Uncool Cities
From London
and Berlin to Sydney and San Francisco, civic authorities agree that the
key to urban prosperity is appealing to the "hipster set" of
gays, twentysomethings and young creatives. But the only evidence for this
idea comes from the dot-com boom of the late 1990s—and that time is over
he
world’s great cities face serious, even catastrophic problems.
Terrorists have planted bombs in London’s Underground and bus systems.
Floods have wiped out New Orleans, and fires incinerated scores of
impoverished Africans living in crowded, seamy Paris apartments.
Everywhere—from New Orleans to
London and Paris—the middle classes, whatever their colour, are
deserting the core for safer and more affordable suburbs, following in the
footsteps of high-tech industries and major corporations.
Yet rather than address serious
issues like housing, schools, transport, jobs and security, mayors and
policy gurus from Berlin and London to Sydney and San Francisco have
adopted what can be best be described as the "cool city
strategy." If you can somehow make your city the rage of the hipster
set, they insist, all will be well.
New Orleans, the most recent
victim of catastrophic urban decline, is a case in point. Once a great
commercial hub, the city’s economic and political elites have placed all
their bets on New Orleans becoming a tourist and culture centre. Indeed,
just a month before the disaster, city leaders held a conference that
promoted a “cultural economy initiative” strategy for attracting
high-end industry. The other big state initiative was not levee
improvement but a $450m expansion for the now infamous convention centre.
This rush to hipness has its
precedents, perhaps even in Roman festivals or medieval fairs. But in the
past, most cities did not see entertainment as their main purpose. Rome
was an imperial seat; Manchester, Berlin, Chicago and Detroit foundries of
the industrial age; London, New York, and later Tokyo, global financial
centres.
Perhaps even worse, the lure of
“coolness” leads cities to ignore the fundamental issues—infrastructure,
middle-class flight, terrorism—that have so much more to do with their
long-term prospects. Cities once boasted of their thriving middle-class
neighbourhoods, churches, warehouses, factories and high-rise office
towers. Today they set their value by their inventory of jazz clubs, gay
bars, art museums, luxury hotels and condos.
The advocates of this approach
are a new generation of “hip cool” mayors, including Ken Livingstone,
Berlin’s Klaus Wowereit, San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom, Baltimore’s
Martim O’Malley, Detroit’s “hip hop” mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and
the gay chief executive of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe.
Ken Livingstone sees London’s
future tied to “the richness, breadth and diversity of its cultural and
creative resources.” Theatres, sports stadiums, museums and cinemas are,
he notes, “what many of us enjoy most about living here.” Culture, not
commerce, is “London’s heartbeat.” For a city “vulnerable to the
up and downs of the global political and economic system,” the mayor
proclaims, culture and tourism represent an ideal way to counteract “the
negative impact of such events.”
This refocus of urban policy
around culture and tourism has wide appeal, particularly in continental
Europe. Expensive—and increasingly economically marginal cities—like
Paris, Vienna and post-cold war Berlin have all embraced the notion of a
culturally-based lifestyle economy. Berlin epitomises the trend. In the
1990s, massive funds were expended to make the restored German capital
into the business capital of Mitteleuropa. These ambitions foundered on
the city’s high taxes, red tape, and generally anti-business culture.
Over 100,000 jobs have left in recent years, unemployment is nearly 20 per
cent and the population is declining, as people flee to the suburbs or
more prosperous parts of Germany.
Faced with such problems, what
does the mayor of the bankrupt city propose? Cut taxes, build new
infrastructure, find ways to keep the middle classes and businesses? No,
Mayor Wowereit pegs the future to selling Berlin as “the city of
glamour.” To him, “the most decisive aspect is to bring creative young
people to Berlin.” Somehow, he believes, this will turn the city’s sad
economy around.
Similar thinking has been picked
up by political and business leaders in grittier places like Liverpool and
Manchester, Cleveland, Baltimore and Detroit. Faced with population
decline of 30 to 40 per cent over the past half century, these cities have
all created programmes designed to lure gays, bohemians and young “creatives”
to their towns.
This ephemeralisation of urbanism
derives, in part, from the theories of Richard Florida, an American
academic whose theories about the “creative class” have captivated
many city leaders. Using research drawn largely from the dot-com era of
the late 1990s, Florida insists that the key to urban success lies in
attracting such groups of young twentysomething singles, artists and
homosexuals. Florida’s favourite hip cities, not surprisingly, are
places like Sydney, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Boston, areas
with lots of students, artists and gays—and the lowest percentages of
families. Other less hip locales have been duly forewarned, as a headline
in the Washington Monthly put it, that cities “without gays and rock
bands are losing the economic race.”
There is little evidence that
this is really how urban economies work. It turns out that many of the
most prized members of the “creative class” are not 25-year-old hip
cools, but fortysomething adults who, particularly if they have children,
end up gravitating to the suburbs and more economically dynamic cities
like Phoenix, Boise, Charlotte or Orlando.
The false promise of Florida’s
“creative class” has been obvious for the last five years,
particularly with the collapse of the dot-com boom. In the late 1990s
there did appear to be a new kind of urban economy—driven by black-clad
graphic designers, programmers and marketeers—that was bringing new
jobs, wealth and residents to old urban areas from San Francisco’s “multimedia
gulch” to New York’s ultra-trendy “silicon alley.”
Then the dot-com economy fizzled
out, leaving whole districts of New York, San Francisco and Boston with
huge vacancy rates and declining job rolls. San Francisco has lost roughly
10 per cent of its jobs and 4 per cent of its residents since 1999. Its
job growth rate, like most of the “hip” cities heralded by Florida,
has lagged behind the national average, not only in overall jobs but in
high-wage technology, business and financial service jobs.
There have also been social
costs. These cities have become the most divided by class in the US, and
often suffer large homeless populations. In some, the largely immigrant
service class labour to keep the wealthy population properly served, at
least until they can afford to move to the suburbs. Perhaps there is no
more searing evidence of the limitations of a culture-based economy than
New Orleans. Once a great industrial and commercial centre, the city—despite
its huge port—has roughly half the US average of jobs in manufacturing
and wholesale trade. Other, more business-focused cities, notably Houston,
have taken the lead in the high-paid service jobs connected to trade, such
as finance, engineering and medical services. The energy industry, once
the lynchpin of the local economy, also decamped, primarily to Houston.
All this happened despite New Orelans being a city that was heavily gay,
very cool and extremely hip.
By the time of the flood, tourism
and culture, along with a huge social service bureaucracy, was driving the
economy. The problem, of course, is that tourism pays poorly; a 2002 study
for the AFL-CIO showed that nearly half of all full-time hotel workers
could not earn enough to keep a family out of poverty.
Lost in the ghastly images of New
Orleans’s poor is the fact that the city’s whites, about 27 per cent
of the population, are wealthier and more educated than their counterparts
nationwide. They, of course, welcomed the new nightclubs, coffee shops and
galleries that dotted their grander neighbourhoods. New Orleans epitomised
the inequality of the hip cool city. While the national gap between black
and white per capita income stands at about $9,000, in New Orleans it is
almost $20,000.
The prospect for older industrial
cities, which lack much of a basis for tourism and culture, are even less
encouraging. Detroit, in particular, under its “hip hop” Mayor
Kilpatrick, continues to slide. Baltimore, another city that has openly
embraced the “creative class” theory has languished. It also
experienced a shocking increase in crime, and now suffers one of the
highest homicide rates in America.
Little recognised amid the
creative class craze is the fact that a strong and growing middle class is
still the key to well balanced urban life. Without a permanent middle
class, cities through history—from ancient Rome and 17th-century Venice
to 19th-century Amsterdam—have lost their ballast, become ever more
divided by class, and ceded their central role.
London and other amenity-rich
cities like New York, Paris, San Francisco and Boston will not become
ruins, any more than Venice and Amsterdam did after they entered their
elegant dotages. Even New Orleans, owing to its location and historical
significance, and troubled Berlin, by dint of being Germany’s capital
and possessor of an enormous cultural legacy, are unlikely to go the way
of Detroit.
Indeed, as long as the world
economy expands, such cities may find their sustenance as amusement parks
for adults. But the people will come from other more dynamic rising cities—places
like Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Perth, Calgary, Los Angeles, Houston or
Phoenix—that still retain their “animal spirits” and remain the
locus of middle-class aspiration.
New Yorkers and Londoners still
possess the essentials for a more vital future. But first their political
leaders must realise that great cities need schools for families,
transport that works, jobs for the middle and the aspiring working
classes. And they must acknowledge the continuing need to invest heavily
in public safety, particularly in an age of terror.
These challenges come with a
price, and require public money to pay for them. In contrast, the “coolness”
strategy both costs little and offends no one. It is the path of least
resistance, but one that offers only poor returns.
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