This will be one of those posts bloggers consider an enticing challenge. I'm entertaining parallel thought processes as I try to get something accomplished today. The objective - or target, to employ a bit of project-management jargon - is to tie them together and thereby make some kind of point. Right now, I intuit the point, so you, dear reader, get to witness the process whereby I flesh it out with connections between my observations.
On the one hand, I'm going over my notes from an interview I conducted the other day with someone at our local Chamber of Commerce about how its efforts to brand the city and attract hotshot young professionals have been codified into what it calls a system.
On the other, I'm monitoring national political and economic developments, as, of course, I do compulsively every day.
I can tie the two tracks together right now, actually. When I asked the Chamber person how the system was going, what kinds of measurable results she was seeing, she confessed that follow-up monitoring had been kind of interrupted due to the ongoing crappiness of the economy.
The local Chamber is enamored of the work of Rebecca Ryan, the author of Live First, Work Second and the head of Next Generation Consulting, as well as Richard Florida, the Creative Class guy. They've both been recent annual-meeting speakers, in fact.
I've seen Ryan in person myself. I had the occasion to represent a jazz-appreciation society, not in my own city, but in a nearby community, at a regional conference on how to get young professionals to attend arts events. Ryan was a big presence there. She's got the keen wit going on, has an arsenal of stats stored in her head, and obviously knows how to make a buck. And is she ever representative of the demographic she's professionally concerned with. Per the link above, her favorite food is pho and she loves Madison, Wisconsin because it plows its bike trails in the winter.
The whole business of looking at swaths of society and generations and behavior and attitudes based on demography has a long pedigree. It certainly goes back to Alvin Toffler, with his Future Shock and Powershift, and up through John Naisbitt, the Megatrends guy, and on up through Faith Popcorn, who was the hot figure in the field in the 1990s. There was the David Brooks tome of a few years back, Bobos in Paradise.
I do have to hand it to my own community. It is aware that municipalities now economically compete with one another, on the statewide level, as well as nationally and even globally. It's furthermore aware that it has some unique selling points, such as an unrivaled concentration of world-class architecture and the world headquarters of the world's premier diesel-engine maker. It is capitalizing on these and other traits as it works this system.
As I say, it knows other cities are doing the branding thing to attract YPs. In fact, a look at Ryan's speaking schedule demonstrates that burgs up and down the pike want to know how to be cool in the eyes of engineers, IT hotshots, finance wizzes and nonprofit poobahs.
Now, it's clearly commendable and sensible for a city to want to develop the most concentrated pool of brain power possible, as well as foster the maximum level of an ethos of civic involvement. I'm just not sure there's anything very organic about any of the way it's currently being done. Ironically, even as one piece of the model for a cool 21st century place to live is a funky, vibrant arts district / downtown, this, too, has become an interchangeable component, like an item on a checklist that the job-seeking YP insists on seeing in his or her Internet research.
The demographic that gets America's chambers of commerce and economic-development commissions so excited is big on the notion of "partnering." (In all kinds, of ways, but for the sake of staying focused, let's set the other main meaning of that aside for now. Well, we may fit it in before the big conclusion. We'll see.) Because they're so used to doing things in coalitions, they see no problem with "public-private partnerships." Does the funding come from a private foundation or a governmental entity? Hey, so the lines are a little blurry, no biggie.
We have an interesting situation going on right here currently. The new Commons downtown, which houses some restaurants and a children's play area on the ground floor, and an acoustically state-of-the-art performance space (which doubles as a conference / banquet space) on the second floor, as well as a parking garage across the street, was such a project, and now there are lease disputes and questions about what legal entities are responsible for various contractual obligations that are clouding the happy atmosphere of the area.
Another issue on our plate is a push by certain elements to increase property taxes to pay for prekindergarten for low-income families. Take a few moments to parse all the levels of implication of that one: redistributionism, increased opportunities for the public-education machine to indoctrinate the most impressionable among us, and the further erosion of unstructured childhood and parental bonding.
So cities kick in revenue and tax breaks and the like for physical infrastructure that favors particular parts of town. Then there are activities that go on in the various institutions in a given city. I wrote a piece for The American Thinker in March 2010 on how a local outfit - coalition, excuse me - called Healthy Communities Initiative got federal stimulus money to put eat-your-broccoli posters in the day care centers around town.
While there are always focus groups, surveys and townhall meetings leading up to any new developments around here, and constant assurances that top-down imposition is not what anybody intends, there's an undeniable sense that that is indeed how this stuff gets done.
It also looks increasingly like an atmosphere characterized by a cultural dare. If you wonder aloud whether "diversity circles" at our biggest local university or LEED certification for new construction projects or cooking classes for low-income families really amount to anything, you risk looking like the skunk at the garden party.
And I guess this is a good place to tie my tracks together. Let's use a concrete example. Last spring, the CEO of the diesel-engine maker headquartered here was part of the small group gathered behind the Most Equal Comrade in the Rose Garden as he signed more stringent emissions regulations for trucks into law. I wanted to hurl when I saw the photo. "Please, Dear Leader, tell us more about how to make our products."
I'm all for truly strong communities and neighbors lending a hand and such. That is an American tradition going back to the days of barn-raisings and church suppers. But no one at those gatherings had to arrange play dates for the kids in attendance, or be on the lookout for harassment. The local musicians would break out their fiddles, and it didn't require a penny of grant funding. Nobody had to wear networking name tags.
We used to actually create our communities organically. It happened by people living their lives and associating with those they felt affinity toward.
And people regarded the town's - and the nation's - crusty contrarians with fondness, rather than hauling them in for sensitivity training.
One more thing: when someone in a family, a town or the national Congress, had a big idea of some sort, folks asked, "Can we afford it?"
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