Imagining Alexandria's Future

A new marketing group envisions the city as a launching pad for innovation and creativity, and hopes to create a 'cluster effect' to attract like-minded businesses.

As Hollywood is to movies, Silicon Valley to software and New York's Garment District to fashion, a group of cutting-edge marketing and advertising boutique companies in Alexandria wants to make the city the place to be for what they call the "creative class."

The vision of the group, which calls itself iMAGINE Alexandria, is for the city to become the place where creative ideas are born -- in engineering, architecture, art, marketing, Web and graphic design firms -- along a specially zoned corridor in Old Town and patented up the road at the Patent and Trade Office.

The idea, they say, is to create a "cluster effect" of creative minds, firms and ideas that not only produce the best products, but also attract like-minded companies and top talent to locate in the city and international businesses to seek creative counsel, ultimately reshaping the image of Alexandria.

"The cluster effect is powerful," said Nancy Belmont, chairman of iMAGINE Alexandria and chief executive of Belmont Inc., an advertising firm that says it creates "meaningful connections" between brands and consumers. "Change and innovation happen fast with clustering," Belmont said. "Creativity is explosive. You never get your best ideas sitting in a room by yourself. Your best ideas come from being surrounded by 20 other great creative minds."

Belmont and the six other founders and board members are hoping to find a space, a "hub," that will function as a place where this creative class can meet and share and apply ideas, hold workshops, test products, learn about the latest technology or trend sweeping the nation and serve as an incubator for new creative businesses. They also hope to host speakers and conferences for businesses from around the world seeking innovation and to attract tourists to the hub's "museum and gift shop" of commercial creativity.

"When the creative class gathers, it creates a cool city," Belmont said.

Belmont shared her vision at her Old Town office, where the walls are painted a bright orange and are covered with colorful squares with words such as "Collaborate" and "Excellence" and "Innovate." The small, warehouselike space is open and decorated with vivid artwork and samples of past ad campaigns. A drum kit sits in one corner near the garage door. Every Thursday, the door comes up and some employees start to jam.

The idea first came to Belmont a few years ago, she said. She had been reading a book by Richard Florida, "The Rise of the Creative Class," about how sweeping changes in technology and innovation were changing the landscape of cities and towns as creative types sought one another out in flexible, interesting work spaces and diverse, tolerant and "hip" atmospheres.

At the time, a committee appointed by Alexandria's mayor was peering into the city's future, trying to see the economic way forward for a place that was no longer an industrial port and that relied on residential property taxes for more than half of its revenue. In 2006, as much as 62 percent of the city's revenue base came from residential property owners. That, city officials said, was not only too much of a burden on residents, but it also did not bode well for the economic growth and health of the city.

Fostering the growth of a "creative class" was listed as one of the top priorities in the 2007 Mayor's Economic Sustainability Workgroup recommendations.

Then the Alexandria Economic Partnership devised a list of at least 230 companies in the city that could be considered part of this creative class. Belmont was floored, she said, because she had no idea that many firms were doing creative work, and doing well, in the city. She said she began to think how much better their businesses could do if they knew one another and began to network. She gathered six other like-minded members of the creative class, and thus was born iMAGINE Alexandria.

The point immediately hit home with Brad Nierenberg, who heads RedPeg Marketing, a firm that specializes in "creating events and experiences" in advertising, and who is one of the directors of iMAGINE Alexandria. In the previous year, he had contracted $4 million worth of work to firms in Altanta, Chicago, New York and North Carolina. He had no idea there were firms in Alexandria doing the same innovative work on the Web with video and graphic design.