Canada’s missing ingredient: creativity

The Edmonton Journal‘s Ray Turchansky interviewed a local economist out with a new book about what’s missing from the Canadian economy: creativity.

Speaking with Alberta Treasury Branch‘s chief economist Todd Hirsch, Turchansky notes that for far too long, we have relied on our status as “hewers of wood, drawers of water” to fuel our prosperity (no pun intended, Alberta). Even without the current resource & commodities boom that’s driving Western Canada and keeping the country as a whole afloat during these difficult economic times, its been evident for quite some time that Canada suffers from a “productivity gap” compared to our southern neighbors.

This gap is literally visible in the US’s consistently higher GDP per capita and I think it’s also intuitively felt when companies and talented workers migrate south to get a bigger bang for their buck, though admittedly, this gap now seems to be closing for the first time ever.

(It ain’t because we’re suddenly innovating– a contemporaneous piece in the Globe and Mail cites the usual frustrations SMEs have in Canada: small venture capital market, taxation structures, a lack of coordination between public & private agencies, few mentors and weak commercialization processes.)

Much of this is a result of our own complacency.  Hirsch, who looks a bit like Rick Moranis with windswept hair, says “we need to stop asking the government to make us productive and creative.” He & Robert Roach have authored a book that tackles this issue: The Boiling Frog Dilemma: Saving Canada From Economic Decline. The title’s a bit alarmist but he does make a few salient points.

Hirsch offers some interesting anecdotes around creativity and the subsequent lack thereof, such as our increasingly rigid educational system (when “our crayons are taken away”) and the Overseas Experience (i.e. “Gap Year” ) that Australians and New Zealanders regularly take in between finishing school and starting work to refresh and rejuvenate themselves.

This is not to say that Canadians aren’t creative–witness everything from the invention of insulin to the construction of the Canadarm to Research In Motion–but for the most part Hirsch says we are too comfortable in our abundance.  And it’s not like the opportunities aren’t there: as one of the world’s energy hotspots, Hirsch says Alberta should be leaders in areas of relevance such as carbon capture & storage technology.

(my favourite example)

Interestingly, the article finishes by looking at what he considers the three components of applied creativity: invention, innovation & design.  Innovation is a tired, overused term while design is the easiest and most economical to build upon, according to Hirsch. (I would posit that design itself is in danger of being beaten into a cliché. Time for a new word but more on that later).

He cites the world’s number one firm as an example of how to “do” it right: “Apple doesn’t really invent anything, it just takes existing technology and adds tremendous design that people connect with.”

Highlighting urban design

The city of Edmonton has produced a nifty little guide to showcase nifty design highlights among its newest communities.

Entitled “Designing New Neighbourhoods“, the 48-page report is a product of the city’s municipal development plan, “The Way We Grow” which is itself part of a series of high-level plans for the next 40, 50 years as the capital city of one of the world’s energy hotspots.

Designing New Neighbourhoods highlights some of the best practices in the city’s newest areas such as Windermere & The Orchards in the far southwest, Summerside in the southeast, Lago Lindo, Schonsee & Griesbach in the north end of town.

Each highlight has a photo listing the neighbourhood feature, its location and nascent benefits to the surrounding community.

The accolades are categorized according to 9 major urban design considerations:

• housing,
• streets & public realm,
• parks & open spaces,
• natural areas,
• active transportation & transit,
• history & culture,
• commercial, retail & public facilities,
• food & agriculture,
• ecological design.

There’s a major emphasis on natural settings which is interesting given that a lot of people in Edmonton are talking about urban farming lately.

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Some might see unintended irony in oil field service workers bombing down the Anthony Henday freeway in their F-150s from the big box stores of South Edmonton Common to disembark and enjoy “new urbanist” practices of intimate, walkable neighbourhoods.

But when the majority of infill development in this city tends to be highrise condos, it only makes sense that these ideas would be put into practice where land is cheap and demand high.  Given that the capital city region is expected to add as many as 75,000 people over just the next five years I think its worth applauding anywhere pedestrian-friendly, close-knit public spaces can take root. Even if they are in the suburbs.

The city has invited feedback at www.transformingedmonton.ca.

Design as a “Native” Tradition

If design exists in every culture then every culture has its design sense.  Its how terms like Gothic, Baroque, Victorian and Brutalist enter our vocabulary.  Design seems to be a universal concept–see Feng Shui in China and Vastu Shastra in India–as well as an immemorial one: the ancient Romans called it Genius Loci or “the Spirit of the Place.”  But what about aboriginal design?

To anyone who has ever spent any time with it, aboriginal design is vibrant, intuitive and sophisticated, often marked by a prevalence of natural and spiritual motifs.  Yet, like so much of aboriginal culture, either historicized or neglected.  Yet by looking at a few examples of new aboriginal design it makes sense that aboriginal perspectives would gel with architecture, sustainability & urban planning.  That’s the hope of  the “First Nations Conference on Sustainable Buildings and Communities” on February 29^th and March 1^st at the River Cree Resort & Casino, on the Enoch First Nation just west of Edmonton.

Architect Wanda Dalla Costa knows this firsthand, particularly around sustainability.  She says aboriginal-driven design  “aligns with traditional philosophies of environmental responsibilities, being caretakers of the land and caretakers for the next 7 generations.  It comes from within.”  As Chief Clarence Louie, the CEO of the Osoyoos Indian Band Development Corporation will attest to,  resource-based aboriginal economies are poised to boom in Canada, so Dalla Costa says there’s also pragmatic reasons for this conference.  “(First Nations communities) are aware that there is a large push towards green buildings right now and therefore funding for those innovative, pilot projects.” 

The event is entitled “Starting the Conversation”—perhaps a tacit acknowledgement of the sorry state of housing in aboriginal life (one word: Attawapiskat, of which Grand Chief Stan Louttit will update the conference).  Even when done with the best of intentions, the government-mandated urbanization of aboriginal communities hewed to a boxy, institutional approach that  privileged function over form, according to Dalla Costa. “A lot of First Nations communities were built and designed on an urban layout i.e. with town centres on a grid system and prototyped housing but without regards to the society, climate, culture and activities people in rural cultures may undertake.”

So what does aboriginal design in architecture look like?  Some groundbreaking examples include Arthur Erickson’s Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and Blackfoot member Douglas Cardinal’s sinuous Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec as well as the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.

Dalla Costa, a Cree member of the Saddle Lake First Nation, says aboriginal design often borrows from geomantic principles.  For example, after spending many hours listening to elders envision a learning centre for the Blood tribe of Southern Alberta, she incorporated the four cardinal directions, sun patterns, wind dynamics and other earthly elements into the building.

“Concepts with FN architecture are almost everything.  They are so important because the communities are trying to  hang on to their identity…They want to  resurrect the culture and buildings are one of those forms. “

Amazingly, Dalla Costa counts herself as only the 8^th licensed aboriginal architect in Canada, a tiny fellowship that includes Cardinal and Alfred Waugh.  Waugh calls the Left Coast home which is where the most progressive examples of aboriginal design tend to be.  He and Dalla Costa will be having a panel discussion on the best of Canadian sustainable architecture at the Conference (www.sustainablefnc.ca).

Waugh has characterized aboriginal architecture thusly:

“It embraces what happens whenever we take action to give order or meaning to the space around us.  Naming space, designating sacred parts of the wilderness, clearing village areas, garden plots, claiming food-gathering areas, planning and constructing buildings and arranging the spaces that surround and connect them are all components of Native architecture.  Encoded into these buildings and social domains are the social and religious meanings particular to each Nation.”

Seabird Island School by Patkau Architects

UBC Museum of Anthropology by Arthur Erickson

Squamish Lilwat Cultural Centre by Alfred Waugh

Canadian Museum of Civilization by Douglas Cardinal

You knew this was coming…

Its Sh*t Edmontonians Say

Credit to the enterprising folks who saw the meme and jumped on it. In one day its already gotten 100,000 hits…and once it digested the requisite Oiler fanfare (thanks to appearances by phenoms Jordan Eberle and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins), stirred up some civic dialogue.

(for the record, I have never actually seen Lucy the Elephant, I grew up in Millwoods and they’re bang on about the air conditioning…)

In the meantime, hello, everywhere else in the world: consider the floodgates of self-caricature open, if they aren’t already.  I guess it makes sense, given that the ” Sh*t (insert ethnicity here) say” vids lit-up the broadband, one after another.  Alas, even enterprising, funny webisodes based on ethnic comedy eventually meet the law of diminishing returns.

What I think is utterly fascinating is how fast these memes are circulating.  For what its worth I’ve been really enjoying this one lately, and it doesn’t even have a title. The fact that these online memes are less than two months old is starting to give 2012 an interesting–if not worn out–theme.

But I am looking forward to seeing vignettes about what other cities in the world–starting, of course, with Calgary–say when they say Sh*t.