China's new work groups

Spurred by the unlikely success of a factory-turned-art-space in Beijing called 798 and a desire to diversify the economy, cities across China are converting dozens of abandoned factories into art galleries, industrial-chic office space, and entertainment destinations. Many that aren't yet repurposing old industrial sites are drawing up plans – motivated by hope of profits or fear of criticism from higher-ups for failing to follow the latest trends in city development.

"China's investing heavily in the knowledge worker writ large, and this has become another part of that investment," says Eugenie Birch, chair of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of City and Regional Planning. "And when China does something, it does it at full force."

The 'creative industry' concept, born overseas in the mid-1990s, took hold here a few years ago, when government leaders began referringto it in speeches and planning documents.

Projects are springing up across China, from Shenzhen to Hangzhou to Chengdu. They aim to attract artists, architects, photographers, designers, and advertising firms – the core of what China has labeled "the creative industry." Beijing has more than 20 such districts, and Shanghai more than 70, though not all are factory conversions.

The Yangcheng project, conceived two years ago, is one of at least seven large-scale projects in Guangzhou under construction, with varying degrees of official support. They include a former plastics factory and a shipping warehouse. All offer cheap rent and cavernous workshops.

"We've been opening up our economy for so many years, and it's all been so fast, but it's reached a level where we need to change our development strategy," says a spokeswoman for one of the city's larger creative industry zone projects, who cited company policy against speaking with foreign media in requesting anonymity. "The whole economy has to change to develop this higher-level work." [Christian Science Monitor]

Communication Revolution

I've heard stories that Indian village farmers can now make more money because, via cellphone, they have better market information. I also remember my friend using his cellphone screen as a flashlight to help us all go down the dark stairs in his apartment building.

Sometimes a technology comes along and crystallizes a cultural moment. Not since Americans and their automobiles in the 1950s, perhaps, have a people and a technology wedded as happily as Indians and their cellphones — small and big, vibrating and tringing, BlackBerry and plain vanilla.

What makes the cellphone special in India? It is partly that India skipped the land-line revolution, making cellphones the first real contact with the outside world for hundreds of millions of people. It is partly that, with few other machines selling so briskly, the cellphone in India is forced variously to be a personal computer, flashlight, camera, stereo, video-game console and day organizer as well. It is partly that India’s relative poverty compels providers to be more creative to survive.

But it is also that the cellphone appeals deeply to the Indian psychology, to the spreading desire for personal space and voice, not in defiance of the family and tribe, but in the chaotic midst of it. [NY Times]

3 Birds with One Stone

I love hearing about these ideas that solve several problems at the same time.

Kenya's huge and squalid slums don't have much of anything, except mountains of trash that fill rivers and muddy streets, breeding disease.

Now Kenyan designers have built a cooker that uses the trash as fuel to feed the poor, provide hot water and destroy toxic waste, as well as curbing the destruction of woodlands.

After nine years of development, the prototype "Community Cooker" is close to being rolled out in overcrowded refugee camps as well as slums around the country where the filth encourages diseases including cholera.