Childless Cities?
Bring In The Hipsters
At City Journal, Joel Kotkin and
Ali Modarres ask an unusual question: “What are cities for?”
They don’t go so far as to say that cities are for
raising children in families. But Kotkin and Modarres do strongly imply that without
that teleological view of urban environments, cities become moronic playgrounds
for adolescents who might grow old but never grow up. And that’s just the
beginning:
Increasingly,
our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and
Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich, traps for the poor, and
way stations for the ambitious young en route eventually to less congested
places. The middle-class family has been pushed to the margins, breaking
dramatically with urban history. The development raises at least two important
questions: Are cities without children sustainable? And are they desirable?
These concerns
are plausible. But the way they’re framed — cities aren’t
doing what they’re supposed to – distorts our view of some inspiring
possibilities that are already at hand. What happens, for instance, if we
instead begin by asking what our big cities can be for us? We might look
to those who have already asked that question of themselves, and taken action
accordingly.
Some might complain that there are race and class
problems involved in focusing, in that spirit, on our cities’ enterprising
hipsters. While those closer to the cultural right are inclined, like Kotkin
and Modarres, to mock Richard Florida for celebrating the childless hipster
economy, those closer to the cultural left harbor a deep unease with the
socioeconomic valorization of white young things. That’s not to say hipsters
are oppressed, of course. But it is to suggest that they’re misunderstood.
We can very quickly think in terms of four hipster
characteristics we can plot along two axes. Let the y axis be age, the x
axis authenticity. The hipsters America loves to hate are at the bottom left
hand corner of the chart we’ve designed — the youngest and least authentic. But
the hipsters who have actually bothered to ask what their cities can be for
them, and who have turned the answer into an actionable conversation, are much
further up and to the right on our chart: older and more authentic. It’s these
hipsters we should look to for guidance. They’re the ones who actually start
businesses, create relationships, transform communities, and — brace yourself —
often raise families. Cool, creative spaces may inspire a wave of relatively
younger and inauthentic hipsters to flow in (and by inauthentic, I mean,
they’re adopting hipster signifiers and hipster culture in an effort to
construct a personal identity through imitation rather than choice). But cool,
creative spaces don’t grow on trees. They grow out of the powerful choices made
by older, more enterprising, more authentic hipsters: coffee shops,
restaurants, bars, tattoo shops, record stores, bike shops, art galleries,
delis, real estate brokerages, surf shops, skate shops, and on and on.
People like these, who are community creators, not just
stakeholders, do put their time and effort into schools and neighborhood
associations, as Kotkin and Modarres hope. (Their relationship to churches is
another matter.) Do they prop up our economy? Can they save our economy? Don’t
be ridiculous. Why should we expect any relatively tiny group of motivated,
focused people to serve as a crutch or a miracle for the rest of us? Isn’t it
enough that they be an inspiration?
If you are inspired, even at the initial level of
imagination, you might quickly catch on to the way that hipster life actually
frustrates our dominant ideological categories. In an important post at Reason,
Jesse Walker
invites libertarian populists — and others! — to imagine just how far a
libertarian and populist political program could go. Walker’s thought
experiment yields a number of issue areas and policy choices that resonate
strongly with the segment of hipsterdom that flies in the face of conservative
and liberal prejudices alike. Hipster sentiments, interests, and experience all
chime very well with libertarian and populist ideas like reconsidering the
logic of universal higher education, delinking health insurance from employer
coverage, reassigning control of zoning from big business to local communities,
replacing our welfare bureaucracy with a guaranteed minimum income, and
reforming our nightmarish criminal justice system.
Surprise: these are all approaches to political issues
that can help make cities more kid- and family-friendly.
Instead of mocking hipsters at their least effective and
inspiring, we have the opportunity to learn three performance-enhancing things
from hipsters at their most effective and inspiring. First, our established
political prejudices blind us to the source of the transformative social and
economic action that’s already happening in our big cities. Second, our
established cultural prejudices blind us to the significant difference between
hipsters who are and who aren’t doing much to create real possibilities for new
relationships of mutual productivity and shared benefit. Third, the hipsters
who can inspire us in a way that’s significant to the future of cities live in
ways that help show us that several big libertarian and populist reforms could
work well in real life, not just on paper.
All these are reasons why, as Nick Gillespie
points out in The Washington
Post, Republicans stand to benefit greatly from a hipster outreach program.
Yet they’re not the only ones. And neither party will succeed in cornering the
hipster vote in a meaningful way unless they take a moment to understand just
what the hipster experience is really telling them about their own country.
The
link to the article can be found at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamespoulos/2013/08/05/childless-cities-bring-in-the-hipsters/
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