Product Description

Cities and the Creative Class gathers in one place for the first time the research leading up to Richard Florida’s theory on how the growth of the creative economy shapes the development of cities and regions. In a new introduction, Florida updates this theory and responds to the critics of his 2002 bestseller, The Rise of the Creative Class. The essays that make up Cities then spell out in full empirical detail and analysis the key premises on which the argument of Rise are based. He argues that people are the key economic growth asset, and that cities and regions can therefore no longer compete simply by attracting companies or by developing big-ticket venues like sports stadiums and downtown development districts. To truly prosper, they must tap and harness the full creative potential of all people, basing their strategies on a comprehensive blend of the 3 Ts of economic development: Technology, Talent, and Tolerance. Long-run success requires a reinvention of regions into the kind of open and diverse places that can attract and retain talent from across the social spectrum – by allowing people to validate their varied identities and to pursue the lifestyles and jobs they choose.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #350308 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review

Florida and others are changing the American urban agenda. This is a guidebook to the new knowledge-based economy. He mines the best available research to lay out powerful new policy options. No wonder he is in such demand. - Terry Nichols Clark, Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation Project, University of Chicago

Always provocative, always insightful, Florida answers many of the questions raised by The Rise of the Creative Class, and provides new insights into the roles creativity, tolerance and amenity play in transforming places. Every city and region now has to reinvent itself to compete successfully in the global economy, and Florida provides an essential guide to this process. Cities and the Creative Class describes how successful regions can and must make the shift from low-cost to high-quality strategies...
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–Bob Yaro, President of the Regional Plan Association

Florida and others are changing the American urban agenda. This is a guidebook to the new knowledge-based economy...He mines the best available research to lay out powerful new policy options. No wonder he is in such demand.
.
–Terry Nichols Clark, Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation Project, University of Chicago

From the Publisher
About the Author

Richard Florida is the Hirst Professor in George Mason University's School of Public Policy and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He lives in Washington DC.

About the Author
Richard Florida is the John Heinz Professor of Regional Economic Development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. He has been a visiting professor at MIT and Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and is addiliated with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

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Customer Reviews

Not Worth the Time
This honestly might be the worst book I've ever read. I'm a senior in college and was forced to read it for a Sustainable Urban Engineering elective class, and wow what a waste of time. I've never seen an author repeat himself more than Florida did here. He was saying the same things (really, check it out) on, say, page 140 as he was on page 35...that basically cities need to invest not in tax abatements to attract high-quality and talented businesses and people, but need to focus on increasing diversity and quality of life through developing amenities like good social scenes. The book is filled with a bunch of charts, tables, and graphs, backing up his claims that talent and the creative class flock to diverse regions with lots of stuff to do (which, really in my mind isn't groundbreaking information), but they again are extraordinarily repetitive. The book could have easily been condensed into a short article in and I would have gotten just as much out of it.

Much worse than his other books
Even though Richard Florida wrote this book three years after The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, he calls it a prequel. He covers the same theme: cities that show openness to people and new ideas thrive as they attract the Creative Class, which in turn creates new markets and cause economic growth.

The foundation of his Creative Capital theory is his 3 Ts of economic growth: tolerance, talent, and technology. For any city to be a thriving Creative Class cluster it needs all three. The Creative Class generates new ideas and products that cause creative centers to thrive. Those include San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C., Boston, Denver, and Austin. The cities that are less tolerant of people and new ideas do less well. Examples include Memphis, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Indianapolis.

The author goes into more statistics then in "The Rise of the Creative Class." Unfortunately, they are flawed. He shows many scatter plots with either High Technology or Software workers per million as the dependent variable on the Y axis. He tests those against many independent variables. But, he gets very different results. For instance, when he looks at Environmental Quality vs High Technology (figure 3.4) he gets a random relationship. Meanwhile, Environmental Quality vs Software workers shows a strong relationship. When focusing on Amenities, the reverse is true. Also, his scatter plots are flawed because they select different data. The ones with High Technology have 35 cities. The ones with Software workers have only 27. So, comparisons between the two data sets are invalid. For the one variable (Gay index) that does show strong correlation with both High Technology and Social workers, he may have cherry picked the data as he uses now only 24 cities. Thus, he could have eliminated outliers (11 cities from one data set and 3 from the other) that did not confirm the strong relationship. Later, when he studies the Bohemian Index he uses a different independent variable than the ones he used for the Gay Index rendering the comparison between both indexes moot.

When analyzing the impact of amenities in attracting the Creative Class the statistics and narratives contradict each other. Table 4.2 shows Cultural Amenities with a 0.493 correlation with High Tech. Yet, a similar scatter plot on page 70 shows complete randomness. On page 71, the author states there is no relationship between cultural amenities and the Creative Class, as they strongly prefer outdoor recreational amenities. But, on page 99 he states the opposite: "The results of the correlation analysis support that talented individuals appear to be attracted more by cultural amenities than by recreational amenities or climate." Finally, on page 167 he reverses course again: "The Creative Class prefers active, participatory forms of recreation... these workers enjoy active outdoor sports. " So, which is it?

The single best statistical evidence supporting his Creative Capital Theory is a correlation matrix (fig. 5.2) on page 119 that confirms that the Bohemian Index, Gay Index, Talent, and High Technology are all very highly correlated. Unfortunately, those high correlations are contradicted by a Path Analysis (fig. 4.5) on page 106 with path coefficients that are very small. This raises further confusion.

Semantics are also confusing. The author refers to the Gay Index or the Diversity Index or even the Diversity/Gay Index to refer to the same thing. Why doesn't he stick to just one name?

In the last two chapters, he gives us a lead into his next two books. In chapter 8, he focuses on New York city and the whole East Coast corridor going all the way to Boston. This is the first Meta-Region he focuses on. In chapter 9, he muses about international competition with many cutting edge foreign Meta-Regions (London, Sydney, Tokyo, Vancouver). This will lead to his next book I was not that fond off where he sells the U.S. short, The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent. But, ultimately this research will lead to his second outstanding book, Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life where he will study the 50 or so leading Meta-Regions of the World that generate most of the World's GDP and new ideas. If only he had just written "The Creative Class" and "Who'se Your City?" his track record would have been impeccable.

This book is lousy
My hunch is this is a cheap sequel. Not a lot of discussion, just a lot of (regression) results reporting. Extremely repetitive. Moreover, given that this often verves into being fairly social science (as opposed to pop), the causal linkages seem pretty poorly established. If you want to read this for professional reasons (social science or urban planning), most of this could be ignored; if you want to read this for personal (i.e., recreational) reasons, it's really boring.