If you’re looking for an effective precedent in how to jumpstart the creative economy in your city, you need to learn about CreateHere in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

On July 1, 2007 Helen Johnson and Josh McManus entrepreneurially initiated a three-month research and planning project focused on studying the engagement of creatives in the city with the intention of gaining a better understanding of how to retain and attract them, crucial to its transition to a post-industrial knowledge economy.

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Perhaps too many people buying homes they couldn’t afford wasn’t the problem behind the Wall Street collapse, but a symptom. The real problem may be that there are too many homes out on the market that people could never afford in the first place. In other words, the average U.S. American can’t afford $300,000 for a home, as is the going rate in many cities. So rather than lend out more money to buy homes people can’t afford, that banks can’t back, perhaps the real solution is addressing the

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When it comes to industrial design, Milan, Italy is a world capital, leaders in fashion and architecture and home to Alfa Romeo and Fiera Milano, the largest trade fair complex in the world. There is no product
design equivalent in the U.S., but Cleveland, Ohio is poising itself to take on that mantle. What’s the point? For one, design is found to be correlated to economic growth. If you’re wondering how industrial design makes an impact, think of Apple and their influence.

In the heart of

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In 1956 the Federal Aid Highway Act ushered in the auto age, with the U.S. government funding 90% of the costs to build 41,000 miles of interstate highways over 20 years, an equivalent of $200 billion today. Highways are still being built, but they’re also coming down as cities are realizing that a digital infrastructure (ie the internet; wi-fi, fiber optic, cellular, satellite networks) negates a continued need for heavy asphalt investment, and at a much lower economic, environmental and

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Entrepreneurs, newer companies leading economic growth

What’s leading economic growth in our cities?

Robert Litan, VP of Research and Policy at the Kaufmann Foundation* and director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution**, concludes that more of our growth today is generated by entrepreneurial or newer companies. He answers the following question in this interview from Smart City Radio:

Smart City Radio: “If you were advising a local urban leader on how he or she could

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Third place coffeehouses as economic development

I first profiled Tryst back in 2003 as a popular coffeehouse third place in Adams Morgan, Washington DC. But five years later, ten years after it first opened, it’s not only become a neighborhood institution, but it really should be seen as a contemporary model for job creation.

Here’s the big picture:

1. A majority of big businesses come from small businesses, and small businesses are started by entrepreneurs… from their homes.
2. Many

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Third places, events and scenes oh my…

If you’re looking to establish a beta community to crowdsource a natural cultural district (kudos to those of you who don’t have to click on the words to know what’s being talked about here), it starts with third places, events and scenes.

Third places. Most of you know what third places are - where you feel comfortable hanging out when you’re not at home or at work. A community starts with a third place so people can meet face to face, whether it’s a

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How cities can invest in cool places, and why they often don’t

Utilizing the Fifth Discipline principles of systems thinking, we bring to you a representation of why cities, especially their economic development departments that manage the largest of budgets, choose to invest in the outdated practice of landing ‘the big one’ rather than cultivating its own creative economy that is known to create jobs more effectively.

The Context:
First of all, it’s important to understand the long tail.

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A treatise on building vibrant cultural quarters

Today’s entry will be a little uncommon, but rather extraordinary as we present Urban Cultures’ detailed presentation behind their Cultural Quarters: Necessary Conditions and Success Factors checklist. There really are few if any firms that have such fine-grain knowledge in helping cities invest in such places, and we’re glad to be associated with them.

The treatise follows:

An essential prerequisite for a vibrant cultural quarter is the

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Cultural Quarters: Necessary Conditions and Success Factors checklist

Continuing our understanding of natural cultural districts, here’s Urban Cultures’ (profiled previously) Necessary Conditions and Success Factors checklist for what makes a vibrant cultural quarter:

Activity
- Extent and variety of cultural venues
- Presence of an evening economy, including café culture
- Strength of small-firm economy, including creative businesses
- Access to universities and education providers
-

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The four types of cultural quarters, progressively speaking

Speaking of natural cultural districts...

Urban Cultures is a London-based company with extensive experience in helping develop creative cultural quarters throughout major cities in England, Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand and Australia that raise the bar in defining ‘cool towns’, including a CoolTown favorite, the Temple Bar cultural district (pictured) in Dublin. John Montgomery, the Managing Director, is an

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How do you know you’re in a natural cultural district?

...that is, unlike an unnatural one where most of the buildings are large-scale - designed, funded and run by city governments and corporations… and feel that way?

Continuing a look at the research of professor Mark Stern, profiled in the previous entry, natural cultural districts:

- rely on self-organized local players, organized from the bottom-up;
- are cultivated, as in economic gardening (a few examples listed here), not

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Maybe you should think twice about investing millions in that fancy new performing arts building to revitalize your city. While Richard Florida has long de-emphasized such large-scale investments, professor Mark Stern, Co-Director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania provides a detailed answer below to the question, “Well then, now what?“

“While the arts are commerce, they revitalize cities not through their bottom-line but through their social role. The arts build

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The rise of design in Buenos Aires

Here’s one way to transform an industrial city like Buenos Aires, Argentina into a mecca for design and creativity, though this is definitely doing it the hard way…

Take one economic crash in 2001 where the peso’s (Argentian’s dollar) is devalued from 1:1 with every U.S. dollar to 1:3 with every U.S. dollar. Suddenly companies had to shed workforces in order to stay in business, forcing people out of secure jobs and without a means of finding new ones

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In science, the ‘edge of chaos’ is the region between order and complete randomness or chaos, where the complexity is maximal - where innovation and survival is most likely to take place. Then there is death or inanimate, where things are ‘frozen’.

The City of Littleton, Colorado, the founder of economic gardening, has pioneered research on the edge of chaos as it applies to cities and the three phases of life, to which organizations and economies naturally apply.

Frozen phase: “No

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Film, music, writing, fine arts, fashion, photography, architecture, design…

...are some pretty desirable talents in establishing both a cultural and economic base for any city, but what has that got to do with Bozeman, MT and Asheville, NC?  A lot, thanks to an increasingly popular event known as Hatchfest.

Held annually in Bozeman since fall 2004 and for the first time in Asheville in spring 2008, students from around the world participate in competitions and exhibitions while being

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‘The 30 Fastest Cities to Work, Live and Play’

What better source than Fast Company magazine to list the fastest cities in 2007. Here’s their Fast Cities 2007, with category, city, population and primary reason it’s fast in its respective category:

Creative Class Meccas
Shanghai, China: 14.5M; investment
New York: 18.8M; income per capita
San Francisco Bay Area: 4.2M; technology
Buenos Aires, Argentina: 12.6M; university

Global Villages
Toronto, Canada: 5.1M; diversity/immigration

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How a French town modernized and kept its heritage

Roubaix is a typical small city in Northern France that thrived in the industrial age from the 19th Century through most of the 20th Century, specializing in textiles. However, that economy crashed in the 1970s as the economy rapidly and mercilessly transitioned to the global information age. How did the city evolve?

The city still has a reputation for fashion and fabrics, but has diversified. For one, they transformed one of their

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Based on yesterday’s entry identifying the uneven distribution of extreme entrepreneurship and job growth in a few fortunate places that take advantage of innovation that is ubiquitous and portable, how can cities become more like one of those few fortunate places?

The answer, according to the Council on Competiveness in their comprehensive report, Where America Stands:
Entrepreneurship, all of which are adopted by successful regions:

1. Creating Angel Networks. It not only starts with

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Cities are constantly trying to get companies to move to their region, but what about growing their own (aka economic gardening) and supporting you? Here’s some compelling evidence on why that’s an increasingly popular trend:

A recent Small Business Administration study found that the most entrepreneurial regions in the U.S. had:

- 125% more employment growth
- 58% more wage growth
- 109% higher productivity than the least entrepreneurial regions
- spent 54% more on R&D and had 67% more

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Applying ‘The Long Tail’ to real estate (2 of 4)

As explained in the previous entry, much of what is built today is in ‘the big head’ of mass production rather than diverse niches of The Long Tail. However, in the internet age, companies focusing on both the Big Head (the mainstream ‘hits’) and the Long Tail (hundreds of niche favorites) are starting to eat the Big Heads for lunch - companies like Google, Netflix and eBay that pretty much cater to every niche, every personal interest you

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The future of real estate is in ‘the long tail’ (1 of 4)

“For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.“ Wired Magazine, The Long Tail, Oct. 2004.

Sound familiar when it comes to strip malls, subdivisions and office parks,

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Many of us enjoy that college town feel of a pedestrian-oriented urban fabric, indie hang-outs and diversity mixed with enlightened conversation. Which cities do well in this regard, which don’t, and why?

Creative class economist Richard Florida provides some answers with his colleagues in their recently published, The University and the Creative Economy.

As far as statistics and rankings, the study introduces two new ones:
Brain Drain/Gain Index (BDGI) - measuring and ranking cities by the

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The ‘Inner City 100’

Need some inspiration for inner city job growth?  Want to know what the fastest growing inner city businesses are? Inc Magazine and Initiative for a Competitive Inner City provide an annual Inner City 100 list to answer just that. Inner cities here are defined as economically-challenged core urban areas excluding central business districts, and the candidates must be independent businesses.

The top ten, which seem to serve more than just the financial bottom line:

1.

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Brain drain - a visual map

The map above, from a Choices Magazine article, displays U.S. counties’ competitive share for college-educated population as a percent of total population over age 25 from 1970 to 2000 - in other words, brain gain vs. brain drain.

The accompanying study concluded, not surprisingly, that major metropolitan areas enjoyed a relatively large brain gain in every region while the nonmetropolitan, nonadjacent counties suffered brain drain. New England is an exception,

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