Seattle Reboots Its Future

Read the Sidebar: Seattle's Real Aftershocks

Cities that aspire to be hubs of the new global economy need to be a little lucky and a lot smart.Since it was first settled in the mid-1800s, Seattle has enjoyed a run of amazing luck. First the California gold rush and the accompanying building boom in San Francisco created a massive market for Seattle timber. Then Seattle itself became an important point of departure for miners heading to and from the Klondike gold fields. One successful miner, Swiftwater Bill Gates, did so well in Alaska that he returned to Seattle and became legendary for showering gold nuggets from the window of his hotel room onto pedestrians below.

Seattle's good luck continued in the late 20th century, when another Bill Gates arrived and, along with fellow Seattleite Paul Allen, brought his fledgling software company to the area. Now Gates and Allen, along with other technology billionaires like Craig McCaw, are showering the city with their riches.

Today, Seattle's leaders are reckoning with a question that the leaders of many once-lucky -- and now-forgotten -- urban centers never managed to answer: How does a place transform itself from being fortunate to being smart? Seattle's answer: Don't focus as much on technology as on culture. If you become a place where talented people move to find a job and then end up staying for the rest of their careers, then you've secured your future.

Seattle Mayor Paul Schell, a 63-year-old former real-estate developer, historic preservationist, and dean of the University of Washington's School of Architecture and Urban Planning, says that his job is to turn the city into a "platform for the creative experience": "You have telecommunications, biotech, software, and the Web all coming together with great music, architecture, and art. It's at the intersections of disciplines where sparks fly. That's where ideas come from. We are creating a place where the creative experience can flourish."

The most vivid evidence of this strategy is the building boom that has gripped Seattle. Schell's city has more cultural construction projects in motion than any other urban area in the United States.

Under way are a new Seattle Public Library being designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and a new Museum of History & Industry that will delve deep into the city's gold-rush origins while exploring the national influence of Seattle companies such as Eddie Bauer, Nordstrom, and Starbucks. The Fuse Foundation, a nonprofit organization designed to help emerging artists gain a stable financial footing, will give out its first grants in June. And this past January, the art museum in neighboring Bellevue moved into a new $23 million home designed by architect Steven Holl.

Also in the works are a renovated opera hall and a ballet theater, both funded in part by Craig McCaw; a new aquarium; a waterfront sculpture park being built by the Seattle Art Museum on a former fuel-storage site; a new city hall; and a new stadium for Paul Allen's pro-football team, the Seattle Seahawks. Not to mention the relatively new Benaroya Hall, where the Seattle Symphony plays, and the Experience Music Project, Allen's $240 million shrine to rock and roll that opened last summer. Between 1991 and 2001, $1.2 billion worth of arts-related building projects were begun or completed in Seattle -- more than the National Endowment for the Arts's budget over the course of the same decade.

Mayor Schell, who was elected in 1998 and is up for reelection later this year, isn't worried that change is coming too quickly. "Some citizens want things to go more slowly," he says. "But I'm a change agent. I think of myself as a kamikaze mayor. Why waste time worrying about the next election?"

There's a seize-the-day spirit at play here. Seattle wants to put its potent economy to work building museums, civic buildings, and public spaces, so that in the likely event that the good times don't last forever, the city will be left with more than just empty buildings.

"Plenty of cities have gotten rich without having this kind of creative renaissance," says Alex Steffen, executive director of the Fuse Foundation and former president of Allied Arts of Seattle, the urban-design group that helped preserve Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square. "Look at Dallas in the 1980s, or Silicon Valley in the 1990s. Here the combination of young, smart-money and young, smart-cultural folks is setting off all kinds of reactions."

The organizing principle behind the city's plans -- the vision that most of the players seem to be working toward -- is best expressed by the mayor. "We want to be the Geneva of the Pacific, where international ideas can be exchanged," he says. "We want to be the place where the most choices bang against each other, where sparks fly."

Even, Schell continues, if those sparks ignite controversy, as they did when the World Trade Organization met in Seattle in 1999. "This city has a long tradition of allowing protest," the mayor explains, acknowledging that his job is "still in jeopardy" as a result of disputes over how the city handled the protests. "The government's responsibility is to let the debate rage. A city is a celebration of ideas. You need to let people express themselves."