Creativity is at the heart of the new economy. With computers, robots, and other machines increasingly making many traditional jobs obsolete and with several of the rest being shipped outside the state and the rest of the country, the Inland Empire can no longer rely on a base of manufacturing, construction, and logistics, especially in California whose structure is oriented to the companies that compete through product differentiation, instead of price. While construction, manufacturing, and logistics will still be a part of the mix, the Inland Empire must have an economic base of creative-class industries that export around the world and that offer a sustainable source of job and wage growth into the future. The model such enterprise is Redlands-based ESRI, a large technology firm that is remarkably-headquartered in the San Bernardino Valley, rather than Silicon Valley. Building the new San Bernardino, therefore, depends on the talent and on where it clusters. What are we doing to attract, develop, and retain these highly-skilled people who, in turn, bring employers? Major businesses increasingly base location decisions on the breadth and depth of the labor pool, and, at the moment, most everyone engaged in these fields leaves the Inland Empire to be in or near a place with the metropolitan amenities offered by a Los Angeles, San Diego, or San Francisco or by another first-tier city. Southern California is growing by several million over the coming years, so the first step to changing this situation is by bringing the artists and other urban pioneers to San Bernardino where they can have the opportunity to make their mark and to, in some very specific ways, build a new city. "Crowd-sourced place-making," "tactical urbanism," and "form-based codes" are all areas where the City government can set the stage for transformation by the current and future creatives among us, and Creative San Bernardino will be the rallying point for this movement.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 00:43:25 +0000
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