Should We Abandon the “Uncreative Class”?
What would you do if you were the mayor of Detroit? Right now entrepreneurial urbanists in Detroit and other rust belt cities are by necessity re-envisioning their urban milieus, trying to make them greener, more creative, more prosperous places. There are pockets of success here and there, but the scary part is that all of this re-imagining might not matter. Given the rate of industrial decline, it would seem that distant global forces are shaping urban landscapes in ways that are as stoppable for urban planners as the weather.
The late management expert Peter F. Drucker wrote a piece in Foreign Affairs called “The Changed World Economy” in 1986 that accurately foresaw the problems that cities are dealing with today. The manufacturing sector, he said, was becoming decoupled from blue collar employment. America may produce just as much, but it’s doing so with fewer workers. At the same time, he saw flows of global capital—investment money moving from one place to another—as replacing in importance the actual physical trade in goods. Put together, this means that job opportunities come and go, moving around the country (and globe) at unprecedented speed. I’m worried that this accelerated mobility of opportunity might be too much for most people to keep up with.
The real problem in the ever-mercurial global economy is how to manage cities whose roles in it could become unmarketable by next week. The urban theorist Richard Florida argued in the March Atlantic that the answer was to redesign our urban geography for increased mobility. That way people can keep up with changing job markets and members of Florida’s lionized “creative class” of white-collar professionals can find one another. The old system that encouraged home ownership should be jettisoned in favor of renting, which makes it easier for people to pick up and move without the time consuming agony of home selling. Cities should be more concentrated, less suburban, and more connected by public transit. I’m generally fine with those propositions, as are most urban planners. However, there are bigger issues at hand when we talk about enhancing mobility to accommodate the volatility of unleashed markets.
The inefficient suburban-centric development model of the past few decades isn’t the only reason why migration is so hard. When people migrate nationally or internationally for the (potentially false) promise of a better life, they leave behind important familial and communitarian networks of social support. Permanent communities become temporary residences of job seekers en route from one place to the next, and any sense of connection to place is lost. Relationships fall under strain as families separate out of necessity. So the system of creative capitalism can be painfully atomizing.
There are also brutal legal barriers that prevent mobility. While goods and capital can move between cities freely (and job opportunities with them), millions of people around the world have to keep their very presence a secret in order to avoid deportation or Byzantine detention. It’s ironic that, in the age of NAFTA, the governments of the U.S., Mexico and Canada are spending billions on high-tech surveillance to regulate who travels among them. In China’s coastal cities—the geographic centers of the country’s economic activity—rural migrants are a legally mandated underclass.
Finally, not everyone can afford to move and the poorest are left behind amidst urban blight and neglect. What do we do about the immobile? What do we do with cities that are net losers of the “creative class”? For this so-called creative brand of capitalism, the uncreative are someone else’s problem. As Florida says, “We need to be clear that ultimately, we can’t stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try.” I would say that this is not at all clear. There is an inherent inhumanity in leaving people and their cities in the dust. Besides, the cost of finding ways to get so-called obsolete classes of workers gainfully employed where they live is looking preferable to the social costs of managing huge ghost cities and permanent spatial inequality.
Josh Leon is a regular contributor to Next American City.
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Petra Todorovich in New York City on Tue, May 19, 2009 at 4:40pm
This is an excellent critique of Florida’s argument for personal, geographic mobility. There’s a value in creating strong communities where people develop social networks that support and nurture families, civic life, and economic relationships. I saw Jane Jacobs speak at an event in Lower Manhattan in early 2001 and I remember clearly her comments on this point. She said that strong urban communities are those that can keep their residents in the neighborhood even as they move up the social and economic ladder. The problem with many struggling urban communities is that as residents move up in income, they move on and away. The goal of those communities should be keep their successful people there. As Leon notes, It suggests too that Florida’s vision of personal mobility would reinforce segregation by income and class, which is already so prevalent in America today.
Jim H on Mon, May 25, 2009 at 10:47am
This is a great little piece. In the same vein as the comment by Petra, I’d say that proponents of geographic mobility are missing important points. Even if we take it as a principle that increased geographic mobility helps allocate resources more efficiently, we have to remember that the resource we are most specifically talking about in this context is human capital. Human capital is predicated on the productivity of real, live people. So, though the above human mobility-efficiency principle may be useful, it is only one amongst many other principles.
A key, as Petra noted, is that not only do people produce, but they have needs. The breakdown of communities is a sort of Rousseauian alienation of people from the contexts in which they are embedded, and I would take from this that there is a principle in opposition to the principle of geographic mobility. This principle is the human need for society. Not just any old thrown together society, but a society that people truly feel that they are a part of. I think there needs to be a meta-turn in economic discussions: it may be a dismal science, but economists should recognize the limits of efficiency, and they ought to not try to turn the warm life-blood of human productivity - humans themselves - into cold machines. If the discussion of economics continues on a path which disregards human productivity as part of the larger context of human life, the application of theories produced by that discussion will end up undermining humanity in the short term, and in the long term those theories will be considered flawed and eventually obselete.
dan in california on Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 11:47am
there is also the idea in the business community that if they have over capacity they can abuse the work force and to increase profits. this gives industrialist the ability to punish one community by shutting down plants where workers are getting too fussy. as more people are marginalized and pushed into poverty over capacity comes on the cheap because it doesn’t require capital for new infrastructure. this is one of the benefits of globalization and part of the reason for the recent boom in construction which contrary to the experts is already starting to rebound nicely they just had to threaten us with economic meltdown if the public didn’t back their risky ventures. soon wealth and power will become so concentrated that it will be so simple to maintain it will no longer require any intelligence or ability. simply put brutality will do quite nicely then. with all the inbreeding they know their offspring will have mental challenges.
Richard Campbell on Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 4:46pm
Public transit and rail both provide local jobs for the “uncreative class” and boost local economies making them less dependent on the ups and downs of the global economy. The same can be said for local production of food.