Deepthinking

The Fall of the Creative Class

Frank Bures in Thirty Two Magazine bursting the bubble on Richard Florida’s Creative Class while looking at the case of Madison, Wisconsin.

It has always seemed to me that Florida was and has been confusing cause and effect when talking about the “Creative Class” and its impact on cities and their economies

Florida’s idea was a nice one: Young, inno­v­a­tive peo­ple move to places that are open and hip and tol­er­ant. They, in turn, gen­er­ate eco­nomic inno­va­tion.

But the problem is, as the essay points out all too clearly, there’s a chicken and egg thing going on. Is your economy thriving because “creatives” are flocking to it or are “creatives flocking to it because it’s thriving?

What was miss­ing, how­ever, was any actual proof that the pres­ence of artists, gays and les­bians or immi­grants was caus­ing eco­nomic growth, rather than eco­nomic growth caus­ing the pres­ence of artists, gays and les­bians or immi­grants. Some more recent work has tried to get to the bot­tom of these ques­tions, and the find­ings don’t bode well for Florida’s the­ory. In a four-year, $6 mil­lion study of thir­teen cities across Europe called “Accom­mo­dat­ing Cre­ative Knowl­edge,” that was pub­lished in 2011, researchers found one of Florida’s cen­tral ideas—the migra­tion of cre­ative work­ers to places that are tol­er­ant, open and diverse—was sim­ply not happening.

But mayors and civic leaders bought into it. Here in Toronto we had a mayor practically prostrating himself in front of the Church of Florida. But there really was nothing behind any of this. Looking at a study by Michele Hoyman and Chris Faricy in 2009, we get to the point

“The mea­sure­ment of the cre­ative class that Florida uses in his book does not cor­re­late with any known mea­sure of eco­nomic growth and devel­op­ment. Basi­cally, we were able to show that the emperor has no clothes.” Their study also ques­tioned whether the migra­tion of the cre­ative class was hap­pen­ing. “Florida said that cre­ative class presence—bohemians, gays, artists—will draw what we used to call yup­pies in,” says Hoy­man. “We did not find that.”

But we still want to believe because if we don’t we would have to admit the truth that it was just basically a one big hipster circle jerk.

In other words, if there was any­thing to the the­ory of the Cre­ative Class, it was the pack­age it came in. Florida just told us we were cre­ative and valu­able, and we wanted to believe it. He sold us to ourselves.

…

I know now that this was Florida’s true genius: He took our anx­i­ety about place and turned it into a prod­uct. He found a way to cap­i­tal­ize on our nag­ging sense that there is always some­where out there more cre­ative, more fun, more diverse, more gay, and just plain bet­ter than the one where we hap­pen to be.