interesting from the nytimes this morning, some good ideas:

 

 

 

ATLANTA, Nov. 24 — Some cities will do anything they can think of to keep young people from fleeing to a hipper town.

 

From left, Bria Bryant, 25; Tiffany Patterson, 27; and Obi Ogene, 27, at Verve, a new Midtown bar and restaurant in Atlanta. Ms. Patterson, originally from Dallas, and Mr. Ogene, from Nigeria, are part of a growing trend of young people who are moving to Atlanta.

 

 

Attracting the Next Generation

Leah Nash for The New York Times

 

 

Employees at the Wieden & Kennedy advertising agency, top, at a company basketball game. Below, Nicole Andren assays her shot options.

In Lansing, Mich., partiers can ease from bar to bar on the new Entertainment Express trolley, part of the state’s Cool Cities Initiative. In Portland, Ore., employees at an advertising firm can watch indie rock concerts at lunch and play “bump,” an abbreviated form of basketball, every afternoon.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/us/25young.html?hp&ex=1164517200&en=2eb146550a59373f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

 

Thats because Atlanta has a great music scene, clubs, and other forms of entertainment.

sure, but it's not just about atlanta or entertainment.

To some extent it's people who got straight A's and who are going to have a successful white collar career trying to be cool (thinking that's the part of their life that's missing), spending a lot of money on clothes and bar-going, but still relying on others to show them what's cool.  In general people are very insecure about their tastes, this is what marketers jump on and make their fortunes off of.  The irony of course is that if you took the young people with money and "bright futures" and got them stuck in a stuck elevator with people who actually create music and art (and by that I mean the people really doing it, not just drifters and scenesters), they'd likely come to hate each other almost immediately.  So in short people who want to be around culture pay money to consume it in a clean-handed manner but rarely will really get involved.  Loosely parallel to a diversity-preacher extolling a "diverse" bus or subway car, but not actually striking up conversations, let alone starting friendships or asking out any of the immigrant women.  Culture and diversity therefore become a decoration to the hip city-dweller like nature or farms do to someone buying a house in a suburban subdivision.     

 

 

 

       

 

 

 

EDIT: Sorry, it's not worth it...deleting my post...

 

"Relocation videos have begun to feature dreadlocks and mosh pits instead of sunsets and duck ponds."

 

Lol werent those 'hip' 10 years ago??  I'm pretty sure a lot of that stuff could fit into the whole irony thing thats going on now. 

 

this article kind of depresses me, the whole reason I'm personally interested in city life is the fact that its unscripted and diverse, not some kind of template thing that really seems kinda pre-fab suburban.  its basically suburban mindset decorated with stuff thats considered 'cutting edge' in a safe consumable way. 

^The avante-garde groups of the 1960's like Andy Warhol's group and Bob Dylan's circle and so on are a thing of the past.  The problem today is that the avante-garde has been academized, packaged and sold, and rents have gone so high in New York that it's virtually impossible to find cheap apartments or cheap places to stage events or open a storefront business.  There are also tons of trust fund kids clogging up art schools and gallery internships, all of them on a quest to be cool.  Because being avante-garde is such a cliche, I believe that's a big part of what led to the present ironic era, where people don't know what the heck to do to be original so they just make fun of everything. 

 

This actually opens up a lot of room for the second-tier cities to act independently but unfortunatlely most people are always looking for approval of New York and traditional media.  There is also an obsession with music "scenes", art "scenes", etc., when people should accept randomness and stop fetishizing past scenes because often people didn't realize they were scenes at the time they existed.  A "scene" is often the framing which a writer puts around a group of disparate people and events. 

 

>this article kind of depresses me, the whole reason I'm personally interested in city life is the fact that its unscripted and diverse, not some kind of template thing that really seems kinda pre-fab suburban.  its basically suburban mindset decorated with stuff thats considered 'cutting edge' in a safe consumable way.

 

There is in my opinion a ton of original stuff going on out there (and it's happening everywhere), unfortunately people tend to not recognize it because they have been conditioned to see "cutting edge" stuff only in certain forms.  The lower class everywhere is always coming up with a ton of ideas for two reasons.  First there are tons of poor people and second poor people tend to be less self-conscious.  Self-consciousness is what chokes the current ironic art/music/everything era. 

I have a really hard time understanding Charlotte's growth. Frisbee Golf courses are not enough to lure in a huge number of young people.

^The avante-garde groups of the 1960's like Andy Warhol's group and Bob Dylan's circle and so on are a thing of the past.  The problem today is that the avante-garde has been academized, packaged and sold, and rents have gone so high in New York that it's virtually impossible to find cheap apartments or cheap places to stage events or open a storefront business.  There are also tons of trust fund kids clogging up art schools and gallery internships, all of them on a quest to be cool.  Because being avante-garde is such a cliche, I believe that's a big part of what led to the present ironic era, where people don't know what the heck to do to be original so they just make fun of everything. 

 

This actually opens up a lot of room for the second-tier cities to act independently but unfortunatlely most people are always looking for approval of New York and traditional media.  There is also an obsession with music "scenes", art "scenes", etc., when people should accept randomness and stop fetishizing past scenes because often people didn't realize they were scenes at the time they existed.  A "scene" is often the framing which a writer puts around a group of disparate people and events. 

 

>this article kind of depresses me, the whole reason I'm personally interested in city life is the fact that its unscripted and diverse, not some kind of template thing that really seems kinda pre-fab suburban.  its basically suburban mindset decorated with stuff thats considered 'cutting edge' in a safe consumable way.

 

There is in my opinion a ton of original stuff going on out there (and it's happening everywhere), unfortunately people tend to not recognize it because they have been conditioned to see "cutting edge" stuff only in certain forms.  The lower class everywhere is always coming up with a ton of ideas for two reasons.  First there are tons of poor people and second poor people tend to be less self-conscious.  Self-consciousness is what chokes the current ironic art/music/everything era. 

 

I basically had this revelation when I was in Evanston, IL. Everyone refers to this demographic as "snobby", "yuppie" etc. but I think the best way to describe them is just...boring. It's not that these people are stuck up, they're just socially awkward. They lack social skills and also a lot of creativity. There's nothing going on in their life making them feel alive enough. I guess that's why I have a little bit of a problem with the generalization in what is refered to as the "creative class"; which realistically consists of professional 20-30 somethings that sit in a cubicle all day.

 

We try to reverse engineer what poor people (less self concious like you said) have made and begin to design the Panera Breads and Starbucks coffee shops stocked with Johnny Cash and Jack Johnson CDs. 120 dollar "vintage" jeans from Urban Outfitters. Indie 4 sale!! Upper class people crave culture and they're willing to pay out the ass for it.

 

When these people (well not in Evanston but in the pre-fabbed subdivisons) look for a sense of community, they hire event planners that organize the morning walk groups, festivals, etc... but you will never see these communities bond the way an inner city community does when they work together to fight Walgreens from ruining their neighborhood business district, etc. Unfortunately, ideal communities form in an organic way that hardly any rich or suburban people will ever get to experience.

Yeah, the rich, they don't know nothin' about communities.  Or about culture, or love.  Or music.  They probably judge people without knowing them too.  Man, they ain't even human.

 

Yeah, the rich, they don't know nothin' about communities.  Or about culture, or love.  Or music. 

 

Oh they know about it. Definitely. They just have a a hard time creating it :]

 

Yeah, the rich, they don't know nothin' about communities.  Or about culture, or love.  Or music.

 

Oh they know about it. Definitely. They just have a a hard time creating it :]

 

 

Whachoo talkin' about? It was the rich who funded like 80% of our great art and the museums where the art is stored. I have no  problems with the rich because they create markets for jobs the average person cannot afford to sustain. How often does a factory worker hire an interior decorator/designer. They might not create culture with their bare hands, but they are the catalysts.

 

I'll admit that I skimmed that article. These young professional stories can only interest me for like four minutes. There are so many factors that make a city "cool." I think a lot of it is, people want to move to a place that is a "maturing" investment. They want to move in to a place that is ready to go, plop your furniture down and go party. And there is the factor of supply of jobs, entertainment, culture, societal personality, housing stock, number of other similar people, etc. etc.

 

To me, the best way to attract "the young" is just to work on making the place where you live better for everyone who lives there NOW. I met an African American girl recently who is in college, and she said she would like to live in Baltimore rather than Cleveland because she dislikes all the segregation and doesn't like how people don't mix around here. You could turn downtown into an urban Dave and Busters, but if we don't focus on the real issues, we'll never do a lick of good.

 

Oh they know about it. Definitely. They just have a a hard time creating it :]

 

Yeah, Paavo Jarvi can hardly pay the bills.  And don't forget all those starving artists in the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.  Say, I hear Zaha Hadid has a hard time putting food on the table.  It's a shame after all Bob Dylan's given to the world that he still has to drive a cab between tours to make ends meet.  And didn't Gustav Mahler split his time between conducting orchestras and blacksmithing?

 

It's too bad Mick Jagger's parents couldn't afford to send him to Dartford Grammar School when he was a boy...and just imagine what Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir could have accomplished if their days hadn't been filled with 12-hour shifts at the garment factory.  In fact, the whole history of philosophy is pretty much entirely peopled by folks who worked back-breaking jobs from sunrise to sunset...

 

 

I'm not saying poor folks don't create art as well - I'm saying that it's people who create great art and great culture, no matter what their circumstances.  And that pretending some group of which one disapproves is incapable creating it is ignorant and bigoted, no matter which group it is you're excluding.

 

Reading JMecklenborgs posts upthread made me think of that line from Alexander Pope:  "What was oft thought but ne'er so well expressed"....he's put into words a lot of what I think about this whole "hip/bohemia" phenomenon.

 

Cities have long competed over job growth, struggling to revive their downtowns and improve their image. But the latest population trends have forced them to fight for college-educated 25- to 34-year-olds, a demographic group increasingly viewed as the key to an economic future.

 

Mobile but not flighty, fresh but technologically savvy, “the young and restless,” as demographers call them, are at their most desirable age, particularly because their chances of relocating drop precipitously when they turn 35. Cities that do not attract them now will be hurting in a decade.

 

This sounds like a large number of people, but does "hip" appeal to all or even most of the "25-34 year old college educated people"?  Maybe finding a good job based on their education (which might not be in "the arts"), as well as a place to raise a familiy might appeal too?

 

The issue about economic growth is also a bit confused, I think.  Perhaps a place that would attract people is one that is entrepeneurial enough to see a lot of new buisness formation and growth based on economic and technological creativity y....the cultural creativty one could associate with the concept of "hip" would be a consequence of the incomes and wealth produced by economic and technological creativity.

 

 

 

Reading JMecklenborgs posts upthread made me think of that line from Alexander Pope:  "What was oft thought but ne'er so well expressed"....he's put into words a lot of what I think about this whole "hip/bohemia" phenomenon.

 

You've got to be kidding.  His rants where he explains other people's motivations, based on his apparent ability to read the minds of those he looks down on?  Or where he explains how Dylan and Warhol are apparently examples of being "less self-conscious"?  And the trust-fund kids in the academy?  Non, quelle horror!  Why, that's never been the case in the past!

 

 

This sounds like a large number of people, but does "hip" appeal to all or even most of the "25-34 year old college educated people"?  Maybe finding a good job based on their education (which might not be in "the arts"), as well as a place to raise a familiy might appeal too?

 

Amen.  Some folks like clubbing at the gay bars until 4am three nights a week, some folks like going to the symphony and getting to bed by 11pm on Saturday.  Some folks want a quiet place to raise a family, some want bohemia.  Some folks want to go to one place to do shopping half a dozen times a year, and some folks want to spend all day wandering around downtown shops.

 

And neither group is "better" than the other, even if they their choices differ from one's own.

 

I'm not interested in getting in a Warhol and Bob Dylan discussion but mention of those two did not appear in the same paragraph as my comment on self-consciousness.  Obviously Warhol was quite conscious of what he was doing and Bob Dylan is the stage name Bob Zimmerman contrived before moving to New York.  But that is not at all what I am talking about, I am talking about people who are insecure about themselves and position themselves as conspicuously hip.  

 

Also I can speak about young people caring so much about being cool because I readily admit that I was like that when I was a teenager but mostly shook it off by about age 18.  Not a terribly bad case of it, but I had shades of it, and that's enough to pick it out in others who never grew out of it.  By my last year of high school I wanted to go to college in New York City quite badly mostly out of a genuine interest in the place but slightly out of arrogance.  There's no way to know how my life would have turned out if I had, but it wasn't really an option money-wise and I fear that I might have taken on hipster-like properties if I had in fact spent those formative years there (though I doubt even hipster boot camp could have turned me into a full-fledged hipster).

 

In bringing up French philosophers, you reminded me of a visit to the CAC where visitors were greeted in the first gallery by a suspended panel with a Foucault passage written on it.  Herein lies so much of the problem with hip cultural institutions and the hip people that identify with them, that on one hand they claim to want to reach out to the masses, but people don't like to feel stupid.  Nobody likes going into situations where they're going to feel stupid and be afraid to ask questions, and even fewer are going to pay for the privilege.  Foucault and any of those French guys aren't close to being household names, and their ideas are too difficult for anyone to absorb immediately.  And who after attending that show is actually going to go down to the library, check out every book, then read sources listed in the bibliography?  The fashion and manner and interests of hipness are all excluding others even as the hip people think themselves to be more open-minded than the masses.         

 

You've got to be kidding.  His rants where he explains other people's motivations, based on his apparent ability to read the minds of those he looks down on?  Or where he explains how Dylan and Warhol are apparently examples of being "less self-conscious"?  And the trust-fund kids in the academy?  Non, quelle horror!  Why, that's never been the case in the past!

 

Its just some similar opinions, and I liked his comments about 'scenes':

 

This actually opens up a lot of room for the second-tier cities to act independently but unfortunatlely most people are always looking for approval of New York and traditional media.  There is also an obsession with music "scenes", art "scenes", etc., when people should accept randomness and stop fetishizing past scenes because often people didn't realize they were scenes at the time they existed.  A "scene" is often the framing which a writer puts around a group of disparate people and events. 

 

In bringing up French philosophers, you reminded me of a visit to the CAC where visitors were greeted in the first gallery by a suspended panel with a Foucault passage written on it.

 

Name-dropping, with names only the cognoscenti will "get".

 

For some name dropping of my own, see if you can find Tom Franks "Consolidated Deviance" parody, or his good book The Conquest of Cool, Buisiness Culture, Counterculture, and the rise of Hip Consumerism 

 

Before Frank became a political guy he was a cult-stud stud.

 

 

Fun stuff! 

 

 

And for a parting shot, since this is an urbanism board....

 

Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator (beta)

 

(go ahead, click on the link, dont be shy)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

incentivize innovative phase-states

 

Absolutely hilarious...it's like business-speak.  A guy in a meeting today was talking about whether one of our coders could knock out a report for us, and said, "I'll check on Brad's bandwidth, see what his resource allocation is."  I burst out laughing...

 

In bringing up French philosophers, you reminded me of a visit to the CAC where visitors were greeted in the first gallery by a suspended panel with a Foucault passage written on it.  Herein lies so much of the problem with hip cultural institutions and the hip people that identify with them, that on one hand they claim to want to reach out to the masses, but people don't like to feel stupid.  Nobody likes going into situations where they're going to feel stupid and be afraid to ask questions, and even fewer are going to pay for the privilege.  Foucault and any of those French guys aren't close to being household names, and their ideas are too difficult for anyone to absorb immediately.  And who after attending that show is actually going to go down to the library, check out every book, then read sources listed in the bibliography?  The fashion and manner and interests of hipness are all excluding others even as the hip people think themselves to be more open-minded than the masses.         

 

 

What can I say.  I have 3 friends here at LSU Geography (graduate side) that can quote Foucault on demand.

Not only am I hip, but I can deconstruct too. :-P