ReThink: The Creative City

Posted on September 07, 2010

CEOs for Cities Fall Event Line-Up

This spring, we announced our plans to launch an ambitious, five-year campaign to imagine a new kind of future for urban life in America. And for the past five months we have been cultivating the partnerships and resources to do so.
 
Next week, we begin. With our San Jose City Cluster we will host the first of more than half a dozen Brain Trusts—intimate conversations among civic leaders, influential partners and brave new thinkers on the most relevant issues of our time.  The San Jose conversation will be followed almost immediately by the San Francisco Brain Trust, which we are co-hosting with our partners at SPUR in conjunction with our second Urban Next Summit, where we’ll engage the perspectives of 100 emerging leaders from around the country.
 
In October we will convene the Livability Challenge in Indianapolis, where together with the Central Indiana Community Foundation and Indianapolis Downtown, Inc. we will work with national civic leaders like Will Rogers, President and CEO of Trust for Public Land to imagine what it would take for a city to provide its citizens access to beauty, art and nature every day.
 
We will round out a busy fall with a week of rich engagement in Detroit. It kicks off with a 48-hour civic intervention and emerging leadership exchange between CEOs for Cities partner CreateHere in Chattanooga and our Detroit City Cluster leadership. We will share the results of their work with our network of partners at our fall national meeting, the Urban Leaders Summit on Nov 8-9. We’ll finish the week with a 1.5 day Community Challenge, a project of CEOs for Cities and The Rockefeller Foundation to propel American cities toward the ambition to re-engage citizens in a robust public life and attach them to their communities.
 
An overview of the fall event schedule is below:
 
Sept 16:                            San Jose Brain Trust (San Jose, CA)
Sept 20:                            San Francisco Brain Trust (San Francisco, CA)
Sept 20-21:                       Urban Next Summit (San Francisco, CA)
Oct 11-13:                         Livability Challenge (Indianapolis, IN)
Nov 4-6:                            Civic Intervention (Detroit, MI)
Nov 8-9:                            CEOs for Cities National Meeting: Urban Leaders Summit (Detroit, MI)
Nov 10-11:                        Community Challenge (Detroit, MI)
 
Questions on how you can be involved? Contact Julia Klaiber at 202-525-5627 or jklaiber@ceosforcities.org.

Bruce Mau to Be Honored for Contributions to the Design Community

CEOs for Cities Board Member Bruce Mau, author of The Third Teacher and founder of Bruce Mau Design and Bruce Mau Live, will be honored at the Design Exchange’s annual gala on October 23 in Toronto.  

The Design Exchange will recognize Bruce’s body of work with Massive Change and for clients including Coca-Cola, MOMA, Chapters Indigo, Arizona State University and many others.

Join Bruce at CEOs for Cities’ Urban Leaders Summit, November 8-9 in Detroit where he will present an exciting new vision for developing all of a city’s talent and putting all of its talent to work. He will be joined by Carol Goss, president and CEO of the Skillman Foundation, who will talk about her inspiring work to improve the lives of children in Detroit.

Please note that the Urban Leaders Summit is a national meeting for CEOs for Cities' partnership network and is not open to non-members. For partnership inquiries, please contact Julia Klaiber.

Alaina Beverly to Deliver Keynote Address at Urban Next Summit

CEOs for Cities is pleased to announce Alaina Beverly, associate director of The White House Office of Urban Affairs, as the keynote speaker during the Urban Next Summit, September 20-21 in San Francisco.

Throughout the two-day summit, 100 of the nation’s freshest thinkers will engage in facilitated, interactive dialogue on what it will take to create the next American Dream.

A select group of participants will present their work during the Urban 20x20 reception with a series of six-minute slide shows that will feature an inspirational glimpse of next generation urban leadership.  These inspiring emerging leaders will be showcased on the CEOs for Cities website, along with a full report on outcomes of the summit following the event.

The Urban Next Summit is made possible by generous support from the Koret Foundation and the Walter & Elise Haas Fund.

Charles Landry Profiled in Strategy+Business

If you are a long-time CEOs for Cities member, you will remember Charles Landry as our keynote speaker in Miami.  His book, The Creative City, has inspired many of us.  There is a wonderful profile of Charles in the current issue of Strategy + Business.  The article cites CEOs for Cities’ research in its early paragraphs to set up the importance of Charles’ work. Unfortunately, the writer stretches the research to infer something it doesn’t. It’s close, but it’s not accurate.

Referring to our findings on the opinions of U.S.-based college-educated 25-34 year-olds that found 64 percent of them say, first, they look for the city they want to live in, then they look for a job, the writer asserts, “A landmark study by the Chicago-based CEOs for Cities released in 2008 found that 64 percent of highly mobile global knowledge workers said they were more likely to choose a job because of where an organization was located than because of the organization itself.”  

While we appreciate the laudatory comments, we believe this is another example of stretching research findings beyond their meaning.  In fact, we see this all the time in the popular press.  Read very carefully whenever research is cited.  How questions are asked and of whom make a big difference in the answers you get.