CP+S Day One - Richard Florida
Keynote Lecture on the collaborative city shaping our 21st century approach to city building.
- Richard Florida, ardent advocate of the import of place and author of "Rise Of The Creative Class", "Who's Your City?" and his upcoming "The Great Reset" posits an overarching theme that everyone is inherently creative. Just that their environments have them stifled in the same isolationist silos that old city centers allowed for but, the value in a place.... be it a city or a fashionably broad "mega-region"... is how it brings together a community to make a working model.
Florida has distinguished himself as a much needed and well heeded cheerleader for Toronto... particularly noteworthy for his having chosen this place to live.(.. in contrast to his twin hometowns of New Jersey and New York.)
Toronto is not his hometown, it's his intended, aspirationally ideal one. The place that seemed close and familiar enough to feel like what he knew... but, fresh, diverse and optimistic enough to espouse his upbeat rallying cry that we can, we will, and we are working at building a utopia... even if it never comes into being as we intend or dream.... at least we're making the in-roads, paving the superhighways and imagining the infrastructure.
Florida even goes so far as to praise the almost departed Mayor David Miller, saying; "when all is said and done, he'll be seen as one of the most transformational figures in the city's history... moving us from where we were... to where we needed to go. Which was no easy task."by cpands at 10/29/2009 3:28:22 PM - In order to create a new paradigm, Florida posits, you must create the conditions to build and revitalize the landscape. Anecdotally, Florida offers up that the number of abandoned homes in Detroit could fill Central Park three times over. It was likely the idea of the place... its heart and the soul... that died before the landscape followed suit. The devastation of this once powerful auto manufacturing hub is such that we have left a seemingly sullied plot of land but, the 'plantation mentality' is such that we think we can work and plow through. We can work the people to till the soil and never address the distress beneath the surface. The soil on the surface of the land... the skin as surface of the people will show the stress before too long if left uncared for. (Take it from someone who always had adolescent acne. It wasn't just my natural state for that time in my life... hormones and the like. It's so often overlooked that we have extraordinary perceieved stresses in our youth. High School can be hard.)
Detroit and it's outlying suburbs of affluence are a cautionary tale... but, one that seems so alien to our native city as we seem to have side-stepped this crisis... at least, relative to their predicament. Still, we have the collective wisdom of multi-colored, multi-cultural wisdom.
Moments of crisis are historically the moments where systematic change can take root. We are able to tap into that reservoir of people's creativity.... and, the more the multitudes of disparate thought... the more chance for cross-pollination.
Assuming the right conditions... when we are left to our own devices, we affect change and redesign our approach as we go.
On a factory floor in auto plants across America, giants and titans fell because workers were never allowed to implement the intuitive changes and applied knowledge that they knew could make improvements and affect the requisite changes... both great and small. Toyota understood this to be true, and were the first to allow their workers to reconstitute their approach from within.
The factory must be allowed to... encouraged to.... become a living lab for new approaches.
This runs contrary to every idea of institutional thinking... and, so institutions who fight or resist, implode as a result.by cpands at 10/29/2009 3:43:34 PM - Florida reminded us that neo-conservatism is really a futile attempt to control the city structures. Neo-cons rightly fear losing track, losing control and ultimately, accountability of artists and abstract thinkers inside the mosaic of multi-cultural cities like Toronto. Lost inside the ever-churning and changing landscape of a mega-city... we self-regulate. We self-govern... and, find ourselves resisting the notion that anyone outside our immediate area would have the requisite knowledge to know how and what need be done.
A neighbor knows what needs to be done with common fences... how and when to mend them and, why they need to be mended at all. If we share a common space, we share everything more freely... including ideas. We tend to guard ourselves against an unknown enemy... in close quarters, we come to know each other very quickly and intimately.
It's these cross-pollinations that allow progress to flower.... that allow for practical consensus to come to a better end.
In the process of conversion to the new paradigm of collaboration we need to be reminded that every step, and every misstep, mean more than the end product could ever do.
We find it often suffices to evaluate our one shining example... an individual who stands head and shoulders above everyone else already stands out in a crowd... and, we dismiss or devalue all the people who contributed to that success.
In a communal approach, no one is really left behind. Put another way, in the hurly-burly of a bustling metropolis that the neo-cons fear, we're harder to distinguish from one another.... and, we can't help but share in the spoils.by cpands at 10/29/2009 4:07:48 PM - Aesthetics must be taken out of the exclusive realm of design and placed in the context of work..... placed in people's faces on a day-to-day basis(pardon the rhyme)... so that we can remind ourselves of greater truths. Beauty being paramount amongst them for its universality.
As an aesthetic city... Toronto, and others like it, can be a shining example, inspiring people from inside the city streets and demonstrating the greater collective idea and ideals from outside our walls as we push these exciting but somehow still inviting walls.... outwards. onwards and upwards.by cpands at 10/29/2009 4:17:11 PM
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