Having the most wired and wireless infrastructures are undoubtedly important. San Diego even commissioned a City of the Future Committee in 1993 to make plans to build the first fiber-optic-wired city in the United States in the belief that just as cities of the past were built along waterways, railroads, and interstate highways, the cities of the future will be built along "information highways" -- wired and wireless information pathways connecting every home, office, school, and hospital and, through the World Wide Web, millions of other individuals and institutions around the world.
But at the heart of such efforts must be a recognition of the vital roles that art and technology play in enhancing economic development and, ultimately, defining a "creative community" -- a community that exploits the vital linkages among art, technology and commerce. A community with a sense of place. A community that nurtures, attracts and holds the most creative and innovation workers.
In recent years, people habitually have referred to the domain in which Internet-based communications occur as "cyberspace," an abstract communications space that exists both everywhere and nowhere. But until flesh-and-blood humans can be digitized into electronic pulses in the same way that computer scientists transform images and data, the denizens of cyberspace will have to continue living in some sort of real physical space -- a home, a neighborhood and a community.
The state of California in 1996 launched its statewide Smart Communities program, recognizing that electronic networks like these will play an increasingly important role in the economic competitiveness of its municipalities. The underlying premise of the California initiative is that smart communities are not, at their core, exercises in the deployment and use of technology, but rather active tools in the promotion of economic development, job growth, and higher living standards overall. In other words, technological propagation in smart communities is not an end in itself, but rather a means to a larger end with clear and compelling benefits for communities.
We have learned a great deal about the challenges that cities face in a new global "information economy," an economy based on something other than the production of goods and services or agriculture. Although these basic industries continue, the new economy relies on the production, use, and transfer of information and knowledge.
In fact, one distinct possibility is that cities of the future will not be cities in the usual sense, but rather powerful regional economies. Kenichi Ohmae, author of The Borderless World (1999,) suggests we are witnessing the resurgence of the age-old concept of the city-state or, as he prefers, the "region-state." The new region-state has the power and authority to take ownership of its own future and establish a governing process reflecting a new model of government for the digital age.
Civic engagement and new civic "collaboratories" (collaborative projects and endeavors) will also be needed to help reinvent our great cities to reclaim the sense of place and civic pride this once possessed, as well as to ensure that no one is left behind. In The Magic of Dialogue: Transforming Conflict into Cooperation (1999), Daniel Yankelovich argues that there is a "struggle between two one-sided visions of our future: the vision of the free market and the vision of the civil society." Citizens need to create the "social capital," that distinguishes their communities, and in the process close the gap between the electorate and those they elect, as Robert D. Putnam put it in his seminal work Bowling Alone (2000).
Cities of the future no doubt will be "creative communities" in the sense that they recognize art and technology as vital, not only to a region's livability, but also to the preparedness of its workforce. Future cities will understand that a basic understanding of the role of technology as a tool of transformation, and that art-infused education is critical to producing the next generation of leaders and workers for the knowledge economy. Today, the demand for creativity has outpaced the ability of most nations to produce enough workers simply to meet their needs.
Worrying about the lack of qualified workers in this day and age may sound odd. With the globalization of media and markets in full bloom, America, for example, is beginning to see the outlines of yet another out-migration of jobs, unleashing new concerns about rising unemployment. Many economists are alarmed that the latest round of losses -- unlike the earlier shift of manufacturing jobs to Taiwan and less-developed East Asian countries -- will have a dramatic impact on America's wealth and well-being.
Twenty years ago, it was fashionable to blame foreign competition and cheap labor markets abroad for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, but the pain of the loss was softened by the emergence of a new services industry. Now that the service sector has also widely automated itself, banking, insurance, and telecommunications firms are eliminating layers of management and infrastructure.
The traditional corporate pyramid is disappearing replaced by highly skilled professional work teams. State-of-the art software and telecommunications technologies now enable any kind of enterprise to maximize efficiency and productivity by employing foreign workers wherever they are located, making the service-sector jobs even more precious. Forrester Research Inc., a market-research firm, estimates some 3.3 million service jobs will move out of the United States over the next 10-15 years. Others put that number at 15 million, and say the results will be devastating for the U.S. economy.
While CEOs, economists and politicians are telling us that these are short-term adjustments, it is clear that the pervasive spread of the Internet, digitization, and the availability of white-collar skills abroad mean potentially huge cost savings for global corporations. Consequently, this shift of high-tech service jobs will be a permanent feature of economic life in the 21st century -- but this does not necessarily mean the news is all bad for workers in the United States and other developed countries.
Some economists believe that globalization and digitization will improve the profits and efficiency of American corporations and set the stage for the next big growth-generating breakthrough. But what will that be?
A number of think tanks, including Japan's Nomura Research Institute, argue that the elements are in place for the advance of the Creative Age, a period in which free, democratic nations thrive and prosper because of their tolerance for dissent, respect for individual enterprise, freedom of expression, and recognition that innovation, not mass production of low-value goods and services, is the driving force for the new economy.
The new economy's demand for creativity has manifested itself in the emergence and growth of what author Richard Florida has termed the Creative Class. Although Florida defines this demographic group very broadly, he does a convincing job of underscoring the facts of life and work in the new knowledge economy. As he points out, "every aspect and every manifestation of creativity -- cultural, technological and economic -- is inextricably linked."
By tracking certain migration patterns and trends, Richard Florida did a huge service for those struggling to redefine their communities for the new knowledge economy. However, many questions remain. Can the community, through public art or cultural offerings, enhance the creativity of its citizens? And if the new economy so desperately demands the creative worker and leader, what should schools and universities do to prepare the next generation of creative people?
I first realized that we were doing something fundamentally wrong in K-12 education when I was asked in 1996 to chair California's then-governor Pete Wilson's Commission on Information Technology. About the same time, the governor had a subcommittee on education technology, which I also chaired. Participating in that effort were such luminaries as one of the founders of the personal computer industry, Alan Kay; Larry Ellison, founder and chairman of Oracle Corporation; Joanne Kosburg, former president of Californians for the Arts and a secretary of state and consumer affairs under Wilson; and Jeff Berg, Chairman and CEO of International Creative Management Inc.
Early on in our deliberations Larry Ellison suggested our goal should be "to put a personal computer in the backpack of every K-12 student by the year 2001." It was a big, startling idea and captured everyone's attention regarding the enormity of our task. California in 1996 was about fiftieth among the 50 states in computers per pupil.
But Alan Kay shouted across the room, "Would you give five pencils to a school, Larry?" The computer, Alan argued, was nothing more than a pencil. What about the paper? he asked, and more importantly, what about the ideas that must come when we ask the student to put pencil to paper? Our challenge, he said, was to better understand how students learn, what they needed to learn to survive and succeed in today's knowledge economy, and what our teachers in private and public learning institutions were doing about it.
Later that year I was asked to meet with a senior vice president of the Los Angeles-based Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, who were asking Governor Wilson to "declare a state of emergency" to help Hollywood find digital artists. Silicon Valley, we learned, also wanted the governor to lobby Washington for more foreign visas for the same reason. There were people aplenty who were computer literate, they claimed, but could not draw. In the new economy, they argued, artistic talents are vital to all industries dependent upon the marriage of computers and telecommunications.
Sadly, we discovered that art and music had been cut out of most California schools over 20 years ago in our zeal to be number one in the world in math and science. At the time this decision was made the United States was about eleventh in the world according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Now, the United States ranks about 24th in the world while Singapore, Sweden, Denmark and Finland are in the top 10 in part because they have found a way to underscore the linkages between music and math, art and science.
Until recently, there has been only limited evidence of the connection between education and in appreciation of the arts and success in the postindustrial age of information. But now it is becoming increasingly apparent that arts initiatives will be the hallmarks of the most-successful schools and universities and, in turn, the most-successful and vibrant twenty-first-century cities and regions. One key to this vision is that we must acknowledge the current out-migration of high-tech jobs as a challenge to the status quo. As former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina told a panel of governors a short time ago, "Keep your tax incentives and highway interchanges; we will go where the highly skilled people are."
Those communities placing a premium on cultural, ethnic, and artistic diversity, reinventing their knowledge factories for the creative age, and building the new information infrastructures for our age, will likely burst with creativity and entrepreneurial fervor. These are the ingredients so essential to developing and attracting the bright and creative people to generate new patents and inventions, innovative world-class products and services, and the finance and marketing plans to support them. Nothing less will ensure a city's economic, social, and political viability in the twenty-first century.
John M. Eger, Van Deerlin Professor of Communications at San Diego State University, was chair of Governor Wilson's first Commission on Information Technology. He is editor of The Smart Communities Guidebook, released by The State of California (1997), and the recent author of The Creative Community published by SDSU. This article was excerpted and adapted from the March / April issue of The Futurist, published by The World Futurist Society.
