No More Learning

The space between the city of Kent's downtown business district and the west and north sides of the uni- versity is bisected by the Main Street Bridge and Haymaker Parkway, a con- struction project conceived long before the May 4 shootings but completed just shortly thereafter. The bridge and parkway comprise the epicenter of the cultural economy of Kent for several reasons. Haymaker Parkway in its cur- rent form inscribes the territorial boundaries of both the city and the univer- sity. Haymaker was designed to bring new economic life to the downtown business district, but in my analysis the coincidence of the parkway with the shootings and unrest in 1970, and with what one resident called a "violation of the 50-year commitment to the university as a cultural anchor," meant that the city built a wall in the form of a boulevard. In doing so, it slowed the reconciliation of dissonant points of view on a public tragedy by ensuring that the artifice of the city, owned by all residents and employees, was broken in two.
The legacy of the city's efforts to reimagine and build a positive economic future is cataloged in cycles of urban planning. Figure 1 compresses the mate- rial history of the city and its need to cross the Cuyahoga River to promote commerce. The image displayed on the following page illustrates the city's fixation from 1970 to the present on Haymaker and the downtown business district and the desire to correct what it has wrought. Excerpts from planning documents show how the city's artifice inscribed over time has left an indeli- ble geography of the city and university's epicenter. The full history of eco- nomic development, the artifice of the city, and an interweaving of public tragedy goes well beyond this essay, but this illustration shows how ordinary urban landscapes, as Deloris Hayden states in the quotation that opens this essay, reveal much more than mere cycles of urban renewal. They exhume a city's cultural economy from its artifice to remind us that culture can never be
? City plans and artifacts. From Kent State University Archives and from Ruller, "Kent 360," http://www. kent360. com
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 89
explained through orthodox economic accounts alone or by virtue of a city's monumental structures or public record. The city planners of Kent sought the expertise and involvement of the university, and the 1993 and 2004 plan- ning cycles present Haymaker as an urban corridor that must be beautified, rezoned, bisected, tempered by traffic-calming devices, crossed on foot and by bicycle--anything but let the 1970 manifestation stand. One idea was to lower the parkway to decrease the noise and to improve visibility so that the cam- pus and the community would see each other more clearly. The zone that Haymaker created is one of the more economically blighted in the city. Hay- maker severed two key arteries in the city, Erie Street and College Avenue, and in doing so invented "college park," consisting of high-density student rental properties further buffering the downtown business district from the customer base of the university and its professional schools.
Each community in which civic engagement occurs can be represented through frames of orthodox, new, and cultural economies. Kent's history is iconic, but all communities inscribe their cultural economies through the design and redevelopment of the urban artifice; the design of cities has never been the sole province of architects. 57 The practical aim of a cultural economy is to recapture the interworkings of public life across discursive, embodied, and material terrain. Kent through the prisms of orthodox and new economies appears to be doubly impoverished: its orthodox economic indicators report depressions in tax and income revenue, and there are few resources in the city, beyond the walls of the university, that are poised to reinvent a vibrant public life fueled in the new economy by digital technology, innovation, a new learning class, and global economic expansion. Kent's cultural economy, however, suggests a different resource for its economic future. Tragedy is by its rhetorical nature epideictic, and the interrelationship between memory, artifact, policy, and discourse in my analysis can assist in plotting a differ- ent deliberative future. The city through its cultural economy can become a mezzo-structural commemorative event, the place where reconciliation and entrepreneurialism coexist if steps can be taken to disrupt the institutional memories and urban artifice that calcify the past. It may sound simple, even crass, to suggest the May 4, 1970, must be reconceived as an economic cata- lyst, as a brand redistributed to the downtown business district, but those pro- posals are beginning to surface in discussions of the city's future.
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economy
Thus far in this essay I have gestured to an affinity between civic and rhet- orical engagement, if the economic plight of a region can opportunistically embrace its cultural past. I suggest that it is unwise to deny the economic pre- tense for civic engagement, either as an extension of university planning or as a political policy. As I have tried to describe in the preceding section, the
90 John M. Ackerman
inadequacies of both orthodox and new economic prisms can be confronted by determining what can arguably function as the cultural economy of a city. Civic engagement as practice and policy cannot escape its economic circum- stance, and thus our rhetorical engagements will, by necessity, return us to the city to learn how the past calcifies and how our futures can be renewed.
Gerard Hauser concludes his studies of the vernacular with this caution: "Before we can rehabilitate public life, we first must understand the way actu- ally occurring discourses shape it. "58 As I have argued here, we should add actually occurring cultural economies and a transposing of figure and ground-- in Hannah Arendt's words, "the transformation of the intangible into the tan- gibility of things. "59 The cultural economy of Kent differs from other cities in degree but not in kind. It consists of a constellation of public memory, urban artifact, public and institutional policy, design discourse, and human geogra- phy. In keeping with the critical impulse in cultural economy theory, our first step is to reject those "technologic" limits that remove rhetorical practice from matters of economic policy. We then gather the once disparate, now contin- gent pieces of public life that reassemble culture from orthodoxy to supplant the disquieting inequities that unchecked globalization fosters. We must dis- ambiguate orthodox and new economies, and cultural economies, from what I now refer to as "creative" economies that have enough material and discur- sive metal to alter the policy spheres of local communities. 60
To translate a cultural economic analysis into a creative economic argu- ment, we in rhetoric must forestall the aesthetic and ideological preference for cultural analysis and critique, and embrace, when the occasion allows, new kinds of sponsorship. Said differently, our critical entrance into the cul- tural economies of cities (and universities) may well yield the best "register" for public policy deliberation when we look for atypical partners for rhetori- cal collaboration. As essays in this collection illustrate, sponsorship is multi- variate in public life open to residents, students, the arts community, and the university. Rhetorical engagement can also emerge through partnerships in economic redevelopment.
The illustration on page 88 presents four images that coincide with cycles of urban planning in Kent, culminating with a 2008 architectural drawing that portrays the economic future of the city. My foray into Kent's economic future occurred between 2004 and 2008, and in 2005 Right Dimensions, a California developer, proposed to the city a $40 million mixed-used "lifestyle" development lodged in the triangle of urban decay bordered by Haymaker Parkway. This project eventually failed, according to the developers, because neither the city nor the university stepped forward to anchor the develop- ment. From the city's point of view, the developers did not attract an anchor retail client to strengthen their financial due diligence. 61 The lessons learned from the Right Dimensions proposal are many with regard to city planning
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 91
and economic speculation, but the lesson relevant to my analysis is that there are clients in urban communities who are open to rhetorical analyses of cul- tural economies and who fully comprehend the relationships among ortho- dox, new, cultural, and creative economies as the coin of the realm for public policy.
Outside developers, city officials, local business owners, and residents of the city and the university learned that we have more in common than the conventional boundaries of economic policy, civic engagement, and rhetori- cal theory would suggest. I proposed, as did the developers, that downtown development was an opportunity to coalesce many of the attributes of the cul- tural economy of Kent into an economic future and a site for reconciliation of a tragic past. The location of what is now referred to as the Kent Down- town Development Project reconnects the city and the university by bicycle, by foot, by history, and by artistic and deliberative tradition--all toward eco- nomic renewal. Though the Right Dimensions development plans eventually failed for lack of financial stakeholders, the economic futures represented by those plans remain and are carried forward in the more recent city drawings. The illustration compresses the design history of Kent, with focal attention on Haymaker, to convey that the artifice of the city is an archive for both epi- deictic and deliberative discourse. With the cultural economy in mind, regional economic planning commingles orthodox and new economic futures to pro- duce a creative economic solution heterotopias, where place and event coin- cide, that embraces tragedy and social division as elements for renewal. The city conducted its own Cool Cities Survey of Kent in 2007 and determined that "lifestyle" was one of the most desired attributes of a livable city, along with biking, outdoor gathering spots, safety, and economic growth. 62 The city has now embarked on a new planning exercise, this time triangulating in a more forceful and economically feasible way the cultural and economic heri- tage of the city, the university's interests, and those of a new developer, Fair- mount Properties. 63
The rhetorical engagement that I have pursued in my research and through my residency in Kent, and that I briefly summarize here, exploits the eco- nomic preconditions of civic engagement. The power of place, as Deloris Hay- den reminds, is in the shared time, shared territory, and shared resources that can coalesce for a better future. When university residents venture forth into local communities and in the name of civic engagement, we are wise to open our methods and dispositions to the economies of practice and culture out- side of the academic milieu. What I argue for, and have tried to illustrate through my public work, is that culture as an economy operates as both com- modity and critique, leading the rhetorician to surprising partnerships and objects of analysis. Our rhetorical engagements must thirst for such oppor- tunities.
92 John M. Ackerman Notes
1. Hayden, Power of Place, 9.
2. This comment is inspired by the absences in Bennett, Grossberg, and Morris, New Keywords.
3. For example, see Kohrs Campbell, "Promiscuous and Protean"; Crowley, Toward a Civil Discourse.
4. WordNet, "A Lexical Database for the English Language," is a corpus-linguistic project at Princeton University that determines denotation through the contiguous usage of words.
5. Hariman, Political Style, 3-4.
6. Arendt, Human Condition.
7. Boyte, "Different Kind," 12.
8. Boyer, "Scholarship of Engagement," 21.
9. Association of American Universities, "Campus Community. "
10. Information retrieved from the Campus Compact Web site
11. American Association of State Colleges and Universities, "American Democracy
Project. "
12. Association of American Colleges and Universities, "Civic Engagement. "
13. Higher Learning Commission, "Institutional Accreditation. "
14. National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, "Links. "
15. University of Colorado, "CU-Boulder's Vision for 2030. "
16. Chaput, Inside the Teaching Machine, 143.
17. Ibid. , 129.
18. Columbia University, "ServiceNation. " The presidential forum coincided with
Time's September 22, 2008, Second Annual Service Issue, A Sense of Community. 19. Be the Change, "Be the Change. "
20. ServiceNation, "Executive Summary. " 21. Progressive Policy Institute, "About. "
22. Progressive Policy Institute, "About the Third Way. "
23. Democratic Leadership Council, "Third Way. "
24. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 113.
25. Since the 1970s the conservative movement has built an enduring and a well-
coordinated philanthropic apparatus to forward its interests and that of private enter- prise. This philanthropic apparatus has fostered federal policies that include deregulating business and cutting social services. Liberal philanthropic organizations have scrambled to address the humanitarian needs that these cuts have created.
26. For example, the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute. 27. Bennett and Entman, "Democracy," 4.
28. Hauser, Vernacular Voices.
29. Bennet and Entman, "Democracy," 5.
30. Examples are plentiful: Americans for Tax Reform has influenced the Federal Com- munications Commission (FCC); MoveOn. org has influenced digital political network- ing and arguably domestic and foreign policy; and DividedWeFail. org connects the AARP with business interests to support bipartisanship.
31. See Fischer and Forester, Argumentative Turn, 3-4.
32. Simons, Rhetorical Turn.
33. The positionality of such a "middling" rhetorical stance was outline by Lucaites
and Condit, "Epilogue. "
Rhetorical Engagement in the Cultural Economies of Cities 93
34. Greene, "Orator Communist," 86.
35. Boyte, "Against the Current. "
36. Boyte, "Different Kind," 16.
37. At the University of Utah in the early 1990s, I developed a multisection course
titled "Professional Writing: Business," which featured a consultancy model of instruc- tion. As a variant of service learning, groups of students found their own client, estab- lished a working relationship with the client, built an assessment model of the client's writing and communication, and decided whether to stop with the assessment or to propose new services. Flower and Ackerman, Writers at Work.
38. During the Clinton presidency, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was introduced, welfare disintegrated, and the FCC gave public air space to the telecom- munication industries.
39. Henwood, After the New Economy. Tables to support this point can be found on pages 4 and 146, with analysis of actual economic growth and equity throughout the book. See also Gee, Hull, and Lankshear, New Work Order.
40. Henwood, After the New Economy, 4-5.
41. Sennett, Cultural.
42. Captured by Appadurai, Fear; Attali, Millennium. 43. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 110-11.
44. Zukin et al. , New Engagement? , 53.
45. With my focus on local policy spheres, I am particularly interested in how a "cre- ative economy" is used in regional planning, for example, by Christopherson, Creative Economy Strategies; Douglass and Wassall, Creative Economy; and Markusen and Johnson, "Artist's Centers. "
46. Du Gay and Pryke, "Cultural Economy. "
47. Ibid. , 6.
48. See Hariman and Lucaites, "Dissent and Emotional Management. "
49. See, for example, Freeland, "Universities and Cities. " A broader discussion can be
found in Brint, Future; Hoeger and Christiaanse, Campus and the City.
50. Office of the City Manger of Kent, Ohio, "2005 Financial Report. " This report was made available to all residents of Kent through the City of Kent Web site and other
venues.
51. Newman, Declining Fortunes.
52. See the discussion of Benjamin in Boyer, City.
53. Allen, "Symbolic Economies. " Allen cites Zukin, Culture of Cities, 826.
54. Casey, "Public Memory. "
55. Casey, Fate of Place.
56. Casey, Remembering, 214.
57. See Alexander, "Fifteen Properties," in his The Phenomenon of Life, Book 1 of The
Nature of Order; Rossi, Architecture.
58. Hauser, Vernacular Voices, 273.
59. Arendt, Human Condition, 95.
60. When the term "creative economy" enters into city and redevelopment planning,
the writings of Richard Florida often surface. See Florida et al. , "University," and com- pare with Shorthose, "New Cultural Economy. "
61.
The narrative of the Right Dimensions proposal and its demise can be found in Ruller, "Kent 360," the city manager's blog.
62. Cool Cities Survey Results, "Voice of the Next Generation. " 63. Ruller, "Kent 360. "
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