The Best Addresses

 

 

by Nathan Glazer

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy is Making Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

By Richard Florida

(Basic Books, 374 pp., $26.95)

 

In 2002, with The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida launched one of those terms or categories or ideas--there have been many--that try to structure our contemporary societies into something more complicated than the Marxian conflict between the owners of the means of production and those who are exploited as proletarians working on them. His "creative class" has become more than a concept and something like a commercial enterprise, with its own website, its consultation services for cities and enterprises, its large research undertakings. According to the jacket of his new book, Florida is the creator of the Creative Class Group, located in Washington, D.C., Toronto (where Florida is now director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and professor of business and creativity in the business school of the University of Toronto), Pittsburgh (where he was for many years a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University), and Europe. He is, his publisher tells us, "one of the world's leading public intellectuals."

The "creative class" includes those who work in occupations and industries that call upon some measure of creativity. Florida divides them into a "super-creative core" consisting of computer and mathematical occupations; architecture and engineering; life, physical, and social sciences; education, training, and library occupations; arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media--a grouping that seems rather too capacious to merit the term "super-creative"--and a larger, wider group of "creative professionals," which includes management, law, health care, and some in sales and sales management. Together the two categories make up a large part of the American labor force. Florida tracked the rapid rise in the numbers of this creative class, contrasted it with the decline of workers in manufacturing, and posited its significance for innovation and economic growth. More interestingly, he argued that the growth and decline of urban areas is dependent on their ability to attract the members of the creative class--that it was more important for cities to have a "people climate" than a "business climate."

The "people climate" that attracted the creative class was not simply the natural amenities we think of to explain the growth of the Sunbelt and the decline of the industrial heartland. In Florida's view, a climate that would attract the creative class is within the powers of imaginative local communities to, well, create. "Neither sunnier weather nor warmer climates are systematically associated with regional growth," Florida wrote, adding: "University of Chicago sociologist Terry Clark finds that natural amenities, including sun and temperature, are not associated with location decisions of high human capital individuals. [They] are more likely to be drawn to cities that offer 'constructed amenities,' from arts and culture to highquality restaurants."

http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=ab9d84bd-506b-4935-98e6-f84f241e7b54