    Allow me to digress for a moment to talk about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and how it figuratively relates to the flow of capital. Consider it a working metaphor. Components of the Second Law state that whenever energy is out of equilibrium with its surroundings a natural potential exists to return a setting to equilibrium. For instance, if you bring a hot cup of coffee into a cold room, eventually the energetic tension between the cup and the room will dissipate as the heat leaves the coffee until there is thermodynamic equilibrium between the cup and the room. In many respects, I see the same energetic tension existing precariously between the spiky “have’s” of America and the Buffalo-like “have not’s”, with a subsequent resetting coming as talent and capital leak back into a convergent, equilibratory state.

    Now, what’s creating this tension, other than feeling sorry for Buffalo, Sioux City, etc.? Well, it’s part cultural, part social, and part economic. But all wholly real.

    First, the economic: as the GDP of spikiness goes up so does worker expense. For example, New York City’s cost of living is becoming unsustainable, even for knowledge laborers. From a recent Philadelphia Magazine article discussing a growing trend of New Yorkers moving (to) and commuting (from) Philly, the author notes:

    Those of us with young families, in the so-called creative class…were now high-status, poorly paid culture workers who could no longer afford to live in New York, especially with children. Things no longer seemed possible because they weren’t.

    This exodus is not a blip. For instance, the borough of Brooklyn has lost nearly a half-million people from 2001 to 2009. To that end, the “spikiness” in this case is the unsustainable nature of global city price points, with fewer and fewer folks able to hang on as expenses skyrocket toward the needle-head of the elite.

    What will this mean for the future of jobs? Blogger Jim Russell believes that demand for labor will follow the out-migrating labor supply, even for tech companies. The reasons for this are simple: an increasingly available talent pool in geographies lauded for hard work, and cost. From a Silicon Valley exec who headed to a beer and sausage city:

    “I was very skeptical five years ago that I would do a meaningful expansion in Milwaukee…But what I have found is the majority of talent we need in our company, we are able to acquire in that area.”

    Space is less expensive, it takes less time to find qualified employees in Milwaukee, and they stay with the company for longer than they would in California, [Edward] Jackson said.

    Tied closely to the economic pressures of spiky locales are the social costs. For example, Chicago, once a City of Broad Shoulders, had long ago ditched its industrial ethos and swagger to become the City of Slim Hips. In short, under Mayor Daley, Chicago went all in with global city development, which meant using public funds and incurring public debt to build a place to serve its growing global city clientele. The cost was high, though: crippling municipal debt, a situation no doubt aided by the fact that luring the elite did nothing for jobs, with the city having fewer total jobs in 2009 than it did in its blighted heyday of 1989. Said Richard Longworth:

    In other words, Chicago — the only old industrial city in the Midwest to transform itself into a global city, a big success story in the global rankings — still can’t provide as many jobs for its residents as the old sooty City of the Big Shoulders.

    And that social cost? It has to do with the effect of creating cities within cities, for as Chicago pumped money into its various beautification endeavors, disparity and poverty festered on its West and South sides. The consequence for the city—for anyone who has been paying attention—is one of the most violent summers in Chicago history, with 56 people shot in a recent three-day period alone. Naturally, violence does nothing to attract talent, with one study showing that for every homicide that occurs in a city, total population declines by 70 people. And while many cities do not rival Chicago’s spike in crime, disparity-driven tensions are deepening fast in spiky locales, thus fermenting the possibility of unrest and subsequent flight.

    But at least there are oodles of creativity in “hot and spiky” locales, right? Here, things get interesting.

    There exists a subtle yet growing tension in various creative-laden camps regarding the globalization of creativity which—when implemented as a product—is marketed as “cool”. It’s an old tension really, one between selling yourself and being yourself, and the predicament was spelled out nicely in a recent article by Justin Moyer entitled “Our Band Could Be Your Band–How the Brooklynization of culture killed regional music scenes”.

    In it, the author laments the dissolving regional sound of music in America that has arisen from a decades-long divergence of musical talent into Brooklyn. For Moyer, vanning to “regional music scenes” allowed for a distinct back and forth between one’s own sound and the sound of the other, with the ping pong in musical differentiation allowing for a betterment of one’s own sound as well as the sound of the other. You know, how creative escalation and interplay is supposed to work.

    But somewhere along the way this stopped. As was recently proved in a study detailed in Scientific Reports, everybody started to sound like everybody else. How does Brooklyn do this? What is Brooklyn exactly? Moyer explains, before venting:

    Brooklyn has a downside. Those who abandon their [regional music scene] to come to Brooklyn risk co-option by an aesthetic Borg. Things get mushy. There’s too much input, and there’s not a lot that’s not known…There aren’t many secrets. There are no mountains to go over.

    …There are many Brooklyns. Los Angeles is Brooklyn. Chicago is Brooklyn. Berlin and London are Brooklyn. Babylon was the Brooklyn of the ancient world. In the 1990s, Seattle was Brooklyn…

    Some Brooklyns aren’t even places. MySpace is Brooklyn. YouTube is Brooklyn. Facebook is Brooklyn. Spotify and iTunes are perversely, horribly, unapologetically, maddeningly Brooklyn.

    I’m against it.

    Moyer is on to something, and he has got good theory behind him; that is: diversity and differentiation drive creativity, be it in the political, social, cultural, or economic realm, whereas homogeneity cloaked in popularity does not. What’s more, creative destruction rarely occurs in places perceptibly intact—be it in Park Slope or posh Naples. It occurs where there is urgency, or where it is needed most. It occurs in places very broken, like Detroit. And so eventually the next wave of a new system can very likely be rippled out from places that have been saturating in the pieces. Said Atlantic writer Alexis Madrigal, who just finished touring the Rust Belt: “[T]here are a lot of places where the apocalypse has already happened”.

    Of course this is all very speculative at the moment. The winners are still seen as the winners and the losers still the losers. But the writing is on the wall: the future is in the seams, between the lights and monotone, loud-ass beats.

    Even Twitter creator Jack Dorsey thinks so. The Rust Belt native was in Detroit recently discussing how he gets his creative fix. Is it soaking in Silicon Valley with other visionaries? Not exactly. Rather, by taking the bus to work. Why? Dorsey states:

    “I actually see real things… That encourages me and gives me a stronger purpose, sense of purpose about what I want to change and how my work might apply to that change

    Hear that Buffalo? Don’t listen to your death sentence. You are becoming. Just like Dar Williams predicted.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. This piece originally appeared at his blog.

    American Gothic statue in Chicago photo by flickr user GYLo.

  • The Creative Destruction of Creative Class-ification

    Bits and pieces of ideal cities have been incorporated into real ones; traffic projects and housing schemes are habitually introduced by their sponsors as at least preliminary steps to paradise. The ideal city gives us the authority to castigate the real one; while the sore itch of real cities goads us into creating ideal ones. Jonathan Raban, from Soft City

    There’s a spot in Cleveland that is becoming what many had hoped for: a bit vibrant, a bit hip, with breweries, local retail, and farm-to-table restaurants turning that hard rawness of a disinvested Rust Belt city strip into a thing less raw.

    Actually, the current mix of grit and slight refinement works well on Cleveland’s W. 25th St in Ohio City. Characters abound. The racial and class mixing feels both natural and unforced. Place authenticity is there, aided no doubt by the presence of the 100-year old West Side Market anchoring what is an emerging neighborhood identity of an area where one can get a bite or sip of Cleveland amidst its architectural integrity. And the distinctive Cleveland-ness of it all is becoming ever more attractive, especially to those looking for something beyond that sea of cities sanitizing their urban terroir.

    West Side Market at night. Courtesy of the Plain Dealer

    I just wonder if the inevitable will happen.

    The inevitable, of course, is called “success”. Often, in the creative class-ification of the urban environment, “success” commonly proceeds this way: an area seeps in its own disability to achieve “highest and best use”—yet it’s cheap, intriguing even, particularly due to “the creative allure of urban grit”. Artists and bohemians make a home and create. A scene unfolds, thus laying the sluice gates toward beautification. Food and coffee places soon come to fill need. Retail locates near the foot traffic. Investment begets investment until all the dead buildings are freshly coated. The professional creative class eventually brings in the rear, effectively dictating a claim of “highest and best use”. Market studies by developers get corporate chains interested. Homogeneity ensues via the unforgiving force that is the economy of space, with income, race, and viewpoint converging into a slice of the urban electorate. This convergence is often presumed to result in the explosion of ideas via agglomeration of knowledge. But suppose it simply results in the deadening of insight via an agglomeration of group think.

    Take the case of Portland. It is a creative class darling, with the young and educated demographic inmigrating rapidly over the past decade. Proponents of the creative class suggest it is Portland’s place-based amenities—its density, its array of bike paths and coffee shops, its craft brews and locavore scene—that is attractive to the psychology of the mobile and modish. Let’s suppose this is true. No suppositions are necessary, however, when inferring what the decade-long demographic shift has done to the diversity of the city’s inner core.

    From an article entitled “In Portland’s heart, 2010 Census shows diversity dwindling”, the author writes:

    “Portland, already the whitest major city in the country, has become whiter at its core even as surrounding areas have grown more diverse…The city core didn’t become whiter simply because lots of white residents moved in…Nearly 10,000 people of color, mostly African Americans, also moved out…As a result, the part of Portland famous for its livability — for charming shops and easy transit, walkable streets and abundant bike paths — increasingly belongs to affluent whites.”

    Of course the irony here is that diversity and tolerance is said to attract a subgroup of forward-looking folks who then congregate using the grease of spatial economics to force said tolerance and diversity out. Given that diversity and tolerance have been argued to be key engines to idea production and subsequent economic growth, perhaps it’s no surprise Portland has not grown economically, regardless of the strained narrative stating otherwise.

    Diversity of people are not the only victims to creative class-ification, so is diversity of place. From a recent Atlantic Cities article, the former owner of the popular Mama’s Bar in the East Village talked about his taxes skyrocketing 380% as the reason he had to close. Later, the owner wonders about the cost of NYC’s decision to world-class the hell out of its urban intricacy and ambiguity:

    I think the thing that makes this city unique is it does have different neighborhoods that are specific and unique unto themselves. They have their own personality. What has happened — and I don’t want to blame the mayor, because it’s the evolution of the city — but things have become so expensive here…the only way businesses can survive in these neighborhoods is if they’re banks or corporate chains. These neighborhoods are being whittled down into carbon copies of each other.



    Mama’s Bar, now closed. Courtesy of community54.com

    Echoing this sentiment, the New York Times just ran an op-ed from the blogger at Vanishing New York about how the place-making standard bearer the High Line has created for a stretch of people lined like cattle amidst a neighborhood increasingly delineated into a pasture of consumption, not a hive of innovation. The author writes:

    [T]he idea was enticing: a public park above the hubbub, a contemplative space where nature softens the city’s abrasiveness…

    …My skepticism took root during my first visit. The designers had scrubbed the graffiti and tamed the wildflowers. Guards admonished me when my foot moved too close to a weed…

    …The neighborhood has since been completely remade. Old buildings fell and mountain ranges of glassy towers with names like High Line 519 and HL23 started to swell…

    Since the op-eds running, the blogger, Jeremiah Moss, has been derided as regressive, an obstructionist, with one commentator on his blog accusing Moss of being “a lazy critic” who is “not interested in either exploring the nature of our changing urban environment or discussing the merits of the [High Line’s] design”. But these critics miss Moss’s point, or that place-making is not simply about beauty, but so too the motive behind beautification. Often, that means economic gain, and often: that means at any cost. From a post in Art Info:

    The High Line — being such an alluring work of design — became, quite literally, a lure to attract groups powerful enough to steamroll socioeconomic diversity and reconstruct the neighborhood into a more glamorous version of New York.

    This was not how it was supposed to go. In a piece in Parks and Recreation, the author describes creative class theorist Richard Florida’s exemplifying of the High Line as an example of “communities transforming old industrial-age infrastructure into unusual and magnetic parks”. Florida explains many cities are figuring out that place has worth, and are prioritizing accordingly:

    The good news is that some cities have come to understand that great parks can rally citizens and hold communities together…and the most far-seeing mayors realize that.

    What is less discussed is how publicly-subsidized parks and other place-based jewels can be used as a hammer to polish out the vicinity around them; that is, how parks can be co-opted to break communities apart.

    Don’t get me wrong. I think place-making has its place. But its Frankenstein effects can’t be ignored. As—again—there is a contradiction at play in creative class theory; namely, that the preconditions of success: diversity, density, and tolerance, can create for a “success” that eats diversity and tolerance, particularly in those “special sauce” dense spots like East Village and downtown Portland that are harmonized to be vessels for new knowledge and thus new economies. In fact it can be argued that such outcomes deaden the long-term growth of cities in that traditional geographic and cultural hearts are being sold for the “gimme now” gains of taxation on objects from coffee to condos. And really: there is nothing much cool or creative about that. Rather, it’s selling your city to the highest bidder. It is mountains turned to coal.

    East Village Condo. Courtesy of http://cityofstrangers.net/

    Looking back, maybe this was all to be expected. Layering a cellophane of universal cool over the topography of distinct places to attract a slice of the urban electorate—many of which have no clue about the genius loci of each place—well, what would one expect?

    Still, there are lessons to be had here. Lessons for cities. Here’s hoping that those so-called failed and dead cities like Cleveland can resist getting their spots of raw locality from being entirely scrubbed out. In fact, in a world of inauthenticity it will be cities of realness that provide for environments fostering a stimulation of thought. It will be these cities collecting the hemorrhaging of thinkers and doers that can no longer stand the plasticity derived from the mold of “highest and best use”. It will be these cities providing for the creative destruction of creative class urbanity.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. This piece originally appeared at his blog.

    Downtown Cleveland photo by Bigstock.

  • Writer, Researcher, Consultant

  • Anorexic Vampires and the Pittsburgh Potty: The Story of Rust Belt Chic

    “Rust Belt Chic is the opposite of Creative Class Chic. The latter [is] the globalization of hip and cool. Wondering how Pittsburgh can be more like Austin is an absurd enterprise and, ultimately, counterproductive. I want to visit the Cleveland of Harvey Pekar, not the Miami of LeBron James. I can find King James World just about anywhere. Give me more Rust Belt Chic.” Jim Russell, blogger at Burgh Diaspora

    National interest in a Rust Belt “revival” has blossomed. There are the spreads in Details, Atlantic Cities, and Salon, as well as an NPR Morning Edition feature. And so many Rust Belters are beginning to strut a little, albeit cautiously–kind of like a guy with newly-minted renown who’s constantly poking around for the “kick me” sign, if only because he has a history of being kicked.

    There’s a term for this interest: “Rust Belt Chic”. But the term isn’t new, nor is the coastal attention on so-called “flyover” country. Which means “Rust Belt Chic” is a term with history–loaded even–as it arose out of irony, yet it has evolved in connotation if only because the heyday of Creative Class Chic is giving way to an authenticity movement that is flowing into the likes of the industrial heartland.

    About that historical context. Here’s Joyce Brabner, wife of Cleveland writer Harvey Pekar, being interviewed in 1992, and introducing the world to the term:

    I’ll tell you the relationship between New York and Cleveland. We are the people that all those anorexic vampires with their little black miniskirts and their black leather jackets come to with their video cameras to document Rust Belt chic. MTV people knocking on our door, asking to get pictures of Harvey emptying the garbage, asking if they can shoot footage of us going bowling. But we don’t go bowling, we go to the library, but they don’t want to shoot that. So, that’s it. We’re just basically these little pulsating jugular veins waiting for you guys to leech off some of our nice, homey, backwards Cleveland stuff.

    Now to understand Brabner’s resentment we step back again to 1989. Pekar–who is perhaps Cleveland’s essence condensed into a breathing human–had been going on Letterman. Apparently the execs found Pekar interesting, and so they’d book him periodically, with Pekar–a file clerk at the VA–given the opportunity to promote his comic book American Splendor. Well, after long, the relationship soured. Pekar felt exploited by NYC’s life of the party, with his trust of being an invited guest giving way to the realization he was just the jester. So, in what would be his last appearance, he called Letterman a “shill for GE” on live TV. Letterman fumed. Cracked jokes about Harvey’s “Mickey Mouse magazine” to a roaring crowd before apologizing to Cleveland for…well…being us.



    Think of this incident between two individuals–or more exactly, between two realities: the famed and fameless, the make-up’d and cosmetically starved, the prosperous and struggled–as a microcosm for regional relations, with the Rust Belt left to linger in a lack of illusions for decades.

    But when you have a constant pound of reality bearing down on a people, the culture tends to mold around what’s real. Said Coco Chanel:

    “Hard times arouse an instinctive desire for authenticity”.

    And if you can say one thing about the Rust Belt–it’s that it’s authentic. Not just about resiliency in the face of hardship, but in style and drink, and the way words are said and handshakes made. In the way our cities look, and the feeling the looks of our cities give off. It’s akin to an absence of fear in knowing you aren’t getting ahead of yourself. Consider the Rust Belt the ground in the idea of the American Dream.


    2012-06-29-toledo_rust_harticle_intro.jpg

    Photo credit: Sean Posey

    Of course this is all pretty uncool. I mean, pierogi and spaetzle sustain you but don’t exactly get you off. Meanwhile, over the past two decades American cities began their creative class crusade to be the next cool spot, complete with standard cool spot amenities: clubs, galleries, bike paths, etc. Specifically, Richard Florida, an expert on urbanism, built an empire advising cities that if they want creative types they must in fact get ahead of themselves, as the young are mobile and modish and are always looking for the next crest of cool.

    These “Young and the Restless”–so they’re dubbed–are thus seeking and hunting, but also: apparently anxious. And this bit of pop psychology was recently illustrated beautifully in the piece “The Fall of the Creative Class” by Frank Bures:

    I know now that this was Florida’s true genius: He took our anxiety about place and turned it into a product. He found a way to capitalize on our nagging sense that there is always somewhere out there more creative, more fun, more diverse, more gay, and just plain better than the one where we happen to be.

    After long–and with billions invested not in infrastructure, but in the ephemerality of our urbanity–chunks of America had the solidity of air. Places without roots. People without place. We became a country getting ahead of itself until we popped like a blowfish into pieces. Suddenly, we were all Rust Belters, and living on grounded reality.

    Then somewhere along the way Rust Belt Chic turned from irony into actuality, and the Rust Belt from a pejorative into a badge of honor. Next thing you know banjo bingo and DJ Polka are happening, and suburban young are haunting the neighborhoods their parents grew up in then left. Next thing you know there are insights about cultural peculiarities, particularly those things once shunned as evidence of the Rust Belt’s uncouthness, but that were–after all–the things that rooted a history into a people into a place.

    Take the Pittsburgh Potty. For recent generations it was about the shame of having a toilet with no walls becoming the pride of having a toilet with no walls. From Pittsburgh Magazine:

    We purchased a house with a stray potty, and we’ve given that potty a warm home. But we simply pretended as if the stray potty didn’t exist, and we certainly didn’t make eye contact with the potty when we walked past it to do laundry.

    The Pittsburgh Potty is basically a toilet in the middle of many Pittsburgh basements. No walls and no stalls. It existed so steel workers can get clean and use the bathroom without dragging soot through ma’s linoleum.


    2012-06-29-PghPotty.JPG

    Photo credit: Brookline Connection

    Authentic: yes. Cool? A toilet?

    Only in the partly backward Rust Belt of Harvey Pekar and friends. From the twitter feed of @douglasderda who asked “What is a Pittsburgh Potty?” Some responses follow:

    “I told my wife I wanted to put ours back in, but she refused. I threatened to use the stationary tubs.”

    “In my house, that would be known as my husband’s bathroom.”

    “It’s a huge selling feature for PGH natives. I’m not kidding. We weren’t so lucky in our SS home.”

    “We’re high class people. Our Pittsburgh Potty has a bidet. Well, it’s a hose mounted on the bottom, but still ….”

    Eventually, this satisfaction found in re-rooting back into our own Rust Belt history has become the fuel of wisdom for even Coastal elites. Here’s David Brooks recently talking about the lessons of Bruce Springsteen’s global intrigue being nested in the locality that defines Rust Belt Chic:

    If your identity is formed by hard boundaries, if you come from a specific place…you are going to have more depth and definition than you are if you grew up in the far-flung networks of pluralism and eclecticism, surfing from one spot to the next, sampling one style then the next, your identity formed by soft boundaries, or none at all.

    Brooks continues:

    The whole experience makes me want to pull aside politicians and business leaders and maybe everyone else and offer some pious advice: Don’t try to be everyman…Go deeper into your own tradition. Call more upon the geography of your own past. Be distinct and credible. People will come.

    And some are coming, albeit slowly, unevenly. But more importantly, as a region we are once again becoming–but nothing other than ourselves.

    Authenticity, reality: this was and always will be the base from which we wrestle our dreams back down to solid ground.

    American splendor, indeed.

    This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book Rust Belt Chic: A Cleveland Anthology. It first appeared at RustBeltChic.com.