Louisiana’s Cultural Districts Program has set the bar for government policy innovation in terms of both identifying a cultural district, then providing incentives for it. It’s the first step towards growing a creative economy, but what could the next step be?

First step:
1. Identify cultural products districts using internal criteria (Louisiana’s state program)
2. Local and state sales taxes exemptions on the sale of original artworks (Louisiana’s state program)
3. Income and corporate tax credits for the rehabilitation of historic buildings (Louisiana’s state program)
4. A streets to plaza program (New York City Department of Transportation)

Second step: (to attract creatives that become gazelles - businesses that grow 20% yearly)
1. Identify creative products districts using internal criteria and that of natural cultural districts.
2. Local and state sales tax exemptions on the sale of original artworks, as well as inventions and creations, including packaged food products, music recordings and customized furniture. Why? Local design and innovation is encouraged, and money isn’t leaving the state whenever these products are sold, more than made up by the tax exemptions.
3. Income and corporate tax credits for the rehabilitation of historic buildings and tiered tax credits for smaller (and green) housing units where tax credits increase as housing units below 600 s.f., 500 s.f. and 400 s.f. are built without parking requirements. Why? Smaller units allow a wider range of incomes to purchase (or to rent from the owners), use less energy, and because their small size can eliminate the need for parking altogether, like Cubix Yerba Buena in San Francisco.
4. Establish a creative content Long Tail site (display every creative product available, help people find it) with collaborative filtering (rate and review products, which are then self-ranked like on Yelp! and YouTube). This should be standard in every city, and it allows larger companies to contract smaller companies.
5. Forget government-subsidized incubators, cities should help entrepreneurs establish coworking sites and instead of paying their rent, provide assistance through marketing and introducing the smaller creative firms to the larger firms seeking innovative talent, services and products.
6. A streets to plaza program like in New York City that allows the kind of pedestrian-only portal where it all comes together as a vibrant place. Policy doesn’t get much better than this.

Louisiana is one of the few states that has a very clear program on establishing natural cultural districts for creatives. In 2007, the state legislature approved the Louisiana Cultural Districts Program, also referred to as Cultural Products Districts because of the program’s emphasis on tangible products. As is stated on the state’s website, “The primary goal of the Cultural Districts program is revitalizing communities by creating hubs of cultural activity.“

So what is the state offering? Two primary benefits:

1. Local and state sales tax exemptions on the sale of original artworks.
2. Income and corporate tax credits for the rehabilitation of historic buildings, up to 25% of the costs, which is invaluable given federal historic tax credits up to 20%.

Who gets these benefits? The criteria is based on districts that have proven themselves as cultural districts, based on arts and cultural resources, institutions, businesses, activities and/or production, as well as its promotion, preservation, and education.

The specifics of the program’s goal, or expected results from these benefits include:

“Community Development
• Engage residents
• Provide a sense of community
• Serve as a gathering place
• Strengthening community partnerships
• Develop a positive image

Artist/Cultural Product Development
• Promote the arts and support artists
• Encourage creativity and cultural activity
• Attract artists and cultural industry workers”

What ‘cultural products’ qualify as tax exempt?

“A work of art is tax exempt if it is sold from an established location within a Cultural
District and it is:
a. Original;
b. One-of-kind, except as further defined in section 2 below;
c. Visual art;
d. Conceived and made by hand of the artist or under his direction; and
e. Not intended for mass production, except for limited editions specified below.

2. Examples of eligible media and products include:
a. Visual arts and crafts, including but not limited to drawing, painting, sculpture, clay,
ceramics, fiber, glass, leather, metal, paper, wood, installation art, light sculpture,
wearable art, or mixed media; and
b. Limited, numbered editions (up to 100) of lithographs, photography, silk screen,
intaglios, etchings, graphic design, and giclees.“

In the next entry, a look at how this program can be expanded to a more intensive economy-generating district.

The previous entry looked at how creative skills + cultural products = creative economy, but where does it all happen? Of course, the actual production occurs digitally via computers and materially in factories, but since people make up a system, how do the entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, financiers, filmmakers, programmers, designers, etc. etc. etc. establish the relationships to make it all happen?

As creatives know, and as Elizabeth Currid states in her book, The Warhol Economy, much of it comes together outside of 9 to 5 ‘work’ hours… in nightclubs, bars and cafes, or in other words, creative third places.

From Elizabeth’s book, “The Bungalow 8 (pictured above) and the SoHo of the creative industries are the Marshallian (specialized, clustered) industrial districts of the Industrial Revolution. And there is something “in the air,“ as Marshall put it, these are places where knowledge is exchanged in the most casual but significant capacities. It isn’t just over social engagements like dinner or power lunches but through music venues, gallery openings, and DJ nights that real knowledge and collaborations and product review are occurring.“

Read more in The Importance of Nightlife section of Chapter 5, The Economics of a Dance Floor of Elizabeth’s book, the latter of which is the basis for her article, The Economics of a Good Party.

Image of Bungalow 8, Chelsea, New York City, by Lock.

The creative economy is often ineffectively defined by the creative skills/talent: media, film, design, music, visual art, etc. However, those are arguably just the means, and what’s overlooked are the cultural products that result from a convergence of those creative skills. Now that’s what the creative economy is about.

To understand in greater detail how creatives with talent transform their skills into cultural products that grow an economy, you’ll want to read Elizabeth Currid’s The Warhol Economy, and her accompanying article, The Economics of a Good Party. Elizabeth happened to be a key writer on Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class.

In summary, from Elizabeth’s book, cultural production occurs around three concepts:

1. The commodification of culture. It’s how the environmental movement is represented by bicycles, Priuses and organic groceries, hip hop by clothes, and authenticity by the rise of indie music artists, films and coffeehouses.
2. The symbiotic nature of creative exchange. Musicians don’t work in a vacuum from filmmakers and visual artists, they work together on a regular basis. Thus, separating the creative industries by music, film and design is like defining the housing industry by carpenters, masons and electricians, which is fine for learning skills, but does little for the creation of whole products people truly want.
3. Creative review across the cultural economy. This follows the ‘make everything available than help me find it’ principle of the Long Tail. In today’s ultra-connected world, people are even able to tell us what product should be created that doesn’t yet exist, from where it’s up to the creative industry to figure out how to combine their creative skills in order to produce.

If there’s one thing I’m glad to see, it’s not just nonprofits or membership groups working with for-profits to execute their vision, but green organizations working with developers to build attainably-priced green housing.

It started with Live Green, a green-oriented membership organization based on providing green business discounts to its members, and Taurus Development Group, a woman-run real estate development firm with a twenty-year ecological track record. Both of these entities, through a linking partnership with CoolTown Beta Communities, agreed to a crowdsourcing program ensure Washington DC would provide the most attainably-priced, greenest housing that its most progressive, willing residents wanted, manifested via the Bearden Arts Building. In the arrangement, the developer agrees to contribute to the green organization for every one of their members that eventually buys a home when they’re completed in 2010. Not only did Green Drinks DC, DC Greenworks, Treehuggers and CreativesDC recently join the program, but…

...they inspired another DC developer, the Menkiti Group to offer the same program, this time for a redevelopment of an existing building (pictured) just four blocks from a major transit station and neighborhood hub with housing scheduled to be completed within a year. You can read about the program from Live Green’s viewpoint via their website here, and if you live in DC and are looking for a green home you can truly afford in a hot neighborhood, well, then you’ll want to know it’s first-come, first-serve by completing the survey and stating your interest in group customizing your future residence with fellow creatives!

We’ve looked at what a proscriptive code is, and examples of proscriptive codes, but what’s the proscriptive code for creatives‘ ideal town?

You can check out New York City’s proscriptive code of sorts regarding transportation, World Class Streets, preceding a prescriptive code. You should also peruse a chart of what can be referred to as changing proscriptive codes over time here. As you can see, proscriptive codes can vary greatly over time as cultures and economies change. It can also vary by location, influenced by local geography, topography, natural features and climate. However, here are some basic components for current times:

- The buildings and streets will be environmentally-conscious. That means less of a priority for driving and parking.
- Public spaces (as shown above) will be primary focal points, like portals on the internet where people gather.
- People are increasingly embracing and thriving in diversity, and that means a greater variety of places and spaces, homes and workplaces.
- Authenticity has returned as a primary value, and that translates to more local businesses and human-scaled buildings.
- Public health is as big a concern as ever, with more emphasis on walking and biking.
- People will be looking to connect to their friends more often, more spontaneously, like on Facebook, but in person.

Speaking of connecting on Facebook, once we get to a 100 members in the Facebook CoolTown Group (currently 85 members), we’ll have an online chat event with people from around the country, even around the world, to get an idea of what a modern proscriptive code should have, publishing the collective vision as an entry on this site.

Also, get a head start on group editing the proscriptive code above on the CoolTown Wiki. I’ll present that to the group at our first chat.

In the previous entry, Cities today use ‘prescriptive’ codes, but what came before that?, we looked at proscriptive codes, the framework for rules, being the precursor to prescriptive codes, the rules themselves (e.g. street widths, building setbacks, amount of parking, etc.), and how cities today seem to have forgotten proscriptive codes altogether. Unfortunately, the records for historic cities were not preserved, but one can understand there’s indeed a greater inspired vision that preceded prescriptive codes. Here’s one viewpoint at what those could have been:

Portofino, Italy Pictured above. The proscriptive code would have prioritized views of the water over everything. It could have also guided the prescriptive codes into ensuring the buildings have humanistic proportions rather than the horizontal machine-like buildings we commonly see from the 1960s and 70s, fitting for a country whose language was heavily influenced by poetry. Also, a must would be a piazza surrounded by commercial buildings that would become the city’s main gathering place.

Washington DC - In the 1800s, residents were concerned about losing the European, again, humanistic feel of the city to skyscrapers, which resulted in Congress passing the Heights of Buildings Act in 1899, restricting any new building in Washington from exceeding the height of the U.S. Capitol, later amended in 1910 to allow buildings to be 20 feet higher than the width of the street it’s on. It certainly makes it easier to see the Capitol, the Washington Monument and the National Cathedral from just about anywhere in or around the city. No one seems to be complaining about the lack of skyline, except maybe opportunistic developers.

Venice and Detroit - Ok, not a fair comparison, but it didn’t have to be. Venice has no cars and several dozen piazzas - human interaction was at the core of its proscriptive code. Detroit has some of the widest streets in the world to accommodate its homegrown auto industry, and dismantled most of its historic buildings along the same lines of ‘progress’. Unfortunately it has no formal proscriptive code upon which to realize the reason why the city is lacking economic and cultural vibrancy in its downtown.

What unwritten proscriptive codes in cities are you aware of?

Image of Portofino, Italy by Ben.

All cities have planning codes which predetermine street widths, building heights and volumes, parking ratios, etc. These are known as prescriptive codes, of or relating to the enforcement of a rule. However, those are merely the means to the end, and historians have long been trying to decipher how the most elegant cities (in Greece, Tunisia, Spain…) came to be via such prescriptive codes. Well, the answer, as outlined in the article, Decoding paradise - the emergent form of Mediterranean towns, is that they didn’t.

“Modern and post-modern architects attempted in vain to imitate traditional building using their own, lazy information technologies, and succeeded only in building pastiche of complexity. The breakthroughs in complexity theory of the past decades finally gave us the opportunity to decode the mysteries of historic building cultures by showing us what kind of information to search for. What was right in front our noses suddenly becomes deeply meaningful.“

The answer is proscriptive codes.

While a prescription is “a rule that defines in detail what to do in a given situation”, a proscription is “a template for defining prescriptive rules, a pattern for a rule“. Use of the word ‘proscription’ is intriguing, in that its dictionary definition means ‘preventing’, yet its prefix is ‘pro’, which means ‘for’, followed by ‘script’ - ‘write’. So it’s actually become a bit tainted over time, and perhaps so have our codes and cities.

Ok, so what’s the purpose of a proscriptive code? It was created to “treat the town as a living, whole structure in movement that must be preserved while it achieves equilibrium with a changing environment and society.“

In the next entry, some examples of proscriptive codes…

Image of Symi, Greece by Bevilacqua Giampiero.

By popular request, here are what I feel are the top 20 articles among the 1400 on this site, influenced by current times. This will be constantly changing, especially as I rediscover previous articles and post new ones (in bold)...

Crowdsourcing and creatives…
The creatives: rengen, cultural creatives, creative class - Identifying the core market itself.
What is crowdsourced placemaking? - The most definitive definition.
The time is now to crowdsource the places you want - Get started now.
The beta community - The crowdsourced placemaking community that makes it all happen.
The four different kinds of beta communities - The four kinds of projects beta communities can help generate.

Placemaking…
The impact of natural cultural districts - The best academic definition for the places that attract creatives.
The third place - The fundamental unit of a natural cultural district.
Cultivating your own Temple Bar District - One of the most inspiring stories of how a natural cultural district was saved and now flourishing.
Happiness best reflected by the beauty of place - Aesthetics matter to people more than anything.
The ‘postcard test’ - A litmus test for a place’s aesthetics, beauty.

The economic foundation…
If there was ever one definitive graphic, this is it - A table that illustrates our evolution from an industrial to a knowledge economy.
Digital infrastructure replacing an asphalt one - The physical environment to accommodate modern needs.
The Experience Economy - A better description of our modern economy than simply ‘the information age’ or ‘knowledge economy’.
Creatives ahead of the financial crisis - How the preferences of creatives, and not so big homes, are better suited to a sustainable economy.
How the creative class relates to the economy - Visual evidence of how creatives grow an economy.

Innovative examples…
The most innovative government agency in the U.S. - The New York City Department of Transportation.
NYC’s stunning ‘streets to plazas’ program - A model program for creating pedestrian-only destinations.
Ten defining principles for a true green community - Benchmark principles and communities for zero carbon, zero waste communities.
Paris launches world’s largest bike sharing system - No bike sharing system in the world comes close.
Elements hits the Washington Post front page - A crowdsourced restaurant gets national exposure.

Recently dropped from the Top 20
More evidence that ‘not so big homes’ are in - Smaller homes are the creative American Dream
Affordability’s secret weapon - the ‘ipad’ - A stylish 380 s.f. one-bedroom in the UK.

One challenge with establishing a natural cultural district in the early stages, especially one that’s retail-oriented, is reaching a critical mass where it feels like a place. One solution is to build a microcosm of a such a flourishing retail center so people can experience the vibe of the larger district, and for that we have Hollywood’s Space 15 Twenty to thank as a model, to a certain degree.

Featured in the latest Springwise, the concept is brilliant - Space 15 Twenty is a collection of eight stores centered around a common courtyard, with seven of the stores (including a cafe, pictured above) strategically complementing the one anchor store and an art gallery. Those seven stores rotate out to make way for new stores (though it’s unclear how often) to keep the retail mix fresh, much the same way the work of local artists rotates in the gallery, thus the loft-like interior design costs are kept to a minimum. Local bands are featured via courtyard concerts. In other words, Space 15 Twenty is a creative gallery, for not only art, but music and retail as well.

Ok, so the not so hot aspect of the destination is that the anchor is a national chain (Urban Outfitters), and the complementary stores are chains as well, so there’s really no inherent neighborhood soul or character, and not only do you need national corporate approval for local events, but you even need that same approval to show official photos of events in the space, which at least can be seen on the Space 15 Twenty Flickr corporate account and are definitely work viewing.

The point is that I’m sure creatives are waiting for someone to sponsor a local indie version of Space 15 Twenty in their neighborhood, and are ready to crowdsource it if given the opportunity.