Youth Explosion

A few weeks ago, the Urbanophile posted a piece on the generational shift happening in this country. I largely agree with what Mr. Renn had to say. I've written about this a little bit as well, but I would like to add something to the discourse. I am 33 years old, an age that puts me just at the tail-end of the accepted range for Generation X'ers. Just old enough to know what a busy signal sounds like or what a mimeograph machine was for. However, unlike people just a few years my senior, I grew up amidst what will no doubt come to be seen as an epochal event, the revolution in data processing and telecommunications that gave us everything from personal computers to mobile phones to the 24-hour news cycle. I'm not saying that somebody in their 40s can't wrap their heads around these modern marvels, or that there are many computer scientists & engineers older than me who are doing things I myself couldn't even begin to comprehend, but they were certainly at a later stage of brain development than those of us my age and younger by the time they were introduced.


Our family got it's first of many computers, an Atari 400, in 1980. My dad was an early adopter, as he's always had a penchant for gadgetry. That said, there is a disconnect between myself and my parents when it comes to technology. My mom still doesn't know how to use e-mail or send a text message (two things I'm secretly grateful for), and my dad apparently has yet to find a better use for a computer than playing solitaire or checking stock quotes. For me, growing up with microprocessors and modems that got exponentially faster every year, the possibilities were more limitless. For one thing, inside a computer, national borders are meaningless. I've been interacting with people from a multitude of countries since I was in high school, all it took was a 2400 bps modem and finding people who could speak English. We take websites like eBay & PayPal for granted now, but the notion of having a global marketplace with an instant payment system is pretty revolutionary stuff in historical terms.


And it's a revolution that's still playing out, as we've seen recently in Egypt and elsewhere. This is a generation that is just coming into it's own, and as should be expected from a group weaned on satellite tv and the internet, the expectation of instant gratification is high. Egyptians too poor to travel abroad could go online and see that people in other parts of the world took for granted the same freedoms that they desired. It's the great promise of the freeing power of mass communications technology that our neo-liberal State Department has pushed for the last decade...until WikiLeaks came along.


The long-term implications of what's taken place over the last twenty years will take decades to sort out. Some have wondered whether our brains can psychologically deal with all the information that we're now bombarded with. Technotopians counter that this is just going to unlock parts of the 80% of our brains that we're not currently using and human evolution will advance as a result. Who knows? We're only now coming to terms with the darker side of the automotive revolution that changed this country after World War II. And as technology marches on, it's hard to fix an end date. We've reached a point where microchips can't get much smaller and still work effectively, so it may be close. There's no "new" technology in the iPad 2, for instance, just improved and repackaged ones, some of which have been around since the early '80s. What is clear to me is that the younger generation and those that follow are likely to have much different views of the world than our parents. That's always true, of course, but I think that today's youth are much more flexible than their forebears. It's out of necessity, mostly. We can't expect to find a job that will employ and feed us for forty years and give out a nice pension at the end, because they just don't exist anymore.


In part, I think the reason younger people have embraced low-tech solutions to the world's problems, like riding bicycles or producing food locally, is out of a desire to reconnect with "simpler times". If you attend an event like the Renegade Craft Fair, you may be surprised at the entrepreneurial spirit on display. Hundreds of small businesspeople, selling handmade whatnots, to people who appreciate such things. It may seem overly precious to some, but none, or few, of them seem to have set out to become huge financial successes, and there's a cooperative attitude which is refreshing. Many business owners I know in Chicago work out trades for their services, libertarians would no doubt be appalled at such a collectivist mindset. Lest we forget, Portland, often seen as the incubator of such things, saw the country's largest protest against the Iraq invasion in 2003, nearly 100,000 people on the streets of what George H.W. Bush christened "Little Beirut". Mostly young people, and now that they're older they are trying to break the country's addiction to petroleum products in myriad ways.


Every generation that comes along bemoans the mess left by the prior one, it's nothing new. But it's certainly true that the leaders of the last sixty years have really done a number on this country. I take a small amount of solace in thinking that it could be worse, we could be Greece. Then this morning, I read this opinion piece from a Greek newspaper which could just as easily apply to the United States. The youth are just as undervalued in this country, as older workers are either unwilling or, as has been the case with my parents, unable to afford to retire, it's left huge numbers of recent college graduates (myself included) unemployed or underemployed. an entire generation's potential is being squandered, largely due to economic conditions. Something has got to give, I hope it doesn't take a Greek-style collapse (either in the financial sense, or of the kind that left it in literal ruins) to awaken the change.

I Care About Detroit

There are many reasons why one cares about a city. Why you care about it's problems, its people, and, indeed, its very future. Is it friendly, warm, hospitable? And are there good job opportunities, educational facilities and a cultural center? Are you proud to call it your hometown? When you come right down to it, I venture to say you'll all agree to a resounding "Yes" when you're talking about Detroit.   -   Smokey Robinson, 1967

One of my earliest posts on this blog shared the 60s promotional film Detroit: City on the Move with you all. That post has received a fair bit of traffic from search engines over the months, I think because people are clearly fascinated by the city's decline, and ruin porn exposés can be found all over the internet.

During the Super Bowl the other night, Chrysler's "Imported from Detroit" ad featuring Eminem garnered a lot of positive buzz, even from people who don't really like cars or Eminem, for offering what was likely the first positive media view of the city in decades. You may have missed this, though. Last summer, iconic French bootmaker Palladium released a film featuring, uh, Johnny Knoxville showcasing some of the more positive things going on in Motown. It features interviews with local artists & entrpreneurs, as well as musicians like Martha Reeves, Wayne Kramer of the MC5, techno pioneer Carl Craig and members of the Dirtbombs, and a soundtrack that draws on the city's long and storied musical history. Hipster street style meets urbanism, and it's surprisingly effective stuff on both levels.

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

There's more on the brand's "explorations" page, with pieces on abandoned buildings in New York, Cold War relics in Berlin and London pirate radio. Excellent marketing, in my opinion. (It worked on me.)

PS: I can state with 99.997% certainty that this is the only time Eminem or Johnny Knoxville will be mentioned on this blog.

Kultur Takes the Ruhr

Whoops, no posts in the month of May. Sorry about that. I don't know how some people make the time to update their blogs regularly with interesting content. Rest assured, I have not abandoned this thing, I have a few posts I'm working over in my head that should arise in the coming weeks. Patience is a virtue, or so I am told.

I was watching the Deutsche Welle news last week (what, doesn't everybody?) and saw a really interesting piece on the Ruhr Valley's preparations to be one of the European Capitals of Culture 2010 under the theme "Art, Culture & Energy". I've been hoping that the video would go up so I could share it with you lovely people, but so far no dice. So to break it down for you, Germany's Ruhr Valley contains the cities of Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Dortmund and is home to about twelve million people. It was once Germany's industrial and coal mining heartland, though most of the factories have since migrated to cheaper realms in the former East Germany and beyond. The folks in charge of regional planning have apparently been listening quite intently to the likes of Richard Florida and have been busy reinventing the area's image. Where once stood smokestacks, now there are, um, three hundred and eleven luftballons.

The EU's Culture Capital program is ostensibly a chance for cities to showcase their unique character to tourists, which on the surface seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But as Andrew Ross has written, it's become little more than a feeding trough for real estate developers at the expense of the displaced working classes. Writing about Glasgow's experience as the Culture Capital for 1990, Ross posits that "the familiar lopsided footprint of neoliberalism made itself visible in a system of labor apartheid that displayed an ever-firmer spatial demarcation between the residences, workplaces, and playgrounds of the ascendant professional service classes and those of the low-wage and unemployed populations at the city margins. From the standpoint of arts practitioners themselves, a 2004 study showed that the progressive legacy of 1990 was widely perceived to have been squandered by the data-focused bureaucracy in charge of cultural policy in the intervening years. An obsession with audience numbers and quotas had inhibited the sustainable growth of jobs in the sector." (Ross 2009; pp 30-32) He goes on to cite a 2007 Demos report by saying "city boosters who followed the model were locked into...a 'cultural arms race,' competing for finite pools of investment resources, cultural workers, audiences, tourist streams, and signature archistectural icons." (Ibid.) As a witness to Chicago's recent failed bid for the Olympics I can relate.

Florida is not without his critics, but his ideas (most of which he amalgamated from other sources, but I digress) are popular among city managers worldwide...and he has made quite a lot of money selling communities his services. But honestly, the way small cities are latching onto this bandwagon is a bit silly. Not to pick on Duluth, Minnesota--I'm sure it's a lovely town for three months out of the year--but does anybody honestly believe that anybody will be drawn there just because the city paints a few bike lanes and cuts tax breaks to art galleries? Don't misunderstand me, those are nice things to have, but the way Florida is selling these ideas as a panacea to dying towns seems a bit disingenuous. It may work for some, and places like Pittsburgh have had success, but the idea that Pittsburgh's revival is reproducible anywhere is preposterous. The much sought-after "creatives" are a limited resource, and most of them tend to be drawn to places that have already reached a critical mass. Large ponds may translate to a lot of small fish, but it also means more ideas being bounced around and more "creativity", however you want to define it. For all of it's qualities, Duluth lacks two critical components to revitalizing a city: connections with the outside world and existing, philanthropic wealth. You need one or the other to get on your way. I'm sure Duluth has it's prominent families that made fortunes from the iron mines, but nothing close to Pittsburgh's collection of Mellons and Heinzes and Scaifes and their associated charitable endowments.