Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
rich in cultural amenities and conducive to diversity in local social life in order to
attract talent. Florida (
2002a
) identified three components in this ability to achieve
urban success, namely the 3T's of success: technology, talent and tolerance. While
the first two of these assets are important components of the new urban growth, the
tolerance of a range of cultural and lifestyle choices is also seen as a critical ele-
ment in attracting the necessary talent to create success. Florida argued that cities
cannot compete successfully without all three components and provides a number
of examples to support this claim. He suggested that places like Pittsburgh have not
grown because although they have 'deep reservoirs of technology and world-class
universities', they lack the open, tolerant atmosphere required to retain creative tal-
ent (Florida
2002a
, p. 250). Other places like New Orleans, which have open and
tolerant societies, have the opposite problem, in that they lack a major technology
base. He suggested that, only when the 3T's converge, can a place be truly creative.
One of the major criticisms of his ideas is that, unlike Landry who argued that
everyone within a city has the potential to contribute to its creativity, Florida rei-
fied one group of people—the Creative Class—and argues for urban policies that
nurture the conditions to attract and retain them.
In many ways, what Florida has done is to turn traditional ideas in urban and
regional economics on their head. He argues that what cities should be doing is at-
tracting talent so that the high technology companies will follow, rather than attract-
ing jobs for people to follow
While innovative, this approach is not entirely new
and draws some inspiration from previous work. For example, Gouldner (
1979
)
wrote about the 'rise of the new class' in line with the new economy, while Lucas
(
1988
) suggested that productivity gains resulting from talented people clusters are
the driving force behind the growth and development of cities and regions. More re-
cently, Glaeser (
2005
) has provided empirical evidence of the association between
regional economic growth and talent. Like Gouldner (
1979
), Florida provided a
Creative Class definition, those employed in the upper stratum of the new economy.
Within this, he identifies a number of sub-divisions: the creative professionals or
knowledge-based workers such as those working in law, business and healthcare;
the super-creative core “
whose economic function is to create new ideas, new tech-
nology, and/or new creative content”
(Florida
2002a
, p. 8), such as artists, musi-
cians, and architects; and bohemians. In his first topic on the topic in 2002, Florida
calculated that the Creative Class constituted 38 million Americans, or 30 % of the
workforce, which shows the importance of this sector. However this growth in the
creative class numbers is not just an American phenomenon. A more recent EU-
funded project comparing the Creative Class in thirteen European cities has high-
lighted the importance of this group in employment terms to the general economic
structure. For example, in Munich (Germany) the category constitutes over 32 %
of total employees (Hafner et al.
2008
), while in Barcelona (Spain) they represent
almost one quarter of all workers, with the distribution in the various occupations
shown in Table
10.2
.
Hall (
2000
) has also contributed to the debate by suggesting that creative cit-
ies are those within which outsiders feel a sense of ambiguity, and where they are
neither excluded from opportunity, nor so embraced that they lose their creative
drive. However, Florida's thesis is more specific since he focuses on the attraction,
