Richard Florida

The story of how and why cities have declined has dominated the American conversation on cities for decades, in both popular and academic literature. In recent years, city-watchers have begun to cautiously chronicle a move back to urban areas — some in the media have gone as far to announce that cities are “coming back.” Yet even a cursory look at U.S. Census data makes it clear that not all cities are doing so. Young singles and families alike are flocking to places like Austin, Seattle, and Boston, while cities like Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Detroit register little growth if any. Why do some places grow and prosper while others do not?

Richard Florida thinks he has an answer. The Carnegie Mellon professor and urban consultant argues in The Rise of the Creative Class:And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, and Everyday Life that in the 21st century, neither the 19th century model of strategic geography and being home to a major industry nor the 20th century model of large-scale redevelopment initiatives to create stadiums and malls will make a city successful. What will make a city attract people and capital? A cutting edge music scene, bike trails, and a healthy population of artists and gays — all signs of what Florida calls “creative capital.”

Florida presents creativity as “the most highly prized commodity in our economy,” and the rest of his observations and theories about economic development follow from there. Creativity, to Florida, is more than just what artists, novelists and inventors have. It is “multidimensional” and can be economic, technological, and organizational as well as cultural and artistic. And because creativity is essential to the success of a business, people with exceptional creativity become a company’s key asset.

Florida argues that in a creativity-driven economy, cities with a high concentration of creative people have a competitive advantage in attracting new businesses. Cities like Austin and San Francisco have thriving tech sectors because they have thriving music and art scenes that can attract the types of workers companies need to stay competitive. Certain regions still have clusters of certain industries, but clustering no longer just means taking advantage of economies of scale or the proximity of related factories or services. Industries now cluster to take advantage of pools of people. Thus, the old model of people moving to follow jobs is turned on its head.

The main pool of people Florida expects industry to cluster around is the “creative class,” a term that encompasses those traditionally thought of as creative — artists, musicians, writers — as well as those called variously “knowledge workers” or “information workers” — computer programmers, engineers, academics, and lawyers.

The Creative Class is not just distinguished by its members’ professions, but by their lifestyles. Florida paints a picture of a group of people whose creativity permeates every aspect of their lives, who thrive on diversity and change, who collect experiences rather than possessions, and for whom the ability to express individuality and find an outlet for creativity is more important than any material gain. What Florida emphasizes most is that members of the Creative Class need to live and work in places that nurture their creativity. Companies have taken note and restructured the workplace, allowing for casual dress, more open office layouts, and flexible schedules.

Florida’s mission in The Rise of the Creative Class is to argue that cities, to compete, must restructure themselves for the Creative Class’ needs much as companies have already done. Florida argues that catering to the preferences of the Creative Class is a far better strategy for growth than the more traditional economic development strategy of catering to the companies that employ them. “Cities need a people climate even more than they need a business climate,” Florida argues. Thus, investing in lifestyle options and amenities, such as bike trails, parks, historic districts, and a diversity of cultural attractions will lure more tech firms in the long term than building research and development parks.

Florida looks to Jane Jacobs’ description of Hudson Street in lower Manhattan in the introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities as the model of a community that encourages creativity. Creative types, he says, crave the “organic” cultural experience offered by funky urban neighborhoods like Jacobs’ Greenwich Village and Washington, D.C.’s Adams Morgan. They seek to participate, not merely to observe. Thus, sports stadiums, big art museums, and grand theatres interest them less than street level music and art scenes. More street level innovation comes out of these “marginal” neighborhoods, making them vital to nurturing a healthy Creative Class.

More than any one specific scene, though, the Creative Class wants a city that offers a variety of social interactions and a diversity of people and lifestyles. To borrow a distinction laid out by the late Michael Brill in a recent article in the environmental design journal Places, they want “public life” over “community life.” Community life, Brill tells us, takes place among those who know each other well, or at least see each other regularly. It is made up of strong social ties and takes place in local bars, at P.T.A. meetings, and during church picnics. Public life, on the other hand, “is spent in the occasional company of a diversity of strangers.” Public life thrives in places that are open to all, such as public parks and museums, but also nightclubs and shopping malls.

Brill argues that most Americans see public life as “too fractious, too troublesome, not always safe and comfortable.” Public life, however, provides exactly what the Creative Class craves. Florida argues that creative people seek quasi-anonymity, having a few strong social ties, many weak ones, and ample opportunity to be surrounded by strangers and exposed to different types of people.

Furthermore, Florida claims that weak social ties are more important to a creative economy and society than the strong ones Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam praises in his Bowling Alone, which spawned the term “social capital” and was perhaps the most influential book on American communities written in the past decade. A larger network of weak social ties are more useful to individuals in finding jobs and in mobilizing money and resources than a close-knit group. Furthermore, communities composed of strong social ties tend to be exclusionary, setting high entry barriers for newcomers. Since individuals can manage many weak ties at once, communities built around them are flexible and welcoming, thus facilitating rapid entry.

Having identified what the Creative Class wants in a place, Florida sets out to rank various cities based on a variety of indices that he believes will predict economic growth. The big winners won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone: San Francisco, Austin, San Diego, Boston and Seattle make up the top five of his Creativity Index. But there are a few curious rankings down the line. Dallas and Houston, which evoke images of endless Sunbelt sprawl without the hipness of Austin, rank in the top ten. Meanwhile, New Orleans, chock full of authenticity and offering a world-famous cultural scene, finds itself near the bottom of the barrel, ranked well below Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Hartford, CT — not places most people consider “creative centers.”

These rankings may go against our first instincts about what types of places are creative, but make more sense if we accept, as Florida does, that technological and organizational creativity is as significant as artistic creativity. The Creativity Index is a composite of four other indices, measuring not only the numbers of gays and people engaged in creative professions, but also the number of patented innovations and the amount of high-tech activity. Thus, the Creativity Index is a pretty accurate predictor of economic health, if not necessarily of cultural excitement. And while Florida would like to show that these two go together, that technological creativity will be drawn to places that have artistic creativity, the outcomes of his rankings suggest otherwise. Writers, artists, and musicians may still flock to New Orleans, but computer programmers are going to Houston.

Florida stresses that successful Creative Centers need “three T’s”: technology, tolerance, and talent. Just one or two won’t cut it. The technology part of this triptych is more important than Florida lets on in many places. Though he argues throughout that it is the culture of a place that is most important in attracting creative people, he concedes that no one will relocate to a place without job prospects. Because the Creative Class career trajectory tends to be horizontal (movement from job to job within an industry) rather than vertical (movement up within one company), creative workers look for places with a thick job market. They may not move to follow one particular company, but they will choose places that offer many possible job choices.

While he insists throughout much of the book that courting companies is not the way to go, he admits towards the end that the key to Austin’s success isn’t all in the music scene. Austin, he tells us, actively recruited high-tech companies and put money into creating R.&D. parks and building up the University of Texas. A major research institution is always a big advantage, Florida says, but universities have to do more than just produce cutting edge research; they must also persuade talented people to settle there by creating progressive and creative climates. And the surrounding community, led by strong regional business coalitions, needs to support their efforts rather than fighting them.

Though many consider new suburbs like those in Silicon Valley and Northern Virginia to be the archetypal centers of technological innovation, Florida believes that cities that are unique and historic, with an identifiable character, have an edge over newer places. He points out that Silicon Valley and similar early tech boomtowns have reached their growth limits and become sprawling, generic, and ugly. Given a choice between similar jobs in Boston and Tysons Corner, Virginia, he believes the average software designer would choose Boston. 

While on the whole Florida paints the changes he describes in a positive light, he does recognize negative side effects. He worries, for example, that the U.S. will grow into two societies with different economies: one creative and diverse, another of close-knit working class communities. The first society will dominate economically and grow healthier as the other declines. The spatial component of this dual economy is that different classes will segregate into different cities, a trend already visible in many places. Cities like Boston and Washington, D.C. have come to be dominated by the creative class, while others, such as Grand Rapids, MI. and Greensboro, NC., remain largely working class. There are even some cities dominated by the service class, most notably Las Vegas and Miami. Florida argues that this new class separation between different metropolitan areas will eventually become more pronounced than racial or suburban segregation — within the same metropolitan area. There is a considerable body of urban theory to back up Florida’s assertion that creativity is the main driving force behind our economy — even if much of that literature does not specifically use the word “creativity.” Manuel Castells argued that managing information has become the key economic activity of our “post-industrial” society as it operates in a global economy. The advent of large multinational corporations who must manage factories scattered all over the globe, and market and ship products to consumers all over the globe, necessitates complicated information-gathering systems. Thus, as University of Chicago economist Saskia Sassen points out, specialized services that keep production and consumption processes going — software design, advertising, financial services, network architecture — increase in importance and the professionals in these fields increase in value.

Despite his background as a professor of economic development, Florida’s main contribution to this conversation is cultural and social rather than economic. Though he never directly engages economists like Castells and Sassen, he does take on the ideas of nearly every important social critic of the last decade — turning many of these ideas upside down in the process. Harvard critic Juliet Schor’s “overworked American” becomes a driven professional whose “use of time has intensified.” Putnam’s breakdown of social capital paves the way for communities of “individuality, self-expression, and openness to difference.” The commodification of counter-culture symbols described by Baffler editor Thomas Frank becomes the democratization and spreading of the bohemian ethic and aesthetic.

Florida dismisses the notion that economic forces beyond our control are reshaping life, arguing instead that human preferences are the driving force behind economic and social change. Things change because we want them to. Even if factory jobs weren’t disappearing, we wouldn’t be able to find young people interested in filling them. The fact that social and economic ties have weakened everywhere in society is not a tragedy, as many have claimed, but a natural concomitant of the desire to continually re-create oneself.

While Florida provides a welcome challenge to the gloom and doom scenarios prevalent in the work of Putnam and others, some of his cultural observations do not hold up well under close scrutiny. For example, he writes that “individuality, self-expression, and openness to difference are favored over the homogeneity, conformity, and ‘fitting in’ of the organizational age.” Who, then, is keeping purveyors of homogeneity such as the Gap in business? You can chalk McDonald’s off as a working class supported enterprise, but what of Starbucks, whose presence has become an indicator of a town’s hipness?

Florida also defines the creative class so broadly as to include people who likely want widely disparate things in a place. Since he offers only four classes — creative, working, service, and agriculture — almost all of what would have been called the professional or the middle class gets labeled as creative. Grouping all professional workers into a class is hardly a novel idea, but it makes one question the applicability of many of his cultural observations. While computer programmers may be able to go to work in jeans, sporting spiked hair, lawyers and investment bankers still keep Brooks Brothers in business. When Florida counts the members of the creative class to provide data supporting his arguments, he includes almost anyone with a college degree, except maybe administrative assistants, who fall into the service class. But when he actually describes the Creative Class, he’s usually talking about computer programmers.

More worrisome than these faults in Florida’s cultural observations, however, is the lack of thought he gives to the possible implications of the trends he describes. Though Florida points out various problems that have become evident over the past three decades — for example, rising income inequality and persistent poverty in spite of economic growth — the overall tone is unequivocally celebratory.

Florida frequently praises flexibility in labor patterns without discussion of its broader economic roots and with only passing discussion of its often harmful effect on non-creative workers. Marxist geographer and cultural critic David Harvey, in The Condition of Postmodernity, offers a broader view of the place of flexibility in the new economy. He explains that old-style Fordism was too rigid to allow for innovation, design flexibility, and rapid changes in markets, which led to disaster in the mid-1970’s. Products with a high turnover and great variety, like clothes and consumer electronics, became more important than durable goods, like appliances and furniture. These changing patterns of consumption not only raised the value of innovation, but necessitated a flexible production process and flexible labor markets. So employers took advantage of weak unions, high unemployment, and general instability to create more casual jobs and flexible work patterns, often going beyond what was economically necessary and displacing regular jobs that historically had provided decent pay and benefits. Thus emerged a new labor structure, with a core of high level, valued regular employees, a peripheral group of full-time employees with common and easily replaceable skills who could be easily cut or replaced (such as clerical workers), and another peripheral group of casual, part-time, and contracted workers.

“Creative” business models and increased “flexibility,” both key to the new creative economy, are often bad for workers on the bottom. Florida focuses on people who choose to be “free agents.” But he ignores the unwilling “free agents” — temps and day laborers, who are forced into flexible work patterns. Flexibility may indeed be desirable for high-end professionals, for whom job instability is less threatening because they can build up savings during good times and cut back their lifestyle to survive in lean times. In many service sector jobs, however, flexibility often means replacing regular union jobs with casual labor, thus cutting pay and benefits and gaining the ability to hire and fire at will.

Florida views such outsourcing as a positive change that encourages creativity and efficiency, rather than as a strategy for dumping expensive full-time labor. He holds up the garment and electronics industries as examples of how outsourcing has made production super-efficient because it allows companies to concentrate on design. This arrangement can be described another way, especially once one notes that these two industries have the highest prevalence of sweatshop labor.Thanks to the low labor costs of “efficient” and “flexible” subcontractors in the Third World, Nike can afford to pay its creative design team big bucks to dream up stylish new sneakers that satisfy the needs of other highly paid creative professionals to express themselves through their footwear.

This trend towards casualization is not only bad for workers in the Third World; it is a major factor in urban poverty as well. Cities are filling up with a new class of “working poor:” men and women who often work two or three part-time jobs, yet do not receive health insurance or other benefits and often do not bring home enough to pay for basic necessities. In the service sector, which makes up over 40% of the U.S. workforce, two out of three workers are casual.

While Florida recognizes the service class numerous times throughout book, he declines to describe it or to explain its growth. Florida believes that the economy is not only restructuring away from manufacturing but away from low-end services as well. He predicts that the biggest growth will happen in high-valued-added sectors, such as finance and technology. Current statistics suggest a more complicated trend. Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for 2000-2010 show that of the top ten fastest growing occupations, eight are in the tech sector and the other two in health care. At the same time, the projection for the occupations that will account for the greatest number of new jobs shows the reverse: only two of the top ten relate to computers, and eight are in the service sector. In the same vein, Sassen predicts an eventual economic bifurcation. At one end of the economy there is a stratum of highly-valued and highly paid professions (advertising, financial consulting) and a corresponding stratum of high end consumer services to meet their needs (gourmet restaurants, boutiques, theaters). At the same time there is a stratum of people doing low value, low pay work (janitors, temps) and a stratum of low-end consumer services to meet their needs.

Florida does not discuss how the service class, and their increasingly casual work arrangements, will fit into his creative centers. One must assume that service workers will, by necessity, be present in all types of cities. It seems likely that they will exist in large numbers on the margins of the creative economy, where they are needed but not valued. One should expect to see in all creative centers what has been evident for years in Boston and San Francisco: gentrification. As highly paid young professionals rediscover cities, they inevitably, if not purposefully, squeeze out lower-income residents. Sassen points out that there is a parallel process evident in the business world. Firms with small profit margins become unable to compete for space as concentration of highly profitable firms grow. Small businesses serving low-income neighborhoods often are not able to survive no matter the market because, as prices are driven up by other sectors, they cannot compete for bank loans or afford real estate and business services. The loss of small businesses leaves low-income workers under-serviced. It also may impede the very creativity Florida seeks to encourage, making it increasingly difficult for artists and businesspeople from low-income neighborhoods to start out. The changes described in The Rise of the Creative Class could indeed mean surprise comebacks for long-ailing cities like Baltimore and Providence — if they follow Florida’s advice and successfully translate their old neighborhoods, urban charm, and leading research institutions into useful “creative capital.” But the implications of Florida’s predictions should give city-watchers reason for concern. If a chosen few cities will become “creative cores,” drawing the best and the brightest from all over the nation and receiving the bulk of economic investment, is it inevitable that the lower-income populations in these places will be pushed to the fringes, thus undermining the very diversity that lured the Creative Class there to begin with? And what of the cities dominated by the working class? As factories continue to close, will we end up with ghost-cities? Or with cities dominated by the unemployed?

All this is not to say that there isn’t much of value in The Rise of the Creative Class. Florida’s observations about what young professionals want in a city may serve as a much-needed wake-up call to city officials all over the country who are trying to spur growth by pouring public money into convention centers and sports stadiums. And his advice is based not only on studies, but on his own experience consulting in nearly every major (and minor) city in the nation. But while his book no doubt offers a useful model for cities seeking to spur the development of a strong tech sector, Florida does not adequately warn them of the other challenges they may have to face as a result, or offer suggestions as to how to handle such problems. Florida does not, for example, take up the interesting question of how regions that succeed at becoming creative centers can use their creative capital to pressure firms into providing better wages and benefits for low-end service workers, therefore creating a potential path from creative economy success to overall reduction of poverty.

Finally, much depends on whether Florida is reading his creative class correctly. If members of the creative class really do value diversity and interaction with strangers — as opposed to safe, packaged experiences — they may truly revitalize public life. In fact, members of this class may even stand up against the relentless gentrification that, following in their wake, often pushes out the very diversity that they value. But enjoying diversity where it exists is very different from actively fighting to preserve it, especially when preserving diversity necessitates difficult sacrifices. Preserving diversity would take active organization, not just passive enjoyment paired with lamentation over the decline of diversity in a neighborhood.

To be fair, Florida recognizes this last set of problems and calls upon his creative class to develop a class identity and a shared vision. He sets out three challenges for them: to invest in creativity for everyone (i.e., the disadvantaged), to overcome class divisions, and to build new forms of social cohesion. For his next project, I’d like to see Florida take up these challenges himself.