Hipness Began at Five Points

This is a blog in response tot he New York Times article posted below.

The New York Times writes about hip cities, and how cities like Atlanta try to lure young, creative people away from traditional centers of cultural production like New York and Chicago. This has propped an unusually productive inter-blog discussion about it. On The News Blog, Steve explains that,”A lot of black people, a high school friend was one, was lured to Atlanta and lasted four years. Why? Because it was still Atlanta. People still judged you by the church you went to and there were still some jobs you couldn’t get if you were black.” Steve’s co-blogger Jen goes into more detail,

First, let me say that this article makes me want to barf. The fact that some city official would say that (young creative class folks) “view diversity and tolerance as marks of sophistication” right along with “downtown living” shows a complete lack of understanding as to how “creative” neighborhoods really happen. NO, it’s not a “build crappy coffeehouses and overpriced foodie boutiques and they will come.” In Real Life, you need a pervasive culture of tolerating difference and learing for its own sake in the first place. You also need affordable, equitable housing, not $1800/month slumlike studios that used to house lower-middle class workers before they got evicted when the ‘hood got “hip.”

Amanda adds a good dose of snark to that and starts a discussion about what it is exactly that makes a city attractive to young creative types. Jill gives a really good treatment of the process of generation of coolness,

When Amanda says “the creative class,” I don’t take her to simply mean “creative people” or even “people who make art.” I take her to mean the culture-drivers, the people who decide what’s worth paying attention to and who set the standards of “cool” for the rest of the country. These people are not necessarily the artists and the actual creators — but they’re the ones who determine how successful said artists and creators are, and who shape what youth culture looks like. Of course, the artists and the creators will be drawn to the areas where there will be a large, receptive community to their art — namely, larger cities with a decidedly “hip” contingent.

But it’s that first group — the culture-drivers — who really matter. Artists can create away, but if no one is paying attention then, obviously, their creations don’t register. And having gone to NYU and living in the East Village, I’ve met more than a few of the people who make artists matter. Here’s what they generally have in common: (1) A college education; (2) lots of disposable income; (3) time and energy. This certainly isn’t anything new. Edie Sedgwick wasn’t exactly poor; the Misshapes kids and the audience they cater to aren’t struggling. Of course, this isn’t true of every hipster in the country, but there is certainly a large degree of social and economic privilege involved. How many people can afford to graduate from college and then accept an unpaid internship in a “creative” field while they live in New York and go to shows and parties every night? How many people in their 20s have the security of knowing that whatever they do today, it’ll work out? It’s these kids — the ones who say they like bands you’ve never heard of (but go to the shows largely to socialize) and who complain about gentrification (but who just moved in two years ago) and who apologize for their parents’ SUVs (but are forced to drive them anyway when they go home) — who dictate what “cool” even means.

I don’t think it’s possible to improve on Jill’s post in explaining the process of what makes things cool right now. Its weakness is in explaining why Atlanta is less hip than New York. Jill explains it mostly in terms of inertia: hipsters flock to cities where there already are other hipsters. That’s good on the city level, but it has two weaknesses. First, it won’t tell you why there’s more cultural production in San Francisco than in Houston. And second, it doesn’t explain why hipsters are flocking to Williamsburg.

The key observation is that in American cities, cultural production doesn’t require the tolerance Steve is talking about. New York was a prime mover of American culture even before the Civil War, when it was Dixie by the Hudson. Cultural production in the US began at Five Points, an urban ghetto where blacks and Irish immigrants started creating a fusion culture when they weren’t busy killing each other.

In New York, the most important neighborhood in terms of cultural history is not the Upper West Side, but the Lower East Side. The commenters on Pandagon who stress the importance of cosmopolitanism are right, but the kind that promotes cultural production is not the happy-go-lucky cosmopolitanism of the Upper West Side or Morningside Heights, but the brutal ghetto of the old Lower East Side and South Bronx.

People who produce new culture usually can’t afford to live in trendy neighborhoods. In Paris, artists concentrated on the Rive Gauche rather than along the Champs Elysée; in New York, they did in Greenwich Village rather than by Central Park. And the artists themselves would draw inspiration from a highly cosmopolitan urban ghetto, which in North America means an immigrant neighborhood where different ethnic groups deal with one another not because they want to but because they have to.

This ties into what Jen says: gentrifying a neighborhood won’t promote cultural production - on the contrary, it will suppress it. Long Island City wouldn’t have art collectives if rents in the Village were sane.

Of course, Atlanta can’t become hip just by trashing a few neighborhoods beyond belief till artists can afford living in them. It has enough trashy neighborhoods with rock-bottom rents as it is. The problem is that these neighborhoods are slave-descended black, instead of a combination of slave-descended black, immigrant black, Mexican, Chinese, Filipino, Russian, and Dominican.

That’s at least the number one way for a North American city to become a center of cultural production. There are two more, which don’t involve importing a large number of immigrants and then throwing them into slums.

One is by fusion of local cultures, i.e. black and white. That happened in the less segregated South first, but then caught on better in the less racist North. This also covers African-American cultural revivals like the Harlem Renaissance (which, note, happened in a thoroughly low-income neighborhood), which couldn’t happen in a city where too many white people would sneer at it.

The other is by attracting large numbers of young professionals, what Jill calls the white collar workers who are eager to consume what has been deemed cool. This includes Austin, the Triangle, and even Seattle, which was hip before it attracted immigrants. Lindsay hints at it in a comment on Pandagon that analyzes the situation in terms of universities. Univerisities help, but any nerd attractor would help; having the headquarters of Boeing in your city would do just as well.

The Creative Class and where they are going

Cities Compete in Hipness Battle to Attract Young

By SHAILA DEWAN

Published: November 25, 2006

ATLANTA, Nov. 24 — Some cities will do anything they can think of to keep young people from fleeing to a hipper town.

Employees at the Wieden & Kennedy advertising agency, top, at a company basketball game. Below, Nicole Andren assays her shot options.

In Lansing, Mich., partiers can ease from bar to bar on the new Entertainment Express trolley, part of the state’s Cool Cities Initiative. In Portland, Ore., employees at an advertising firm can watch indie rock concerts at lunch and play “bump,” an abbreviated form of basketball, every afternoon.

And in Memphis, employers pay for recruits to be matched with hip young professionals in a sort of corporate Big Brothers program. A new biosciences research park is under construction — not in the suburbs, but downtown, just blocks from the nightlife of Beale Street.

These measures reflect a hard demographic reality: Baby boomers are retiring and the number of young adults is declining. By 2012, the work force will be losing more than two workers for every one it gains.

Cities have long competed over job growth, struggling to revive their downtowns and improve their image. But the latest population trends have forced them to fight for college-educated 25- to 34-year-olds, a demographic group increasingly viewed as the key to an economic future.

Mobile but not flighty, fresh but technologically savvy, “the young and restless,” as demographers call them, are at their most desirable age, particularly because their chances of relocating drop precipitously when they turn 35. Cities that do not attract them now will be hurting in a decade.

“It’s a zero-sum game,” said William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, noting that one city’s gain can only be another’s loss. “These are rare and desirable people.”

They are people who, demographers say, are likely to choose a location before finding a job. They like downtown living, public transportation and plenty of entertainment options. They view diversity and tolerance as marks of sophistication.

The problem for cities, says Richard Florida, a public policy professor at George Mason University who has written about what he calls “the creative class,” is that those cities that already have a significant share of the young and restless are in the best position to attract more.

“There are a dozen places, at best, that are becoming magnets for these people,” Mr. Florida said.

That disparity was evident in a report released this week by the Metropolitan Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, which showed Atlanta leading the pack among big cities, while other metro areas, like Philadelphia, hemorrhaged young people from 1990 to 2000. (In this competition, surveys that make a city look good are a favorite opening salvo.)

In that decade, the Atlanta study said, the number of 25- to-34-year-olds with four-year college degrees in the city increased by 46 percent, placing Atlanta in the top five metropolitan areas in terms of growth rate, and a close second to San Francisco in terms of overall numbers. Charlotte, N.C., also outperformed Atlanta, with a growth rate of 57 percent, the second highest in the country after Las Vegas.

(Demographers point out that Las Vegas started with very small numbers and still ranks last among major cities when it comes to the percentage of its 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree.)

Atlanta did particularly well with young, educated blacks — a boon for employers seeking to diversify their ranks. The city’s report zeroed in on people like Tiffany Patterson, 27, who on a recent Thursday night was hanging out at Verve, the sleek new Midtown bar and restaurant that is one of her marketing clients.

The place was thrumming with young African-Americans in leather jackets, stilettos or pinstripe suits — the kind of vibe, said Ms. Patterson, who is from Dallas, that made her stay in Atlanta after college.

“If I go home, women my age are looking for a husband,” she said. “They have a cubicle job.”

In Atlanta, Ms. Patterson said, she can afford a new town house. A few years ago, she decided to leave her financial sector job and start her own business as a marketing consultant.

“I thought, I can break out and do it myself,” she said. “It really is the city of the fearless.”

The recent study, based on census figures and conducted by Joe Cortright of Impresa Consulting in Portland and Carol Coletta, president and chief executive of CEOs for Cities, a nonprofit organization in Chicago, showed that Atlanta won its net gain in educated young people by luring them from New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston.

“What we’re seeing is the jury of the most skeptical age group in America has looked at Atlanta’s character and likes it,” Sam A. Williams, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, said.

But Mr. Williams acknowledged the difficulty of replicating that phenomenon on purpose.

Had the chamber tried to advertise Atlanta, he said, “we might have screwed it up —because they’re much more trusting of their own network than they are of any marketing campaign.”

“You can’t fake it here,” he said. “You either do it or you don’t.”

In addition to Atlanta, the biggest gainers in market share of the young and restless were San Francisco; Denver; Portland; and Austin, Tex. The biggest losers included Washington, Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles.

But some of the losing cities have been trying hard to forestall their losses, in part by focusing on talented workers who want a certain lifestyle instead of big employers that have traditionally been interested in tax credits and infrastructure.

Steven W. Pedigo, the research director for the Greater Washington Initiative, a regional economic group, said the numbers there had begun to turn around. Stephanie Naidoff, Philadelphia’s director of commerce, said a major effort to draw college students off campus with things like internships and concert tickets was paying off, increasing the city’s graduate retention numbers.

Studies like Atlanta’s are common these days. From Milwaukee to Tampa Bay, consultants have been hired to score such nebulous indexes as “social capital,” “after hours” and “vitality.” Relocation videos have begun to feature dreadlocks and mosh pits instead of sunsets and duck ponds. In the governor’s race in Michigan this fall, the candidates repeatedly sparred over how best to combat “brain drain.”

But determining exactly what works is not easy. In Atlanta, focus group participants liked the low cost of living, an airport hub that allowed easy travel and what they perceived as a diverse and open culture.

And Atlanta has some strong advantages, of course. There are some 45 colleges and universities in the metro area. The Cartoon Network is based here, as are scores of companies in the technology and entertainment sectors. The music industry is another draw for the creative class. And the city has large international and gay populations, considered strong indicators for popularity with the young and restless.

“Atlanta’s just one of those mixes,” said T. J. Ashiru, 30, a Nigerian who chose Atlanta over New York for college shortly after the 1996 Olympics were held here, and stayed to begin his career in finance. “The Olympics was basically the catalyst for what Atlanta became.”

In some cases, cities have done well in the competition without even overtly trying. Charlotte has done well without either a major university or the kind of strong identity — like Austin’s position as a live music capital — that helps put cities on the young-and-restless map.

At the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, Tony Crumbley, the vice president for research, said the city and state had done a lot of things right without realizing it, like establishing liberal banking laws that made Charlotte a financial capital, and redeveloping downtown in the 1980s.

“Another thing,” Mr. Crumbley said, “there are more Frisbee golf courses in this area than any other place in the country.”

Still, what works in one city will not work in others, Mr. Cortright said, and not all young people are looking for the same things. He cites Portland’s bike paths, which many point to as an amenity that has helped the city attract young people.

“I think that confuses a result with a cause,” Mr. Cortright said. Portland happened to have a group who wanted concessions for cyclists and was able to get them, he said.

“The real issue was, is your city open to a set of ideas from young people, and their wish to realize their dream or objective in your city,” he said. “You could go out and build bike paths, but if that’s not what your young people want, it’s not going to work.”

The Golden Age of the Hermit

Carrie Fischer was in Star Wars with Harrison Ford who was in The Fugitive with Tommy Lee Jones who was in Batman Forever with Val Kilmer who was in Heat with Robert Dinero who was in Sleepers with Kevin Bacon.

Six degrees of Kevin Bacon is based on the concept of six degrees of separation that was developed around 1967 by Stanley Milgram who proposed that any two random U.S. citizens were connected by a chain of six acquaints on average.[1] Also commonly referred to as the “small world phenomenon,” actually suggests that there are many small worlds that are connected by a few “stars” who act as cohesive members between groups. These people vary from the hyper involved who will pursue a number of interests to the drifters who move casually between groups with no long term sense of attachment.

The key connector between all of these people is the social network. The social network can generally be understood as a web of connections. The network often has social implications beyond the apparent ones, where make-up and size of the network will influence ones potential connections.

The development of social networking communities online has developed from simple webrings into vast networks of users in pursuit of common goals. The social implications and associations vary based on the group. Groups and websites have been established based on any number of shared interests or desired methods of interaction.

One of the recurring social connectors in history has been music. The social importance of musical tastes and preferences has regularly developed into a level of cult worship. Ones musical tastes can make or break a relationship. Since the development of the radio and later the LP, the ability so share music allowed for the growth of the music industry and the development of a wider range of musical choices.

The release of Napster in 1999 rekindled the importance of the social aspects of music.[2] By sharing and receiving music with peers, many of which you have never met – and will never meet – gave people a brief glimpse into the lives of what became millions of users. The popularity of certain songs and genres could be tracked in numbers of downloads and could begin to allude to the size and dominance of the social groups associated with the various genres.

Anonymity, ease of use and the free distribution made Napster a runaway hit. Everyone and anyone could use the program and could share a piece of themselves in a non-invasive and safe way.

The distribution of music in a widespread and easy to access manner is complimented by the corresponding tool for information – Wikipedia. Wikipedia was founded in 2001 as a means of providing open access to a free encyclopedia.[3] The founders utilized a similar system to peer-to-peer networking, like Napster, by not only allowing users to change or add content, but encouraging it.

Collaborative authoring allows the site to address a wide range of topics without the costs associated with the creation and writing of millions of articles. Everyone can add or edit content regardless of background and education. Though this has been criticized as a means of dispersing bad or incorrect information, the democratic nature of it acts as a sort of social commentary and provides a living and changing understanding of the world. Social, political, economic, and cultural trends can be tracked and understood as a shifting assortment of facts, theories and opinions. The constant evolution of the website and the individual articles shows the importance of personal interpretation of facts and issues that is often missed in traditional sources. In fact, it is among the top 20 most visited websites, making it one of the most influential sources of information.

But perhaps the most omnipresent and inescapable of the social networking trends is the dominance of friend’s websites like Myspace. Myspace – developed in 2003 as a way of developing social networks and sharing personal information – claimed 106 million users as of September 2006.[4] The vastness of the network can be attributed to the ease of use and users inviting or referring new users from their own social networks. Much of the attraction to the site is due once again to the anonymity. The buffer that the internet provides for social interactions emboldens people.

The illusion of separation between the Myspace life and the outside life is changing over time as more and more people – employers especially – are becoming savvy enough to search Myspace to learn more about potential employees. There has been sharp criticism that Myspace makes it too easy to act in a manner not generally considered socially acceptable and is leading to a breakdown of social precepts.

But a new trend is developing in social networking websites that has shown the decrease in use of the site as the users age. The original group of users is entering college and is switching to a more active social life in the traditional sense. This group is also of the group that has been pushed to do everything under the moon by their parents and teachers. Hyper-activity for generation M – those born in 1980-2000 – is less a statement of an inability to focus but the tendency to focus in more directions at once.

Though the collapse of western civilization is unlikely, these sites have begun changing the expectations of community structures at a faster pace than radio, rock music, and television had managed to accomplish. The television and the car provided the means of operating away from the city center and made the periphery accessible, in what we now know of as the suburban environment. The development of the personal computer and the proliferation of the internet has reestablished the importance of the center, but of multiple centers rather than a single city center or agora. This X-Urban environment[5] is dependent on and compliments the social networks that exist on the internet. These networks make it possible to exist independently – living, working, and socializing in an isolated bubble. Just as the automobile made travel an independent and isolated experience, the development of the cyber social network makes everything from shopping to dating safe and secluded.

The golden age of the hermit is at hand.[6]

---

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_world_phenomenon

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace

[5] Gandolsonas, X-Urbanism

[6] All of the research for this piece was done on Wikipedia.

Precedent Studies

For the Unit:
Mobile Dwelling Unit (MDU) by LoTek
Dockable Dwelling by Mathias Creimer
Markies by Eduard Bohtlingk

For the Hub:
Project for Algiers by Le Corbusier
Nomad and other projects by Archigram
Skyerise by Elmer Frey

neo nomad

There are over 243 million registered passenger vehicles in the U.S. which means there are roughly 1.9 cars per household (based on the 2000 census number of 107 million households). These cars are responsible for 40% of the world’s oil and gas consumption.

The U.S. is, as a point of fact, a throw-away consumer culture. Americans consume an enormous amount of resources per capita at a rate that is a major concern of economists and ecologists. A major aspect of this consumption is consumption of building materials and housing stock. Since the average American moves every 6 years, the number of houses needed to support that trend is gigantic. In 2005, there were 124 million housing units in the U.S. Our housing stock is growing at a rate of 1.5 percent per year, with some counties growing at a rate of 15 percent or higher. But based on the average household size, we have an excess of around 8 million housing units. This surplus is necessary to support the number of Americans who want to move regularly.

This raises the question of why we feel the need to trade out our whole house every time we move. With the median home price over $200,000, and those below that mark rarely worth the investment, it’s not surprising that the housing market has hit yet another slump in many cities.

The solution is to look to nature. Creatures that carry their homes with them are abundant and many of them are highly mobile. The hermit crab (yes, that lovable crustacean that is a staple of childhood pets, perhaps due to their staunch will to live against all odds) will salvage shells and other items to be their homes. They migrate for mating and food purposes, but always have their home with them.

This pattern can be adapted by nomadic Americans. By having a nomadic unit, they can travel at whim and seek out new opportunities – both economic and cultural – without having to invest in a new unit. This provides a modicum of flexibility and mobility while still being within the economic range of a larger portion of Americans.

The Truck Stop

The American truck stop is a major condition of the automobile community culture. Anyone who has taken any major road trip -- which should beat least 6 out of 10 of people reading this according to census numbers -- has experienced the truck stop. You pull over for gas and end up eating, shopping, showering, or even staying the night there. Some truck stops have become so elaborate as to even include 24 hour dentists (because you can't wait another week to replace that crown or shine up your pearly whites).

And trucks stops have a distinctive regional identity. Ask any trucker who has trecked the great highways and he'll tell you about his favorite state to stop in. Your first hint that you have entered a new state is the state of the roads. You can literally feel the difference between Mississippi and Alabama when you cross that state line. Travel into the state and you will find truck stops that will be similar in function but filled with regional food and merchandise -- where else would you find that one last state spoon you need than in a Gas Mart along the highway.

These stops are served by a sedentary population which is as varied as the road surfaces. In some smaller stops, you'll find an older population of employees that are often coming form neighboring towns that lack the economic oomph to provide enough jobs for all who want them. Near larger cities, a younger crowd may well be serving you those truck stop breakfasts or pumping your gas (if you've ventured into New Jersey).

Without this sedentary population, the truck stop would disappear. Who would work there otherwise? This suggests that a sedentary population will always be necessary and will always be in a sybiotic relationship with the American nomad.

The relationship between the trucker and the truck stop is a window into the possibilities of opening up the transient lifestyle to a broader swath of Americans. The trucker depends on his ability to move for economic survival. Many owner/opperators will even have living quarters built into the back of their rigs so that they don't need to spend money on hotels or even invest in a stable home. But the lifestyle of a trucker is a lonely one. Their need for community and social connection must be filled at those truck stops, and they often aren't. The development of a more socially based hub system would allow for the nomadic person to continue to have the comforts of a social group that they can call their own while still allowing them the freedom to leave when they need to or want to.

To be continued...

american nomads

comfort

Whenever I go on a trip, I think about all the homes I've had & I remember how little has changed about what comforts me.


Brian Andreas