Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell brought his big hair and biggish ideas to Baltimore last week, as he addressed the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Downtown Partnership, bringing a message sure to please this city-boosting crowd: “Place matters.”

“This particular environment that we’re in — all of the buildings all crammed in together, and all of these strange and eclectic uses and all of the people from different walks of life bumping into each other on the sidewalk — is more than a real estate asset, it’s more than a cool-looking part of town, it’s more than an extraordinary collection of historic buildings, it’s a very real intellectual asset,” Gladwell said, speaking in the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

“There is a kind of energy and potential here that is not possible in communities outside of downtown Baltimore,” Gladwell said.

He was addressing a nearly-packed house that included lawyers, public relations executives, commercial realtors, developers, non-profit-types and elected officials, among them City Council President Bernard C. “Jack” Young and City Council member Rochelle “Rikki” Spector — a group who, if they don’t all actually reside in the city, at least have their fortunes tied to the place.

“When you make the argument for why this particular community is worth investing in and worth revitalizing and worth rebuilding,” Gladwell exhorted them last Wednesday, “make that argument using this very real tangible point about creativity, don’t express it simply as a kind of act of preservation.”

Motivational Malcolm

It was maybe not the exact “bit” from the New Yorker writer’s repertoire that audience members such as Brad Chen came to hear. Clutching his copy of “What the Dog Saw, and Other Adventures” in hopes of an autograph, Chen snapped pictures and took notes in a leather-bound journal throughout the talk. Asked what made him a Gladwell devotee, Chen smiled.

“He is very inspirational and very systematic. His approach follows a very logical sequence,” said the Baltimore business school student. “He uses a unique combination of insight and statistics.”

Chen said he brought up the best-selling author in a recent job interview to good end, specifically, the notion (discussed Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers and now somehow taken as gospel in sales and productivity seminars) that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something.

Did Chen think this Outliers reference was going to help him get the investment banking position he sought with Bank of China International in Hong Kong?

“Oh, yes, in fact, I already got the job,” he said, turning to the stage as proceedings got underway.

Taoists, Zen masters and Jane Curtin

The headliner commenced to serve up an entertaining and typically Gladwellian goulash of high and low culture references. Jane Jacobs popped up pretty quickly. Soon there were mentions of a Taoist metaphysician and Monet and Manet and who was sleeping with whom in the glory days of Saturday Night Live, and Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler drinking schnapps in Freud’s waiting room in Vienna with Stekel and Kahane, as they consorted in three dimensional space, preparing to invent psychoanalysis.

Gladwell’s knack for finding the hidden patterns governing everyday life and explaining them with prose at once geekily precise and entertainingly clear is what has endeared him to the legions of fans who buy his best-selling non-fiction books.

With Tipping Point, it was the idea that small actions can spark social epidemics. With Blink, he celebrates intuitive thinking. And in Outliers Gladwell looks at the factors contributing to high-level success (and concludes that effort and serendipity are often more important than intelligence.)

These days, Gladwell has become a certified brand, reportedly commanding speaking fees of $40,000 each for talks delivered to business schools, commercial real estate companies, even, famously, a dental supply company trade group convention (for which New York Magazine says he received $80,000.) Estimates of his advance for Outliers hover around $4 million.

Gladwell’s broad appeal – and hard-to-parse political leanings – are well described by Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker, reviewing “What the Dog Saw” in The New York Times last year.

“The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition,” Pinker wrote. “For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left.”

Boosting Baltimore, bookishly

Indeed, the lanky, professorial Gladwell was pretty upbeat in Baltimore, unlike some of the edgier speakers the Partnership has brought in lately, such as New Urbanist scold James Howard Kunstler. (Kunstler spoke in March and bashed assorted local icons, including the “despotic” former Legg Mason building and “hideous” Formstone.)

Gladwell’s only crack at the city’s expense was the gentlest reference to our at-one-time-highest-in-the-nation, ahem, syphilis rate, mentioned in Chapter One of The Tipping Point.

But really, the rest of the talk was urgent and positive (“I can’t help it, I’m Canadian!”) and focused on the power of community and place and density and cities (rather than typically-sprawling suburbs) to build health and happiness. (Sound familiar? Don’t bowl alone, people!)

Gladwell built his talk around the story of Roseto, Pennsylvania, a town created by Italian immigrants who named it after the village in the Apennine foothills from which most of them came. (This anecdote is from the opening chapter of Outliers.) In the 1950’s, it seems, Roseto came under the microscope of social scientists because of its citizens’ unusually low rate of heart disease.

After ruling out diet, exercise and genetics, Gladwell said, they figured out that the explanation for this lay in Roseto’s paesani culture — the town’s civic organizations, extended families and dense village layout. What was different from other little Pennsylvania communities was a church at the center and town square and Garibaldi Avenue with its sidewalk cafes and people knowing each other, talking to each other, making wine in the backyard and watching out for each others’ kids.

“Its layout had a lot to do with its magic,” Gladwell said. What’s did this have to do with his Baltimore audience?

“You too believe in the importance of place,” he said.

What (private) money can’t buy

Elaborating on the theme, he said density is what gives cities their “magic.” They also boast a wealth of “public goods,” rather than ” private goods.” By public goods, he said he meant, not the things people buy for themselves (“flat-screen TVs and three-car garages”) but “the park, the trees and the flowers and the shrubs on the streets, the church and the civic organizations — all of those elements of the community that were collective.”

Continuing with this idea, he had a pretty good riff on Stephen Schwartzman, the private equity king who famously compared President Obama’s efforts to get rid of tax breaks for the super wealthy to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

“The only thing that would make life better for him would be less time (needed to get) from his mansion on the Upper East Side to his private airport at wherever, or fewer potholes outside of Le Cirque or cleaner air at St. Barts at holiday time or when he flies over Central Park in his helicopter, a slightly greener expanse below,” Gladwell said, noting that these are all things Schwartzman can’t buy but could help bring about through tax dollars and collective action.

To his credit, Gladwell noted that he himself is more or less in the same situation, having made “a million a year for the last ten years.” (Compared to Schwartzman’s, Gladwell’s private-goods purchases are downright modest. According to The New York Observer, in 2008 Gladwell bought his second West Village apartment for $1.5 million.”)

Soapbox postscript

In the end it was hard to argue with much Gladwell said and the only thing lacking was a little reality check, to remind the movers-and-shakers crowd of all the things that keep places like Baltimore from achieving the Roseto ideal – like politics and clannish-ness and bureaucracy and greed.

Plenty of public goods here in Baltimore, they’re just frequently not valued very much. We’ve got loads of neighborhood schools — that are perpetually struggling, underfunded and crumbling. We’ve got great public swimming pools — that were closed during the hottest summer in memory while officials played politics. We’ve got people with great ideas on how to raise funds to help pay for such things — but we walk away from the money lest we anger the entities asked to give a little up, like the bottled beverage industry.

Instead, millions of public dollars go into ‘roided-up, tourist-and-conventioneer-oriented, mixed-use- convention-center-arena mega-plexes and Grand Prix races– sold as trickle-down sources of benefit for the people who actually live here.

Gladwell’s pep talk was fine, but it was missing at least a nod to  how much more complicated things are outside the Meyerhoff. Not everyone yearning for more private goods here is a sybaritic Stephen Schwartzman. Some just want a week’s worth of groceries and something nice for their kids for Christmas. And a job with benefits and a decent salary they can use to support that laid-back paesani lifestyle.

Still Gladwell’s message of what’s so great about cities like Baltimore was pretty well-put and, one hopes, taken to heart by all, for all.

“It’s about the kind of thing that happens when you step outside, it’s about the life and community that can be created out there in the public space — culture and diversity and excitement and the beautiful, random, glorious chaos of the city and architectural beauty and all of those things that exist in public space and not private space . . . all are incredibly powerful drivers of human inspiration and human happiness and I think your challenge is to remind people of that.”