Creating a creative community

Out with San Diego, America’s Finest City. That self-aggrandizing title never has felt entirely comfortable. John Eger thinks it’s time for our urban region to adopt a new slogan: San Diego: The Creative Community. Not a bad marketing slogan – if it turns out to be true.

Richard Louv

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/louv/20031221-9999_mz1e21louv.html

(Thanks to Mark Martin for passing this along.- Russ)

Several years ago, Eger, director of SDSU’s International Center for Communications, chaired a group that, at then Mayor Susan Golding’s behest, investigated how San Diego could become what Eger called a "city of the future." The group labored long and hard and delivered a hefty report to Golding, who was distracted by her dream of becoming a U.S. senator. The report became a doorstop.

Eger kept tilling the soil, and this year decided it was time to evolve the idea, to focus less on technology and more on the region’s civic structure.

What emerged was the notion that San Diego needs a new public space – a different way of considering the future.

Though its official launch isn’t until January 5, this five-year civic construction project is stimulating a good deal of on-line discussion, e-mailed comment and a flurry of ideas for San Diego’s regional future. Envision San Diego: The Creative Community (its full title) is a partnership between KPBS, SDSU’s International Center for Communications, and the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Web site, http://www.SignOnSanDiego.com – where Envision blogs are propagating.

On March 31, KPBS will sponsor a town hall meeting, a special one-hour public affairs program featuring some of the best ideas for the region’s future, culled from public comment. Envision’s organizers hope to extend its reach to the ethnic, economic and age groups that have traditionally been excluded (by default, if not by intent) by some of the earlier attempts to jumpstart new leadership. So far, the makeup of the steering committee does not reflect that goal, but the night is young.

One of the roles of journalism is to encourage public discourse, and this region sorely needs a new way to communicate. Envision, without any apparent political axe to grind, promises to enlist new and old media, print, radio, TV and the Internet, to create a new public conversation. The second role of journalism, which, when push comes to shove, must trump that other role – is to stand outside the institutions and challenge them, reporting the truth as it can be seen.

As someone who has supported the creation of such a public dialogue for a long time, I sat in on the planning sessions and offered my own notions. Envision is off to a good start but faces some serious challenges. Among the hard truths about many of the past civic enterprises, here and in other cities: most start out talking a populist line but devolve into elitism, replacing one set of good old boys with a newer oligarchy; they avoid dissent and stumble at the first sign of controversy; they produce unreadable reports; they fail to collect their own independent data; they never figure out a way to turn public debate into real action; and finally, they float away on a sea of platitudes.

The worst thing that an effort like Envision could do is claim the civic turf as its own. Other civic groups are also emerging or have been working in these fields all along. What the region actually needs is something much larger: a network of networks, in which no single organization or set of ideas dominates, but all are connected; a network of networks that engages the residents of San Ysidro as purposefully as the folks in Scripps Ranch, environmentalists as intently as builders.

Eger hopes the Envision dialogue will nurture that kind of network, and produce the broad-based intellectual ferment that could help launch a new era for the region. As he sees it, this is a matter of civic and economic survival. "With globalization in full bloom, America is beginning to see the outlines of yet another out-migration of American jobs," he writes. "Unlike the earlier shift of manufacturing jobs to less developed East Asian countries, the loss of the latest round of high-tech software and service jobs could have dramatic impacts on America’s economic wealth and well-being."

But Eger is well, eager. "On the positive side, think tank Nomura Research Institute says that the stage is set for the advance of the ‘Creative Age,’ a period in which America should once again thrive and prosper because of our respect for individual enterprise, tolerance for dissent and freedom of expression," he writes. "Those communities placing a premium on cultural, ethnic and artistic diversity, and reinventing their knowledge factories for the creative age, will likely burst with creativity and entrepreneurial fervor."

So far, the ideas being offered by Envision, the Civic Initiative, and other old and new civic groups suggest that this community could become as well known for its creativity as for its sunshine.

Imagine San Diego as America’s first truly 21st century urban region, with a powerful civil society structure, pushing the technological and human-relations envelope – establishing an independent think tank devoted to the region’s future; dismantling the isolated silos of higher education; pioneering a new kind of transit system; finally cracking the border code; figuring out how to link ethnic communities; launching a kind of San Diego Corps (as LEAD is already doing) that would enlist San Diegans to help rejuvenate neighborhoods, rich or poor, far from their own – transcending the social loneliness associated with the newer cities.

One way Envision could fulfill its promise would be engage the local high schools, universities and community colleges, encouraging classes to come up with their own ideas about the region’s future, and to participate in the on-line and in-print dialogue. Augie Gallego, chancellor of San Diego Community College District and Envision participant, hopes that his system’s student body will do just that, thereby flexing its extraordinarily diverse muscles. That would be a vision indeed.

Louv’s column appears on Sundays. He can be reached via e-mail at or via http://www.thefuturesedge.com.