Creating Cool Cities

New Bedford, long known as the “armpit of Massachusetts,” is trying to recraft itself as a setting for the “creative economy.”* To some extent, it has the ingredients: Proximity to a state university (UMass Dartmouth), a scenic working waterfront, an art school, a cobblestone city center, a whaling museum, ferries to the islands, and slightly cheap (but still overpriced) real estate. But it is still just a little too far from Boston-area jobs and its own jobs base is going the way of most manufacturing in this country. At the same time, this city, for all its assets, has some syndromes common to cities in decline (which I will detail at another time). In 2005, I met Kennedy Smith of CoolTown Studios, a consultancy that helps cities become “cool cities” that capitalize on their unique assets and features. She was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard Design School. I tried to line her up as a speaker at New Bedford’s AHA (Arts History Architecture) Night but the organizers didn’t want her to steal thunder from the Preservation Awards ceremony later that night. It was a symbolic introduction to New Bedford, the gritty city on the bay. Anyway, see this post on the Cool Cities Studio site about how cities too often look for the outside “big fix” instead of cultivating local resources: click here
*When I read up on the Creative Economy market angle, it looks to me more like the Life 2.0 schtick: that small affordable cities will be incubators for small- to medium-sized businesses. New Bedford could indeed fit that bill, however, it is not entirely conducive to white-collar business. Ultimately, if we analyze its intrinsic value, its primary assets, we see they are mostly physical: a port, infrastructure (power, tankage, wastewater treatment plant) on the coast, a city with shoreline throughout, an affordable workforce, and lots of wind and water. 

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