Maisonneuve - February 9, 2005
Creative
Class War: The Debate over Richard Florida’s Ideas
by Christopher DeWolf
ou’re
doing really well,” Richard Florida gushed to an audience of business types
and government officials at a downtown Montreal hotel two weeks ago. “You’ve
inherited one of the best ecosystems for this kind of creative economy in the
world.”
Florida, an urban consultant and
professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon, was there to tell the audience what
they had paid to hear: that Montreal was one of the most promising cities in
North America and that, if its creative potential was properly harnessed, it
would reap untold benefits. It’s easy to be cynical when faced with a speech
that so closely resembles a pep talk, but Florida’s conclusions aren’t
pulled out of thin air. He and his colleagues have just completed a nine-month
study of Montreal’s economic health, and they’re impressed with what they
found. After decades of near stagnation, Montreal is among the top five North
American cities for job growth over the past five years, and ranks second on
the continent in terms of “super creative” employment—meaning people who
work in education and training, arts and culture, and technology.
But what’s so important about
education, technology and the arts? It goes back to Florida’s wildly
successful 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class. In it, Florida
documented the emergence in the twentieth century of a new “creative class”
of workers, defined as people “engaged in science and engineering, research
and development, and the technology-based industries; in the arts, music,
culture, aesthetic and design; or in the knowledge-based professions of health
care, finance and law.” According to Florida, the creative class now makes
up 30 percent of the American workforce but accounts for half of all income
earned. Meanwhile, the manufacturing and service sectors’ shares of the
economy, along with their portion of the nation’s income, continue to
decline precipitously, as manufacturing jobs flee to Asia and service-sector
employment is usurped by Canada and India.
The future, then—at least according
to this theory—lies in attracting the lucrative, high-earning creative
class. But how? Florida argues that this group is drawn to open, tolerant
cities that appeal to a wide variety of lifestyles. To measure a city’s
openness, Florida and his researchers compile a series of indicators, such as
the number of patents issued per capita and the cost of living.
The media, though, have focused most
of their attention on Florida’s city rankings, including the infamous “gay
index,” which looks to the number of gay couples in a city as a measure of
its tolerance. As a result, they’ve largely neglected Florida’s
fundamental message: that cities must move away from funding corporate tax
breaks and big-ticket white elephants designed to stimulate the economy. (In
one recent example, Washington, DC, convinced the Montreal Expos to settle
down by offering to build a new ballpark, raise business taxes and sign over
all potential profits to the team’s future owner, all on the public dime.)
Instead, says Florida, cities need to promote grassroots innovation and
small-scale creativity, conditions that have spawned some of the biggest
business successes of the past twenty years. “Human creativity,” he
writes, “is the ultimate source of economic growth. Every single person is
creative in some way. And to fully tap and harness that creativity we must be
tolerant, diverse and inclusive.”
Increasingly, Florida is interested
in applying his theories to Canadian cities, especially Montreal, Toronto and
Vancouver. With more immigrants than most American cities, high concentrations
of the most creative types of employment, government funding for small
business and the arts, low crime, good public schools and a large urban middle
class, Canada’s biggest cities seem well poised to take advantage of the
trends Florida describes.
Montreal in particular has caught
Florida’s eye. While outside perception of its language and politics
continues to be an obstacle (Florida admits to having had low expectations
before he started his research here, then to being pleasantly surprised), it
boasts the fundamental ingredients for a creative city: Over half the
population is bilingual, and nearly a quarter speak three languages; with four
large universities, it has almost as many students per capita as Boston; and
it is home to a thriving collection of grassroots arts and cultural projects
that benefit from public support (for instance, the federal government’s
Canada Music Fund, the tax credit given to art spaces and Quebec’s Société
de Développement des Enterprises Culturelles). That might sound like the kind
of fluff a Board of Trade would publish, but you have to admit that Montreal
is doing something right. Along with rapid job growth in recent years, the
city has attracted a number of prominent companies, including the French
video-game firm Ubisoft, which last week announced its intention to double its
number of Montreal employees.
Florida
has a lot of fans but just as many detractors. Joel Kotkin—a Los
Angeles-based writer and consultant whose latest book, The City: A Global
History, will be released this April—is one of them. He doesn’t believe
the creative class is as big as Florida makes it out to be. Sure, at least
part of the American workforce consists of “hip, cool, single,
culture-oriented” people, Kotkin says, “but it’s not remotely close to
30 percent. [And] if the creative class isn’t defined by bohemians, what is
it? If it’s just the migration of educated people, they’re moving to the
suburbs, to the Sunbelt.” In Kotkin’s view, it’s the suburbs—and
suburban Sunbelt metropolises—that now drive economic growth, because of
their high birth rates, low taxes and family-friendly environments. “All of
these artistic cities started out with an incredibly vital economy,” he
says. “Everything else followed afterwards.”
In a recent Washington Post op-ed,
Kotkin declared inner-city living to be a “niche lifestyle preferred mostly
by the young, the childless and the rich.” The real action, he said, is now
in suburbia and smaller cities like Fresno, California. Some have compared
Kotkin’s views to those of David Brooks, the New York Times columnist who
reduces the American city to a playground divided between such cliques as
urban, latte-sipping hipsters, Volvo-driving, liberal inner-suburbanites and—Brooks’
darlings—the exurban Patio Man and Realtor Mom, who revel in their frontier
paradise with childlike innocence. Unlike Brooks, however, Kotkin has grounded
his arguments in real research rather than simply hackneyed caricatures. But
Florida is quick to counter Kotkin’s findings with his own figures, pointing
out that the regions that rank highest in his “creativity index” generated
35,000 jobs between 1999 and 2002 while the lowest-ranked lost 400,000 jobs.
Florida also criticizes Kotkin for “divisive thinking” for implying “that
a place must either be family-friendly or gay-and-bohemian-friendly, but can’t
be both.”
Still, Kotkin—who places himself in
the progressive tradition of former New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia—worries
that Florida’s findings might be used by cities as a way to neglect mounting
infrastructural and social problems: “It’s almost like we’ve taken the
ephemeral and put it in front,” he says. “It’s a way of people saying we
cannot deal with urban education, urban infrastructure. New York doesn’t
need another art museum; it needs a subway that works.” Kotkin is an
advocate of what he calls “sewer socialism”: sound investment in efficient
transportation, good schools and reliable public services. “If public-school
education was better in [American] cities, it would make a huge difference,”
he remarks. Above all, he concludes, city governments should listen to their
citizens, fixing what makes them unhappy and building on what satisfies them.
Unfortunately, the debate over the
creative class increasingly resembles a Fox News shouting match. Florida is
portrayed as a big-government lackey who advocates reckless spending on
museums and symphony halls, while Kotkin is accused of pandering to a
social-conservative agenda. “I blame the media for this,” Kotkin says. “There’s
less intelligent discussion about [cities] and more soap opera.” He
continues, “It would be of more use to have a discussion on these issues and
see what comes out of that rather than have a cartoonish debate.”
Ultimately, though, Florida seems to
have the momentum. It’s easy to dismiss his ideas as a vacuous cash grab
that nets big bucks for his research firm and big losses for cities, but that
doesn’t do justice to his basic message that cities need to invest in people
and street-level innovation, not incentives for big corporations or baseball
teams. Kotkin is absolutely right when he says that cities must first of all
invest in the infrastructure and public services that will maintain a healthy
and heterogeneous population. But that’s only part of the story. A tolerant
and creative environment is also necessary in order to stimulate the
out-of-the-box thinking that makes some cities such dynamic places.
What this all comes down to is
fostering an environment where as many different kinds of people as possible
can thrive. Innovation comes from the ground up, not the top down: that’s
what cities need to understand.
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