The Next Silicon Valley. It’s almost a cultural cliche – the quest for a dynamic, innovative, creative tech hub contained in a specific geographical area. Is it something you can create, or is it a phenomenon that happens organically, when the right set of ill-defined features come together in a alchemy of innovation?
Mark Surman has had a long career in fostering innovation, and looking at ways of creating open collaborative spaces for people. He’s currently Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, makers of Firefox.
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Stewart Brand had an odd book called "How Buildings Learn," which went over how architecture (something usually considered rigid and prestigious) are slowly modified by its users over time. He called one class of space the "low road," which was like this almost trashy space where nobody really cared what happens to it. Low Road places are any real physical space where it can be modified so quickly and freely that playful things are bound to happen, where things can't be ruled into any sort of structure.
Upon that, he hinted at the role of Low Road buildings in a sort of economic cycle: A building is in disrepair and is set to be abandoned. An artist who can't really afford much picks it up on the cheap and moves in to both make studio space and maybe live as well. He divides it all up into more studio space and rents it out to other artists. As they stay there, they begin fixing things up a bit to their tastes — not like anyone really cares what happens to that old crappy warehouse anyway.
Then they do their work, and the place begins to pack a lot of creative culture. As the culture grows more interesting, new businesses like cafes and shops move nearby to try and pick up on the trendiness. The place becomes a culture capital. Middle class to rich people then try to move nearby and begin fixing up the place even more because they want to live in a dignified, culture-rich place. Now you got a high class neighbourhood!
But that makes the property values go up, and thus the artists that made the place work in the first place can't even afford to work there anymore. They move out, and the new city goes into a slow decline into mediocrity. Its cultural economy collapses, people move out, buildings go decrepit, and then the artists move back in to start the whole process all over again.
I nearly forgot. Here is an example of a successful "low road" building: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20
It's rather strange, isn't it? If you want to really make a creative or innovative hub, you do the exact opposite of planning to get it.
My university has been building a uberbuilding to house its engineering program. It's going to be like one of those "iconic buildings of the future" that will make the university look all pretty and enviornmental and appealing in its brochures and advertising, but I sometimes fear that such a temple-like massive structure will end up being so imposing and frightening to the students that none of them will try doing anything spectacular out of fear of causing profanity on sacred ground.