By Richey Piiparinen.
Scarcity leads to creativity out of necessity. That’s the pop culture meme at least. Think “starving artist,” or the survivors in Survivor. The thinking has penetrated the business culture as well. For example, in the shadow of the 2008 recession, Google founder Sergey Brin, in a letter to his shareholders, writes: “I am optimistic about the future, because I believe scarcity breeds clarity: it focuses minds, forcing people to think creatively and rise to the challenge.”
But a recent book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, by Ivy League psychologists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, states otherwise. Through years of investigative research, the authors found that people operating from a bandwidth of scarcity don’t have the luxury of preemptive thought. Rather, being in survivor mode saps a person’s cognitive reserve.
“Think about being hungry,” says Shafir in a piece in Pacific Standard. “If you’re hungry, that’s what you think about. You don’t have to strain for years — the minute you’re hungry, that’s where your mind goes.” The mental preoccupation extends to unpaid utility bills, debt, or, more generally, anything that’s life-pressing, he adds. The effect drains resources from a person’s “proactive memory”.
Think of the absence of scarcity, then, as the freedom to think, visualize, and create. The results of Mullainathan and Shafir’s findings have implications for cities. Specifically, it’s widely theorized that cities must innovate to survive, and it is a city’s creative reservoir — which is dependent on the size of its educated workforce — that will nurture innovation. This is how a city of soot can evolve into a city of software, not unlike what has occurred in Pittsburgh.
But what about Rust Belt cities struggling with high rates of poverty? Over 36 percent of Detroit’s 700,000 plus are below the poverty line. In Cleveland, the poverty rate is 33 percent of nearly 400,000. The national poverty rate is 14 percent. This is a ridiculous amount of brain capacity consumed by unforgiving reality. No wonder Detroit inches to get a leg up. The feral dogs, abandoned houses, and creditors looking for money have eaten up the capability to envision. Hence, the collective exasperation, and the bankruptcy death spiral.
What will save the Clevelands and Detroits? The most prescribed cure is to find a way to attract more educated people. This has led cities across the country to compete for the vaunted “creative class” professional demographic. To urban theorist Richard Florida, to get creative types a city must have “[an] indigenous street-level culture – a teeming blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line between participant and observer or between creativity and its creators.”
According to Florida, a city needs to know it is on stage,and compete for the attention of a select demographic. In theatre parlance, this is called “capturing the audience experience.” In urban place-making parlance it is called “principles of persuasion” that emphasize novelty, contrast, surprise, color, etc.
Courtesy of Humble Pie Vintage
In other words, cities must become the collective embodiment of Robin Williams.
Then, once you get your audience, you just watch them go, says Florida, as creativity is “a social process.” Creativity is bred by “the presence of other creative people.” The scarcity of creativity in a poor city hypothetically gets filled up by the big-bang spontaneity of two creative types talking, neurologically egged on, no doubt, by a festival performer on stilts in a clown suit sauntering before them.
If this strategy sounds like an overly simplified way to change what ails Detroit and Cleveland, it’s because it is. In fact Florida himself acknowledged this, stating in Atlantic Cities that, “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits [to the poor].” In fact, because housing costs rise, it makes the lives of lower- and middle-income people worse.
But cities keep revitalizing this way because it is a feel-good prescription that is politically palatable. Who hates art, carnivals, drinking, and eating? Displays of abundance provide the incentive to look the other way. Writes Thomas Sowell, “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics”.
Where does that leave the millions operating on the wrong side of scarcity? Florida’s answer is for cities to somehow convince corporate America to pay their service workers more. While admirable, I doubt Daniel Schwartz, CEO of Burger King, is listening.
Another option would be refocusing the lens through which modern urban revitalization is viewed. The default setting is to compete for scarcity of the educated elite. Instead, we should alleviate the scarcity from the struggling. But flipping this script requires cities to give up on the idea that there is some audience that will save them. It is a city’s people who ultimately ruin or save themselves.
In the meantime, the urban play continues. Cleveland is directing $4 million dollars of its casino windfall profits into the creation of an outdoor chandelier that will hang at an intersection outside of Playhouse Square, the city’s theater district. The design, evoked by chandeliers inside the Playhouse itself, is intended to blur the line between drama and reality, and will “add glittery outdoor glamour to a district that tends at times to look gray and lifeless,” according to architecture critic Steven Litt — all the while making the intersection “feel like a giant theater lobby”.
But the script on Cleveland’s streets is one of hardship, not glittery glamour. Here’s hoping the outdoor chandelier illuminates that scarcity to those walking beneath it.
Richey Piiparinen is a senior writer for Belt.
Top image: Playhouse Square in Cleveland, Ohio. (Karin McKenna)
You’re absolutely right to point out the absurdity of revitalizing cities solely for the educated elite with the naive hope that prosperity will somehow trickle down to the working poor, but what can a Cleveland or a Detroit (or any other city, for that matter) do to revitalize themselves for the benefit of the non-elites? You briefly touched on paying service workers more, which I think is a given, but that is more of a wider systemic issue that cannot be addressed at the city level. What specific things could be done by cities to accomplish this?
I think the first thing that must be done is changing the lens of investment so money is not wasted, or worse: so that inequities are not exacerbated by how investment is done. Creating gentrified silos within hip neighborhoods is the default approach on neighborhood revitalization, if only because the low-hanging fruit of filling condos and restaurants is the primary goal. What if the primary goal of middle class reinvestment instead was leveraging capital so that community capital, via integrated and equitable re-development, was the endpoint? What you are asking for is tactics. But tactics follow a cohesive strategy, which in itself must be developed in the political and public realm through information so as to change the lens of policy. Don’t get me wrong, there are tactics used nationwide that leverages investment without catastrophic consequences into existing urban fabric, but they most often are just paid lip service. Policies ensuring affordable housing near transit and jobs are one example where tactics abound. If a city, as a collective, had their priorities right, then maybe the tactics are useful. Most often they are piecemeal. Until then it is a battle for the hearts and minds of community leaders as to what path a city wants to go down: a unique path that develops human capital, or a path of consumption that shifts money from the same hands to the same pockets.
Hi Richy, two answers, good and bad. Starting with the bad, when it comes to poverty, most Americans don’t care. They haven’t cared since Richard Nixon decimated Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty 40=some years ago. In fact, many Americans resent what we’ve done and are doing about poverty, witness the Tea Party’s throwing Head Start and similar programs out the window this week. Not to mention that a country that serenely watches homicide consume a goodly portion of the under-30 males in these communities who think drug dealing is the only way out is immoral, no matter how self-proclaimed Christian it is. The good answer is, first, statements that the Creative Class doesn’t trickle down seems suspect. While often personally annoying, these folks tend to work for companies that do, in fact, create jobs–maybe not well-paying jobs, but jobs. I think people are working their way out of poverty, gradually, and abetted by some of the sturdy characters, particularly mothers and grandmothers, who reside in these communities. All of which may account for my witnessing a broadening and integrating of the middle class here in Lakewood that I would never have believed possible 30 years ago.
“Rather, being in survivor mode saps a person’s cognitive reserve.” Having been in that position myself, I can tell you that when you’re working 10-12 hours a day just to hang onto a job, and then spending the rest of your time taking care of business at home, there isn’t much time for anything else. And that isn’t just a blue collar thing. White collar workers who are lucky enough to have jobs are being pushed to the limit of exhaustion, too. Scarcity doesn’t give you the freedom to think, visualize and create — unless someone else is paying the bills. I don’t know many “creative classers” who are doing it on their own.