Hot dog stands: the harbringers of a changing
sociological tide? Photo courtesy of Richard Hsu

I attended the inaugural Open Cities Camp, hosted last Saturday by the Centre for Social Innovation to discuss adding ‘open’ into Toronto’s urban landscape. While ‘open’ seems to be as amorphous and philosophically charged a term as ‘convergence innovation,’ it roughly means energizing public life through collaborative, participatory initiatives. The idea is to challenge the austere ‘institutionality’ of the public sphere with enterprises that meaningfully engage citizen and community participation, and to transform the urban environment from the stereotypical ‘anonymous slab of concrete’ into a catalyst for meaningful social interaction and creativity.

As the name suggests, ‘openness’ is an extremely broad concept. Although one of its key targets is our democratic process and its endemic voter apathy, I was treated to an education about some of the more eclectic projects in the works:

• I Want Rhythm puts together impromptu groups who seek out street musicians and dance to their music.
• Multi Story Complex focuses on liberalizing street vendor legislation to allow for more diversity. (I hadn’t realized this, but all street vendors are prohibited from selling food other than hot dogs.)

All day long, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Max Weber’s theory of bureaucratization. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, he argued that demands of managing a modern industrialized economy and society would require increasingly strong and pervasive public institutions, which in turn would create ever narrowing constraints on individual liberty. Openness, however, claims to improve economic, political and social outcomes precisely by undermining bureaucratized institutions, and by harnessing grassroots creativity and organizational power that they squelch.

Now that creativity appears to be an increasingly critical resource for the developed countries’ economies (see “Can The US — and Canada — Avoid an Innovation ‘Gathering Storm’?”), perhaps openness is part of a sociological paradigm shift away from conventional, more structured and compartmentalized modes of social, political and economic organization. MaRS’ emphasis on interdisciplinary convergence, a collaborative working environment and social innovation may represent a facet of this movement in the innovation economy. Although Weber argued that bureaucratization was a pragmatic necessity, perhaps one hundred years of history have turned the tables.

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