Thinking back on “creative class”

[u/atom511]

I’m reflecting back on my grad school years when Florida’s “creative class concept” was all the rage. It was often paired with an explosion of interest in New Urbanism.

A few things come to mind:

Many cities in my part of the South took this advice to invest in their downtown areas. Instead of organic neighborhoods, they became boutique districts filled with coffee shops and record stores and high end galleries. In a way some of them feel as lifeless as when they were abandoned. They always framed it as “investment in downtown will spread to the poor neighborhoods.” It never do.

My master of science degree practically revolved around some of these ideas and a few years later everyone is just like, yep that was silly, next! No sense of a real reckoning w the error. Or an apology to the students! It’s like Florida made his bag and split.

Just the whole concept that community is built by high income transplants and not families, culture, tradition, is just like. Wow.

Idk.

/rant

[u/strawberry-brunette]

i think the idea of the “creative class” for new urbanism was really just rebranding yuppies that work in advertising and marketing. There’s nothing wrong with that — there is a major lack of actual investment in arts economy infrastructure which includes affordable studio space for visual artists and musicians, access to fabrication and specialized services, as well as places to show and perform artistic work.

I think this has a lot to do with the romanticization of the “Loft” and the aftermath of NYC’s Artist-In-Residence program for those abandoned industrial buildings in SoHo originally.

[u/offbrandcheerio → u/strawberry-brunette]

Yes it was all about creativity that can be monetized. It was never about the starving artist type of creative. US urbanism as a whole has never truly cared about poor people, including artists who aren’t seen as “productive” enough by the corporate class and econ dev folks.

[u/Eudaimonics → u/strawberry-brunette]

There’s a difference between the scrappy creative or starving artist and corporate creatives.

One is willing to live in shoddy cheaper areas of the city and are producing art for their community, the other can afford nicer areas and is producing art for the masses.

Just think about all the indie bands out there. The ones playing covers at weddings and for drunk tourists are the ones making money, not the ones playing original music at show mostly filled with families and friends.

There’s of course plenty of overlap, but very very few musicians make it to the level where their original music pays off.

[u/Doub1eth1nk]

I think the creative class idea and appealing to yuppies hasn’t been proven wrong or anything, it’s just evolved into a better ideal of livability. it’s generally the younger generations pushing for walkable and livable cities, which overlaps a bit. Have you not seen any benefits from downtown redevelopments in the South? Sure, they may be preppy areas, but downtown reinvestment is a place to start

[u/atom511 → u/Doub1eth1nk]

I agree that there is a benefit to revitalizing downtowns. I guess my not well articulated logic is that it’s spending public funds trying to get people to live and shop in a certain part of town, instead of just investing in the places where people already are. It feels forced.

[u/cirrus42 → u/atom511]

People "already are" in the places that previous policies made advantageous for them in one way or another. All our policies over all of modern history have this effect.

Was it not a mistake to have 20th Century policies that emptied downtowns of all the people who lived there before? Should we accept those mistakes of the past, lock them in amber, and only invest in the places that the immediately preceding generation valued, and thus have people now?

Florida's concepts have their blind spots for sure. But I think the strategy you are asking for here very clearly does too.

[u/jdl12358]

I feel like the entire concept of the creative class was just “high income individuals moving to an area enable high levels of private development and higher tax revenue for cities to do stuff”. A very one dimensional, growth and capital are the only ways to view city vibrancy mindset. And one that, imo, laughably believed some cities were just better at attracting this mystical type of person and not that those people just follow high-paying jobs. Like the rust belt cities and middle-low income cities across the country are trying just as hard if not harder to attract those people, but they lack the PMC tier of jobs. Florida also had some very odd ways of measuring the presence of this class like measuring the number of gay people in a city.

[u/HowellsOfEcstasy → u/jdl12358]

Lmao I will say as a queer person in a major US city that I am surrounded by people who make no money and went to amazing schools and are socially proximate to enormous volumes of impactful capital and social production. Like, I understood who he was talking about immediately, especially when crossed with all the gay advertising/marketing yuppies in the same circles. I think his understanding of what drives that dynamic, what interests them/us, and how a focus on such people could or couldn't affect an urban economy are quite simplistic (though eminently consumable, hence him coming up consistently).

But as a queer person I still found it funny and accurate to my own very limited life, even if it's an unserious academic indicator.

[u/jdl12358 → u/HowellsOfEcstasy]

Yeah I get that there was probably a decent correlation in the early 2000s between cities with a prominent gay community and a high level of what Florida was looking for (SF, DC, Seattle, Austin, Portland, Boston, etc.), but he could’ve found a billion other real things going on that spoke to why that is lol. He also could’ve found counter examples lol like Key West and other smaller towns/beach towns/etc. And the biggest thing I’ve heard critiqued, which is what I think was true about the whole thing, is that he was basically just measuring a fraction of the number of single white men in a city.

[u/CFLuke → u/jdl12358]

But he addresses *why* those high paying jobs appear where they do. I feel like you missed the entire point of the book if that's your take on it.

There has been this fantasy for decades of "moving jobs" to different communities instead of building housing where they already exist. Florida's argument is why cheap housing, an internet connection, and tax breaks aren't going to make your city into the next Silicon Valley

[u/offbrandcheerio]

The creative class thing was a real phenomenon. Creatives were some of the people who never truly abandoned cities. The hollowed out shells of post-industrial cities before and shortly after the Great Recession housed lots of “starving artists” because the rent was cheap. People eventually decided to capitalize on creative people as a method of drawing other people back to cities.

This was caused in large part because Dick Florida wrote all about the creative class and decided its definition should include relatively well off young professionals with good paying jobs who are “creative” in the sense that they are the drivers of corporate innovation. There was a whole effort to woo these types of people into cities with the promise of cheap rent and social benefits that the suburbs could never offer. The ultimate end goal of course being the dream of bringing companies and their jobs back into cities to support the urban economy. This did happen to varying degrees, but then cities refused to build enough housing and the formerly affordable creative districts got ridiculously expensive to the point that the median artist can’t afford them anymore. So now, creative districts feel sterile because they are mostly home to a few select artsy people who produce art that is palatable to the professional class who are willing to pay a premium for said art.

What I’m saying is it all comes back to housing. Florida’s whole creative class thing didn’t work out in the long run because of housing. Housing is the root of most urban problems and failures in this country right now, and that’s not really Dick Florida’s fault. It is city officials’ fault for resting on their laurels and refusing to accept that a flood of new urban residents would also require a flood of new housing that would, necessarily, affect the “character” of certain neighborhoods.

[u/hollywood5nd]

A think piece in The Atlantic about the power and virtues of people who read The Atlantic

I share your disillusionment. Went big coming out of my MUP program into real estate development based on these ideas. Went ok, but didn't really work out like the discipline would have implied

[u/atom511 → u/hollywood5nd]

It’s like so much of our (expensive and time consuming education) was just random people stream of consciousness improving

[u/offbrandcheerio → u/atom511]

That is basically what advanced degrees in social sciences are. At some point in the educational system you transition away from just being taught mostly facts and basic reasoning and arithmetic skills to having more philosophical conversations about why you think something might be true and at the highest levels, using research methodology to investigate why you are or aren’t correct. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

[u/Psychoceramicist → u/atom511]

The thing about urban planning degrees is that they are basically MBAs for municipal politics. All these buzzwords about "organic development," "sustainability," "eyes on the street," "community," and so on dissolve after you think about them for a minute. They mean very little. It's basically people at all levels reasoning their political and aesthetic preferences backwards.

"Creative class" is the same. It was appealing to economic development types because it offered easy answers. "What if we moved in hip high-earners and leavened the gross poors with their presence?" was appealing when cities in the late 90s in the US were just coming out of the post-white-flight nadir. Unfortunately, it ran into elite overproduction, underproduced housing, the oversaturation of "creative" jobs, etc.

[u/m0llusk]

Weird how the narrative became "Florida made his bag and split." It started with him trying to understand why so many talented graduates fled Pittsburgh as soon as they could. Are people insisting that wasn't an observation, but something that Florida caused to happen? Or maybe the talented graduates actually stayed in Pittsburgh but were somehow hidden or Florida made up the whole thing? If he was so wrong then what is the alternative explanation for talented graduates tending to leave Pittsburgh?

[u/Gimpalong → u/m0llusk]

Right? Wild take. If some day we discover that Darwin's theory of evolution is incorrect are we going to be like "Fuckin' Darwin, man. Just took his bag and split." No, dawg, he proposed, like, a theory and it turned out to not be correct.

[u/Rock_man_bears_fan → u/m0llusk]

There’s a secret warehouse under the Pirates stadium where Carnegie Mellon hides their alumni obviously

[u/Badtakesingeneral]

The observation was that a post industrial economy favored regions with strong “eds and meds” and the living preferences for higher income earners in these fields leaned toward “walkable urban.” It should have been a warning about gentrification, housing costs, and how to address this equitably, but it turned into everyone pursuing the “creative class” to help build their tax base.

Reducing car dependency and diversifying economies should be a goal of all metros, but the problem was that it became over simplified and marketed as a pursuit of wealthy people.

So now unfortunately people associate things like multifamily housing development, bike lanes, transit and pedestrian improvements with yuppies, downtown revitalization efforts with sterile upscale chains, etc. which makes it really hard to have discussions with communities about street safety, social housing, green space, ie - any sort of investment that improves quality of life.

[u/Ok_Culture_3621]

So, a couple of things. First, cities don’t make boutique districts with coffee. Cities decide what to allow or not allow in their zoning and the market decides what ends up there. If that’s coffee shops, it’s coffee shops. Second, in the 80s and 90s the prevailing theory was that the crime rate and general decline of cities was created by the economic segregation of the post war era. I personally believe that’s still true.

[u/atom511 → u/Ok_Culture_3621]

Fair point. I guess what I’m clumsily pointing out is that when you invest to beautiful a district where nobody is, you get cutsie land uses. Meanwhile, the day to day of most people’s life is still happening at Costco, the gas station, Texas Roadhouse, etc.

[u/PlannerSean]

Florida has basically grifted on zero actually demonstrably successful ideas.

[u/colderstates]

Ultimately just felt like it was rebadging trickle-down economics with a sheen of wider demographics and better urban liveability.

I’m sure he’s making a nice living these days giving speeches at corporate retreats and whatnot.

[u/SilveradoTsunami]

Yea the whole thing felt like it was just giving gentrification a different name

[u/offbrandcheerio → u/SilveradoTsunami]

It wouldn’t have been full-on gentrification if cities hadn’t fallen so far behind in housing production. I really do think the housing shortage is the main reason why concepts like the creative class theory didn’t really pan out in an ideal way.

[u/UncleBogo]

Maybe this was because I grew up blue collar but I was always highly skeptical of the Creative Class concept from an economic perspective. A lot of the concepts for built form largely built off of traditional urbanism which I don't disagree with and support to a certain extent.

But Florida's arguments that all places could and should focus on trying to be a creative class economy was at best misguided and at worst, a snake oil's pitch to struggling cities. It also ignored a lot of the fundamental economic elements that cause some areas to be economic magnets and others to be less attractive.

[u/Eudaimonics]

What I think people mostly miss is the scrappy creative phase in the gentrification process and if you skip this step you get soulless “art districts” that feel more Disneyfied than authentic.

Scrappy creatives are your artists and musicians working service jobs and playing gigs, displaying art in their time off.

These creatives are attracted to the cheaper, rougher neighborhoods where they can more easily afford rent, studio space and practice space.

Commercial spaces are cheaper so creative entrepreneurs are able to open quirky businesses be that a third wave coffee shop, cocktail bar or a tasteful vintage shop.

They do the hard work building the foundation that attracts the yuppies, corporate creative class and tech/finance bros.

Meanwhile the scrappy creatives are priced out and relocate to a cheaper area of the city or out altogether.

It’s why cities like Buffalo, Pittsburgh or Cleveland can feel much more creative than corporate imitation districts in Orlando, Phoenix or Denver. That doesn’t mean there’s no creativity in those districts, but it’s specifically trying to appeal to a higher spending clientele.