Economists are commonly deemed to be more prone to abstract reasoning than to concrete action. There must be a grain of truth in this, because it is quite common to hear economists jokes in Economics Departments. This one, for example:

After a shipwreck, an economist ends up stranded on a desert island. He looks around and sees a wooden box, washed upon the shore by the waves. He opens it: it is full of canned food, nutritious and long-lasting! However, he does not have any tools to open the cans: is he doomed to starve amidst abundance? The economist does not lose his cool, and he tackles the problem the way his profession tas taught to to: “Assume I have a can-opener…”

Many of us yearn for concreteness. This is why I am so happy to fly to Potenza on Friday 4th: in May 2007 the Ministry of Economic Development asked me to help the Basilicata regional administration in designing a policy to build creative spaces, and now the first space (called Cecilia) is here, and the other four will follow in a matter of months. Not only have they been designed chiefly by the local creatives that are going to use them; they also come with clear guidelines for being turned over to private sector– and third sector entities or running them, which the competent local authorities have signed off to; and are integrated with a pretty advanced governance model of the Region’s cultural policy.

The project is called Visioni Urbane. I have dealt with it before. I’m told it’s becoming some sort of flagship project for the regional adiministration; the “Visioni Urbane method” is being demanded on tackling other policies (for example setting up a regional Film Commission), and the administration itself is building upon the partnership with the creatives created within Visioni Urbane to launch Matera’s bid for European Culture Capital 2019. It is no coincidence that the person in charge of Visioni Urbane, Rossella Tarantino, has been appointed as coordinator of that bid; and another Visioni veteran, Paolo Verri, is serving as scientific director.

My book Wikicrazia contains a lot of Visioni Urbane war stories, and the grandopening of Cecilia will include a book presentation. But what I’m really looking forward to is the joy of witnessing a policy that I helped to develop go live, live and so concrete that I can actually sit and listen to a concert in it. For an economist, this is a thrill, alas, all too rare.

I am in Krakow. I walk through the former extermination camps in Auschwitz and Birkenau and don’t feel like blogging at all. Hope you don’t mind. I’m off to the sound check, see you next week.

The repairman from Whirlpool showed up the other day. My dishwasher was having problems. I looked the issue up online, and found out that they are often associated to a clogged discharge pipe. I checked mine, and it worked, so I had no choice but to call in the professionals. Good thing I’m covered by a comprehensive warranty.

The repairman showed up five days after my call. He removed four screws to access a compartment underneath the main space (where you put your dirty dishes); then he asked for a sponge. A sponge? Yes. He explained that the discharge pipe must have been partially clogged at some point (it was), and that caused some waste water to be spewed back into this lower compartment. That caused the machine to halt its cycle. So he removed the water with the sponge and closed the lower compartment. Fifteen minutes of work, for which he charged me €62. What about the warranty? Doesn’t apply. There was nothing wrong with the machine itself, the problem was (or rather had been) in the discharge pipes.

At this point I protested. This must be a common problem, I told the guy; and it does not require particular training or skills to solve. I can use a screwdriver and a sponge too. Why don’t you write about it in the user’s manual? Answer: “You’re not allowed to open the machine. If you do, you lose your warranty.”

I find this attitude of Whirlpool’s (in fairness, shared by almost all the manufacturers of durable goods) dishonest and insulting. It’s dishonest, because they are selling me a warranty that does not cover a common problem that is very simple to fix, yet it does not allow me to fix it myself. And it’s insulting, because the underlying assumption is that buyers of dishwashers are dangerous idiots that should not be allowed to tamper with a machine. There is also a paricular irony: I bought my dishwasher at IKEA, a company which sells almost only buyer-assembled furniture.

Dear Whirlpool, I am no idiot. I may not be an expert technician, but (though it may come as a surprise with you) I have the basics of using my brain and my hands covered. I can read a manual (if it’s written reasonably clearly) e use simple tools like scredrivers and spanners; I can certainly operate a sponge. I don’t want to deal with companies that treat me like a lump of meat with a credit card. Read the Cluetrain Manifesto and the Self-Repair Manifesto, and come back when you have figured out what it’s all about. In the mean time, if there is a more respectful appliance company out there, with a more permissive approach to technology, make yourself known: I’ll be happy to mention you on this blog, and to buy from you my next dishwasher.

An interesting place I visited recently is 798 Art District in Beijing. It is a large industrial complex for the manufacturing of electronic components (with transistors especially important) built in the Fifties by the Chinese government in cooperation with their East German counterparts. With production discontinued in most plants starting in the Eighties, 798 has known a second life after 1995 (or 2000, as other sources say), when artists and galleries started reclaiming the abandoned buildings, attracted by the abundant availability of cheap space and by the Bauhaus-style aesthetics dictated by German engineers. In the early Noughties the district turned into an art utopia: a fascinating place where artists and gallerists live and work side by side with workers of those factories in the complex that are still churning out product. There is so much space (it is as large as a small town) that people could and did engage in oh-what-the-hell activities, and scattered the landscape with ironic Mao statues, ceramics dynosaurs, ten-meters-tall manga style warrior robots build of pieces scavenged from old cars (my favourite); and hosting performances, raves, live concerts, film festivals like New-York based Tribeca. Today 798 is by far the most important – also in an economic sense – powerhouse of the fledgling Chinese contemporary art scene. And that means business: in the course of 2007 artist Zhang Xiaogang alone sold paintings for US$ 57 million. Obviously, trendy cafés, restaurants and shops with a bohemian penchant mushroomed.

It would be fascinating to study in depth, especially now that the Visioni Urbane experiment draws to its end, with the creative spaces being delivered and turned over to the coalition of firms and associations that will run them. For now I’m going to take a few notes, based on the visit and some reading.

• Aesthetics matter. As an economist, I always thought that artists like derelict industrial spaces because they are cheap, and, being aesthetically neutral, they can be made into whatever they want, from aseptic lab to steampunk cave. But no: the statements I have collected agree that 798 attracted artists for its unique looks. To be sure, the care put in designing it by the Germans is unparalleled in contemporary industrial architecture in China (just look at the sawtooth profile of the roofs, or the large windows facing north to maximize shadowless lighting)
• Organic growth just does a better job. 798 is home to a large variety of works and organizations, but at the same time it displays a very clear aesthetic and socioeconomic coherence. It feels like a coral reef, with various species fighting and cooperating and exchanging matter and information in an endless coevolutionary dance. Top-down planning dooes not stand a chance to achieve anything like this. This is not to say that there can be no role for the policy maker in the making of an art district, but it does recommend it takes on the role of starting the evolutionary engine and monitoring thatthe system moves in the general right direction, letting it work out its own layout. An example can be found in the story of 798 itself: the event that spawned the district’s second life is the temporary occupation of one of the dismissed factories by the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. The Academy only needed cheap workshop space while it relocated to a new campus, but the event did bring many artists and art students to visit the area. The dean of the Faculty of sculpure, Sui Jianguo, fascinated by the space, relocated his personal studio to 798, and he was among the first established artists to make the move.
• The economic success of an art district endangers its long-term credibility and sustainability. As corporations looking to be cool start to organize marketing events in 798, many artists lament a rapid rise in rental costs and fear excessive commercialization. To be sure, many of the pieces you’ll find in the maze of galleries have a disquieting tendency to rework in different contexts the iconography of Chinese communism: Mao statues, little red books and red stars. Why? Because (generally more sophisticated) references to Chinese communism are to be found in the work of the most successful and wealthy artists, like Zhang Fanzhi or the already quoted Zhang Xiaogang. Pressure on rental costs, of course, increases the incentive to imitation to make a quick buck, and takes away the mental space for artists and gallerists to develop new products. Many observers fear the collapse of the ecosystem now in place and the transformation of 798 into a sort of shopping mall of Chinese contemporary art.
• The district’s economic success, while in a sense too great with respect to the needs of artistic creation, is too small with respect to protect 798 from the real estate market. The area, once peripheral, is today on the strategic corridor between the city centre and its new international airport, and pressure is mounting to just bulldoze the whole thing and develop it to satisfy the housing demands of a 13 million inhabitants (and counting) city. The owner of 798 is Sevenstar, a State-owned corporation established in 2001 with what remained of the old Mao-era complex; it has responsibility for managing the buildings. There’s a clear governance problem here: the corporation’s mandate is declined in purely financial terms, so its management’s duty is to maximize financial return, without any regard for cultural significance. The alliance between it and the artists lasted only as long as the latter were the only people willing to pay a rent, however low, to occupy the derelict factories: as soon as the space became interesting for financially stronger entities, the tensions between artists and the corporation mounted. In 2005 art institutions in Beijing were able to persuade the municipal government that – in the light of the coming 2008 Olympics – the city needed a contemporary art showcase more than it needed new housing. The following year, authorities designated the area the first-ever “centralized district for cultural creativity”. No bulldozing: instead, roads were repaved, street lighting enhanced, and gentrification (and rents) sped up.

This is China: the government always has the last word. While it’s hard not to applaud its decision, the economist is left wondering whether market economy is doomed to keep art between the rock of excessive commercialization and the hard place of insufficient profitability. And this, I am afraid, amounts to saying that art economics – once stripped of explicit and hidden public subsidies and wishful thinking – is a delusional exercise, and that art and market can live in symbiosis in the short run, but when all has been said and done are incompatible.

According to the World Bank’s noteworthy PSD Blog a senior official in the Kanpur district, in Northern India, has ordered his highest ranking subordinates to create personal Facebook profiles “at the earliest”, and associate them with the page of the district’s administration.

The idea is that officials, being more accessible to citizens, feel them breathing down their neck, and therefore be prompted to respond quickly to suggestions, complaints or applause (“Citizens are going to like this, as they will be able to track their complaints”)

I like the intuition: it’s in line with what I wrote in my book Wikicrazia, particularly in the chapters on “transparency” and “speaking in a human voice”. In the actual decision there remain a few kinks to iron out: one of them is that my Facebook profile is mine, not my employer’s, public authority or not. Maybe this problem could be addressed creating multiple accounts, or using platforms where users have a much better control on what they share with whom, like Diaspora.

What I find most interesting, however, is that the Kanpur district administration initiative stands for the idea that the more transparency, the better. Which, after all, is the opinion I thought was common ground to more or less all of us, until the Wikileaks affaire kicked in and several commentators (including authoritative ones, like Shirky) started making the statement (in my opinion without proving it) that government need secrecy by default to be able to function. Who is right? At a first glance, between Ms. Clinton’s Department of State and the Kanpur district administration, the latter seems more in sync in the times. We, the people, had to rethink privacy at the times of the Internet: it seems logical that public authorities rethink secrecy as well. Frankly, I don’t see that many alternatives: Wikileaks and entities like it are here to stay, like it or not.

Note: I have not been able to find the Facebook page in question – but I am in China, and Internet access is not always straightforward, so I try to stay away from long Google searches. Should a reader find it and point me to it, I would be grateful to her or him.