Remarkk!

Cross-posted from Metronauts.ca:

Friday’s Globe and Mail featured a prediction by Jeffrey Rubin, the CIBC World Markets economist, that damage from Hurricane Gustav and other intense storms this season could cause a sudden spike in gas prices to $1.75 a litre.

Every time there is a price spike, the media runs to the local gas station to cover the “pain at the pumps”. But does that pain translate into a change in behaviour? How much of an impact do gas prices have on the commuting public in the GTA? Do increasing gas prices cause people to make different personal transportation decisions, or are households just absorbing the extra costs?

It appears that gas prices are affecting vehicle purchasing decisions (sorry GM), but are consumers switching from private vehicles to other modes of transportation? I would love to see the research on that. (Perhaps our friends at Metrolinx have some sources they can share? If readers know of recent research on this question, please leave a link in the comments.)

Surely demographic factors influence gas price sensitivity and the substitution of one mode of transportation for another. It makes sense that household incomes will affect price sensitivity, with the working poor being hit hardest. At the same time, many service workers need to use private vehicles to get to or perform their work (i.e. not the GO train Bay Street crowd) and have few alternatives. This creates a political problem that will bring calls for action.

But I also believe that there is a relationship to a another familiar demographic trend with political and policy implications: Boomer parents versus their Gen Y children.

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Cross-posted from Metronauts.ca.

The economic conditions that supported the tremendous growth of North American suburbs during the last half of the 20th century - cheap energy and the modern industrial production system - appear to be undergoing a sharp reversal. What do these signals of the future mean for the suburbs and the demands that will be placed on politicians asked to respond to these changes?

You don’t have to be a peak oil theorist to recognize - as James Smith, CEO of Shell UK has - that “the era of easy oil is over”. The reality that we are not going to ever return to an age of cheap oil is just starting to sink into the consciousness of the marketplace, electorate and policy-makers. Scenarios of a serious supply crunch and $200 a barrel oil are no longer on the fringe.

The Freakonomics blog at NY Times recently held a quorum inviting a small group of smart and opinionated experts to imagine the future of American suburbia in 40 years time. The responses vary from James Kunstler’s “the suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins” to the more hopeful “Suburbia will be flexible, it will be smarter, and it will be hybrid” of John Archer.

What about in the Toronto region?

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Pleased with the validation of having our TransitCamp article published in Harvard Business Review (co-authored by Eli, Jay and I), we were looking for ways to continue to develop the TransitCamp community from that first event exactly 1 year ago. We wanted to spread the idea far and wide. Well, it looks like we’ll have our wish - and on a bigger scale than we were imagining.

On the anniversary of the first TransitCamp, I am excited to announce that Remarkk! Consulting, working with a stellar cast from the TransitCamp and OpenCities communities, has been engaged by Metrolinx (aka, the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority) in order to adapt and extend the TransitCamp community across the vast city-region of the GTA and Hamilton and from transit into all aspects of integrated regional mobility, including roads, bike routes and pedestrian experiences.

What is TransitCamp?

TransitCamp is a solutions playground, not a complaints department. TransitCamp is an open creative community.

As described in the Harvard Business Review article [Sick Transit Gloria], we will use open source tools (including unconferences) to bring together community members from across the GTA and Hamilton to participate in intense, participatory and fun face-to-face and online happenings to reimagine the future of the region’s transportation system. This will be, above all, a community-led experience. While we are helping to build the platforms, it is people passionate about transit and transportation issues in the region who will provide the content.

We were delighted to discover that Rob MacIsaac, Chair of Metrolinx and the Metrolinx planning and communications staff are open to new ideas and approaches. The community will have an unprecedented opportunity to contribute to the future of the region in a very tangible way. Metrolinx is responsible for developing an integrated Regional Transportation Plan in 2008 and is the Ontario government agency responsible for deploying at least $17 billion in new capital to projects across the region.

But this is a Camp, so it’s not all serious. We’re also going to have a lot of Campy fun. There will be accordions and chickens and other mayhem.

When is the next TransitCamp?

No date has been set just yet, but we would like to have the next TransitCamp in March. Watch this space! We are planning a series of TransitCamps across the GTA, so we can look forward to doing more than just one event over the coming months.

How do you get involved?

1. Join the TransitCamp Google Group. You will receive updates from the organizers, and also be able to join the discussion and participate in the design of the unconference experience. (Twitterers can follow here. You can also join the Facebook group.)
2. Read about the original TransitCamp experience from February 2007. There are many links of interest on this wiki page.
3. Check out the Regional Transportation Plan papers on the Metrolinx site and start imagining the future.
4. Participate!

What does participation mean?

Help us design the events and the online community spaces and help fill them with your aspirations, ideas and passions. Tell us what you would like to do together as a community.

You can leave comments on this blog post, or start a thread on the Google Group, or blog about it, share videos, photos - express yourself! (tag: transitcamp).

If TransitCamp is a solutions playground, every game on the playground needs basic rules so that the participants can have the best play possible. What kinds of games would you design?

Who is already involved?

Eli Singer; Jay Goldman; Sean Howard; Misha Glouberman; Michele Perras; Daniel Rose; David Eaves; Mark Surman; David Crow; Jed Kilbourn (don’t worry, we’ll get him a blog soon); and soon many others….

FAQ Links:

What is an unconference?

Why “unconferences” are fun conferences

What is a wiki?

torontotransitcamp, transitcamp

A harsh critique from one of Toronto’s best public intellectuals in The Walrus. [Hat tip: Joey , BlogTO and Kelly.]

Kingwell argues that there is nothing new about Toronto as a rich source of ideas and the shift “of Canada from being a resource basket to a linked series of communications nodes held together by thought”, and continues…

But the economic and social conditions of ideas have changed, here as much as elsewhere, putting the city on the brink of a certain kind of identity, and a certain kind of success: a creative-class boom town. My suggestion is that we are thinking about this possibility in exactly the wrong way. The question for Toronto now is not whether ideas can flourish in this place, because demonstrably they do, but what consequences in justice that flourishing will entail. On the edge of new identities and possibilities, what is our idea of justice?

It’s a good read. Kingwell describes the central creative era political faultline around the question “what is the city for?”. Is the city for glory or for justice? Kingwell argues,

Though a city in pursuit of glory may neglect justice, the opposite does not hold: a truly just city is always a glorious one, because it allows greatness even as it looks to the conditions of strangeness posed by the other.

Kingwell warns against a certain “hucksterism” in the creative city agenda that sees the city as a glittering entertainment space for the bohemian bourgeois. You can see this vision being realized everyday in the horrifying marketing campaigns of downtown loft condos targeted at the nouveau-hipster-doofus.

Another great quote:

Toronto is not a city in the modern sense of a unified whole. I suspect it never will be, and probably need not try. Toronto is, instead, a linked series of towns loosely held together by the gravitational force of its downtown core and the pinned-in-place effect of the surveillance rod we call the CN Tower. Like Canada in general, that triumph of communications technology in defiance of all nationalist sense, Toronto is postmodern in both its geography and its psychogeography. There is a physical centre, in the sense of a summing of vectors like a centre of gravity, but there is no normative or mythic one, no single agora or narrative. This much is obvious, and often said. But we continue to fail in grasping its political significance.

Great food for thought, the whole piece is a must read. I’m interested in your take on it.

I delivered a Ignite version of Cocreating the Creative City to the DemoCamp community at DemoCampToronto16. View full screen on Slideshare if you want to be able to read the speaking notes.

If you aren’t familiar with the Ignite format, it is 20 slides, 5 minutes, 15 seconds per slide on an automatic timer. The format enforces quite a lot of discipline on you - and decisions about what to communicate with images, text and speaking notes are fun to play with. This was the first attempt, and I’d love to practice it some more to improve my delivery.

As a follow-up, I am challenging interested members of the DemoCamp community to take the open source code behind FixMyStreet and localize it for Toronto and the GTA. FixMyStreet is a bug tracker for city services that sits outside government control. Users identify, report and map local issues and the system forwards them onto the appropriate local authority for action and follow-up. If some developers in the community want to take this on, I will work with them to connect this to city halls across the region.

Well, it looks like the TransitCamp meme we launched in Toronto back in February has gone round the globe and landed right back in Canada with Vancouver TransitCamp coming up fast on December 8th. Congratulations to Karen (Quinn) for surviving the existential angst and politically charged atmosphere just getting to launch. Karen was at the first TransitCamp in Toronto and has been passionate about bringing it back to her home city of Vancouver ever since.

When David registered the transitcamp.org domain last year, we envisioned that maybe someday many city.transitcamp.org subdomains might propagate for cities around the world that wanted to look at transit and community in a new way. I’m really glad to see someone has taken the ball and run with it.

In February, TransitCamp returns to BarCamp ground zero at Bay Area TransitCamp. We heard some rumblings from Australia, Boston and Washington DC. Time will tell if they surface. If you need advice on organizing a TransitCamp in your city, just send an email. And, hopefully, Toronto TransitCamp ‘08 will be bigger and better.

Technorati Tags: transitcamp

The most recent column by Richard Florida in the Globe and Mail triggered a small storm of confusion and vitriol by commenters on Globeandmail.com. Some context from the article:

I recalled those Saturdays recently when I had my hair cut in Toronto. It turned out that the hairdresser, a stylish young man in his late 20s or early 30s, was once a resident of Birmingham, an upscale suburb of Detroit that I knew well because my wife lived there when we met. Without thinking, I said, “My wife used to get her hair done in Birmingham; what salon did you work in?” “I wasn’t a hairstylist then, man. I worked for General Motors,” he said. “Really?” I said, trying to dig myself out of a hole. “What plant did you work at?” “Plant?” came his reply. “I didn’t work in a factory — I’m a mechanical engineer and I worked on new product development.”

My jaw dropped. This man had quit a high-paying job in a good company so he could cut people’s hair. He had left the creative class because it wasn’t creative enough for him and had gone into a service industry to express his creativity.

Commenters were confused and took Florida to task for mixing the idea of a creative class with the idea that we are all creative. No question, there are tensions between these ideas and I think Florida himself would acknowledge them. The language is slippery. Many people who cite Florida haven’t read him fully, and don’t pickup on this second idea in his work at all.

It is a problem that is partially of Florida’s own making by emphasizing the word “class”. By drawing a huge circle that puts starving artists living in poverty and investment bankers in the same economic class, we lose some key distinctions that are beyond industry and occupational classifications. I argue that to understand who the creatives are, we need to look at another level of analysis: that of values.

There are a set of creative values that tend to be held by creative people. Our companies, industries, economies and societies have for too long ignored those values as frivolous - or a necessary evil when working with creative teams on ad campaigns. As the cultural/brand/design value of products and services in the economy increases relative to functional value, the values held by those that create culture are increasingly difficult to ignore. The group of people who hold this set of values (25% of the U.S. population) is the subject of The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, by Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson. Cultural Creatives share values that distinguish them from Traditionalists and Modernists. I just picked up the book and look forward to digging deeper.

I believe further insight into what is emerging can be seen by combining Florida’s economic lens with Ray and Anderson’s values lens. It is the combination of these two ideas plus the impact of enabling web technologies that I’m interested in exploring in what I call open creative communities.

Technorati Tags: open creative communities, richardflorida

The Creative Convergence Project (I’m the Project Manager) is conducting four World Cafe events to engage a broad cross-section of creative people into conversations about themselves, their creative practice and their neighbourhoods. These events allow us to gather fascinating qualitative data for our research study (take the survey) and are also experiments in new ways of engaging the so-called Creative Class into a conversation that has been stuck inside policy circles for too long.

What do an artist and a software developer have in common? What are our shared dreams for our neighbourhoods and our city? We invite you to join a unique conversation, meet the creative people in your neighbourhood and hope that you will leave with new perspective and new opportunities for your own work.

Download the invitation. Join the Facebook Group.

UPDATE: Slides posted on SlideShare:

| View | Upload your own

I will be in Vancouver this Friday, November 2nd speaking as part of the Downtown Eastside Heart of the City Festival. My talk will be followed by some open dialogue at Gallery Gachet Friday at 4pm:

Co-Creating the Creative City
Presenter: Mark Kuznicki (Toronto)
Friday November 2nd, 2007 4:00pm-7:00pm
Gallery Gachet, 88 E. Cordova

The creative economy and the cultural ecology of the city can be mutually supportive or at odds with one another. The creative city movement has so far failed to engage the passions, energy and values of creative people, or to unite them towards a common goal. Merging ideas from the creative city movement with emergent properties of “open creative communities”, Mark Kuznicki will explore how government and these diverse groups can engage each other towards a shared vision of an inclusive and sustainable 21st century creative city.

Presented by Gallery Gachet, DTES Community Arts Network, Stantec, CCTCA, and Fearless Media. Mark Kuznicki is a researcher, writer and strategy consultant working at the intersection of technology, culture and public policy. He has consulted to the Ontario Min. of Culture, the Dept. of Canadian Heritage, Toronto Artscape and the Ontario College of A&D.

If you are in Vancouver on Friday, please come by and say hi. I hope to see some of the Vancouver BarCamp crowd come out and mix it up with the Van-city downtown culture scene. My experience in Toronto is telling me that linking these two forces together is a powerful way to transform the sense of community and place among a diverse cross-section of creative people.

Facebook Event

By now old news, but worth repeating: Richard Florida is coming to Toronto! A major coup for Roger Martin and Premier Dalton McGuinty, this is a huge development in the continuing story of Toronto’s efforts to become a world-leading creative city.

For some context, read this piece in the Globe and Mail. For a hilarious articulation of his theory, see his appearance on Monday’s Colbert Report. Introduced as Dr. Richard Florida, from University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, he did a great job keeping up with Colbert’s madness (video online until August 15th):

Stephen: So should I be following gay people around, to see where they’re living?
Rich: Absolutely!
Stephen: Ok good, because I do it already and now I have a reason.
Rich: Absolutely! Me too.
Stephen: You know what I think sir? I think that you are a gay bohemian artist that just wants to sell his house!
Rich: You know we just sold our house on Sunday, my wife and I, to move to Toronto!
Stephen: So you made a quick buck on this study!

What would draw the creative class guru to Toronto? Well sure, he loves the place. But a $120 million budget and a welcoming political leadership sure don’t hurt:

The Centre for Jurisdictional Advantage and Prosperity is a $120-million project, made possible by a $50-million donation to Rotman from the Province of Ontario. The federal government contributed an additional $10-million. The balance will be raised from the private sector.

I am looking forward to meeting Richard Florida again. My work is being drawn into the gravity well of this meteoric academic star. He comes to Toronto at a time when a critical mass of attention is being drawn to his ideas and those of like-minded leaders in creativity-driven community and economic development.

This is going to be fun!