Note: This paper was delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Chesapeake Bay American Studies Association conference at George Mason University on April 2, 2009.
As David Harvey has written, the ability of firms to move production and administration functions around the globe confers upon capital the ability to play localities off one another, in search of the best possible deal.
This in turn has forced urban leaders into fierce rounds of interurban competition, with each city trying to one-up all others by presenting to mobile capital the best possible “business climate.”
And so in the last thirty years we have seen city leaders embark upon a succession of entrepreneurial strategies designed to attract tourists, investment, and jobs to their cities—everything from corporate tax breaks and enterprise zones to new baseball stadiums and underground shopping malls.
However, as we speak, one strategy for enticing investment and economic growth into urban America stands head and shoulders above the rest. We are, in short, living in the era of Richard Florida.
Florida is an urban development and public policy scholar who first ascended to superstar status with the publication of his bestselling The Rise of the Creative Class.
Most of Florida’s analysis in this book is not new.
Like Daniel Bell, Alvin Toffler and countless others, he argues that global capitalism has entered a new phase, where the engine of economic growth comes not from industrial might and control of material resources, but from human creativity, innovation, and knowledge.
In the new knowledge economy, then, human creativity is now the decisive competitive advantage.
For this reason, a new class of workers has emerged to displace the proletariat as the central subject of capitalism.
This is Florida’s “creative class”—that is, a rapidly expanding and influential class of scientists, engineers, designers, artists, and knowledge professionals who get paid to develop new ideas, new technologies, and new solutions to old problems.
In the end, those firms and industries that effectively nurture and harness the intellectual firepower of the creative class will prosper and grow, while those firms and industries that shut it down will wither and die.
So what does all this mean for cities trying to turn around their economies?
Here Florida gets, well, creative. He argues, first off, that the old models of urban economic growth are wrong. You can’t attract high-tech firms and “knowledge” jobs by giving out tax breaks or building subsidized office space.
Instead, he argues, high-tech firms follow talent, not tax breaks.
They will move to those cities that offer them the deepest pools of creative labor.
So the key to urban prosperity paradoxically has nothing to do with attracting firms. It depends instead upon attracting the creative class.
If you attract the creative class, the firms and jobs will follow.
And here Florida turns from economic analyst to urban vitality guru. Building a vital city means delivering to the creative class the bourgeois-slash-bohemian lifestyles they crave.
And what do “creatives” want?
According to Florida, they want funky and diverse neighborhoods, interesting architecture, a vibrant arts and music scene, and endless recreational opportunities.
They want cappuccino bars and bike paths. They want their authentic urban grit and their sushi, too.
So if you want to attract knowledge jobs, you need to attract the creative class. And to attract the creative class, you need to turn your city into a “bourgeois-bohemian” playground.
As Jeffrey Zimmerman put it, “be hip and they will come.”
These ideas, it turns out, are like catnip for city leaders.
They can’t get enough of Richard Florida, and so he commands five-figure speaking fees and spends much of his time consulting with local governments and chambers of commerce on how to attract creative talent to their communities.
And they are indeed eating it up.
Now, to be sure, these ideas can be critiqued on a variety of fronts.
For instance, you can object to the way they essentially advocate a policy of state-sponsored gentrification, by cajoling city leaders to do everything possible to turn their urban neighborhoods into playgrounds for a particular class of affluent workers.
But my main question today is “what’s next?” In short, what happens when these ideas fail to deliver urban growth and prosperity to cities like Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Baltimore?
And why will they fail?
First, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that Florida is just plain wrong when he ties urban economic and population growth to attracting the “creative class.”
The first broadside came when Ed Glaeser, a Harvard economist, ran an analysis of Florida’s own data, and found that population growth in US cities was unrelated to the concentration of “creative class” occupations.
Glaeser also found that having a lot of bohemians living in your city doesn’t attract population growth either.
Cities that scored high on Florida’s “bohemian index” (an index which measures the number of artists working in a city) were no more likely to grow than those that scored low. What did matter was simply the total number of college-educated people in the city: the more BA degrees in a city, the faster the city grew.
Other more recent studies have been unable to support Florida’s claims as well.
Remember that Florida argued that young creative workers will migrate to cities which sport a vibrant bohemian “scene” and where they can find a concentration of other “creatives” like themselves.
But one recent study in Urban Affairs Review found that the in-migration of young knowledge workers was unrelated to both cities’ pre-existing concentration of creative class occupations as well as the city’s rank on Florida’s “bohemian index”
Second, there is the anecdotal evidence of cities who have tried valiantly to reverse their urban fortunes by appealing to young knowledge workers, but have failed miserably to produce any tangible results.
Jeffrey Zimmerman, for example, describes how the City of Milwaukee embarked on its own “creative city” strategy to stem the population and job losses associated with rust belt deindustrialization.
However, after: (1) building a riverwalk, (2) encouraging high-end housing development close to downtown, (3) providing seed money for creative class amenities like sidewalk cafes and pet daycare businesses, and (4) funding an urban branding campaign targeting young professionals and titled “we choose Milwauke”…the city has precious little to show for all this trouble.
In fact, Zimmerman reports that job losses across the board accelerated during the years in which Milwaukee’s leaders pursued this strategy—even in so called “creative” occupations.
His conclusion was that Milwaukee’s “creative city” effort indeed increased land values in two gentrifying downtown neighborhoods, but that this basically reshuffled affluent residents from one part of town to another.
So, again, my question is “what’s next?” What will be the next big solution to urban revitalization be? And will this solution have any hope of succeeding where others have failed?
After all, the track record of revitalization strategies is not inspiring:
*Urban renewal plans of the 1950s and 1960s
*The “fantasy city” strategies of the 1980s and 1990s, when cities built baseball stadiums, festival malls, and aquariums to attract tourists and build a positive image of place.
*And now the “creative city” strategies of Richard Florida.
None of these strategies have delivered on promises of steady urban population and broad-based economic growth.
For example, the last census showed that, despite the fact that central cities have stopped hemorrhaging residents and even grew from 1990 to 2000, suburban growth still outpaced urban growth, as it has for decades.
Close to home, despite embarking on a glitzy campaign to attract young, single, affluent workers in 2003, the District continues to loose population and jobs to the suburbs.
Today, the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia command a larger share of metropolitan jobs than ever before, and, for the first time, the sprawl of the Washington metro area has come within sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
By any standard, these public-private urban revitalization plans have been abysmal failures.
But, then again, perhaps I said “failed” too quickly.
My cynical side wants to suggest that although each of these revitalization strategies—the aquariums, the festival malls, and now the funky gentrified neighborhoods—failed to deliver on their promise of attracting global investment and reversing their declining urban fortunes…
…they actually succeeded in at least one of their aims: bringing public money into the service of local development actors and increasing the property values of politically-connected landowners.
So perhaps my true question is a cynical one:
What’s next? What new strategies will urban developers and landowners use to attract public money to support and expand their investments in urban real estate? And how will these subsidies be sold as a means of “saving the city” for us all?
As David Harvey has written, the ability of firms to move production and administration functions around the globe confers upon capital the ability to play localities off one another, in search of the best possible deal.
This in turn has forced urban leaders into fierce rounds of interurban competition, with each city trying to one-up all others by presenting to mobile capital the best possible “business climate.”
And so in the last thirty years we have seen city leaders embark upon a succession of entrepreneurial strategies designed to attract tourists, investment, and jobs to their cities—everything from corporate tax breaks and enterprise zones to new baseball stadiums and underground shopping malls.
However, as we speak, one strategy for enticing investment and economic growth into urban America stands head and shoulders above the rest. We are, in short, living in the era of Richard Florida.
Florida is an urban development and public policy scholar who first ascended to superstar status with the publication of his bestselling The Rise of the Creative Class.
Most of Florida’s analysis in this book is not new.
Like Daniel Bell, Alvin Toffler and countless others, he argues that global capitalism has entered a new phase, where the engine of economic growth comes not from industrial might and control of material resources, but from human creativity, innovation, and knowledge.
In the new knowledge economy, then, human creativity is now the decisive competitive advantage.
For this reason, a new class of workers has emerged to displace the proletariat as the central subject of capitalism.
This is Florida’s “creative class”—that is, a rapidly expanding and influential class of scientists, engineers, designers, artists, and knowledge professionals who get paid to develop new ideas, new technologies, and new solutions to old problems.
In the end, those firms and industries that effectively nurture and harness the intellectual firepower of the creative class will prosper and grow, while those firms and industries that shut it down will wither and die.
So what does all this mean for cities trying to turn around their economies?
Here Florida gets, well, creative. He argues, first off, that the old models of urban economic growth are wrong. You can’t attract high-tech firms and “knowledge” jobs by giving out tax breaks or building subsidized office space.
Instead, he argues, high-tech firms follow talent, not tax breaks.
They will move to those cities that offer them the deepest pools of creative labor.
So the key to urban prosperity paradoxically has nothing to do with attracting firms. It depends instead upon attracting the creative class.
If you attract the creative class, the firms and jobs will follow.
And here Florida turns from economic analyst to urban vitality guru. Building a vital city means delivering to the creative class the bourgeois-slash-bohemian lifestyles they crave.
And what do “creatives” want?
According to Florida, they want funky and diverse neighborhoods, interesting architecture, a vibrant arts and music scene, and endless recreational opportunities.
They want cappuccino bars and bike paths. They want their authentic urban grit and their sushi, too.
So if you want to attract knowledge jobs, you need to attract the creative class. And to attract the creative class, you need to turn your city into a “bourgeois-bohemian” playground.
As Jeffrey Zimmerman put it, “be hip and they will come.”
These ideas, it turns out, are like catnip for city leaders.
They can’t get enough of Richard Florida, and so he commands five-figure speaking fees and spends much of his time consulting with local governments and chambers of commerce on how to attract creative talent to their communities.
And they are indeed eating it up.
Now, to be sure, these ideas can be critiqued on a variety of fronts.
For instance, you can object to the way they essentially advocate a policy of state-sponsored gentrification, by cajoling city leaders to do everything possible to turn their urban neighborhoods into playgrounds for a particular class of affluent workers.
But my main question today is “what’s next?” In short, what happens when these ideas fail to deliver urban growth and prosperity to cities like Milwaukee, Buffalo, and Baltimore?
And why will they fail?
First, there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that Florida is just plain wrong when he ties urban economic and population growth to attracting the “creative class.”
The first broadside came when Ed Glaeser, a Harvard economist, ran an analysis of Florida’s own data, and found that population growth in US cities was unrelated to the concentration of “creative class” occupations.
Glaeser also found that having a lot of bohemians living in your city doesn’t attract population growth either.
Cities that scored high on Florida’s “bohemian index” (an index which measures the number of artists working in a city) were no more likely to grow than those that scored low. What did matter was simply the total number of college-educated people in the city: the more BA degrees in a city, the faster the city grew.
Other more recent studies have been unable to support Florida’s claims as well.
Remember that Florida argued that young creative workers will migrate to cities which sport a vibrant bohemian “scene” and where they can find a concentration of other “creatives” like themselves.
But one recent study in Urban Affairs Review found that the in-migration of young knowledge workers was unrelated to both cities’ pre-existing concentration of creative class occupations as well as the city’s rank on Florida’s “bohemian index”
Second, there is the anecdotal evidence of cities who have tried valiantly to reverse their urban fortunes by appealing to young knowledge workers, but have failed miserably to produce any tangible results.
Jeffrey Zimmerman, for example, describes how the City of Milwaukee embarked on its own “creative city” strategy to stem the population and job losses associated with rust belt deindustrialization.
However, after: (1) building a riverwalk, (2) encouraging high-end housing development close to downtown, (3) providing seed money for creative class amenities like sidewalk cafes and pet daycare businesses, and (4) funding an urban branding campaign targeting young professionals and titled “we choose Milwauke”…the city has precious little to show for all this trouble.
In fact, Zimmerman reports that job losses across the board accelerated during the years in which Milwaukee’s leaders pursued this strategy—even in so called “creative” occupations.
His conclusion was that Milwaukee’s “creative city” effort indeed increased land values in two gentrifying downtown neighborhoods, but that this basically reshuffled affluent residents from one part of town to another.
So, again, my question is “what’s next?” What will be the next big solution to urban revitalization be? And will this solution have any hope of succeeding where others have failed?
After all, the track record of revitalization strategies is not inspiring:
*Urban renewal plans of the 1950s and 1960s
*The “fantasy city” strategies of the 1980s and 1990s, when cities built baseball stadiums, festival malls, and aquariums to attract tourists and build a positive image of place.
*And now the “creative city” strategies of Richard Florida.
None of these strategies have delivered on promises of steady urban population and broad-based economic growth.
For example, the last census showed that, despite the fact that central cities have stopped hemorrhaging residents and even grew from 1990 to 2000, suburban growth still outpaced urban growth, as it has for decades.
Close to home, despite embarking on a glitzy campaign to attract young, single, affluent workers in 2003, the District continues to loose population and jobs to the suburbs.
Today, the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia command a larger share of metropolitan jobs than ever before, and, for the first time, the sprawl of the Washington metro area has come within sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
By any standard, these public-private urban revitalization plans have been abysmal failures.
But, then again, perhaps I said “failed” too quickly.
My cynical side wants to suggest that although each of these revitalization strategies—the aquariums, the festival malls, and now the funky gentrified neighborhoods—failed to deliver on their promise of attracting global investment and reversing their declining urban fortunes…
…they actually succeeded in at least one of their aims: bringing public money into the service of local development actors and increasing the property values of politically-connected landowners.
So perhaps my true question is a cynical one:
What’s next? What new strategies will urban developers and landowners use to attract public money to support and expand their investments in urban real estate? And how will these subsidies be sold as a means of “saving the city” for us all?
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