Although the technology of the Internet and the concept of knowledge value are new, the phenomenon of vital urban neighborhoods serving as both residential areas and as centers of production has precedents in the cities of antiquity and the Renaissance and even in the early history of great American cities. Long before industrial districts became a prime focus of economic theory, the Venetians broke up their neighborhoods along distinct functional lines, with specific residential and industrial communities for shipbuilding, munitions, and glassmaking. By the 14th century more than 16,000 people worked in those varied industries. Venice was not only the West's trader and banker but its artistic workshop as well.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries such districts flourished in many American cities, both as residential and industrial areas. Hudson Street, greatly celebrated in the writings of urban theorist Jane Jacobs, epitomized the successful diverse urban neighborhood. Jacobs rhapsodized about its intricate street ballet, the goings-on of meat packers, warehouse workers, printers, and the families who lived in or near the neighborhood.
Yet by the second half of the 20th century, rail lines, electricity, and eventually highways encouraged further diffusion of the industrial infrastructure. Dependence on suppliers and pools of skilled labor dropped in many industries located outside the urban core. Many urban districts foundered, sometimes miserably. From 1978 to 1997, the nation's large city centers lost nearly two in five of their manufacturing jobs while manufacturing employment in the rest of the nation grew slightly. New York retained its culture of industrial diversity, in contrast to the doomed mass-production monoculture of a city like Detroit, but nevertheless began to decline, a process hastened by rising taxes, regulation, declining public service, crime, and general indifference.
The onset of the information economy in the closing years of the 20th century helped bring the street ballet celebrated by Jacobs back to places like Hudson Street. Much, of course, has changed. Gone, likely forever, is the family atmosphere of the 1950s and early 1960s. As blue-collar artisans and workers have exited, black-clad, mainly childless artists, video producers, hip advertising executives, and designers have replaced them.
The personality of those districts may have changed, but many places designed for the old industrial paradigm are perfectly well suited to the new one. Across the nation such areas -- Boston's Fort Point Channel; Hayden Tract in Culver City, Calif.; Seattle's Pioneer Square; San Francisco's South of Market; Chicago's Bucktown; and New York's Hudson Square -- boast concentrations of large airy buildings, usually fewer than 10 stories high, that house fast-growing new media, the Internet, and related businesses.
The "suits" in Chicago believe that creative neighborhoods and firms like Jen Arterbury's Boom Design possess a cutting-edge style not found in "the Loop."
New York's Silicon Alley, rather than clustering near Broad Street in the high-rise-dominated financial district -- as is often suggested in the media -- has in reality flourished in stretches of old industrial areas along the Hudson River and along lower Broadway. The reason, notes Aaron Cohen, CEO of Concrete Media, has to do with the nature of Internet businesses, which tend to expand, and sometimes contract, at lightning speed.
"You need a certain kind of space as a high-growth company," says Cohen, whose Internet professional-services company has grown from 13 to 100 employees in the past year. "You can't put people in cubicles," he says. "It's not an appropriate economic environment. This kind of contiguous space is the old industrial space -- for 10 people or 50 people. It's hard to do that in midtown or at 55 Broad Street."
But it's not just their ability to accommodate growth that makes these areas appealing. Unlike traditional high-rise downtown offices, old industrial buildings lend themselves to the work patterns of knowledge-value businesses. Elevators and cubicles designed for segmented workforces are nonexistent in the older spaces, which tend to have large floors and high ceilings. Those spaces accommodate workforces that rely on intense interaction and that grow and shrink on a project-by-project basis. In an age in which equipment is a critical part of work environments, large open spaces are ideal.
The space that @radical.media occupies blends individualist values with the latest high-tech concepts. The ceilings are unfinished, the walls and doors are made of black steel wrapped in tin, and the windows are large (from the pre-air-conditioning era) and open onto a sweeping view of the midtown Manhattan skyline. Yet the work space is crammed with television screens, computer monitors, and the latest film-editing, computer, and graphics equipment. There are few individual offices. Space is flexible. The common areas -- living rooms and a large dining area -- are comfortable and welcoming and encourage conversation and discussion.
More important, notes Kamen, the space fits the highly individualistic, creative spirit that animates the company. Instead of following the mass-oriented approach of conventional large advertising agencies, studios, or networks, @radical.media has a workforce of skilled artists that includes 100 on staff and 150 who work with considerable autonomy on a contract or freelance basis.
Kamen designed the space not simply to be an enlightened employer but to lure his workforce there. Attracting eclectic talent is particularly critical in the digital age. New technology allows companies to move effortlessly from producing commercials to producing television programs, CD-ROMs, and feature films in a way unimagined in the past, when each part of the visual-production business was highly segmented. Now the key is flexibility, attracting people who, like creative artisans of the past, enjoy diverse challenges more than working on one kind of project.
Perhaps most important, the knowledge-value neighborhoods -- with their plethora of warehouses and other funky buildings -- provide not only great individual spaces but a community of them. In the race to create new high-value services, notes Jon Kamen, no company, not even one as innovative as @radical .media, can flourish in isolation.
