NURTURING A CREATIVE COMMUNITY

JOHN M. EGER

The role of art and culture in commerce and community

Cities across the globe are still struggling to reinvent themselves for the post-industrial economy and society foreshadowed in the 1960s by economists Fritz Malcop and Marc Porat, and by sociologist Daniel Bell. In their efforts to prepare themselves for the 21st century, many communities are still working to update their data infrastructure to accommodate the needs of an age in which information is the most valuable commodity. The US National Information Infrastructure, Singapore’s Intelligent Island, and similar initiatives focus mainly on the technological aspects of the post-industrial economy. San Diego even commissioned a City of the Future committee in 1993 to make plans to build the first fiber-opticwired city in the country in the belief that as cities of the past were built along waterways, railroads, and interstate highways, cities of the future will be built along “information highways”—wired and wireless information pathways connecting every home, office, school, and hospital and, through the World Wide Web, millions of other individuals and institutions around the world.

These new information infrastructures are undoubtedly important. But the effort to create a 21st century city is not so much about technology as it is about jobs, dollars, and quality of life. In short, it is about organizing one’s community to reinvent itself for the new, knowledge-based economy and society.Cities must prepare their citizens to take ownership of their communities and educate the next generation of leaders and workers to meet the new global challenges of what has now been termed the Creative Economy.

At the heart of this latest effort is recognition of the vital roles that art and culture play in enhancing economic development and, ultimately, defining a “creative community” that exploits the vital linkages among art, culture, and commerce. Communities that consciously invest in these broader human and financial resources are at the very forefront in preparing their citizens to meet the challenges of the rapidly evolving, and now global, knowledge- based economy and society.

CYBERSPACE AND CYBERPLACE

In less than 10 years, the mammoth global network of computer systems collectively referred to as the Internet has blossomed from an obscure tool used by government researchers and academics into a worldwide mass communications medium. The Internet is now recognized as the leading carrier of all communications and financial transactions affecting life and work in the 21st century.

The growth of the Internet’s now widely popular component, the World Wide Web, has been even more spectacular. With more than 700 million users worldwide and a growth rate of 15 percent per month, it is being integrated into the marketing, information, and communications strategies of almost every major corporation, educational institution, charitable and political organization, community service agency, and government entity in the developed world. No previous technological advance—not the telephone, television, cable or satellite TV, the VCR, the facsimile machine, or the mobile telephone— has been adopted by the public in such a widespread manner this rapidly. In fact, today, children frequently are more skilled than their parents in these new technologies.

The questions that many people are now asking are concerned with determining where this phenomenon ultimately will lead. Predictions range from electronic “virtual communities,” in which individuals interact socially with like-minded Internet users around the world, to fully networked dwellings in which electronic devices and other appliances respond to the spoken commands of residents.

In recent years, people habitually have referred to the domain in which Internet-based communications occur as “cyberspace,” an abstract communications space that exists both everywhere and nowhere. But until fleshand- blood humans can be digitized into electronic pulses in the same way that computer scientists transform images and data, the denizens of cyberspace will have to continue living in some sort of real physical space, an environment that will continue to dominate our future in the same way that our homes, neighborhoods, and communities do today.

Many communities, often without being directly conscious of it, are beginning to design the initial blueprints for the “cyberplaces” of the 21st century. As early as 1976, the French launched an aggressive plan called “Telematique,” which sought to place computers on every desktop and in every residence in the country. Singapore has implemented its “Intelligent Island Plan,” which includes the world’s first nationwide broadband network, SingaporeONE. Japan is working toward an electronic future known as “Teletopia,”with 150 municipalities transforming themselves into “cyber cities” specializing in various industrial applications of information technology. Dubai has launched its “Internet City” and Torino, Italy, has its “Infoville” initiative.

In the United States in the mid-1990s, the Clinton Administration unveiled its ambitious National Information Initiative (NII), with the goal of linking every school and school-age child to the Internet by the turn of the century. Recognizing that electronic networks like these will play an increasingly important role in the economic competitiveness of its municipalities, California in 1996 launched its statewide “Smart Communities” program. The underlying premise of the California initiative is that smart communities are not, at their core, exercises in the deployment and use of technology, but rather active tools in the promotion of economic development, job growth, and higher living standards overall. In other words, technological propagation in smart communities is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a larger end with clear and compelling benefits for communities.

We have learned a great deal about the challenges cities face in a new global “information economy,” one based not on the production of goods and services or agriculture. Although these basic industries continue, the new economy relies on the production, use, and transfer of information and knowledge. In fact, one distinct possibility is that cities of the future will not be cities in the usual sense, but rather powerful regional economies. As economists and pundits alike acknowledge, there is no national economy per se, only a global economy, which author Neil Pierce defines as “a constellation of regional economies with strong cities at the core.” Kenichi Ohmae, author of The Borderless Economy, suggests we are witnessing the rise and the rebirth of the age-old concept of the city-state or, as he prefers, the “region-state.” The new region-state has the power and authority to take ownership of its own future and establish a governing process reflecting a new model of government for the digital age.

Second, civic engagement and new civic “collaboratories” will be needed to help “reboot” or reinvent our great cities to reclaim the sense of place and civic pride that these cities once possessed, as well as ensure that no one is left behind. In The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation, Daniel Yankelovich argues there is a “struggle between two one-sided visions of our future; the vision of the free market and the vision of the civil society.”Americans across the country need to reengage themselves in the work of reinventing our great cities for the global knowledge-based economy. They need, as Robert Putnam in his seminal work Bowling Alone put it, to create the “social capital” that distinguishes us as a people, take ownership of our communities, and in the process close the gap between the electorate and those whom we elect to serve us.

Cities of the future no doubt will be “creative communities” in the sense that they recognize art and culture as vital, not only to a region’s livability, but also to the preparedness of its work force. They understand that art-infused education is critical to producing the next generation of leaders and workers for the knowledge economy.While art, music, and all things cultural have been enjoyed and appreciated by every generation, there has been an often unspoken assumption that they were nonessential, even a frill. Today, the demand for creativity has outpaced the ability of most nations to produce enough workers simply to meet their needs.

JOBS IN THE CREATIVE AGE

Worrying about the lack of qualified workers in this day and age may sound unusual.With the globalization of media and markets in full bloom, America is beginning to see the outlines of yet another out-migration of American jobs, unleashing new concerns about rising unemployment. Many economists are alarmed that the latest round of losses, unlike the earlier shift of manufacturing jobs to Taiwan and less-developed East Asian countries, will have a dramatic impact on America’s economic wealth and well-being.

Twenty years ago, it was fashionable to blame foreign competition and cheap labor markets abroad for the loss of US manufacturing jobs, but the pain of the loss was softened by the emergence of a new services industry. Now that the service sector also is beginning to automate, banking, insurance, and telecommunications firms are eliminating layers of management and infrastructure as the traditional corporate pyramid disappears and is replaced by highly skilled professional work teams. State-of-the art software and telecommunications technologies now enable any kind of enterprise to maximize efficiency and productivity by employing foreign workers wherever they are located, making the service sector jobs even more precious.

In 2003, IBM, the world’s largest computer maker, acknowledged that “a significant number” (the unions say several thousand) of software and chip development and engineering jobs were being moved to India and China. In 2004, industry stalwarts like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell Computer announced that they, too, were either “outsourcing” their software development or beefing up their foreign subsidiaries in China, India, the Eastern Bloc, and Russia to do the same. Forrester Research, Inc., a marketing research firm, estimates some 3.3 million service jobs will move out of the United States over the next 10-15 years. Others put that number at 15 million, and say the results will be devastating for the US economy.

While CEOs, economists, and politicians are telling us that these are short-term adjustments, it is clear that the pervasive spread of the Internet, digitization, and the availability of white-collar skills abroad mean potentially huge cost savings for global corporations. Consequently, this shift of high-tech service jobs will be a permanent feature of economic life in the 21st century—but this does not necessarily mean the news is all bad. On the positive side, some economists believe that globalization and digitization will improve the profits and efficiency of American corporations and set the stage for the next big growth-generating breakthrough. But what will that be?

A number of think tanks, including Japan’s Nomura Research Institute, argue that elements are in place for the advance of the “Creative Age,” a period in which America should once again thrive and prosper because of our tolerance for dissent, respect for individual enterprise, freedom of expression, and recognition that innovation, not mass production of low-value goods and services, is the driving force for the US economy.

Today, the demand for creativity has outpaced our nation’s ability to create enough workers simply to meet our needs. Seven years ago, for example, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers asked the governor of California to “declare a state of emergency” to help Hollywood find digital artists. There were people aplenty who were computer literate, they claimed, but could not draw. In the new economy, they argued, such talents are vital to all industries dependent on the marriage of computers and telecommunications.

The new economy’s demand for creativity has manifested itself in the emergence and growth of what author Richard Florida has termed “the Creative Class.” Although Florida defines this core very broadly, he does a convincing job of underscoring the facts of life and work in the new knowledge economy. As he points out, “every aspect and every manifestation of creativity— cultural, technological, and economic—is inextricably linked.”

By tracking certain migration patterns and trends, Florida did a huge service for those struggling to rede- fine their communities for the new knowledge economy. However, many questions remain.What makes someone creative? Can the community, through public art or cultural offerings, enhance the creativity of its citizens? And if the new economy so desperately demands the creative worker and leader, what do our schools and universities need to do to prepare the next generation of creative people?

While investing in the arts is a business in itself—a $134 billion industry, according to the Washington, DC based advocacy organization Americans for the Arts— the real benefit, according to the National Governors Association (NGA), is that the arts are “a potent source for economic development.” Arts programs, the NGA argues, serve local communities by “contributing to a region’s ‘innovation habitat,’ thus improving quality of life—making it more attractive to the highly desirable, knowledge-based employees and permitting new forms of knowledge-intensive production to flourish.”

The NGA credits Philadelphia, Newark, and Charleston, SC, as cities it says “have used the creation of arts districts as centerpieces in efforts to combat increasing crime and suburban flight by restoring vitality to downtown areas.” NGA also applauds such cities as Austin, which “recognized early that its unique cultural environment was a competitive asset to the New Economy.” The city persuaded the state legislature in 2000 to provide $158 million to support the arts in Austin; used revenue bonds to create new nonprofits like the Mexican-American Cultural Center, a new State Theater, and The George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center; and uses a hotel tax to raise $3.5 million annually for various cultural events in the city.

In 2003, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors adopted “Arts for All—a Regional Blueprint for Arts Education.” The program’s objective is for every public school student in the county to receive an effective K-12 education, of which the arts are an important component. Under this plan, each school district will acknowledge that exposure to, and participation in, the arts strengthens a child’s academic development and growth as an individual; prepares the child to feel a part of, and make a positive contribution to, the community; and ensures a creative and competitive work force to meet the economic opportunities both in the present and future. Thus, sequential instruction in the multiple arts disciplines will be scheduled into each school day and accounted for in the budget of every Los Angeles County school district.

One example of an institution of higher education that is committing itself to preparing its students for the challenges of the new millennium and the information age is the University of California at San Diego’s Sixth College. The new college’s themes are art, culture, and technology. Students will study the progress of the human species and their cultures, and will explore watershed events in history in which art, culture, and technology converged. Provost Gabrielle Weinhausen notes, for example, that during the Renaissance the rediscovery of perspective enabled architects and artists to collaborate on the creation of maps. The key to studying events like that, according to Wienhausen, is learning how to ask the questions that illustrate relationships and patterns.

Until recently, there has been only limited evidence of the connection between education and appreciation of the arts and success in the post-post-industrial age of information. It now is becoming increasingly apparent that initiatives such as these will be the hallmarks of the most successful schools and universities and, in turn, the most successful and vibrant 21st century cities and regions. One key to this vision is that we must acknowledge the current out-migration of high-tech jobs as a challenge to the status quo. As Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina recently told a panel of governors, “Keep your tax incentives and highway interchanges; we will go where the highly skilled people are.”

Those communities placing a premium on cultural, ethnic, and artistic diversity, and reinventing their knowledge factories for the creative age, will likely burst with creativity and entrepreneurial fervor. These are the ingredients so essential to developing and attracting the bright and creative people to generate new patents and inventions, innovative world-class products and services, and the finance and marketing plans to support them. Nothing less will ensure America’s dominant economic, social, and political position in the 21st century.

John M. Eger (CC ’81) is executive director of the International Center for Communications at San Diego State University. Earlier, he was head of CBS Broadcast International, after serving as director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy from 1974-1976.

Return to COSMOS 2004 Table of Contents
Return to COSMOS Journals
Return to COSMOS Home Page