Los Angeles Times - June 27, 2004

The Ephemeral City 

Officials are betting the future on culture and tourism. But whatever happened to staying power?

he much-ballyhooed urban revival, at least in advanced countries, is actually a subtle shift in the role of cities. For most of history, they represented what is permanent and solid — the sacred place, the citadel of power, the center of commerce. Today, they are increasingly a place of transient values, where people sojourn for a time of their life, or part time, but where they don't grow up or spend much of their lives. The fashionable and faddish, not the enduring and faithful, are king. Most key decisions are made somewhere else.

Welcome to the ephemeral city.

Central to the ephemeral city are cultural industries and tourism. Many urban planners and business leaders look to them as keys to survival. No longer do they labor to retain middle-class families and factory jobs or worry excessively about economic competition with suburbs and exurbs. Instead, they nurture their cities' fashionableness, "hipness" and style.

Montreal, for example, once a financial and business-service capital, seems intent on wiping out much of its remaining industrial base — its still vibrant garment sector, in particular — in favor of a strategy centered on marketing the city as a "hip and happening" place. In San Francisco, Miami and New York, culture-based tourism is among the largest and most promising industries. And Las Vegas and Orlando manufacture "experiences," complete with eye-catching architecture and round-the-clock live entertainment.

Many European cities — most notably Paris, Vienna and Berlin — also have embraced the culture-based economy. Having largely failed to meet its aspirations to become a global business center again, Berlin celebrates its highly subsidized bohemian community as its primary economic asset. The city's relevance is increasingly defined by its edgy galleries, unique shops, lively street life and growing tourist trade — not by its export of goods or services.

Even in such unlikely places as the old Lancashire industrial hub of Manchester, England, and Detroit, the largely desolate auto capital, political and business leaders hope that by creating "cool cities" to attract gays, bohemians and young "creatives" they might solve their profound economic and social problems. In Manchester, the accouterments of this kind of growth — loft developments, good restaurants, clubs, museums and a sizable, visible gay and singles population — have revived the town center but have done little to create anything approaching a broad-based economic rebound.

One particularly absurd case of this phenomenon is Philadelphia, a city that has lost half a million people since 1950 (Phoenix recently overtook it as the nation's fifth-largest city). Faced with the reality of a mediocre economy at best, and a city government known for its corruption and ineptitude, Philadelphia's boosters focus on how to make their city cooler and more attractive to singles. One of the city's most prestigious economic development organizations launched a campaign to persuade residents to rig a Forbes magazine e-mail survey so that the City of Brotherly Love could be named "best city for singles" in the country.

The ephemeral-city strategy ignores some disturbing realities. Many of the young people lured to "cool" urban places, says demographer Bill Frey, often depart when they start families and businesses. Increasingly, he adds, even upwardly mobile immigrants, critical contributors to the urban resurgence in the United States, and nontraditional families — such as couples without children — when they hit their mid-30s, are moving to the suburbs.

Urban centers in Europe and Japan face a more extreme demographic crisis. Low national birthrates are reducing the ranks of young people, the group most attracted to large cities, while choking off the traditional pool of migrants from the countryside. All that is left behind, increasingly, are singles, students, the older affluents and, in Europe at least, an often alienated, growing population of immigrants from developing countries.

Although it is hard to see how this population mix could be the foundation for a full-scale urban revival, some cities, or parts of cities, may survive — even thrive — on such an ephemeral basis. For one thing, culture-based strategies tend to be popular with the media.

In the 1990s, the brief but widely acclaimed rise of urban technology districts — New York's "Silicon Alley" and San Francisco's "Multimedia Gulch" are two examples — linked hipness and urban edginess to high-wage Information Age growth. When the Internet and software industries contracted, matured and then moved to the suburbs or lower-cost locales, all that remained was hipness and edginess. But the fundamental elements of late-1990s demography remain strong enough to transform these urban spaces into high-end residential resorts, if not economic powerhouses.

The worldwide rush to convert old warehouses, factories and office buildings into elegant residences is the physical manifestation of the ephemeral city. The declining old financial center of Lower Manhattan, for example, will probably be reborn not as the much-hoped-for technology hub but, in the words of architectural historian Robert Bruegmann, as a place for "wealthy cosmopolites wishing to enjoy urban amenities in the elegantly recycled shell of a former business center."

The demand for recycled shells comes not only from younger people but also from a growing population of older affluents, many of whom seek to experience "a more pluralistic way of life." These modern-day nomads reside part time in cities, either to participate in its cultural life or transact critical business. In some cities — Paris for one — these urban nomads constitute, by one estimate, one in 10 residents. Real estate developers in such cities as New York note similar patterns.

This trend suggests that the most attractive urban centers will continue to gentrify. Yet at the same time, this form of culture-based growth may be incapable of sustaining itself.

In the past, cultural achievement followed economic or political dynamism. Athens was a bustling mercantile center and military power before it became a cultural prodigy. The remarkable cultural production of other great cities — from Alexandria in Egypt and Kaifeng in China, to Venice, Amsterdam, London and, in the 20th century, New York and Los Angeles — rested upon a similar nexus between the aesthetic and the mundane.

More critically, demographics challenge the prospects of the ephemeral city. Declining numbers of urban middle-class families remove a population crucial to both economic growth and cultural vitality. This problem is marked in Japan and Europe, where the numbers of young workers are already dropping. Superannuated Japan, for example, faces increasing competition with Chinese cities, enriched by the migration of ambitious young families from the country's vast agricultural hinterlands.

The ephemeral city also may face profound social conflicts. An economy oriented toward entertainment, tourism and "creative" functions is ill suited to provide upward mobility for those who can't find opportunities in these sectors. Focused on boosting culture and building spectacular buildings, urban governments may be tempted to neglect commonplace industries, basic education and infrastructure. Such a course would lead to "dual cities" composed of a cosmopolitan elite and a large class of low-wage service workers.

The rage among some officials to promote their cities as hip and cool misses the essential elements that make cities great. A city is not merely a construct of real estate projects built for essentially nomadic populations; it requires an engaged and committed citizenry with a long-term financial and familial stake in the metropolis.

A successful city must be a home not only to edgy clubs, museums and restaurants but also factories, schools, companies and neighborhoods capable of regenerating themselves for the next generation.

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