Forging a Creative Community for the New Creative Economy

Creating a twenty-first-century city is not so much a question of technology as it is of jobs, dollars and quality of life. A community's plan to reinvent itself for the new, knowledge-based economy and society therefore requires educating all its citizens about this new global revolution in the nature of work. To succeed, cities must prepare their citizens to take ownership of their communities and educate the next generation of leaders and workers to meet the new global challenges of what is now being termed the "Creative Economy."

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