"I could confit everything": The creative class grows its own society

I just started reading Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class, and have been connecting the types of creative, diverse people he describes to people and trends I hear about these days: from co-working arrangements (shared working space for freelancers, programmers, grad students, and others) to growing your own food. All of it. In the middle of a city.

First up is the "co-working" space. Brian Russell, who visited us for a Basics of Web 2.0 workshop in May, details his attempts to start a co-working space in Carrboro, NC on his blog. For those who run their own business, work from home, don't have a standalone office, or just want to be in a cooperative work environment with others (exactly the subjects of Florida's book), Russell proposes a space with coffee, wifi, office help, and other necessary accoutrements. Membership would be offered on a monthly or annual basis (similar spaces already exist in San Francisco, New York, and probably other places). Follow the link to his blog to find out more and take a survey about the space. Also, the Daily Tar Heel of UNC-Chapel Hill wrote up his idea.

Next we get a little more offbeat. Manny Howard writes in New York Magazine about his extended experience of becoming a farmer in ... Brooklyn. The article, My Empire of Dirt, is long, but don't tl;dr it; it's worth your time. Howard sought to follow the local food movement, which he calls becoming a "locavore," to its logical extreme by growing all of his own food for one month. Yes, Howard at least lives in a detached house with a backyard rather than an apartment, but it's still urban farming and it is as difficult as it sounds. He contended with short time, a skeptical family, rising costs, and, yes, a tornado to raise a month's supply of food in his 20 X 40 backyard and the garage. Here are a couple of preview quotes on the venture:

"In those giddy, delusionally hopeful first days, as The Farm took shape in my mind, I had occasional moments of clarity. I realized, for example, that there are things I need that I could never grow. So I allowed myself what I considered three reasonable exemptions: salt, pepper, and coffee beans. Beyond that, I identified dairy, cooking oil, and bread as the biggest conundrums. Because it was March already, it was too late to plant wheat, which has a winter growing season. Okay, no bread. As for dairy: It is illegal to have a cow or a goat in New York City, but I figured I could at least hide a goat in the garage. Was it worth the risk? Cheese would be nice, but have you ever put goat’s milk in your coffee? Black seemed the way to go. Finally, cooking oil: I didn’t have enough garden space for all the plants I’d need to produce vegetable oil, so I’d have to make do with animal fat of some kind. A pig, maybe? Duck fat was another good possibility—I could confit everything.

"What couldn’t I do? Worried about going cold turkey on booze, I explored distilling vodka from potatoes. In a mere five days, I had been told, you can make passable hooch. I daydreamed about pond-raising tilapia, a freshwater fish that rivals the cockroach for adaptability. The options seemed tantalizingly limitless. But as I looked at the calendar, a certain urgency took over. I had only five months until harvest. I needed to quit dreaming and get crops in the ground."

...

"We exerted extra effort on the potatoes, putting them in their own long rectangular box, called a “drill.” They would be my hedge against starvation, as they have been for civilizations across the centuries, a hard-to-mess-up crop that survives when nothing else does."

Florida probably wasn't thinking about urban farmer/locavores like Manny Howard when he wrote The Rise of the Creative Class, but I'm inclined to include him for his efforts and the seemingly contradictory lessons he learned: "Unless you really know what you’re doing, raising [food] is miserable, soul-crushing work ... Eating local is expensive and time-consuming, which is why this consumerist movement will not easily trickle down into mass society. It requires a willful abstinence from convenience and plenty, a core promise of the modern world." But his proclamation that "[e]ating food fresh from the farm, on the other hand, is delightful" and his wife's realization that their lifestyle was quite wasteful prior to starting a farm of their own justify the difficult experiment. A creative class if I've ever heard of one.