Cities and the Creative Class

Richard Florida

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135933531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Geografía humana

In his compelling follow-up to The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida outlines how certain cities succeed in attracting members of the 'creative class' - the millions of people who work in information-age economic sectors and in industries driven by innovation and talent.

1
Introduction

Cities are cauldrons of creativity. They have long been the vehicles for mobilizing, concentrating, and channeling human creative energy. They turn that energy into technical and artistic innovations, new forms of commerce and new industries, and evolving paradigms of community and civilization. Little is revolutionary in this idea. We have known it intuitively for ages, and its manifestations can be just as easily seen in Athens, Rome, Venice, and Florence, or London, Paris, and Berlin, as in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Toronto, Dublin, Helsinki, or Sydney. The argument of this book is not that the role of creativity in city formation and growth is new, but that, with the decline of physical constraints on cities and communities in recent decades, creativity has become the principal driving force in the growth and development of cities, regions, and nations.

In a sense, this book represents the prequel to The Rise of the Creative Class. Its core chapters are made up of the original academic articles and essays, researched and written before that book, in which critical elements of the creativity thesis were initially discovered, developed, and advanced. This book thus provides a crucial conceptual bridge between, on the one hand, my earlier research on technological innovation and regional development and, on the other hand, my more recent concern for creativity, diversity, and economic growth.

I have long been a student of the former, concerned for almost my entire career with how technological advancements help regions, urban centers, and nations to grow. I came late in my career to issues having to do with arts, culture, and diversity. When I address audiences interested primarily in these topics, I always start with an apology: “I am not a student of any of the three,” I say, “and I have only a cursory understanding of their internal functionings. Rather, my career-long concern has been with how and why regions or nations grow economically.”This compilation of essays should help to illustrate the overall trajectory of my work, from my ongoing interest in the nature of capitalism and the forces that power its growth to my ever-evolving understanding of the role that regions and urban centers play as the key economic and social organizing units of contemporary societies.

It has been more than two years now since The Rise of the Creative Class was published. In that time, its arguments have become the focus of considerable debate. Some of this debate has taken place within academia, blossoming in the fields of economics, geography, regional studies, urban planning, sociology, applied management, and the social sciences. But the debate has also stretched to journalism, public policy, and a huge number of professional communities, from urban development to arts and culture. Now it has begun to spill over into larger national conversations, touching on everything from the nature of quality economic development to the role of diversity and gay rights in twenty-first century society. This has been exciting and gratifying, and I couldn’t have asked for a more well-intentioned group of both critics and proponents.

But, as is so often the case in wide-ranging dialogues, a good deal of the popular debate over these ideas has become diluted, ill informed, or overly ideological. In such exchanges, core ideas can get muddled or misused, and straw-man arguments can begin to overwhelm honest and forthright discussion. What I’d like to do here, then, is to clarify the key elements of the creativity theory, and to inject it into the larger context of ongoing intellectual and public discourse.

This chapter is divided into four main sections. To begin, I’ll take some time to reprise my core theory on creativity and cities. Then, I’ll take a step back to explain where my ideas come from; for, although they clearly reflect larger intellectual arcs and contributions, they are also deeply personal in nature, growing out of critical events and circumstances in my life. Next—and in the context of broader questions regarding technology, culture, and economic development—I’ll outline what I believe to be the central issues in the ongoing debate over The Rise of the Creative Class. I’ll conclude by summarizing the key issues that have emerged in this debate and in the evolution of my own thinking.

Creativity and Cities, Revisited

There can be little doubt that the age we are living through is one of tremendous economic and social transformation. Roughly a century ago, our economy and society changed from an agricultural to an industrial system. The change we are undergoing today is at least as large as that one, and brings with it sweeping implications for the way we work and live, the way we organize our time, the nature of family and community structures, and the role and function of urban centers.

Despite the massive migration to the cities and away from agricultural labor, even as late as 1950 less than 15 percent of the U.S. population could have been characterized as creative workers. Over the past two decades, though, creativity has become the driving force of our economy, and the creative sector has exploded, adding more than 20 million jobs. Globally, a third of the workers in advanced industrial nations are employed in the creative sector, engaged in science and engineering, research and development, and the technology-based industries, in arts, music, culture, and aesthetic and design work, or in the knowledge-based professions of health care, finance, and law. This creative sector accounts for nearly half of all wage and salary income in the United States—as much as the manufacturing and service sectors combined (see 1.1).

I should interject here that perhaps the single most overlooked—and single most important—element of my theory is the idea that every human being is creative. Some have criticized my work by saying that the very idea of a “Creative Class” is elitist and exclusionary. In my view, it is neither. In fact, I came to use this term out of a personal and intellectual frustration with the snobbery of concepts such as knowledge workers, information society, high-tech economy, and the like. I chose the term because I found it to be both more accurate in defining the real source of economic value-creation—that is, human creativity—and because it is an intellectual construct that extends to all forms of human potential: the vast storehouse and virtually limitless resource that is human creative capacity.

Table 1.1 The Creative Economy

Tapping and stoking the creative furnace inside every human being is the great challenge of our time. Finding mechanisms and strategies to make this happen is the key to greater productivity, improved working and living conditions, and more sustainable patterns of development. “Creative Class” is the shorthand I use to describe the roughly one-third of U.S. and global workers who have the good fortune to be compensated monetarily for their creative output. But, make no mistake, creativity is as biologically and intellectually innate a characteristic to all human beings as thought itself.

For me, the most disturbing fact remains that only one-third of the workforce is employed in the creative sector of the economy. That means two-thirds are not. I had a hunch while writing The Rise of the Creative Class that inequality in our society was being exacerbated by the rise of the creative economy. My Carnegie Mellon collaborator Kevin Stolarick and I developed an Inequality Index that compares the wages of creative sector workers to those in the manufacturing sectors. We found that inequality is actually highest in the creative epicenters of the U.S. economy—places like San Francisco, the North Carolina Research Triangle, Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas.

Ironically, creativity is the great leveler. It cannot be handed down, and it cannot be owned in the traditional sense. It defies gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and outward appearance. We cannot know in advance who the next Andy Warhol, Billie Holiday, Paul Allen, or Jimi Hendrix will be, or where he or she will come from. Yet our society continues to encourage the inventive talents of a minority while neglecting the creative capacities of the majority. We must be more imaginative in finding ways to make service, and even manufacturing, jobs more creative and thus less deadening for the people who hold them.

Much of the controversy over The Rise of the Creative Class stems from my arguments concerning the broad relationship between culture and economic growth. Social and economic theorists from Max Weber to Edward Banfield and Daniel Bell have argued that culture affects economic growth by producing incentives (as with Weber’s “Protestant Work Ethic”) that promote effort, thrift, and hard work. Culture, according to this view, motivates economic growth by focusing human energy and effort on work, and away from the pull of distractions such as leisure, play, sexuality, and other forms of non-work-related enjoyment. Left to their own devices, lacking firm rules, and without strong social and economic incentives, humans tend to defer work for other forms of enjoyment. Bell went so far as to identify culture as the core contradiction of modern capitalism, seeing the rise of a more open, expressive, and hedonistic culture during the 1960s as undermining the effort, incentives, and discipline that power innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.

The creativity thesis breaks with these traditional conceptions in a few important ways. It argues that the role of culture is much more expansive, that human beings have limitless potential, and that the key to economic growth is to enable and unleash that potential. This unleashing requires an open culture—one that does not discriminate, does not force people into boxes, allows us to be ourselves, and validates various forms of family and of human identity. In this sense, culture operates not by constraining the range of human creative possibilities but by facilitating and mobilizing them. By extension, open culture on the macro level is a spur to societal innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development.

My view of creativity and cities revolves around a simple formula, the 3 T’s of economic growth: technology, talent, and tolerance. Economists have long argued that technology is the key to economic growth. MIT’s Robert Solow won a Nobel Prize for his work in isolating technology as the driving force in economic growth. Stanford University economist Paul Romer argues that growth is an endogenous process, based on the continuous accumulation and exploitation of human knowledge. I agree wholeheartedly that technology plays a fundamental role in economic growth. In fact, I consider it so important that I made it my first T.

Talent is the second variable in my model. Other leading academics in the field, including the Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas, have argued that growth is a consequence of human capital, a view shared by urban economist Edward Glaesar of Harvard University. In this view, the role of cities is to bring together and augment human capital, and places with more human capital grow more rapidly than those with less. Lucas refers to cities’ human capital augmenting functions as “Jane Jacobs’ externalities,” and has suggested that she deserves a Nobel Prize for that idea. In this sense, urbanization is a key element of innovation and productivity growth.

I agree with this general principle, too. For talent, though, I substitute a measure of creative occupations for the typical education-based measure of human capital. The two are highly correlated, of course, but measuring creative capital(which is to say, creative occupations) includes people based on their current work rather than merely their education levels. In independent tests, Robert Cushing of the University of Texas at Austin has found that this creative capital measure performed better than the less specific human capital at predicting innovation and growth. This measure of creative occupations has the added advantage of being a better tool (than simply counting the number of people with college degrees) for allowing nations and regions to assess and capitalize upon their particular creative capital assets.

The third T, tolerance, is the key factor in enabling places to mobilize and attract technology and talent. Although economists have always recognized some form of technology or talent as important drivers of economic growth, we tend to think of them in the same way we think of the more conventional factors of production, such as raw materials— that is, as constituting a stock. According to this view, a place is endowed with certain stocks of technology and talent, both of which account for its rates of innovation and growth. But resources like technology, knowledge, and human capital differ in a fundamental way from the more traditional factors of production like land or raw materials; they are not fixed stocks, but transient flows.Technology and talent are highly mobile factors, flowing into and out of places.

Which brings us to the question: What accounts for the ability of some places to secure a greater quantity or quality of these flows? The answer, according to the creativity theory, lies in openness, diversity, and tolerance. Our work finds a strong connection between successful technology-and talent-harnessing places and places that are open to immigrants, artists, gays, and racial integration. These are the kinds of places that, by allowing people to be themselves and to validate their distinct identities, mobilize and attract the creative energy that bubbles up naturally from all walks of life. Such places gain an economic advantage in both harnessing the creative capabilities of a broader range of their own people and in capturing a disproportionate share of the flow.

Our work with Meric Gertler and Tara Vinodrai, for instance, found a direct correlation between diversity and high-tech growth in an analysis of Canadian regions. The research group National Economics has found a similar relationship in their independent analysis of Australian regions. And empirical research by the economists Gianmarco Otta-viano of the University of Bologna and Giovanni Peri of the University of California at Davis also corroborates this view, providing further independent confirmation of the effect of diversity and openness on economic growth for a large sample of U.S. city regions.

Where My Ideas Come From

The notion that cities spur human creativity is an old one, and the social and economic trends that my theory seeks to describe have been centuries in the making. The creativity theory does not pretend to exist outside the realm of history, nor would it be very useful if it did. It is instead a continuation of a larger body of work, one that goes far beyond my own humble reach. For my part, I have been developing these ideas in my work for more than two decades now. During that time, I have had the good fortune to learn from great thinkers and to build upon the classics of economic, social, and political theory. I have had the opportunity to collaborate with many incredibly talented people, to discuss and debate my ideas widely, and to work with numerous professionals on real world problems and strategies.

But my interest in creativity and economic development goes far beyond intellectual curiosity and is intimately tied to my personal history. At the risk of being a little self-indulgent, it might be helpful if I told you a bit about where this work and its author both come from.

I was born in the late 1950s in Newark, New Jersey. The Newark of my childhood memories was a lively, ethnically diverse, and thriving city. Nearly my entire extended family lived there: my grandparents and seven sets of aunts, uncles, and cousins, on both my mother’s and my father’s sides. I vividly recall Sunday afternoons at my maternal grandmother’s house on North 6th Street, where I was surrounded by scores of extended family members and friends. But, most of all, I remember the feel of the larger community, the network of dense social capital that I would later come to appreciate intellectually through the work of Robert Putnam and others. In my mind’s eye, I can still picture the Newark of that time. It was the energetic and vibrant place about which Phillip Roth writes, filled with shops and large department stores, incredible museums and libraries, a mosaic of ethnic neighborhoods, and the incredible industrial complex of the iron-bound or down-neck section of the city, where thousands of blue-collar workers made their livings.

During the 1960s, I saw it all go south. The bustling city of my youth fell into a vicious cycle of decline. As a child of that tumultuous decade, the civil rights movement and the race riots of 1967 had an indelible impact on me. For someone of my age, and certainly for me, these issues had an even greater impact than the Vietnam War. The Newark of those later days was an altogether different place: the once-animated city torn apart, tanks stationed at intersections, soldiers occupying volatile streets and neighborhoods. I remember driving down one of Newark’s grand avenues one evening, on the way home with my father from my weekly guitar lesson. We were waved over by armed guardsmen who nervously informed us that “snipers were shooting” in an adjacent building.

The stark reality of racial tension and the deteriorating urban condition had a haunting effect on me, though of course I couldn’t have grasped it fully at the time. Why was Newark exploding into violence? What could be motivating such conflict? These gut reactions would eventually morph into more sophisticated formulations: What in our economy and society could produce such undeniable racial and class inequality? At the time, though, the feelings were personal and visceral.

I was further shaped by the world of my father’s factory, as I talk about in The Rise of the Creative Class. My father was employed by Victory Optical, in Newark’s iron-bound section. He started work there in his teens and, after serving in World War II, returned to the factory, where he labored his way up the ladder from regular factory worker, to foreman, to one of the plant managers. I was always fascinated—as most young boys are—by the place where my father worked, and I wanted to know more about it. He would take me there sometimes on Saturdays, and I was drawn into this world. My father would tell me about the products Victory Optical made, about the machines that did the work, and—most importantly, he always stressed—about the men who provided the talent the factory needed to keep it running. In his eyes, it was their knowledge, intelligence, and creativity that made the plant special.

The factory, like so many other American factories, declined in the late 1960s and 1970s, finally shuttering its doors in the late 1970s. This event left its mark on me, clearly shaping my later fascinations with technological change, the nature of work on the factory floor, systems of production organization, and the spatial location and organization of industries.

Looking back on it, I realize now it was the intersection of these two intensely personal worlds—the wrenching urban conflicts of Newark and the heartbreaking decline of my father’s factory—that foreshadowed my enduring personal interest in the intersection of economic transformation and place. Mirroring as they did the broader transformation of America’s older urban centers and the deindustrial-ization of the American economy, these events spurred my youthful intellect. I wanted to know why these things were happening; what broader forces were setting them in motion? For obvious reasons, it was hard to get anything approaching a thorough answer from the adults who had to live through such highly charged situations. So, as a young boy, I turned my attention to the world of books.

On Saturdays, my father and I would drive first to the factory where he worked the morning shift, and then get a lunch of pizza and h...