There’s a reason a big metropolis, named Detroit, sprung up on the eastern side of Michigan.

It was a good location near water and other resources.

And it created millions of jobs during its heyday.

Everyone is calling Detroit “dead.”

Without a doubt, the problems of the automakers are having a profound effect on the entire Detroit-metro region, which has been in decline for decades.

Let’s face it, if you graduate from college, you aren’t exactly thinking, “I can’t wait to move to Detroit and start my new life.”

And that’s key to the success of a city. According to Richard Florida, the author of the book Rise of the Creative Class, among others, the success in luring the creative class can mean life or death for a city.

Detroit has to figure out a way to move beyond automobiles.

From the Lawrence Ulrich in the New York Times in January 2009:

In 1927, The New York Times called Detroiters “the most prosperous slice of average humanity that now exists or has ever existed.” If Detroit ever again deserves such lofty accolades, it won’t be for screwing cars together. Whether the Big Three survive or not, Detroiters must know it’s time to punch out. Fewer of the next generation will walk through factory doors to take their place alongside fathers, brothers and friends.

Now this sounds like heresy. But the sooner the city gets used to the idea, the brighter its prospects. For Detroit to have a future, it has to imagine what the future might look like without cars.

Can Artists “Save” Detroit?

As Detroit’s housing market craters and houses are literally selling for only $500, an interesting phenomena is sprouting up.

Apparently artists are seeing the cheap housing as an opportunity to move in.

Can Detroit lure the creative class through a regentrification of some of its neighborhoods? And how many artists would it take?

From NPR:

But Mitch Cope and his wife, Gina, are trying to change things — one house at a time.

The Copes, who bought a home on Detroit’s north side four years ago, have been recruiting artists from around the world to buy the foreclosed houses in the neighborhood and rebuild.

Neighbor Greg Profota, who has lived in the neighborhood all his life, has his doubts. His family and friends moved out years ago — and now he wants out, too. Still, Profota admires Cope’s gumption.

“Well, I gotta give him credit because he’s on a new frontier, and the neighborhood is so worn down, it’s gonna take a miracle to bring it back,” he says.

Profota’s house has been broken into three times, his garage six times. Same goes for pretty much every house on his block.

“You gotta have an alarm system on your houses, a dog and a gun, because the neighborhood is terrible,” he says. “I got all three.”

Cope admits that the Power House has already been broken into several times and that he has been threatened. But he has still managed to convince about a dozen working artists to move into the neighborhood. They’re from all over — the Netherlands, Germany, Brooklyn.

Jon Brumit is an artist in Chicago whose work has been featured in The New York Times and on the Today Show and NPR. He and his wife just bought a house in Cope’s neighborhood for $100. That’s right: an entire house for the price of dinner at a nice restaurant for a family of four. Sure, the place needs a ton of work and it[’s not that safe, but Brumit says it’s worth it just to help bring back the neighborhood.

The Copes are getting a lot of media attention for their plan to bring in artists to the neighborhood. You have to give them kudos for trying.

The bigger question is- how will Detroit lure the artists, writers, web designers, advertising executives, consultants and others needed to really have a vital, growing city?

Or should Detroit be allowed to, simply, die?

There is no rule that a city must live for forever. Just ask the thousands of small towns on the great plains that are being abandoned year by year.

I just finished reading Dan Pink’s latest book, “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.”

His theory is that the United States has moved beyond the Information Age (i.e. the internet, software coding etc) and is now in the Conceptual Age where jobs and the workforce will be dominated by people who excel at design and human interaction type of work, which is controlled by the right brain.

The statistical, rote type of jobs such as accountant or lawyer will gradually move overseas (and already are) and the best jobs in our economy will be held by those who are creative, right brain personalities.

Take the iPhone. One of the knocks against it is that it is simply a cellphone with a few gadgets tacked on- that it is not even a “new” product.

But it is, of course, a triumph of design. And it wasn’t an accountant or a lawyer who designed it.

Get Your MFA

He argues that an MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) is a more valuable degree than an MBA (Masters of Business).

Harvard’s MBA program admits 10% of its applicants but UCLA’s Fine Arts Graduate School admits only 3%. Corporate recruiters are now going to the fine arts schools like the Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago to recruit for consulting and management programs.

MBA jobs are routinely being outsourced overseas- such as the Wall Street analyst positions now being filled in India instead of in New York- for a fraction of the cost. But design cannot as easily move overseas.

He cites stats that in the United States, the number of graphic designers has increased tenfold in the decade, with graphic designers outnumbering chemical engineers by four to one. Maybe those statistics talking about the doom of the United States versus China because we aren’t producing enough engineers isn’t so dooming after all?

Since 1970, he says, 30% more people earn a living as a writer and 50% more earn a living by performing or composing music. 240 universities now have creative writing MFA programs versus only about 20 two decades ago.

This is what author Richard Florida, that I have talked about in other posts, describes as the “creative class” and it is the fight for these employees in cities and nations that will determine what countries stay on top during this century.

Pink argues that the caring professions are in demand: nursing, counselors, life coaches etc. These are also right brain professions. You cannot outsource these jobs, yet we have shortages in some of them and are bringing in immigrants to do them.

Pink describes six senses for the Conceptual Age. They are:

1. Design
2. Story
3. Symphony
4. Empathy
5. Play
6. Meaning

You can definitely see the “meaning” sense as people flock to self-help books and Oprah’s Magazine to figure out how to make a difference on the planet and what their lives “mean.” Only a more advanced society, having fulfilled its mandate to feed and clothe its people, can even begin to search for “meaning” in jobs and their lives.

The Next 50 Years

Unfortunately, our society still values the standard doctor, lawyer, accountant professions. Look at the sheer number of lawyers we have- a record level. These are the “good” professions. They are the “safe” professions. But Pink would argue, they’re not safe at all. They’re slowly going away to India, China and other countries.

Pink tells a story about the late Hallmark Cards creative force Gordon MacKenzie. Apparently Mr. MacKenzie used to go into grade schools to talk about his profession with kids. He would look around the classrooms and see the art on the walls and would ask, “how many of you are artists?”

The kids in kindergarten unanimously raised their hands. By second grade, only three-forths raised their hands to announce they were artists. By the third grade, only a few children held up their hands, and not as enthusiastically as he saw with the kindergarteners. By sixth grade, not a single child would admit to being an artist.

The kids had been indoctrinated by adults. They were told they needed to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, or accountants. And so they were.

How many people do you know that majored in biomedical engineering with a side major of music? Or drama and finance? I know a lot. Mainly because parents told their kids that there wasn’t money in those “artsy” professions.

But the parents are dead wrong.

Which would you rather be known as, a lawyer sitting in a one window office reviewing some documents or the designer of the iPhone or the iPod?

Go on Craigslist sometime and look at the job openings for artists and designers in, say, the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s quite illuminating. The right brain jobs are alive and well.

The future of America’s competitiveness lies in the designers of the iPhone. We need to leave the law and accounting to those toiling away in high rises in Shanghai and Bangalore instead.

Now, we just need to convince the next generation of workers, and their parents, that it’s okay to want a career playing with legos or designing videogames.