To set the stage for a post-material form of economic thought, let's begin with the details of an important new trend that tells us a lot about where our economic life looks to be headed: the return to compact downtown living.
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Anyone, such as the young, 1940s-era Parisian author, playwright, and philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre—whose passions in life require a cheap place to live, inexpensive and efficient public transit, cafes where one can linger all day for the price of a cup of coffee, personal interaction with likeminded others, access to a highly specialized audiences or markets for the fruits of one’s labor, or public institutions such as museums, theaters, stadiums, gymnasiums, universities, or libraries—will be attracted to high density urban living. It is in densely packed older cities where such needs are best satisfied. Add to this a decent nightlife, good restaurants, bustling and architecturally interesting neighborhoods, and attractive parks where one can enjoy a bit of nature, and you have most of the ingredients of an “urban” as opposed to a “suburban” dream.
In my own city, two older, densely populated neighborhoods, Riverwest just to the north of downtown and Bayview just to the south, contain a mix of century-old, moderate single family houses, duplexes, and apartments, and numerous aging commercial and industrial buildings. These two neighborhoods have become havens for students, artists, activists, teachers, and a variety of others whose aspirations or incomes preclude living in the suburbs. Riverwest is the birthplace of Lakefront Brewery, a successful producer of microbrews, and Bayview is home to innovative storefront cultural venues such as the Alchemist Theater. In both neighborhoods, one can find great new restaurants, cafes, bars, art galleries, organic food cooperatives, and funky stores. Colectivo, a rapidly growing local coffee roaster, a few years ago constructed an architecturally innovative roasting facility and cafe in Riverwest, and recently opened a huge, visually stunning new cafe in Bayview with a big bakery in view of customers who get to watch the action. Bayview is blessed with close access to a beautiful Lake Michigan shoreline park, and Riverwest borders great hiking trails along a revitalized natural Milwaukee River corridor. Riverwest is also less than a mile from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) campus. Owning and using an automobile in these neighborhoods is a pain given the limits on parking, and one can get around easily walking or biking. Milwaukee lacks fancy light rail for public transit, but we do have a fairly functional bus system. Residents of Riverwest or Bayview don’t really need to bear the expense of car ownership, and they can reside in fairly decent housing more cheaply than in Milwaukee’s suburbs. Crime remains a problem, but it is on the decline in both neighborhoods. If you aspire to the materialist amenities of the suburban dream, Riverwest and Bayview aren’t for you. But if you are looking beyond financial accomplishment and material possessions for meaning in life, either of these neighborhoods might be the place you would want to live.
It isn’t just the offbeat older neighborhoods of Milwaukee that are on the rebound, but more upscale developments in and around downtown as well, such as the city’s Third Ward, an old wholesale district with architecturally unique buildings dating from the late Nineteenth Century. Here rising urban popularity has stimulated conversions of older buildings to offices and middle class dwellings with street level retailing alongside new condominium construction. Young, affluent professionals and suburban expats drive this trend and they seem more interested in luxury consumption than the residents of Bayview or Riverwest judging from the pricy boutiques and expensive restaurants springing up in the Third Ward and elsewhere downtown. The Third Ward hosts a public market and a performing arts complex, home to the Skylight Opera and two theater companies that specialize in modern and experimental plays. Today, the revitalized Third Ward attracts both upscale local residents and tourists to its galleries, restaurants, bars, and entertainment venues, although at the sacrifice of some of its original seedy charm.
The essential virtue of compact urban living is close spatial proximity to diverse, interesting urban neighborhoods and a variety of public and private enterprises including theaters, markets, libraries, parks, and institutions of higher learning. The fundamental advantage of expansive suburban living is the comforts of space manifested in big houses and yards, wide roads, and large, auto-accessible shopping malls. The suburbs facilitate material aspirations; diverse densely packed cities foster a broad spectrum of pursuits, some material in orientation, and some not. Great cities of the world contain their temples of consumption filled with material treasures for the wealthy, but they also contain wonderful street markets and numerous small enterprises where the desires of the palate and other simple pleasures find satisfaction at a reasonable price. One needn’t be affluent to enjoy the virtues of high-density urban living and to follow a post-materialist path through life, but if you are a prosperous professional or retiree more interested in stimulating experiences than consumer acquisitions, and require or desire close proximity to like-minded others, then the downtown living may well be for you.
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Richard Florida, a regional science professor, has gained star standing among urban planners for his book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida presents evidence for the emergence of an economically important group of individuals who play a driving role in a renaissance of downtown urban revitalization and have a new take on life that bears the marks of post-materialist thinking and. According to Florida, this creative class is compose of professionals, such as scientists, engineers, university professors, poets, novelists, entertainers, designers, architects, and opinion-makers who conceive new intellectual or artistic forms of economic or public value. Its members are at once bohemian and conformist, like the employees at Google and Facebook we talked about earlier. They have an intense desire for personal self-expression, which includes body-piercing jewelry and tattoos, but also possess a powerful work ethic and passion for personal accomplishment, especially in the digital arena doing software development or graphic arts. These are the people one increasingly sees sitting around gourmet coffee shops huddled over their computers or conversing in small groups about website design, solving a computer software problem, pulling off the conversion of an old commercial building into condominiums, or getting someone elected to political office. They don’t like bureaucratic hierarchy, but believe strongly in being recognized for their work on its creative merits. They especially believe in social diversity of all kinds, and feel comfortable working with others of different races or sexual orientations. Members of the creative class both work and play hard, and express only limited interest in accumulating material possessions and are especially oriented to consuming individual and shared “experiences” such as adventure travel, road biking or rock climbing or other vigorous activities, offbeat theater performances, cutting edge studio art, or experimental musical events. While Silicon Valley is a suburban bastion for such individuals, they increasingly find urban centers such as downtown San Francisco, Seattle, or Minneapolis to be exciting places to live and work.
Youthful creative types, along with the return of aging suburban expats, fuel much of the boom in condominium construction and conversion of distinctive older commercial buildings to residences in downtowns around the country. Both groups are attracted to the excitement of urban street life in neighborhoods with concentrations of trendy restaurants, theaters, art galleries, espresso shops, brew pubs, bookstores, and entertainment venues. Retailing matters, but its orientation is to specialty foods or wines, boutiques, and outdoor stores that serve the active life of the new inner city residents.
The interest of affluent young professionals in downtown living finds confirmation in a Brookings Institution study of census data by Eugenie Birch, Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. In a sample of 44 cities, downtown population grew by ten percent in the 1990s and the number of households expanded 13 percent, a substantial recovery after years of decline. In 2000 25 to 34 year olds compose a quarter of downtown populations, up from 13 percent 30 years earlier. The proportion of downtowners having a bachelor’s degree rose to 44 percent, a figure that exceeds both that for cities as a whole and their suburbs. The young and the educated moving downtown are exactly those groups where post-material values predominate.
Critics of this new post-industrial urban economy argue that the return of affluent residents to the inner city has done little to alleviate the poverty that prevails in many of its neighborhoods. The aggregate economy of many central cities continues to sink despite renewed economic energy in their downtowns, and little progress has been made in revitalizing central city school systems. To have a shot in the long-run at entering affluent and creative occupations, inner city residents need education, and to survive and improve their condition in the short-run, they need job training and jobs. The presence of affluent professionals and empty nesters doubtlessly stimulate service sector employment and unskilled work in building rehab and construction, but without bolstering the minimum wage and improving access to decent health care, such jobs will not lead to much real economic progress among the inner city poor. In the longer haul, a strengthening of an affluent middle class who want to raise families in the inner city may create the political conditions necessary for central city educational reform to the benefit of all residents, but there is little evidence of this occurring as yet (Chicago and New York are among the many cities making an attempt at serious educational reform). A concerted public effort to reduce climatic warming by switching to a clean energy economy and compact forms of living could bring a wide range of employment opportunities to central city residents in such fields as clean energy equipment fabrication, light rail construction, and commercial and residential energy conservation, but movement in this direction has stalled for now.
Critics also point out that Richard Florida’s use of the term “creativity” to define a social class suffers from the problem of being too nebulous to be of much practical use. Given the opportunity, almost anyone can exercise creativity in their work from the espresso barista who finds a unique way to pull a better shot, to a high-tech computerized machine tool operator who develops a new procedure for improving product quality, to a roofer who figures out a better technique for installing unobtrusive venting pleasing to the eye. It’s not just an elite class of youthful software code writers, web designers, and graphic artists living in affluent downtown neighborhoods who are creative. So are the custom coffee roasters, microbrewery operators, gourmet bakers, and chocolatiers springing up in Milwaukee and most other central cities who often locate in rehabbed storefronts or old factory buildings. The rebirth of this kind of manufacturing in the central city occurs in those industries where the public increasingly demands the kind of quality and uniqueness large corporations are incapable of achieving. Creativity in the world of work need not be confine to a class of youthful professionals who value freedom, diversity, and self-expression. The aspiration and potentiality to be creative in some realm of one’s life is a universal one unrestricted by occupation.
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While the critics of a rising urban post-material professional class are right about a limited public concern with the problem of central city poverty, they have missed the trend to the rise of a modest income creative class as a driving force in the central city economy. Not all the creative occupations referred to by Florida in his writings enjoy the affluence of the creative class as a whole. True creativity doesn’t necessarily bring wealth as the artists of the world historically discover repeatedly. Yet it is this group that concentrates most heavily among all occupations in the central city today and serves as a driving force for neighborhood renewal. The popular image of starving artists or aspiring actors living in garrets and waiting tables for their living stands up to academic scrutiny. Artists (defined broadly to include actors and directors, announcers, architects, drama and music teachers, authors, dancers, designers, musicians and composers, painters, sculptors, craft artists and printmakers, and photographers), in comparison to other professionals, are highly educated but poorly paid. They often hold multiple jobs in a given year, work outside their chosen occupation to make ends meet, face frequent periods of unemployment, and contend with an income distribution highly skewed towards the relatively few who experience substantial success. Financial accomplishment as an artist is a ‘winner take all’ gamble that very few attain. Nonetheless, the number of artists has has grown more than twice as fast as the labor force in recent decades, reflecting an expansion in public demand for the products and experiences artists have to offer as a well as a continued willingness of many artists to endure a lower income for the intrinsic rewards of creative work.
Given their economic vulnerability, artists normally choose to locate in inner city neighborhoods with inexpensive rents. For those who require studios or places to rehearse, declining, seedy commercial or industrial areas often provide affordable space in which to both work and live. Artists concentrate in central cities to a greater degree than most other occupations and tend to cluster together in neighborhoods that best suit their needs for expansive but cheap workspace, artistic community connections, and access to customers. Clustering enables interactions, from which spring ideas and information on economic opportunities, and the concentration of supporting art galleries and display spaces or performance venues. Over the last forty years, Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood has evolved into what sociologist Richard Lloyd calls a “neo-bohemia” that originated in artistic clustering. The neighborhood initially offered an abundance of old, unoccupied commercial space and working class bars that became outlets for performers as well as watering holes for invading “bohemians.” By the late 1990s the neighborhood saw a growth of trendy restaurants, bars, entertainment venues, coffee shops, and art galleries popular with Chicago’s growing class of young professionals. Along with this came a flood of building rehabs and condo construction pushing property values dramatically upward, driving many of the artists that set off the whole process in the first place to cheaper rents on the neighborhood’s periphery.
For Wicker Park, artistic vitality turned out to be self-destructive as it has for other so called bohemian communities such as Paris’ Montmartre or Left Bank or San Francisco’s North Beach. Post-materialist young professionals attracted to downtown living retain some of the consumerist tendencies of their affluent parents, but turn more to spending their dollars on shared experiences as opposed to the accumulation of material possessions, and they love doing so in a neo-bohemian bastion of creativity. They choose to live at high densities in condos and apartments for the privilege of participating in the varieties of human experience that requires proximity—music and entertainment, art galleries and public art, museums and the performance arts, and a lusty bar scene. Life on the streets and in the parks of a big city in itself constitutes a human drama that the suburbs are challenged to match. Part of the charm of neighborhoods like Wicker Park is their marginality and the oddballs and characters they attract. Suburbs are safe and convenient while the central city is dangerous but exciting and stimulating. The problem with the invasion of affluence into neighborhoods like Wicker Park is the pushing out of those people who create the bohemian ambience in the first place.
While a local neighborhood arts scene may be attractive to affluent consumers, gentrification need not be the inevitable result. Milwaukee's Riverwest, with 11,500 residents just to the north of downtown, has evolved recently into a local arts and entertainment center with a growing collection of interesting bars and restaurants. The area was originally settled by working class immigrant Polish families more than a century ago who built modest duplexes and small simple frame houses. The neighborhood today also contains old store fronts and a number of aging factory buildings. Artists usually rent their dwellings, but one of the big attractions of Riverwest is the feasibility of purchasing a modest house or storefront that can serve as both a studio and a place to live. The humble character of the housing stock gives it an immunity from gentrification and keeps the neighborhood affordable and attractive not just to artists, but to a racially and ethically diverse collection of residents as well as students from nearby UWM. For the past twenty-seven years, the Riverwest Artists Association has sponsored ArtWalk, a walking tour displaying the creations of a hundred plus local artists at studios, galleries, and homes throughout the neighborhood, demonstrating the scale and endurance of the local arts community. If anyone expresses post-materialist values, it is artists, and alongside the arts community in Riverwest exist a number of activists groups with goals beyond material accomplishment, including the Riverwest Neighborhood Association, Peace Action Center, Riverwest Rainbow Alliance (an organization of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender residents), and Children’s Outing Association. While the occupants of expensive condos along the Milwaukee River on the southern edge of Riverwest may well be seeking post-materialist consumer experiences in the central city, the residents of Riverwest seem to hue even more closely to a post-materialist philosophy in their economic sacrifices for the sake of creative expression. Nonetheless, there is a certain economic symmetry in Riverwest’s durability as an arts community and the springing up of affluent condo development nearby. Riverwest has artistic experiences and objects to sell, and the young professionals and suburban expats moving into nearby condos have the money to buy.
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The return of an affluent middle class to the central city in places like Chicago’s Wicker Park and Milwaukee’s Third Ward reflects a growing post-materialist interest in experiences that require a “shared consumption.” When we share we get pulled outside of self-concern. This is especially the case with such events as musical performances, theatrical presentations, visual art displays, sporting events, and political pep rallies. In such instances, being a part of an audience or participatory group is an integral part of the experience. The same is true more casually in the enjoyment of a neighborhood’s street or cafe life, or on a Sunday stroll through a park or along an urban lakeshore. In all such instances possession by the consumer is immaterial to the experience. Artists in central cities, who are themselves the paragons of post-materialist self-creation, acquire an economic niche by virtue of their ability to serve a post-materialist shift in the nature of middle class consumption. Artists survive by producing opportunities for experience. Post-materialist experience requires proximity, and compact living greases the skids of spatial proximity and promotes the sharing of experiences in both public and private spaces. It is in urban spaces where we get our fullest exposure to the diversity of the human experience, and where we have the greatest opportunity to submerge our personal egos in the content and flow of this larger reality. This is not to say that post-materialism lacks its dangers. The urban entertainment industry is driven partly by a dark Dionysian alcohol and drug fueled desire for ecstatic group experiences and sexual unions that can have exploitative and addictive outcomes, especially for those doing the work of serving (see the next entry for more on this problem). Aspiring artists pushed into part-time service work out of economic necessity often have to put up with obnoxious and even violent behavior for the sake of getting tips, and can get stuck in doing work for much of their lives they didn’t plan on. The post-materialist values of the young urban professional remain a mixture of hedonistic desire for urban entertainment and a self-transcendent interest in creativity and human diversity. Underlying this, nonetheless, lies a real passion for the products of human creativity. A Bohemia without creativity along with its lusty and tragic qualities wouldn’t be much of a Bohemia. Artistic creativity ultimately produces objects and experiences that give insight into existential meaning. The post-materialism of young professionals may lack seriousness and for many may only be vicarious, but it does nonetheless support living more compactly in the service of human creativity.
Philosophy matters. For nearly a century now our human spatial dream has been materialist, spatially expansive, and suburban, but the winds of our dreams may now be subtly shifting toward a post-materialist philosophy and high density urban compactness that better serves post-material needs. We normally think of philosophy as something for academics to argue about, but it is more important than that. Our philosophical outlook lies behind how we live in the world, and a shift in the values by which we live can change the way we live.
A modest trend towards city living may not seem like much, but if it continues it will be a big deal. A shift to living at higher densities may well come in the nick of time to help reverse our ominous march to climatic warming. If you live in a densely packed central city instead of a spatially expansive suburb, you move around much less to get to work, for shopping, and doing all the other things you love to do. When you do move around in the city, chances are greater that you will walk, bike, or take public transit than if you lived in low density suburbs where odds are that you would drive everywhere because everything is so far apart. In short, if you move from suburb to city, you will cut back on your driving and the volume of auto-related greenhouse gas emissions you cause. Also in the city, chances are you will live in a smaller dwelling that requires much less greenhouse gas-emitting energy for heat and light, and if you live in a multi-family unit and share heat-emitting exterior walls and roof areas with others, your dwelling will be much more energy efficient than a single family, low rise house in the suburbs. By deciding to live in the city, you will do the environment a big favor whether you think much about it or not. If you are a post-material environmentalist, you might even decide to live in the city to live out your own philosophical values apart from realizing the benefits of city living. Again, philosophy is not just for the ivory tower but really matters in everyday life. A post-material future will differ from the materialist past.
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