Cities as classrooms: The Urban Thinkscape project
Design Walk October 2015 Downtown Pontiac: https://youtu.be/s5r3AzctuZQ
Showing posts with label 21st Century Cities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 21st Century Cities. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Incubators, Innovation, Ideas, Smart Cities
India’s Kumbh Mela Is Used as an Incubator for Smart City Startup Ideas
- Wall Street Journal - by Krishna Pokharel, August 3, 2015 -
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2015/08/03/can-studying-the-kumbh-mela-pilgrimage-help-with-modis-smart-cities/
Technology experts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and their associates think it can.
The months long Kumbh Mela is a Hindu festival that takes place once every three years rotating around four cities—Haridwar, Allahabad, Nashik and Ujjain. In July, the western Indian city of Nashik, usually known for its vineyards and little else, took its turn, transforming itself into a metropolis with increased temporary housing, healthcare and policing as its population surges during the pilgrimage.
The peak of the current festival, scheduled to last just over a year, is expected to be in August and September, when devotees will take a dip in the Godavari River on four different auspicious days. About eight million pilgrims are expected to participate in each of those days. Hindus believe doing so will wash away their sins and rid them of the cycle of death and rebirth.
To provide those solutions, they are holding ‘Kumbhathons’—weeklong innovation camps attended by citizens, governments and corporates.
Sandip Shinde, co-founder of the Kumbha Foundation, a non-profit that has organized five Kumbhathon events in the past 18 months in association with MIT, says the project aims to develop solutions that can be rolled out to other Indian cities.
“The main objective and goal for everybody including MIT Media Lab and people working around is actually creating impact on the citizens and bring innovation culture in city like Nashik so that it can be replicated in any other city in India,” said Mr. Shinde, who is on a sabbatical for a year from his job at Tata Consultancy Services 532540.BY +2.02%, one of India’s biggest outsourcers, in Pune to volunteer at Kumbh Mela.
- An MIT Kumbhathon innovation, pop-up housing, was erected for Kumbh Mela visitors in Nashik.
- John Werner
“It’s about helping the smart citizens make their cities smart,” said John Werner, head of innovations and new ventures for Camera Culture Group at MIT Media Lab that has been spearheading the Kumbhathon. “The fact that people have these mobile devices and these tools that they can use; we can change the future of cities.”
The idea for the innovation camps emerged about two years back when two Nashik natives, Sunil Khandbahale, developer of Khandbahale, a multilingual online dictionary, and Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at MIT Media Lab, met. “We were looking for right opportunity to sensitize [a] community for innovation and Kumbh Mela event was just the perfect match to experiment looking at its scale and diversified challenges like housing, transportation, sanitation, health, policing, security, communication, food, safety, crowd steering etc.,” Mr. Khandbahale said in an emailed response to questions.
“Indians have a familiar ability to adapt to varying circumstances in seeming chaos but we know that there is a method to their madness,” Mr. Raskar at MIT said. “Kumbhathon aims to concentrate this spirit of innovation.”
The first Kumbhathon event was held in January 2014 in Nashik. Students from engineering and medical colleges in the city were invited to join in and more than 1,050 potential problems that arise at the Kumbh Mela were crowd sourced from students and citizens. Eventually, the innovators chose 12 problems to focus on, including housing, transportation and sanitation, and developed prototypes of their solutions.
Some of those ideas have already emerged as mobile apps and projects.
An official Kumbh Mela smartphone app gives pilgrims information about the routes they should take for bathing in the holy Godavari River, the center of Kumbh Mela, as well as live traffic information, availability of hotel rooms and hospital beds and the location of stores and banks.
An epidemic tracker app gives doctors and authorities information for tracing any likely spread of disease during the pilgrimage by capturing location, gender, age group, symptoms about the patients. The MediTracker app gives information about ambulances and hospitals in the vicinity.
Meanwhile, the Kumbhathon’s crowd-steering project helps authorities determine how many people have congregated at a particular location using signals collected from mobile phone towers. “It is of immense help in crowd management,” said Praveen Gedam, commissioner of Nashik Municipal Corporation. “Based on the analytics of data we are receiving from nearest mobile towers we can predict the movement of crowd—how it is moving from one part of city to other part of city.”
The pop-up housing project helps conveniently house thousands of sadhus, or Hindu holy men, who congregate during the festival.
The next Kumbhathon event is scheduled for January and the Kumbha Foundation and MIT Media Lab are in the process of registering the Nashik Innovation Center, a non-profit company, to provide common space to the innovators and experts “to help progress innovations and build entrepreneurial skills,” according to Mr. Werner at MIT Media Lab.
“Originally, it was like how we scale up to pop-up cities like Kumbh Mela,” said Mr. Werner. “Now we are thinking this not just of Kumbh Mela and pop-up cities but help non-metro cities reach their potential.”
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Trending Towards VALUE - Whole Child, Whole Person, Whole Communities, Whole Society
Whole Child Development Is Undervalued
APRIL 3, 2015
Child development should inspire lifelong learning across different spaces and communities.
Research suggests that "whole child development," not routine or standardized classroom-based learning, empowers children as creative and engaged citizens who can strengthen the wellbeing of a whole society. It is crucial, then, to nurture their creative abilities to express themselves, understand others, and navigate complex amounts of information so that they can confidently solve the problems of a world that's changing faster than ever.
The question is how to make such an approach both systemic and sustainable.
APRIL 3, 2015
Child development should inspire lifelong learning across different spaces and communities.
Research suggests that "whole child development," not routine or standardized classroom-based learning, empowers children as creative and engaged citizens who can strengthen the wellbeing of a whole society. It is crucial, then, to nurture their creative abilities to express themselves, understand others, and navigate complex amounts of information so that they can confidently solve the problems of a world that's changing faster than ever.
The question is how to make such an approach both systemic and sustainable.
Whole Person
Socio-emotional, physical, creative, and cognitive capacities are deeply intertwined and equally important in ensuring a child's wellbeing, learning, and growth. (That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone studying or supporting children's learning.)
Nobel laureate James Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, has shown that the non-cognitive skills emerging in early childhood are among the strongest predictors of adult outcomes. And Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed, has continued to emphasize the crucial role that soft skills play in character formation and building on persistence, curiosity, and even grit -- the "passion and perseverance for very long-term goals," according to psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth.
The development of these qualities, which rely on an individual's self-worth and self-control, critically outperform any other positive measures of children's long-term outcomes, whether academically or intellectually.
The most impactful way of supporting such skills is associated with helping children feel in control of their learning process. This can be done by talking with children about the best approach to a particular task and having them describe the strategy they intend to test, for example, or asking the child to consider what could go wrong and how they might improve a task if completing it again.
Using relevant playful and experimental activities in the classroom require the teacher not only to encourage the learner to plan, monitor, and evaluate his or her own processes, but also to support the learner with tools like storyboarding, mind maps, and narrative structures.
Socio-emotional, physical, creative, and cognitive capacities are deeply intertwined and equally important in ensuring a child's wellbeing, learning, and growth. (That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone studying or supporting children's learning.)
Nobel laureate James Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, has shown that the non-cognitive skills emerging in early childhood are among the strongest predictors of adult outcomes. And Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed, has continued to emphasize the crucial role that soft skills play in character formation and building on persistence, curiosity, and even grit -- the "passion and perseverance for very long-term goals," according to psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth.
The development of these qualities, which rely on an individual's self-worth and self-control, critically outperform any other positive measures of children's long-term outcomes, whether academically or intellectually.
The most impactful way of supporting such skills is associated with helping children feel in control of their learning process. This can be done by talking with children about the best approach to a particular task and having them describe the strategy they intend to test, for example, or asking the child to consider what could go wrong and how they might improve a task if completing it again.
Using relevant playful and experimental activities in the classroom require the teacher not only to encourage the learner to plan, monitor, and evaluate his or her own processes, but also to support the learner with tools like storyboarding, mind maps, and narrative structures.
Whole Communities
Institutions like Reggio Emilia in Italy, or High Tech High in San Diego, California are grounding their pedagogy in approaches that integrate the resources of a strong, local community. They remind us that healthy human development is often achieved through a child's interactions and experiences in a stimulating environment.
The schools that are most effective take children to museums and art galleries, use the local environment, including local parks, and invite members of local business, sports, or arts communities to play active roles in children's experiences.
Harvard Professor Jack Shonkoff pulled together evidence a decade ago describing that a child's interaction with communities strongly influences cognitive development, and in particular, that the most significant influences on healthy growth and psychological wellbeing stem from attachment to parents and caregivers, the role of early exploration, and the transmission of beliefs and values from caring others.
The three most effective ways for educators to respond to children's need and support their connection to the surrounding environment are:
- Applying flexible use of time and space, as children need sufficient time to dive into an activity and work at their own pace without pressure
- Ensuring strong opportunities for peer collaboration by, for example, using meaningful group projects to build teamwork skills
- Building a respectful relationship between teachers and learners, where dialogue and inquiries are encouraged.
New technologies and project-based activities greatly enhance these opportunities, like the Scratch platform from the MIT Media Lab, which allows for a safe community of peers to actively comment, support. and hack each other's creations. Also, a more radical shift toward the use of new digital communities for learning is illustrated by Michael Wesch. He says that there is no longer any real reason why young people shouldn't experiment with technologies as if they were researchers diving into the world of information, document what they do, and use social media as a pedagogical tool to receive feedback from peers and encourage critical thinking.
Institutions like Reggio Emilia in Italy, or High Tech High in San Diego, California are grounding their pedagogy in approaches that integrate the resources of a strong, local community. They remind us that healthy human development is often achieved through a child's interactions and experiences in a stimulating environment.
The schools that are most effective take children to museums and art galleries, use the local environment, including local parks, and invite members of local business, sports, or arts communities to play active roles in children's experiences.
Harvard Professor Jack Shonkoff pulled together evidence a decade ago describing that a child's interaction with communities strongly influences cognitive development, and in particular, that the most significant influences on healthy growth and psychological wellbeing stem from attachment to parents and caregivers, the role of early exploration, and the transmission of beliefs and values from caring others.
The three most effective ways for educators to respond to children's need and support their connection to the surrounding environment are:
- Applying flexible use of time and space, as children need sufficient time to dive into an activity and work at their own pace without pressure
- Ensuring strong opportunities for peer collaboration by, for example, using meaningful group projects to build teamwork skills
- Building a respectful relationship between teachers and learners, where dialogue and inquiries are encouraged.
New technologies and project-based activities greatly enhance these opportunities, like the Scratch platform from the MIT Media Lab, which allows for a safe community of peers to actively comment, support. and hack each other's creations. Also, a more radical shift toward the use of new digital communities for learning is illustrated by Michael Wesch. He says that there is no longer any real reason why young people shouldn't experiment with technologies as if they were researchers diving into the world of information, document what they do, and use social media as a pedagogical tool to receive feedback from peers and encourage critical thinking.
Whole Societies
At a societal level, these changes seem radical, but they fundamentally rely on how adults imagine the purpose of children in society. Phillipe Aries retraced the history of childhood, from the European medieval to the 20th century, and found that it was not until the industrial revolution that the idea of "childhood as we know it" settled in. Children were seen as fragile beings (to be protected and safeguarded), as unruly spirits (to be disciplined), as empty vessels (to be filled), or as incomplete adults (to be trained).
In modern society, we have to pay attention to children's own thoughts, needs, and rights as individuals. Children are eager to learn and participate, and should be considered citizens at the moment of birth -- they are born curious and competent, connected to the world with ethical thinking, and in a perpetual state of active learning. Maintaining early childhood's playfulness, curiosity, and experimentation throughout schooling is critical in developing the collaborative culture, problem-solving skills, and independent goal-setting that we expect from adults.
Educators and adults can support lifelong learning environments by following practical suggestions found in the recent Cultures of Creativity study:
Nurturing both desire to learn and effective ways of experimenting with things and ideas are at the heart of a whole child approach, but require a whole culture around the child to extend this into schooling and adult life.
Editor’s Note: This post is inspired by one of the eight patterns appearing in educators' innovative approaches in the Future of Learning report, "Equipping Adults to be Changemakers in Learning," by Ashoka and the LEGO Foundation.
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Creativity in Teaching Practice
At a societal level, these changes seem radical, but they fundamentally rely on how adults imagine the purpose of children in society. Phillipe Aries retraced the history of childhood, from the European medieval to the 20th century, and found that it was not until the industrial revolution that the idea of "childhood as we know it" settled in. Children were seen as fragile beings (to be protected and safeguarded), as unruly spirits (to be disciplined), as empty vessels (to be filled), or as incomplete adults (to be trained).
In modern society, we have to pay attention to children's own thoughts, needs, and rights as individuals. Children are eager to learn and participate, and should be considered citizens at the moment of birth -- they are born curious and competent, connected to the world with ethical thinking, and in a perpetual state of active learning. Maintaining early childhood's playfulness, curiosity, and experimentation throughout schooling is critical in developing the collaborative culture, problem-solving skills, and independent goal-setting that we expect from adults.
Educators and adults can support lifelong learning environments by following practical suggestions found in the recent Cultures of Creativity study:
Nurturing both desire to learn and effective ways of experimenting with things and ideas are at the heart of a whole child approach, but require a whole culture around the child to extend this into schooling and adult life.
Creativity in Teaching Practice
Thursday, July 9, 2015
Walkable Urbanism (Original Intention Behind the Design of Phoenix Center)
July 05, 2015 8:00 a.m.
As walkable urbanism grows, more investment is necessary
Christopher Coes (left) is managing director of Locus: Responsible Real Estate Developers and Investors, a program of Smart Growth America.
Chris Leinberger is the Charles Bendit Distinguished Scholar and Research Professor at the George Washington University School of Business and chair of its center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis.
Chris Leinberger is the Charles Bendit Distinguished Scholar and Research Professor at the George Washington University School of Business and chair of its center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis.
Across the country, metro areas like Washington, D.C., and Boston have been experiencing significant shifts toward walkable urbanism, particularly in this most recent real estate cycle, making these areas among the most walkable nationwide. Research released last month at Locus Developers' Michigan Leadership Summit tells us that metro Detroit — and Michigan overall — are beginning to see a similar trend, though not as advanced.
It would have been unthinkable 15 years ago that Detroit would be shifting toward walkable urban development, it having long followed the drivable suburban model. Not surprisingly, this drivable suburban development was propelled by the industry — car and truck manufacturing — that made Michigan one of the wealthiest regions in the world during the 20th century. However, we are seeing the pendulum moving back.
It's clear that Michigan metro areas are in favor of walkable urban places, or what the report calls "WalkUPs." The Detroit-Ann Arbor area is a clear leader in this shift.
For rental apartment and for-sale residential, the price premiums associated with WalkUPs are even greater. Multifamily rental apartments in WalkUPs achieve rents per square foot approximately 28 percent higher than in drivable suburban areas. For-sale residential prices are 57 percent higher in WalkUPs than in drivable subdivision locations.
Finally, more and more income property development — which includes office, retail, hotel, rental apartments and for-sale residential — is concentrating in WalkUPs. Although WalkUPs and walkable neighborhoods make up only 3 percent of the metro region's land, they have accounted for 25 percent of income property development in the latest cycle, up from only 6 percent from 1992 to 2000.
Downtown and Midtown Detroit got an enormous shot in the arm in 2010 when Quicken Loans announced that it was moving its headquarters downtown. Other large companies and residential development and retail began to follow.
It is no coincidence that these moves have been accompanied by major announcements of public-private partnerships and more than $2 billion of further investment in new construction and development over the past three to four years. And the new M-1 Rail is under construction, which will result in even more development, increased tax base and jobs.
While the trend toward more walkable development is evident, Detroit-Ann Arbor still has a long way to go, having just 30 established WalkUPs, only six in the city of Detroit and many quite embryonic. Boston and D.C. have double that amount. Downtown Detroit presents the greatest opportunity.
Realizing Detroit's potential in walkable urbanism will require continued investment in infrastructure, especially the development of a true regional rapid transit system along the rest of Woodward Avenue into Oakland County and on the region's other major transit corridors. Overlay zoning at these WalkUPs and walkable neighborhoods to allow for high-density, mixed-use development is crucial.
With investments in infrastructure, the shift to walkable urbanism presents an opportunity for real estate developers, investors and residents to promote economic development while achieving environmental sustainability.
Walkable urban places can and should be mixed-income as well. The research has shown that the combination of housing and transportation costs on the typical metro Detroit household budget is about 8 percent lower in a walkable place than in a drivable suburban location due to lower transportation costs.
A growing body of evidence shows that college-educated people under the age of 35 prefer walkable urban places. Attracting and retaining these educated young professionals is critical for economic development in Michigan.
Yes, a "walkable Detroit" is a new chapter in the Motor City's history, but the landscape is changing. These walkable areas are critical to making this area competitive for the future and an even greater place to live, work and play.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Innovation Districts Update: Best Practices - Incubators as Catalysts, Tech Shops, Place-Led Development, Inclusive Growth
One year after: Observations on the rise of innovation districts
In the year since we released “The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geography of Innovation in America,” Brookings has visited or interacted with dozens of leaders in burgeoning innovation districts in the United States and Europe. In so doing, we’ve sharpened our knowledge of what’s happening on the ground and gained some important insights into how cities and metros are embracing this new paradigm of economy-shaping, place-making, and network-building.
Innovation districts capture the remarkable spatial pattern underway in the innovation economy—the heightened clustering of anchor institutions, companies, and start-ups in small geographic areas of central cities across the United States, Europe, and other global-trading regions.
The rise of innovation districts has been situated against the familiar backdrop of suburban corporate campuses and science parks. Accessible only by car, these spatially isolated corridors place little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing, and recreation.
By contrast, in our report we found the rise of urban innovation hubs to be the organic result of profound economic and demographic forces that are altering how we live and work. The growing application of “open innovation”—where companies work with other firms, inventors, and researchers to generate new ideas and bring them to market—has revalued proximity, density, and other attributes of cities. At the same time, the growing preference of young talented workers to congregate in vibrant neighborhoods that offer choices in housing, transportation, and amenities has made urban and urbanizing areas increasingly attractive.
We also found that innovation districts uniformly contain a mix of economic, physical, and networking assets. Economic assets are the firms, institutions, and organizations that drive, cultivate, or support an innovation-rich environment. Physical assets are the public and privately owned spaces—buildings, open spaces, streets, and other infrastructure—designed and organized to stimulate new and higher levels of connectivity, collaboration, and innovation. Lastly, networking assets are the relationships between actors—such as between individuals, firms, and institutions—that have the potential to generate, sharpen, and/or accelerate the advancement of ideas. These assets, taken together, create an innovation ecosystem—the synergistic relationship between people, firms, and place that facilitates idea generation and advances commercialization.
One year later, innovation districts continue to rise. What have we learned about how they are evolving?
First, the model of innovation districts has been embraced, co-opted, and (in some cases) misappropriated, further reinforcing the need for grounding this work in empirically based evidence.
A simple Google search will reveal the extent to which the language of “innovation districts” (or “innovation quarters,“ “innovation neighborhoods,” or “innovation corridors”) has rapidly permeated the field of urban and metropolitan economic development and place-making.
In some places, this labeling is being accurately used by globally recognized research institutions (e.g., Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Drexel University in Philadelphia) that are both experiencing extraordinary growth near their campuses as well as designing intentional efforts to build on their distinctive assets. In communities as diverse as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis in the United States and Manchester and Sheffield in England, local leaders are conducting deep empirical analysis to understand their competitive advantages and existing weaknesses within their innovation ecosystem. They are exploring what it means to encourage greater collaboration and cooperation across their institutions, firms, and entrepreneurs. And they are exploring ways to better create “place” so as to increase overall vitality, facilitate innovation, and spur the growth of new businesses and jobs.
In other places, the nomenclature reflects an aspiration—and is spurring more deliberate efforts by local stakeholders to grow distinctive innovation ecosystems. In cities like Albuquerque, N.M., Chattanooga, Tenn., Chicago, Ill., Durham, N.C., and San Diego, Calif., local leaders are using the innovation district paradigm as a platform to measure their current conditions, develop strategies for addressing gaps and challenges, and build coalitions of stakeholders that can together help realize a unified vision for innovative growth. Some of these budding districts represent typologies not outlined in our report but that are ripe for future research, including “start-up” enclaves in or near downtowns of cities that lack a major anchor as well as “public markets” that blend locally produced food products and crafts with maker spaces, digital design, and other innovations in the creative arts.
There is one unfortunate trend in the rising use of the "innovation district" lexicon. In a number of cities, local stakeholders have applied the label to a project or area that lacks the minimum threshold of innovation-oriented firms, start-ups, institutions, or clusters needed to create an innovation ecosystem. This appears to result either from the chase to jump on the latest economic development bandwagon, the desire to drive up demand and real estate prices, or sometimes a true lack of understanding of what an innovation district actually is. The motivation for real estate developers to adopt the moniker seems clear: to achieve a price premium for their commercial, residential, and retail rents. Yet these sites are typically a collection of service-sector activities with little focus on the innovation economy. The lesson: labeling something innovative does not make it so.
From all these observations, it is clear that the field needs a routinized way to measure the starting assets of innovation districts—both to separate true districts from “in name only” ones as well as to give individual communities a platform for developing targeted strategies going forward. This means both running the numbers—conducting a quantitative audit—and undertaking a more qualitative assessment of strengths and weaknesses. Irrespective of their phase of development, innovation districts must evaluate the extent to which they have a critical mass of economic, physical, and networking assets to collectively generate the vitality that these districts demand. They need to evaluate the competitive advantages they have in certain economic sectors and learn how to cultivate them. And they need to ensure that they have the connectivity, diversity, and quality of place necessary to create a unique and vibrant environment in which innovation can thrive.
To facilitate this process, we are working in close collaboration with Mass Economics and the Project for Public Spaces to develop an audit template and tool. Over the next year, we intend to sharpen this tool in a subset of innovation districts across the country and then encourage others to employ it in their own established or burgeoning districts.
Second, the core economic assets of innovation districts are not fixed; in fact, many innovation districts are being created or enhanced by the relocation of major anchor facilities as institutions strive to achieve the highest return on investment.
The conventional notion of an “anchor” institution is that it is solidly weighted in a particular place. Yet over the past decade a substantial number of innovative companies and advanced educational and research institutions have moved key facilities and units as a means of generating greater innovation output. Examples of new locations include the University of California-San Francisco’s biotechnology campus in Mission Bay (2003); the University of Washington’s medical research hub in Seattle’s South Lake Union (2005); Brown University’s medical school in downtown Providence, R.I. (2011); Duke’s Clinical Research Institute in downtown Durham (2013); Carnegie Mellon University’s Integrative Media Program in the Brooklyn Navy Yard (2013); and, most famously, the new Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City (2015).
These “first mover” relocations show how corporate and university leaders are departing from the tradition of building new facilities within their existing footprint and are willing to seek out new areas (and even new cities) to retain, or achieve, competitive advantage in their respective clusters and fields. As Cornell Professor Ronald Ehrenberg said about his school’s isolated Ithaca, N.Y. campus, “It is very, very difficult for us to do the kind of development through tech transfer that a place like Stanford or Berkeley can do in San Francisco or Harvard or MIT can do in Boston.” Our strong sense in talking with leaders around the country is that we are still at the early stage of corporate and university relocations given the extent to which urban areas have been revalued. The physical relocation of key innovation assets has now become a critical competitiveness strategy for companies, universities, and even states.
In some cases, the “unanchoring of anchors” is also compelling local leaders to rethink the traditional borders and boundaries of the innovation economy. In Philadelphia, for example, University City has always been recognized as a settled innovation hub, given the co-location of such anchor institutions as Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University City Science Center, and others. The recent decision of Comcast to consolidate its corporate presence in the downtown area and build its major new Innovation and Technology Center less than 10 blocks from 30th Street Station and the Drexel Campus is convincing some leaders to “stretch” Philadelphia’s University City district to incorporate this new corporate giant.
Third, almost all innovation districts have significant work ahead to understand the rising value of “place” in the innovation ecosystem and leverage or reconfigure their physical assets to create dense and dynamic communities.
While our paper dissected various types of physical assets to help practitioners understand their individual roles and value, the more important message to convey now is the imperative to combine and activate physical assets in ways that create vibrant “places.” The Partnership for Public Spaces aptly describes place as “…environments in which people have invested meaning over time. A place has its own history—a unique cultural and social identity that is defined by the way it is used and the people who use it.”1
Our review of innovation districts, including those cited in our paper, reveals that many have not yet maximized the potential for creating lively communities in which their residents and workers feel invested, reducing the potential innovation output of these communities. When designed and programmed well, a district’s public spaces—whether within buildings or outside of them—facilitate open innovation by offering numerous opportunities to meet, network, and brainstorm. Strong places entice residents and workers to remain in the area off hours, extending the opportunities for collaboration. Strong places create a culturally and educationally enriched environment that strengthens human interaction, knowledge, and motivation.
While some university-led districts have made some improvements over the years, districts anchored by medical campuses have significant work ahead. These spaces were designed as isolated fortresses that valued parking over walking (ironic given their health mission), with little or no attention paid to amenities, cultural activities, retail, or housing. Significantly, some medical campuses are often located in close proximity to downtowns, as part of universities, or near organic entrepreneurial communities (e.g., the proximity of Oklahoma City’s Health District to Automobile Alley). This raises the potential for smart (and related) place-making activities in a nearby area and reinforces the need to rethink traditional geographies and artificial boundaries when considering interventions.
Fourth, the rapid growth and impact of national intermediaries (what we call innovation cultivators) shows real promise in helping innovation districts grow and steward their networking assets and stimulating new innovation opportunities.
The past year has seen substantial growth in multicity intermediaries along with scores of locally grown accelerators and incubators. It appears more than ever that intermediaries are increasingly the catalyst to growing innovation and entrepreneurial energy within local districts and across start-ups, small and medium-sized enterprises, and, even to some extent, large companies and research institutions. They are designed to think and act horizontally, encouraging people and firms to interact and work together in ways and at a scale previously unseen.
A growing and increasingly important role for intermediaries is helping innovation districts evolve from the traditional “research and development” model to a “search and development” one, where crucial answers to their innovation questions and technological challenges are discovered by finding and collaborating with other firms. Some districts immediately recognized this potential and have gone to great lengths to grow, lure, and fund the development of multiple intermediaries across their districts.
The Cortex Innovation Community in St. Louis has, in a short period, clustered new buildings owned and/or supported by a number of well-respected intermediaries. These development and programmatic moves are effectively creating a new focal point for Cortex innovation activities. The new Cambridge Innovation Center, which offers space for start-ups combined with access to venture capital firms, professional services, and a plug-and-play physical environment, is already at 85 percent occupancy. A newly constructed Tech Shop—a do-it-yourself “maker space” equipped with industrial tools, machinery, and technology to support entrepreneurs—is under construction nearby. The near complete renovation of the Center for Emerging Technologies, which provides training, specialized facilities, and technical support, adds yet another layer of support for entrepreneurs and start-ups. Adding more to this mix is a soon-to-be-constructed space for tech-commercial activities combined with new housing, which will exponentially increase the number of people in a very small radius.2
As one can imagine, this clustering was deeply intentional and viewed as a way to stimulate new relationships, new networks, and the cross-fertilization of ideas; Cortex refers to this deliberate process as “innovation engineering.” We anticipate more innovation districts to follow suit, pursuing, if not cultivating, such intermediaries in their own innovation ecosystems.
Finally, the rise of innovation districts takes place in a national and urban political environment that demands inclusive growth and equitable outcomes.
The past year has seen the elevation of income inequality and social mobility as issues of national and urban significance. With the federal government mired in partisan gridlock, cities have become the vanguard of efforts to raise the minimum wage, expand affordable housing, and extend pre-K education, among other initiatives. These efforts come at a time when the civil unrest in Baltimore and Ferguson has refocused national attention on neighborhoods of high poverty.
Because of their location in the cores of central cities, many established and emerging innovation districts are located several blocks away from distressed communities. This proximity creates an enormous opportunity to show the positive impact that innovative growth can have on inclusive outcomes. Innovation districts create employment opportunities that can be filled by local residents and procurement and construction opportunities that can be fulfilled by local vendors and contractors. The districts generate tax revenues that can be used to fund neighborhood services and neighborhood regeneration. And they offer the potential to link the ample expertise and talent in anchor educational institutions with the needs of neighborhood schools and children.
Recognizing these benefits, local leaders are demonstrating a genuine commitment to growing more inclusive districts. In our work, we’ve seen several early models that could be built on and replicated. In the Barcelona 22@ district, for example, leaders are trying to quantify the growth in service jobs accessible to local and regional residents while, at the same time, connecting those residents to training that increases their skills in more innovation-oriented sectors. Last year, Drexel University opened a new “urban extension center” that offers career-building workshops, legal clinics, and other services to residents of the adjacent Mantua Promise Zone. The Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland’s University Circle district has been working for several years to leverage local purchasing power to create business ownership and employment opportunities for low-income residents. And in Baltimore, the University of Maryland partnered with surrounding neighborhood organizations, residents, and institutions to develop a detailed new plan for building what the Baltimore Southwest Partnership envisions as a “diverse, cohesive community of choice built on mutual respect and shared responsibility.”
These examples represent concrete initiatives to ensure that nearby neighborhoods and their residents connect to and benefit from new growth opportunities in innovation districts and beyond. Scaling such efforts will be critical in the years to come, as the success of these districts will be defined in large part by their broader city and regional impacts.
As Brookings works this year to help unleash more innovation districts across the U.S. and Europe, we will continue to hone our observations and knowledge about trends, challenges, and strategies. We will compile and publish what we have learned for anchor leaders, policymakers, scholars, and practitioners, focusing on many of the issues—accelerating commercialization to improving inclusion—noted above. We will do this work in close collaboration with proven organizations like Mass Economics and Project for Public Spaces. We look forward to contributing to this rapidly changing space via empirical and on-the-ground research, strategy and policy development, convenings, and network building. Stay tuned.
1. Project for Public Spaces, “Placemaking and Place-Led Development: A New Paradigm for Cities of the Future, available at http://www.pps.org/reference/placemaking-and-place-led-development-a-new-paradigm-for-cities-of-the-future/ (June 15, 2015).
2. Email exchange with Dennis Lower, President and CEO, Cortex Innovation Community, May 8, 2015.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Studio and Project-Based Learning is for EVERYONE! (submitted by David Leibowitz)
What Hollywood Can Teach Us About the Future of Work
Recently I visited a movie set. It was the first day of production, and I arrived just as the sun was coming up, but already, around 150 people were busy setting up that day’s shot in an abandoned office building. Crew members were laying electric cables and hanging lights. The cinematographer was in one corner with his team, discussing how the sun’s rays filtered through the window blinds. Carpenters were putting the finishing touches on a convincing prop elevator — I pushed the call button and waited, until I finally realized it was a fake.
I was there as a “technical adviser”: The movie involved some financial events that I’ve reported on, and the filmmakers wanted to ask me questions as they set up their scenes. But I spent much of the day asking questions of my own, trying to figure out something that mystified me as the day went on: Why was this process so smooth? The team had never worked together before, and the scenes they were shooting that day required many different complex tasks to happen in harmony: lighting, makeup, hair, costumes, sets, props, acting. And yet there was no transition time; everybody worked together seamlessly, instantly. The set designer told me about the shade of off-white that he chose for the walls, how it supported the feel of the scene. The costume designer had agonized over precisely which sandals the lead actor should wear. They told me all this, but they didn’t need to tell one another. They just got to work, and somehow it all fit together.
More of us will see our working lives structured around short-term, project-based teams, rather than long-term, open-ended jobs.
This approach to business is sometimes called the “Hollywood model.” A project is identified; a team is assembled; it works together for precisely as long as is needed to complete the task; then the team disbands. This short-term, project-based business structure is an alternative to the corporate model, in which capital is spent up front to build a business, which then hires workers for long-term, open-ended jobs that can last for years, even a lifetime. It’s also distinct from the Uber-style “gig economy,” which is designed to take care of extremely short-term tasks, manageable by one person, typically in less than a day.
With the Hollywood model, ad hoc teams carry out projects that are large and complex, requiring many different people with complementary skills. The Hollywood model is now used to build bridges, design apps or start restaurants. Many cosmetics companies assemble a temporary team of aestheticians and technical experts to develop new products, then hand off the actual production to a factory, which does have long-term employees. (The big studios, actually, work the same way: While the production of the movie is done by temps, marketing and distribution are typically handled by professionals with long-term jobs.)
Our economy is in the midst of a grand shift toward the Hollywood model. More of us will see our working lives structured around short-term, project-based teams rather than long-term, open-ended jobs. There are many reasons this change is happening right now, but perhaps the best way to understand it is that we have reached the end of a hundred-year fluke, an odd moment in economic history that was dominated by big businesses offering essentially identical products. Competition came largely by focusing on the cost side, through making production cheaper and more efficient; this process required businesses to invest tremendous amounts in physical capital — machines and factories — and then to populate those factories with workers who performed routine activities.
Nonmanufacturing corporations followed a similar model: Think of all those office towers filled with clerical staff or accountants or lawyers. That system began to fray in the United States during the 1960s, first in manufacturing, with the economic rise of Germany and Japan. It was then ripped apart by Chinese competition during the 2000s. Enter the Hollywood model, which is far more adaptable. Each new team can be assembled based on the specific needs of that moment and with a limited financial commitment.
Nonmanufacturing corporations followed a similar model: Think of all those office towers filled with clerical staff or accountants or lawyers. That system began to fray in the United States during the 1960s, first in manufacturing, with the economic rise of Germany and Japan. It was then ripped apart by Chinese competition during the 2000s. Enter the Hollywood model, which is far more adaptable. Each new team can be assembled based on the specific needs of that moment and with a limited financial commitment.
Obviously this is good news for management and the owners of capital. But as I saw on set, it’s a surprisingly good system for many workers too, in particular those with highly-sought-after skills. Ask Hollywood producers, and they’ll confirm that there are only a limited number of proven, reliable craftspeople for any given task. Projects tend to come together quickly, with strict deadlines, so those important workers are in a relatively strong negotiating position. Wages among, say, makeup and hair professionals on shoots are much higher than among their counterparts at high-end salons.
Similarly, set builders make more than carpenters and electricians working on more traditional construction sites. It helps that, despite the work’s fleeting nature, Hollywood is strongly unionized, which keeps wages high. According to the rate card of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 728, which represents union film-lighting crews in Los Angeles, even entry-level electricians on a major film set make more than $35 an hour — i.e., more than 40 percent higher than the national average for electricians — and make that wage over 12-hour days.
The Hollywood system offers another advantage for workers: Every weekend’s box-office results provide new information about which skills in their field are valuable. I spoke with one makeup artist about the sudden explosion of zombies on TV and in the movies. One result, she explained, is that a handful of zombie-makeup specialists have profited, and others have begun to study the art. This continual signaling can be upsetting, of course; every year, some workers in the system learn that they have no marketable skills. But on the whole, it is surely kinder than the factory system, in which workers are able to assess their market value only occasionally: when they first start working, when they switch jobs, when they ask for a raise or — worst of all — when they are fired, often en masse.
Automation has long been central to Hollywood, too, but it has less of a disruptive impact because of Hollywood’s project-based model. Some projects, like the CGI-laden work of James Cameron, begin with the sort of large capital outlay in new technology that we normally associate with manufacturing. But most films use technology incrementally, as individual craftspeople in each subfield decide to adopt these innovations.
I spoke with one cinematographer recently who said he was quite worried about the latest Hollywood technology: cameras operated by robots. The movie “Gravity,” for example, used cameras mounted on intelligent robotic arms, which laid the groundwork for the film’s dizzyingly realistic rendering of outer space. But that robot didn’t so much eliminate the need for a traditional cinematographer as clarify what it is, precisely, that cinematographers are able to do. If a cinematographer’s entire skill set was the ability to operate a camera, he surely would struggle to find work in an age of robotic camera operators. But a cinematographer’s value lies in his eye, the deep understanding about how an image moves or thrills an audience. (Grips, the workers who help move the camera through complex shots, might have cause for concern.)
Across the economy as a whole, we’re ending one era of robots and automation — the era of giant, clunky, expensive machines that require enormous technical training to operate — and entering a new era of the human-robot partnership, in which robots can be told what to do without the use of difficult programming languages but with fairly straightforward gestures and commands. The challenge will not be learning how to operate robots; it will be figuring out what, exactly, needs to be done and then using the robot to achieve that.
It’s probably not coincidental that the Hollywood model is ascendant at a time when telling stories, broadly speaking, is at the heart of American business. Because of automation, as well as the expansion of trade with so many low-wage nations, it is all but impossible to make a healthy profit in the United States by simply competing as the low-cost provider of a commoditized product or service. Profits need to come from that extra something that only your company can give, something for which customers are willing to pay a premium. I recently visited a cement factory where I was told a well-practiced story about how this quarry-and-kiln operation was part of the green revolution. Creating and communicating added value comes from many of the same skills that go into a movie: making sure that all of the elements of a product are harmonious, that they communicate the same values.
The Hollywood model isn’t good news for everybody. It clearly rewards education and cultural fluency, which are not distributed evenly throughout the population. But the Hollywood model does suggest that the winners in the new economy will be much greater than just some tiny 1 percent. It will be tens of millions of Americans, many of whom won’t have advanced degrees in engineering, but will have curiosity, creativity and more tools available to help them connect with their audience, whoever that may be.
Adam Davidson is a co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money” and a contributing writer for the magazine.
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