ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Know Your Price. Andre M. Perry
Читать онлайн.Название Know Your Price
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780815737285
Автор произведения Andre M. Perry
Издательство Ingram
Traditional business incubators strive to do just as their name suggests—they incubate or help develop businesses so they can eventually leave the nest to fly on their own. Incubators provide a physical office space and offer business services such as printing and internet, conference rooms, and even management training to those who apply and/or pay rent.10 Accelerators (not to be confused with incubators) are businesses that provide intensive technical assistance (most often not offered in college) and access to practitioner-mentors in the field to selected entrepreneurs. It’s comparable to the TV show Shark Tank, with similar pitch competitions to attract potential investors. Some incubators and accelerators help germinate an idea or business with investments of private capital in exchange for an ownership share or profit percentage. Incubators and accelerators are central elements of the start-up tech culture that has proliferated in the last decade. Community Forge, which is featured in chapter 4, hopes to make incubators a community development tool.
The Borough of Wilkinsburg integrated its fire department into Pittsburgh’s in 2011, after the department became financially insolvent.11 Pittsburgh also manages the borough’s waste removal. Wilkinsburg’s downtown today is but a shell of its previous self. The loss of so many businesses and stores only throws into relief the typical poverty shops; cell phone dealers, discount stores, and check cashing places offer a monotonous set of options for passersby.
As I moved closer to the city of Pittsburgh on my 2017 run, the once-invisible border between the cities became remarkably apparent. The intangible aroma of buttery Ritz crackers had vanished, the fragrant boundary between the two cities replaced by a physical one—the colorfully decorated offices Google had set up in East Liberty where Nabisco used to be. Apart from the new windows, multicolored lighting, and pressure-washed brick, the outside looked familiar. But inside, the heavy machinery of the past had been replaced by an open-space cubicle farm for software developers, featuring playrooms with musical instruments, videogames, and hammocks, and with snack stations throughout.
The tech giant anchors a ballyhooed innovation hub in East Liberty, not too far from Peabody, the high school I transferred to in my junior year. In 2009, that high school became the Barack Obama Academy of International Studies. A year later and a mile away, Google established a second Pittsburgh office, also on Penn Avenue, complete with famously fanciful workspaces, on the grounds of the old Nabisco factory renamed Bakery Square. The mixed-use development includes apartments, fancy retail, a commercial gym, and many work-play-live conveniences that highly paid employees expect. Google employees can walk across a footbridge to the latest addition to the campus, Bakery Square 2.0, which opened in 2017. Bike trails wind from the square to adjacent Mellon Park with its walking paths, basketball and tennis courts, and grassy knolls for those who just need some quiet and sun.
The conversion from East Liberty to Bakery Square illustrates how urban planners institute a process for community development that “capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, and … results in the creation of quality public spaces that contribute to people’s health, happiness, and wellbeing,” according the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit that helps people create and sustain public spaces.12 This process is described by the jargon “placemaking”—a verbal waffle that is quite deceiving.
“Places already exist,” said New Orleans based architect Bryan Lee, who heads his own planning firm. Placemaking minimizes architects and planners’ sordid history of transforming a place into what they feel is best for Black communities, which in actuality is rooted in what the architect would do for him/herself. In 2017, only 2 percent of all architects were Black. When Whites are the default placemakers, the projects taken on will undoubtedly carry implicit biases. When it comes to community development in Black-majority neighborhoods, the person, firm, or group orchestrating the actual development can’t be ambiguous. Black communities need reimagined spaces just like everyone else. But architects and planners must be deliberate about not imagining Black-majority spaces as places that are suitable for White, middle-class residents.
If community development is the goal, architects and planners should invest in how people of a particular place already use an area. “Rather than trying to reinvent space, planners should try to accentuate how they are already being used,” said Lee. For instance, the areas in which elders use milk crates as stools and card tables can be resourced and developed to emphasize its current functions. Lee explained that people will adapt a place based on the amount of resources in it but needs and desires for the space can still present themselves. But overall community development wasn’t the goal in the development of Bakery Square. Developing Pittsburgh’s then-budding tech sector was.
Bakery Square helped spur growth along Penn Avenue in one reimagined neighborhood after another, cascading to downtown Pittsburgh, well beyond my old running route through Karen’s old community. Chic restaurants and bars have opened where timeworn buildings and blight used to be. Driverless cars zip through the streets, made conspicuous by a spinning contraption, a lidar,13 sitting atop their roofs. Two new hotels—the notoriously hip Ace and the cool Indigo—have sprung up in East Liberty to accommodate those flying in for job interviews with Google or any number of other tech companies and ancillary businesses.
Something else is noticeable. East Liberty is visibly much less Black than it used to be. It looks more like a home for the pale male tech industry that is struggling with its lack of diversity. The online magazine Business Insider reported in 2016 that Black people made up less than 5 percent of the field nationwide.14
Uber, Amazon, Argo AI, and dozens of other tech companies have all found the Steel City accommodating in the last decade. The Pittsburgh Tribune reported that investments in the city’s tech scene exceeded $687 million in 2017, and will grow to more than $3.5 billion in ten years.15 East Liberty represents the kind of neighborhood transformation old industrial cities lust after. The town that once spun a narrative of brawn, smoke, and iron now peddles brainpower, innovation, and technology, as well as neighborhood revitalization. Bakery Square, the capital of Pittsburgh’s intellectual revolution, sits two miles from the University of Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Carnegie Mellon University, and Chatham University, as well as my hometown of Wilkinsburg.
The tech boom and the development of East Liberty didn’t happen by chance. Millions of dollars were invested in grouping the powerful intellectual institutions of the city, and that clustering was used as the basis for placemaking strategies for areas such as East Liberty. The city sought to develop an “innovation district,” which, according to one of its proponents, Bruce Katz, an urban scholar with Drexel University, is “a small geographic area within cities where research universities, medical institutions, and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, accelerators, and incubators.”16 Those efforts proved successful.
Clustering is another term loosely used in economic development circles. My colleagues at the Brookings Institution define industry clusters as “groups of firms that gain a competitive advantage through local proximity and interdependence … [Clustering] offers a compelling framework for local and state leaders to analyze and support their economies.”17 Black economists and business owners recognize that clustering is mostly a euphemism for some form of exclusion when it comes to economic development. Who’s included in a business cluster almost always reflects the racial dynamics of a place. Pittsburgh leaders’ clustering and placemaking efforts largely excluded Black talent, firms, and associations. The competitive advantages that are gained come at the expense of the quality of life among those who are not included. If deconstructing racism isn’t a