Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
strategies to support the development of weak social ties and broad contacts are
more attractive to creative people.
These four goals can be seen in some of the other theme city approaches. For
example, diversity is a key element in creating Just Cities (Chap. 3), while main-
taining authenticity is a basic Slow City Idea (Chap. 15) and keeping local stores is
an aim for several approaches, not simply Transition Town (Chap. 7). Peck (
2005
)
has interpreted Florida's version of the Creative City as one representative of our
new culture and society in which people are motivated not only by material rewards
but also by a stimulating and interesting life. Moreover, it has been argued that the
Creative Class want to be in a place that validates their identities and provides new
experiences.
Creative Class lifestyle comes down to a passionate quest for experience. The ideal….
is to 'live the life'—a creative life packed full of intense, high-quality, multidimensional
experiences….
….[Members of the Creative Class] like indigenous street-level culture, a teeming blend of
cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line
between participant and observer, or between creativity and its creators….More than any-
thing, they crave intense experiences in the real world. (Florida and Tingali
2004
, p. 166)
The major reason why the Creative Class theory has been so widely embraced is
because of its fortunate timing. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a growing
realisation of the need for economic restructuring in a whole host of cities across
the U.S.A. coincided with the initial publication of Florida's topic
The Rise of the
Creative Class
(
2002
). Unlike in Europe, where the Creative Cities idea evolved out
of discussions on the arts and cultural economy, Landry (
2006
) noted that previous
pioneering work by Scott (
1997
) on the cultural industries in the U.S.A. had failed
to make the same policy impact. Also, some academics have criticised Florida's
theory as an example of what has been described as an example of 'postmodern
weak thought' (Ponzini and Rossi
2010
, p. 1038). But this weakness may be its
very strength. Because of the ease with which it can be translated across cultural
and spatial boundaries, Florida's ideas for urban economic growth captured the
imagination of urban policymakers, perhaps more than any other urban economic
theory in the last 30 years. Part of the attractiveness of the theory has been the de-
velopment of a ranking system that enables urban areas to be compared with one
another, an important activity in an increasingly competitive global environment.
This ranking is based on four individual Creative City indices developed by Florida
(
2002a
), for American cities: the '
gay index'
—an indicator of tolerance; the
'tech-
nology index'
—a measure of technology; the '
bohemian index'
—the density of art-
ists, writers and performers in a place; the '
talent index'
—a measure of those with
a bachelor's degree or above in a region. A composite index, called the '
creativity
index',
was derived by Florida from these initial indices and described as follows:
the Creative Class share of the workforce; innovation, as measured by patents per capita;
high tech. industry, using the Milken Institute's widely accepted Tech Pole Index…; and
diversity, measured by the Gay Index, a reasonable proxy for an area's openness. (Florida
2002a
, pp. 244-245)
