Sorry, this post in Italian only. I review the medium term fallout from a generative regional policy I worked on in 2007-2009, wearing a Ministry of Economic development hat. The policy in question seems to have spawned quite a lot of interesting stuff. My tentative conclusion is that the ingredients of this success have very little to do with the amount of funding allocated, and are basically a function of an initial investment of attention for details, time, and freedom to explore alternative paths. Feel free to use automated translation if you are interested, and to get in touch with me if you want to learn more.

Era il 2007 quando ho iniziato a lavorare a Visioni Urbane, un progetto della Regione Basilicata che si proponeva di realizzare alcuni spazi per la cultura. Nel gruppo di lavoro rappresentavo il Ministero dello sviluppo economico; il mio compito era di spingere il progetto nella direzione di investire molto sulle competenze creative e imprenditoriali invece che nella costruzione di edifici.

I risultati di Visioni Urbane hanno superato le migliori previsioni. Il progetto – almeno per ora – ha avuto successo: la scena creativa lucana, in precedenza divisa da una cultura di sospetto reciproco, ha collaborato con generosità e competenza con la Regione per progettare una rete di nuovi centri per la cultura. Quattro di questi sono stati anche realizzati, non costruendo nuovi edifici ma recuperando edifici pubblici esistenti ma in decadenza e non utilizzati (in questo modo, circa 3 milioni di euro di nuovi investimenti in mattoni hanno messo a valore 10 milioni di euro di investimenti pubblici già effettuati), mentre un quinto, a causa di problemi strutturali insanabili, ha dovuto essere demolito ed è attualmente in corso di ricostruzione. La gestione di tutti e quattro i centri completati è stata messa a bando; in tre casi è già stata assegnata, mentre il quarto bando scade a gennaio. Due dei tre bandi già assegnati sono stati vinti da consorzi di associazioni e piccole imprese della comunità di creativi raccolta intorno al progetto.

Questi sono già ottimi risultati. Ma ancora più notevole è il fallout di Visioni Urbane: il piccolo gruppo di funzionari che lo ha condotto, e che risponde direttamente al Presidente della Regione, ha esteso l’approccio del progetto ad altre policies, parzialmente integrate con VU stesso. A quanto ne so io:

• la rete di coordinamento tra i centri immaginata per Visioni Urbane si è evoluta in una fondazione di comunità, partecipata dalle associazioni e le imprese della comunità creativa, da diversi enti locali e dalla Fondazione per il Sud (che funziona da acceleratore, perché raddoppia la dotazione finanziaria raccolta dagli altri soci). La comunità appoggia energicamente questa operazione.
• la linea di apertura a collaborazioni nazionali e internazionali di VU ha attecchito; i bandi per lo startup dei centri saranno aperti anche a soggetti esterni al territorio.
• il gruppo di VU è stato protagonista nel lanciare la candidatura di Matera a capitale europea della cultura nel 2019. La responsabile del progetto e il direttore vengono entrambi dall’esperienza di Visioni Urbane.
• la Basilicata ha costituito una film commission negli ultimi mesi del 2011. La comunità creativa ha chiesto più volte che il metodo molto partecipato di Visioni Urbane venisse applicato anche in quel caso. Non sono sicuro, però, che questo sia effettivamente accaduto.

Visioni Urbane è stato un progetto generativo. Nei primi tempi è stato necessario fare un investimento iniziale di attenzione, tempo e libertà. Attenzione ai dettagli, per imparare a fare fruttare al massimo ogni occasione e ogni euro di denaro pubblico; e tempo e libertà di azione per crescere, esplorare le alternative a disposizione, rimettere in discussione il proprio modo di pensare la policy (ne ho parlato nel mio libro). Questo ha ridotto, inizialmente, l’efficienza amministrativa misurata in velocità di spesa (ci abbiamo messo diversi anni a spendere quattro milioni di euro), ma ha lasciato all’amministrazione nuovi strumenti per analizzare e per fare. In tempi di crisi e di risorse calanti, è un pensiero che mi dà speranza.

Kublai Camp 2011 is happening today; it is the third of its kind and the first one that I can’t take part in.. My friend Tito Bianchi at the Ministry of Economic Development asked me to make a short video to tell the people convened how I would envision Kublai’s future. I am happy to oblige: in the video above (Italian language) I outline three scenarios, two of which I would approve of and one I would not. They are:

1. shutdown at the end the next cycle and move on. We have gained a lot of useful knowledge we can deploy elsewhere, and that was the whole point of the exercise.
2. devolution of the project to its community, maintaining its public mission. This would be an extraordinary outcome: a public policy so appreciated that its beneficiaries step in to do the heavy lifting themselves. But it is a tricky one to pull off, and at this point in time I deem it unlikely to happen for reasons I explain in the video.
3. entrenchment and drift of Kublai into a kind of business planning online help desk, feeding into the plethora of contests for startups, creative projects etcetera. I think this outcome would be tired and – in the context of Italy’s constitutional architecture – not suited to a central government agency. I think it should be avoided.

I am curious to see what happens. More info on Kublai here.

In 2005 the municipality of Verona was doing consultation on its strategic plan, and the young Veronese were not buying. They thought the administration (four years into its term) was simply not credible: “we are forever stuck in the first meeting”, as a young man told a senior officer to his face and in public (I was there). In this context, I was asked to help the city’s culture-related nonprofits to get together and deliver an event that was to symbolize the municipality’s new commitment to treating youngsters as partners. They were willing to invest a small sum, 30K euro.

Cultural operators in Italian small and medium sized towns almost invariably hate each other. Makes sense: their environment is one of zero-sum competition for funding, allocated with criteria that are not always transparent. Every cent I get is a cent you won’t get. This creates a climate of mistrust. Involving an outsider like me was to be a sign that in this case things would be done differently: this small additional fund was conditional to the creatives being able to design and deliver a common project.

This was my first true community fostering and management. I created a mailing list (hey, we had no cool web 2.0 stuff back then) and demanded everybody used it to communicate, no private emails; bullied the municipality’s stuff into sitting in meetings that started at 7 p.m., so that the creatives could attend without conflicts with their day jobs); and even talked the two main city officials into going to the local winery after each meeting with the creatives. I discovered the power of transparency and informality: the most important progress was almost always made in the winery, not at meetings. In the end the event did happen: it reclaimed derelict spaces like the former zoo; embodied a more free, creative idea of Verona, with the Africal fashion catwalk shows, the writers contests and the mythical dance bus you see in the video. They called it VRBAN, and it was a roaring success. Many people who participated in the process discovered in each other competent colleagues worthy of respect, with whom collaboration could be a pleasure.

Recently I went back to Verona for a concert and –surprise – VRBAN is still there, and it has become the main event of the Verona summer, with thousands of participants. It is now in its sixth year; is entirely funded by private investors and own revenue (the new center-right administration does, however, supply some services); is run by some of the kids of 2005, that meanwhile have become professionals of cultural event organization (Alessandro and Fabio) and communication (Ale); has even generated a spinoff, the Italian network of ecologically sustainable music festivals. It is a piece of the city’s economy and culture. I am so proud of it! Of course, they were the ones who did it. But the city’s authority did its part, and I think I helped.

So, if you go to Verona in July, go to VRBAN, ask for Alessandro Formenti, Fabio Fila or Ale Biti and ask them to give you their stories. And drink one to my health.

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.

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.

Sorry, this post in Italian only. It references another post, also in Italian. Click on the Translate link for an automated translation

Quando mi sono messo a fare il musicista professionista – era la metà dei ’90 – i miei genitori non hanno esattamente stappato lo champagne. Rispettavano il mio percorso (non che avessero molta scelta), ma temevano che sarebbe stato faticoso, forse anche doloroso.

In effetti, l’economia creativa rende il mondo un luogo molto più brillante, colorato, piacevole. Ci stimola tutti quanti, e dà a chi riesce ad affermarvisi un ruolo davvero invidiabile, quello di chi riesce ad affermarsi percorrendo strade insolite, scommettendo sulla propria unicità, facendo mosse inaspettate che il normale mercato del lavoro non sa come valutare. Ma tutto questo ha un prezzo: per ogni successo ci devono essere almeno dieci fallimenti. Più persone ci proveranno, più saranno quelli che hanno successo, e meglio andranno le cose per tutti noi: ma il crescente incoraggiamento ai giovani a provarci, il fiorire dei premi per la creatività e degli aggregatori di talenti moltiplica anche il numero dei fallimenti. Alcune persone falliscono il primo e magari anche il secondo progetto, fanno tesoro di queste esperienze e indovinano il terzo: ma, inevitabilmente, sono molti più quelli che, dopo uno o più fallimenti, abbandonano il campo, e devono ripensarsi, reinventare un’identità meno intrigante di quella di creativo. Fatevelo dire da uno che ha passato veramente tanto tempo a chiedersi “ma sarò capace? mi sto illudendo sulle mie capacità? a chi interessa davvero ciò che sto facendo?”: è un processo che ha un costo umano notevolmente alto.

E quindi, quando leggo una storia come quella di Walter Giacovelli, ci rimango male. Fare impresa creativa già è difficile in condizioni ottimali: con il sistema paese che rema contro diventa quasi impossibile. Walter, comprensibilmente esasperato dalla galleria degli orrori che fa da sfondo al suo percorso (presenta un progetto sui social media e gli dicono che quell’anno si finanziano solo progetti sull’agricoltura; lavora per IG Students, ma il programma chiude senza pagare i collaboratori; è sempre troppo precoce, o troppo anziano, o “non presenta i requisiti di soggetto svantaggiato”) è arrivato a darsi un ultimatum: o si parte entro cento giorni, o si ammaina la bandiera.

Onore alla bandiera, comunque andrà. So bene che non si possono eliminare le sconfitte dal sistema senza fermarlo del tutto, e so anche che alle sconfitte si sopravvive e si va avanti. Lo so sulla mia pelle, perché le ho subite anch’io (questa, per esempio). Però si può e si deve pretendere da noi, che progettiamo e attuiamo le politiche per la creatività, che ci accostiamo con rispetto ed empatia alle persone che, là fuori, lottano e sognano, e spesso pagano salato. Che ci interroghiamo sempre sul senso di quello che stiamo facendo. Che non ci creiamo microfeudi, non chiediamo esclusive, non pensiamo mai di avere capito tutto. Che non ci abbandoniamo alla retorica (io comincio a stancarmi di sentire ripetere a caso “creatività”, “giovani”, “talento”, “innovazione”). E che sfruttiamo al massimo ogni euro, ogni minuto di tempo per cercare di mettere tutti in condizioni di provarci al meglio.

Niente di nuovo, lo so. Ma tenere la guardia alta è utile anche se non è nuovo.

On December 24th, instead of celebrating Christmas as usual, I will start a visit to China. I hope to be there for almost a month, until the middle of January. I am curious of this country so large in space (it is very large and populated) and time (it is very ancient, and seems determined to loom large in the future), and I would like to know more about it. I’m going to set up camp in Shanghai, but I hope to visit also Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

I would like to take advantage of this trip to meet interesting people who live in China, be they Chinese or expatriate “foreign devils” (apparently that’s what they call us) and share a few thoughts with them. I would be mostly delighted to hook up with experts on regional development and creative industries, especially if involved in making policy. If you could put me in touch with someone like that in those cities, I would be very grateful. You can find me in all major social networks (except Baidu, I need to get in there) or by email at alberto[at]cottica[dot]net.

Sono in partenza per la Puglia, per un giro di appuntamenti legati in un modo o nell’altro alle politiche pubbliche in rete. Sono particolarmente contento perché mi darà modo di ritrovare vecchi compagni d’armi e incontrare persone per me nuove e interessanti. Giovedì 2 dicembre mi trovate a Barletta: presento il libro al circolo ARCI Carlo Cafiero insieme a Luigi Pannarale, un sociologo intelligente e curioso.

Venerdì 3 sarò al Festival dell’Innovazione di Bari: al mattino mi aspetta una conversazione sul tema della creatività digitale con Nichi Vendola, presidente della Regione; Vincenzo Vita, presidente della commissione istruzione del Senato; Francesco Morace, sociologo attivo nella consulenza aziendale, presidente di Future Concept Lab; e soprattutto il blogger e scrittore Giuseppe Granieri, con cui lavorammo al primo anno di Kublai.

Al pomeriggio, sempre al Festival dell’Innovazione, faremo una riflessione sulle politiche per la creatività, viste dal laboratorio del Sudest italiano attraverso il filtro di Wikicrazia e del ruolo della collaborazione di massa online: e lo faremo a partire da esperienze concrete e che conosco bene. Annibale D’Elia ci racconterà il progetto Bollenti Spiriti della Regione Puglia; Rossella Tarantino ci racconterà del progetto Visioni Urbane, della Regione Basilicata, simile al cugino pugliese negli obiettivi, ma completamente diverso nell’attuazione; e il vulcanico Walter Giacovelli ci dirà di Kublai, in particolare della sua attivissima colonna sudorientale. Mi aspetto che partecipino molti creativi, mi piacerebbe provare, insieme a chi ci sarà, a immaginare la prossima generazione di politiche per la creatività. Quindi portate post-it e block notes, perché a chi viene sarà chiesto non solo di ascoltare, ma anche di dare una mano a progettare!

Informazioni qui.

As of a few weeks ago, I have the honor of serving in an advisory group to the Council of Europe. It’s called “Quality job creation through network support” (as in social, not data network), and it reports to the Social Cohesion Research and Development Division. It’s a really interesting group: some of the members represent national governments (for example the German, the Austrian and the Norwegen one) or local authorities (like the Northumberland County Council in the UK or the Getafe municipality in Spain); others are grassroot alternative networks out to change the world. There is the Transition Network, born in the UK and gone global, teaching itself energy and food independence of local communities; the Italian Solidarete, out to internationalize social enterprises; the engineers of Aeroe Energy and Environment Office, who managed to generate locally 40% of the energy needs of a small Danish island. I will work mainly with Jean-Louis Laville, a leading expert on the social economy.

We will work mainly on social innovation, and on the policies that might help it to take off. I sense that this is a key theme: new subjects are emerging that can compete on the market, but aim their economic activity at collective goals, if not systemic change. This could have important consequences in an economy that, thanks to Internet-enabled mass collaboration, is getting better and better at producing public goods. Jean-Louis and I have been tasked with trying to figure out how to integrate this theme into mainstream policies: this begs the question of how governments integrate new themes, or, really, how they learn new things. I wish I had that answer! For now, I have a brainful of questions and maybe a proposal on where to start looking for some fragments of truth. The slides for my presentation of October 4th are above.

In the late 90s I made my living as a rock musician. I stepped down in 2000, just in time. Jobs like my old one are disappearing fast; artists with an existing fan base are getting better at exploiting it cutting out various middlemen, while newcomers can get very popular very fast and with near-zero cash investment on Last.fm or Spotify, but they find it next to impossible to build a solid economy. They make music in their free time, the core skill is landing a day job that will pay the rent and allow you to go on tour. I’m told something similar is going on with videomakers and film directors. A deadly cocktail of low cost producton technology and online sharing has thawed massive reservoirs of creativity, turning it from scarce into plentiful. As it did so, it drove a stake through the heart of the music business, which turned into dust like a vampire at high noon (obituary by Dave Kusek). A texbook case of the creative destruction predicted by Joseph Schumpeter.

Fine, but startups are the new rock’n'roll, right? It’s the same narrative: bright, visionary youngsters, obsessed by their own ideas and in sync with the Zeitgeist, becoming millionaires at 23 and inspiring their generation to break away from the dull existence of their parents. And boy, do the young go for it: business plans contest have replaced rock band contests (the latter have migrated onto TV talent shows, maybe low on cred but endowed with a rock-solid business model).

And yet. Recently I found a post by Laurent Kretz, founder of Submate, that describes in merciless detail the hardships of the typical startup entrepreneur’s life. No dream job: it involves living on welfare, sleeping on friends’ couches, getting the boot from girlfriends tired to beg for attention, “being chased by your banker with a chainsaw”. A story all too familiar to my friends of CriticalCity, who triumphed in the end but paid a high price for it.

Mind you, this is not someone looking for a backer. Kretz does have an investor. A seed investor, that gave Mashape just enough money so that four people won’t starve to death as they put in 80-hours weeks for four months. This seems to be all the rage with early stage investor: I remember Joi Ito two years ago saying he only invests in a company that can bring him a working prototype coded by three people who locked themselves away in some cabin for a weekend, and even then he’ll only invest fifty thousand dollars.

Since then Ito has made progress. his latest experience is that a fully functional web services can be launched in three weeks by exactly two people: one designer, one developer. This is because code is modular: you don’t write it from the ground up, you just copy-paste existing routines. This process has been made more fluid by “metaprogramming” tools that stitch together chunks of code coming from different directions into an integrated program.

It does not take a genius to figure out that the startup world has entered a “hey, I can do that too!” phase. Since there is a limit to the market’s ability to absorb new stuff, software development skills could be on their way to becoming plentiful too. Before the job market reacts, we could even have a period in which a software engineer’s time is worth as much as a rock guitarists’, which is to say less than a baby sitter’s. It’s Schumpeter curse: when the market works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything.

Most economists interpret Schumpeter’s careful wording as a process that turns out to be a good thing in the long run, because it makes useful, expensive stuff cheap. I think they are wrong, because Schumpeter’s is not an equilibrium model: if creation and destruction are not in sync, the long run may never come around. What this means, I’m trying to figure out.