Creative Cities - Theme Cities: Solutions for Urban Problems - page 366

government spending on culture and the arts, which has benefitted those involved
in these activities. Markusen ( 2006 ) has also argued that while the agenda of artists
and neo-liberal political regimes cannot be conflated, the Creative City agenda has
given artists a newfound visibility in social and political debates. Her work dem-
onstrates that the artists' visions of urban space are much more in line with Jane
Jacobs 'mosaic of neighbourhoods' ideal (1961) and the approaches to creativity
of Hall and Landry. The irony is that because the Creative City agenda has become
so intertwined with the goals of inter-city competition, urban decision-makers are
increasingly trying to orchestrate this 'creative buzz' or atmosphere, but so far with
mixed effects.

10﻽5 Creative City Critiques

While there is little disagreement that all cities have a creative capacity and func-
tion, there has been intense criticism of the Creative City concept as currently con-
ceived. Four major types of criticism have been made, linked to: methodology and
context of the study; causality between the presence of the Creative Class and urban
success; widening intra-urban inequality; and whether Creative City policies are
being used to legitimate questionable policy prescriptions.

10.5.1 Methodology and Contexts

One of the most attractive aspects for policymakers of Florida's approach to Cre-
ative Cities has been the emphasis on rankings, providing the ability to benchmark
cities against each other in order to assess relative competitiveness. Obviously the
value and validity of these rankings depend on the variables used and how they
are methodologically combined, yet there has been little real justification for the
choice of variables selected by Florida to create his series of indices or the rest of
his Creative City methodologies. His technical approach is also limited for no at-
tempt is made to use more sophisticated factorial multivariate methods to search
for common dimensions or key drivers among the variables used, which could be
measures of the same thing (Davies 1984 ). This is an oversight that contributes to
the second critique below, on the lack of, or contested, evidence around causality. In
a previous study Florida ( 2002a ) calculated correlations between a bohemian index
(measured by location quotients of what amount to creative artistic workers) and
various other indices—of talent (by degrees), technologies, gayness etc. He shows
high levels of concentrations of these indices in a limited number of the largest 50
metropolitan areas in the U.S.A., and finds significant associations between the
bohemian index and the other indices, although the best were only in the 0.5-65
range. Since the bohemian index showed a 0.6 correlation with population, one of
the higher values, it surely shows that these indices are primarily linked to popula-
tion size. Also some doubt can be placed on some of the conclusions, especially his