ending the tampa bay creative diaspora (part i)
permalink | categories: arts, citizens, compare, diversity, economy, marketing, quality of life, ranks, tourismby calebism @ 12:31 pm
Tampa Bay isn’t that different from any other post-WW II collection of sunbelt suburbs in search of a city. LA, Phoenix, Albuquerque, El Paso, Houston, Orlando, Jacksonville – the built landscape is pretty much the same.
Designed to isolate us in autos and ranchettes, these sprawls give us lawns and shopping malls and de facto segregation by class and ideology as well as ethnicity. (Thanks, Greatest Generation.)
This isn’t good for the creative class. And a diverse creative class is a big part of what makes cities livable and attractive to the knowledge workers who generate the dollars in the post-industrial economy.
Oh, yeah, and that includes tourist-dependant economies — Pinellas, I am looking at you.
Mayor Iorio signed on to this concept. In 2003, anyway.
The man-made environment in the bay area — sprawling, low-density, built-for-cars– doesn’t throw people together in a stimulating creative stew the way it does in high-density environments. A friend of mine, visiting St Pete a while back, summed it up for me:
“The most important art contacts you’re gonna make– they’re at the laundromat, at the coffeehouse, on the bus, on the street with a really ugly terrier on a leash. You can’t help but run into them. I mean: Run. Into. Them.”
Tampa Bay is hemorrhaging its creative class, and that is worse than you think. They are leaving for places where they can find respect, employment, amenities, and like-minded people.
Can intentional design break us out of this creativity drain?
Where do you go every day to rub elbows with creative, stimulating people?
Tags: amenities, art, creative class, creativity, economy, environment, pinellas, sprawl, st pete, tampa
Loading ...
August 14th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I talk about this all the time, and it seems this is talked about all the time by others.
It’s all about the urban core, or at least an urban corridor. As you said, in large cities with solid urban density, people have no choice other than to interact. They also no choice (by and large) but to be tolerant of differences, no choice but to support local shops.
I fully support making Downtown Tampa vibrant, and I really have to lump Ybor in with Downtown. My wife and I bought our Tampa Heights home intentionally due to the proximity to our work Downtown and our favorite spots in Downtown, W. Tampa and Ybor. We’re right where we want to be.
Where do I meet people? Where do I see the people I wanna see? Typically speaking: TBPAC, Tampa Theater, The Hub, Cafe Hey, New World Brewery. Occasionally I bump into people walking through Ybor on my way to see my tattoo artist at 1603 or grabbing cash from the BOA machine or looking for a bite.
To be fair, it’s not like I’m going out of my way to hit any of these spots. It’s my hood, where I’ve chosen to be. There’s nothing but opportunity here. No matter how flustered I get by the lack of a meaningful level of growth here sometimes, I’m by no means ready to give up on it.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
tell me about it. if I could afford it right now, I’d move to Boone, NC in a heartbeat. They know how to treat their creative folk. However, there are sparks of interest here and there. The Expressionist magazine just interviewed me for their August issue, apparently they profile Tampa area artists each month. There’s a small enclave of artistry in Ybor, too. If anyone else knows of something, please speak up!
August 14th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
The internet.
Because the urban design of Tampa and surrounding areas is not conducive to forming, or locating, communities of like-minded individuals, there’s a lot of inertia to overcome. But one place where new networking and community-building is obvious is the internet. Sticks of Fire, Metro I4 News, the various Seminole Heights blogs, other community blogs like West Side Stories, various local political bloggers, etc. are all contributing to a discussion about how to recreate Tampa.
The next step, along the lines of BlogOrlando, or the regular Lakeland blogger meet-ups, is to turn some of these virtual conversations into more face-to-face meetings. Tommy Duncan has led that effort a few times, but blogger meet-ups really haven’t caught on yet.
IMHO we need an awesome blogger clubhouse to host an open monthly meeting. Some restaurant or bar that can accommodate a large group of people on a monthly basis. Having a regular place and time lowers the hurdle for those who want to attend but are uncertain what to expect. Similarly, having it at a restaurant instead of someone’s house also helps reduce the anxiety of first-time visitors. Any volunteers?
August 14th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Dave – Talk to owner Steve Bird at New World. He’s very, very open to letting folks use the bar for meetings.
August 14th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I think that there is a creative class here, but its not so easy to locate. Ybor, downtown St. Pete, Dunedin, USF art department among other places. It’s not very cutting edge and it’s mainly driven by younger people. (I say that, but then again, have you ever been to Theo Wojtiuk’s studio? He’s 67 and still pretty relevant and amazing.) The problem that i’ve notice is that most of my friends who are creative in some way tend to spend a couple years in Tampa, and then flee for greener pastures. I think promoting density will be one of the only ways to keep it alive, something the gas crisis might actually force into a reality. That, and somehow developing a culture of locals who actually purchase art. At the end of the day, art is a business, and if people are not buying, the artists usually leave and migrate to where the money is. Creating a business/art community relationship is probably the smartest idea. There is an organization of business professionals here that actually give out artist grants to artists in the community, the name escapes me at the moment. Developing more organizations along that route will help keep local artists alive and the more professional class active in the arts.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Certainly, Tampa Bay has suffered the cruel fate of lots of planning done post world war two. The sad reality is that post world two planning was a polar opposite to the humanist town planning that had gone on for over five hundred years prior to that and which sought to create fairly dense urban mixed-use (living or office over retail on the first floor) environments where one could walk or take mass transit; a place where rubbing elbows occurred daily.
The world war two generation of “planners” were largely educated in the military industrial stew of the war, so after the war they rolled up their sleeves and attempted to create efficient community’s where houses were assembly line (largely), where all uses were separate from one another (no “mixed uses”, which means you drive everywhere because residential is separate from commercial, etc.), and where cities and towns were no longer designed for the needs of humans, but for the needs of the automobile. Another component of the world war two planning model was the desire to leave disliked minorities in the cities and to retreat to the country where land was cheap and air was fresh—ala “the birth of sprawl”.
The sprawl model the greatest generation created hinged on an endless supply of cheap fossil fuel to permit their giant finned automobiles access to the good life which was located farther and farther away from the disliked minorities who lived in the hated and crime filled “urbanized areas”. This is when the word “density” gained the same taboo notoriety as the word “taxes”.
The really strange thing for Florida is that the 1920s were also the epitome of humanist, and humane, planning in the United States, and this superior 1920s planning fabric still exists underneath virtually all of the awful “new and improved” car oriented planning done post world war two (ex. downtown Tampa). In many places, such as Tampa and Temple Terrace, improving the built environment means the archaeology of stripping away the crap of the last 50 years to get back to the good planning bones of the 1920s, or earlier, and rebuilding.
Hence, one of the main things the bay area has going for it is that it was not a tabula rasa (like California or Arizona), post world war two. There is great architecture and planning here, it may be eighty years old and obscured by atomic age madness, but it largely still exists.
There have been and will be technological changes in the future, such as the plug-in all electric car, and the continued resurgence of new and better planning models like the New Urbanism (CNU), but we implement these improvements while keeping an eye on the best aspects of Florida’s past architecture and planning, there is much we can learn.
In short, we need to (re)create more places to “rub elbows”, I think to do that we would do well to adopt the mission of the CNU which “views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge”. http://www.cnu.org/charter
August 14th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Maybe if the cities hadn’t turned to squalor, people would have stayed. Maybe if the cities cleaned up that squalor, people would return. I love West Tampa – I do not love getting stabbed on my way home.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Maybe if before urban flight people actually banded together took control of the neighborhoods and any real problems and didn’t just flee from an incident or two or from people who looked different than them moving into “their” neighborhoods, cities wouldn’t have turned to squalor in the first place.
Br’er Rabbit says you can’t run from trouble, ain’t no place that far.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
When we talk about this issue we fall for the Richar Florida failure – it aint amenities like bike trails and coffee shops that will attract and retian these workers IT IS THE JOBS!
Simple economics, if they can work here and have disposable income their desires and needs will be served by the market economy.
We need jobs, not cocktail hours pretending to be professional development.
We need to encourage and stimulate entrepeneurship, we need to act and not waste time and energy with more talk.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
The best way to encourage entrepreneurship and stimulate the job market is to lower taxes. Bout the best we can do here in Tampa is lower property taxes.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
We need to encourage and stimulate entrepeneurship, we need to act and not waste time and energy with more talk.
I agree with you there, Ed.
August 14th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
encouraging and stimulating entrepreneurship is a great place to start. I strongly believe in supporting local restaurants, retail shops and establishments. I find that I often get a return on my investment. Becoming a regular at several of the local restaurants have allowed me to establish great professional and personal relationships with the owners, servers and staff. Often I get client referrals from these relationships.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
Of the few areas I have seen mentioned in the comments, no one has mentioned Gulfport’s art community.
August 15th, 2008 at 12:29 am
I’m glad to see some dialogue on this subject. The urban planning blog Planetizen (http://www.planetizen.com/interchange) has a number of posts dealing with the future of suburban america and how to recreate and remodel cities like Tampa into more sensible communities. It’s worth checking out.
August 15th, 2008 at 8:42 am
If you want change, then listen to Frank Zappa. You need to be part of the change. Vote. Run for a political office. The best way to effect the change you want is from within the system.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:01 am
about New World – New World is great. I love New World. But, after a couple of years of meeting folks there every Friday for happy hour, it’s clear that it’s not really designed to handle large groups. My experience with open-invitation, long-term meet-ups is that there’s a lot of variation in the number of people who will show up at any given time. You don’t want to rent out a large space, because only a few people might show up. But, you also want a place large enough to accommodate many people when they do show up.
To Ed – It’s both amenities and jobs. I think Richard Florida carries a little too much weight when it comes to thinking about urban design. As you point out, jobs and entrepreneurship are critical.
August 15th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
We need to be aware of what we have already – there is a ton of worthy stuff happening in Tampa Bay. Out institutions can’t or won’t advertise it as they focus on tourists.
I do my part. I compile hundreds of local business and cultural events and make it available. No one can ever say there is nothing cultural or interesting here to me, I got the proof.
August 15th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
It is about economic success – we can not muddle the issue by letting buzz words become the catch all answer.
We want a creative economy and everyone talks about transportation and other urban planning issues. It is not the answer; it is not the whole answer or issue. To act otherwise s foolish.
The Richard Florida kool-aid society has been talking this kind of junk over at Creative Tampa Bay, they do little, understand litle, effect nothing, and the slow down ward spiral of our community and culture continues.
Buy art, hire local freelancers, get your self trained, and demand our leaders do more then dole out their budgets on their cronies and the dusty ineffective bureaucracies. Ignore the bureaucracies, do not look to them, any comttee or government to provide leadership. Act locally, most importantly ACT! Demand better from your leaders, replace them when they fail. ACT!
August 16th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Testify, Ed!
August 17th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Urban design and the built environment has a whole lot to do with livable, economically successful cities and the culture that exists within them. We’ve been pretending otherwise for a long time and continuing to do so, to quote Ed, “is foolish.” I support your call to “ACT” but we can’t both ignore bureaucracy and demand things from them. We have to understand why some cities work and others don’t and use that information as we move forward.
August 17th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
You can build all the bike trails and yuppie conveniences you want, but if they can’t get a job here and can’t work a living wage here they will not come, and the ones here will leave.
It is the economy. This blathering on ambout amenities is the same junk we have been hearing for years about how Tampa Bay “Pays in sunshine”.
We have great weather and beaches yet we have a creative and educated workforce crisis, does that tell you anything? 6.3% unemployment with all that sunshine?
Yes we need mass transit, but it is not the only issue, it is not the easy to ID and repeat buzz word it is being used as.
Find me creative workers who will be able to afford to buy a month-pass for the rail system or the increased taxes to build it.
Jobs, money, opportunity, upward mobiity, that is what we need!