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02/28/2004 Archived Entry: "Hipster Economics"

The Metro Times comes up with Hipster Economics in order to explain the overlap of Granholm's Cool Cities plan and the CreateDetroit Collective. Much of CreateDetroit's plan to revitalize the city through the arts (rather than franchise expansion as the current Mayor has opted for) reminds me of Ulmer's emerAgency project. The emphasis for development is placed on the arts, rather than corporate franchising. Thus, mood becomes central to this endeavor since mood is a major part of any arts (or Humanities-based) project. Focusing on cool, therefore, could present a good move towards re-imagining the city (if the move is not based on only the cliché definition of the word). When the cliché meaning becomes the only available definition, reactions like this (as described in the Time’s article) are inevitable (and justified):

When Granholm donned a pair of dark sunglasses while launching the Cool Cities initiative, the subsequent photographic evidence had Detroit’s “cool” contingent groaning and rolling their eyes, as if their dads had turned their baseball caps around and tried to adopt a rap-star vernacular.

This is where they need to call me. Just as Ulmer's emerAgency designs and teaches a way to deal with community problems through the mystory, I can provide a way to use the rhetoric of cool. How? Well, one step might be to re-imagine the city not as a spatial area of visitation, commerce, and living, but as a series of sampled moments, ideas, and beliefs. Imagine an architecture based on cool (like Rowe and Koetter's Collage City almost does) where sampling provides the logic of implementation rather than unified vision or genius inspiration (i.e. Frank Lloyd Wright).