Some say the decline of modern-day towns and communities started in 1939 at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. The most popular exhibition was “the World of Tomorrow” in the General Motors Pavilion. It featured an enormous model of a “City of the Future,” complete with elevated freeways, on-ramps and off-ramps, and gleaming skyscrapers separated by miles and miles of asphalt. For General Motors and the rest of America, this vision became reality, as more and more roads were built across the country and more and more families were able to purchase their own automobiles.
Only now, over 70 years later, are we beginning to see the need for a new and vastly different vision of our future. In a very real sense, the shift from an industrial to an information society to an innovation economy is the reason for revisiting the American love affair with the automobile and asking some very tough questions about its role in the new economy. By doing so, we will begin to open the door to new thinking about the architecture of cities.
Creative Clusters Lead to Innovation Communities
“Creative clusters” like the I.D.E.A. concept that will be discussed later in this article and also at the upcoming ULI seminar in San Diego in September are the early indicators that a creative community—committed to nurturing an economy and society based on the importance of art and culture and design—is being developed; that a new architecture of a city is taking shape.
In the creative and innovative age, developing “creative clusters,” like author Michael Porter’s earlier industrial or “economic clusters,” is perhaps more important to meeting the challenges of a new, global, knowledge-based economy.
Why? Because art, culture, and design are central to ensuring vibrant economic activity and workplace success in the 21st century.
Indeed, as we talk about the development of creative enterprises today and the foreshadowing of a whole economy based upon creativity and innovation—the dawn of the Innovation Age—we are more acutely aware of the importance of a new overlay called the creative cluster, and the growing importance of fostering the development of creative products and services.
In a sense, these essentially real estate developments are often the first signs that a community is awaking to the importance of creativity and innovation as essential elements of a successful new global economy.
Clusters Now Appearing in Europe and the United States
It comes as no surprise that clusters of creativity are popping up in cities in Europe and across America.
In the U.K., co-location of creative industries has been a mainstay of economic development. The National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA) says it best in a major study on creative clusters and innovation:
“The case studies also show that the mere existence of a creative agglomeration is not enough for the benefits from clustering to emerge. The other crucial ingredient is connectivity between firms within a cluster, with collaborators, business partners, and sources of innovation elsewhere… and finally, with firms in other sectors that can act as clients, and as a source of new and unexpected ideas and knowledge. These three layers of connectivity are underpinned by a dense web of informal interactions and networking.”
The city of Miami, Florida, has experienced widely recognized success in establishing such a cluster. Maybe this success is attributable to getting the most successful art fair in the world—the Basel—to host a second fair in Miami. Maybe it is the art deco hotels or the weather. Nonetheless, the Miami Design District is one of the most successful examples of a city revitalizing itself for the new economy.
According to a recent piece in The Miami Hearld, “Already the news of the luxury fashion arrivals [in the Miami Design District] is having an impact on the market’s real estate. While [real estate developer Craig] Robins paid an average of about $300 per square foot, some recent prices have more than doubled.…”
In the last few years, the Urban Land Institute (ULI) helped start a project in Chicago called the “Industrial Renaissance” aimed at “establishing a Creative Industries District” in one of the oldest but most blighted areas of the city.
Things are moving, however slowly, to convert some of the old warehouses, say reports from F Magazine, published by the Art Institute of Chicago. “An important part of the plan,” the magazine says, “is the incorporation of arts incubators to help small-business startups…. It’s job creation and economic development. Incubator projects will be there to help individuals create things that can be bought or sold, so that will exclude some types of practice.”
The district is intended to be a “jobs-producing creative hub” targeting designers, graphic designers, architects, urban planners, all the entertainment arts professionals, and others representing one of fastest growth sectors of the new economy, the creative industries. More than 200 organizations and over 1,000 individuals are part of the Chicago effort.
And in San Diego, David Malmuth and entrepreneur Pete Garcia are planning an arts district called I.D.E.A., which stands for Innovation, Design, Education, and Art.
Garcia and Malmuth see design itself—combining technology and art in ways that the new economy most values—as the next wave of economic development. Co-location, they say, is the secret to nurturing this kind of development, and they and others involved in the effort envision a ten-block area of the city as ideal for such a new district.
Key, as elsewhere, is getting politicians, the business community, developers, and the education establishment to see the opportunity—indeed, the urgency—of reinventing the city through incubators, arts districts, and the establishment of creative clusters.
It is slowly but surely becoming apparent that the most successful communities of the 21st century will be places with strong and vibrant creative clusters.
Those communities placing a premium on cultural, ethnic, and artistic diversity will likely burst with creativity and entrepreneurial fervor.
Those that don’t will be the ghost towns of the era.
For more information, see Powering Innovation Economies, an upcoming ULI event in San Diego, California on September 1-2, 2011.
