north of England. With a history of popular music from Joe Cocker in the 1960s by way of Jarvis Cocker in the 1990s to the Artic Monkeys, two universities, and a.
CHAPTER EIGHT GETTING OUT OF PLACE: THE MOBILE CREATIVE CLASS TAKES ON THE LOCAL A UK PERSPECTIVE ON THE CREATIVE CLASS KATE OAKLEY (From Kong L, and O'Connor J (Eds), Creative Economies, Creative Cities: AsianEuropean Perspectives, Springer, Berlin, 2009) 1. Introduction Richard Florida’s notion of a “creative class” and the role that mobile knowledge workers can play in the economic development of cities and regions have been highly influential in UK policy circles. In a climate of hunger for “evidencebased policymaking,” Florida’s attempt to quantitatively measure, through the use of “indices” of various sorts, the conditions that he deems necessary for successful cityregions, have proved popular with policymakers, keen for what appear to be empirical approaches to policy development. This chapter aims to trace and critically examine that phenomenon. In particular, it seeks to understand why the work of a hitherto respected but relatively obscure economic geographer, should prove so popular with policymakers. It argues that the combination of some much-needed “good news” for British cities, still recovering from de-industrialisation and job losses, and a technocratic approach, wellsuited to the “post-ideological” politics of the time, proved an irresistible combination. Florida’s adoption of the term “creative,” for his class of knowledge workers and professionals enabled his work to become entangled with existing debates about “creative cities”, “creative industries” and the “creative economy,” and thus to gain wider currency, despite the fact that his focus is largely on high technology growth,
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rather than the cultural or creative industries (Pratt 2008). In other words, it appeared to build on an existing set of approaches to developing the creative industries, though I will argue that it in fact took them in a different direction. The chapter then seeks to ask three basic questions about Florida’s work on the creative class: does it work? does it travel? and is it a productive policy approach for cities in the UK and elsewhere? In examining these questions, we will look briefly at the range of methodological, economic and political critiques that have been levied at Florida’s work inter alia (Donald and Morrow 2003; Gibson & Klocker 2005; Peck 2005; Berry 2005; Montgomery 2005; Markusen 2005; Scott 2006) and in particular, at the argument that while his findings may be well-suited to a North American environment, its translation into policymaking in different geographic and social contexts has proved problematic (Nathan 2005; Oakley 2006, Hui et al. 2004). The chapter concludes by considering the challenges and issues that Florida-style approach to urban policy leaves unresolved.
2. The lure of evidence Puzzling over Florida’s apparent celebrity, Jamie Peck (2005:741) comments, “In the field of urban policy, which has hardly been cluttered with new and innovative ideas lately, creativity strategies have quickly become the policies of choice, since they license both a discursively distinctive and an ostensibly deliverable development agenda.” And indeed one of the paradoxes of Florida’s reception has been the degree to which his work has been taken up, even in relatively small, economically struggling cities and regions, despite the fact that much work in this field (Scott 2006; Hudson
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2006; Massey 2007) suggests that path dependency and the polarising nature of recent economic changes generally serve to reinforce the economic supremacy of particular cities and regions, rather than offer a counterbalance to them. But as Peck states, the appeal of Florida’s work lies both in the notion that “anywhere can do it,” and, more importantly, in the absence of many other ideas for realisable economic development. In the case of UK policymakers, another attraction was that Florida’s work appeared to build on pre-existing creative industry strategies. The degree to which economic needs, brought about by the global economic restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s, were the drivers behind creative industry and creative city strategies in the UK should not be underestimated. This restructuring created highly differentiated cities, and parts of cities, privileging some economic sectors and types of employment (Massey 2007). Britain’s 20 largest cities lost half a million manufacturing jobs between 1981 and 1999 (Turok and Edge 1999), for example, with inner cities being particularly hard hit. This in turn led to a concentration of economically deprived households in some inner city neighbourhoods, as prosperous households moved out in a general shift of population from urban areas to suburbs, market towns and rural locations. In response to this, cities such as Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle have all undertaken what might be described as “culture led” economic development strategies (Evans and Shaw 2004). The low barriers to entry in some creative industries, combined with strong traditions of popular culture from pop music to comic books, convinced policymakers that developing small firms in these sectors was a realistic strategy for job generation. Their approach has been to offer a mix of subsidised workspace, job-training and support for intermediary networks in the creative industries, largely aimed at small firms.
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Yet despite some early success, particularly in the development of digital industries in the late 1990s, creative industry advocates and sympathetic policymakers generally felt marginalised. The majority of the UK Government’s “knowledge economy” and innovation polices remain focused on science and technology (NESTA 2006), and while most British cities began to reverse the decline of previous decades (Athey et al. 2007), at least to some degree, the gap between them and London and its surrounding region, in terms of economic performance, grew wider (Reed et al. 2007; Massey 2007). Policymakers at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport had successfully exported the idea of creative industries, by now renamed from cultural industries (Cunningham 2003), but at home it was not only subject to criticism (Garnham 2005), but had in general failed to lead to large-scale national investment in these sectors or what might be considered any sort of industrial policy for them (O’Connor 2007). The dot com bust just after the millennium resulted in job losses and some restructuring in the creative industries that affected even London, the centrepiece of Britain's creative economy (Freeman 2007). Into this anxious mix, what Lloyd (2006: 68) calls Florida's “relentlessly cheerful account of a creative economy in which alienation is a thing of the past,” was received as a ringing endorsement, both by some urban policymakers, and by arts and culture advocates. As Ann Markusen (2005: 21) has commented, these people welcomed Florida, “because they feel it makes them visible.” But not only did it make creative industry advocates in the UK feel visible, it conferred that most elusive and highly-prized quality in an area that has hitherto struggled to produce a convincing evidence base – it had numbers behind it.
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It is sometimes difficult to fathom, and always easy to mock, the enthusiasm of contemporary policymakers for what appears to be empirical evidence that policies “work.” And it is certainly the case that in the cultural policy world, used to endless problematic debates about culture, scarred by “culture wars,” and often accused of unsupported advocacy (Selwood 2002), the presence of what looked like serious data, not to mention data that had such a positive story to tell, was always likely to be greeted by a degree of uncritical enthusiasm. However, as others started to take a more critical look at Florida's work itself, not only did the policy prescriptions start to look problematic, but the data itself was brought into question.
3. Methods and madness Despite, or perhaps because, of its ease of reception and popularity with policymakers, Florida’s work has been subject to a remarkable degree of testing and analysis, much of it critical. Alongside his own attempts to reproduce his methodology outside the US (Florida and Tinagli 2004), researchers from Dublin (Boyle 2006) to Melbourne (Berry 2005) and many places in between, have tested his approach in their own cities. Other cities, notably in Asia, have adopted variations of Florida’s indices to measure their own aspirations towards “world city” status (Kong et al. 2006, Hui et al. 2004). Even rural areas (Mcgranahan and Wojan 2007), an unlikely setting for “hipsterisation strategies,” one might think, have been subject to the treatment. While it is impossible to do justice to the full range of critiques of Florida’s work, it is possible to group them into particular sets of issues, namely those to do with methodology, with economic problems and with political or social concerns.
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Many critiques cover one or more of these issues simultaneously, though for ease of discussion they are treated separately below. Florida’s distinctive contribution is his attempt to quantitatively measure, through the uses of “indices” of various sorts, the conditions that he deems necessary for successful city-regions. His famous analysis of the “three T’s” – talent, technology and tolerance - leads him to argue that there is a relationship between cities and regions that have high numbers on these various indices and their growing economies. As with other human capital researchers, Florida is forced to use proxies for many of these characteristics and some commentators have seized upon what they see as a lack of rigour in this approach. Patents are generally acknowledged to be an inadequate proxy for technology-led innovation, all same-sex households are probably not gay, and having a qualification is not the same as being able to do something (Berry 2005; Markusen 2005; Sheamur 2007). Transposing these proxies to the UK or other countries is even more problematic. Both the “gay index” and the “bohemian index” are said to measure a region’s tolerance and lifestyle diversity – based on Florida’s (2002: 256) argument that “a place that welcomes the gay community welcomes all kinds of people.” His measure is of coupled, same sex households living in a particular metropolitan area. The numbers are drawn from the US Census, though as the UK Census does not contain a question about sexual orientation, UK researchers attempting to do the same thing, as in the Demos “Boho” Index,1 are forced to use proxies such as number of gay clubs, bars, networks, support groups, businesses and so on – a measure of the relative confidence and openness of a gay community perhaps, but not necessarily of its size.
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See http://www.demos.co.uk/media/pressreleases/bohobritain 6
Likewise his “bohemian” index attempts to measure the number of individuals employed in “artistic and creative occupations,” in a particular area. This aspect receives support from Markusen and King (2003:11), who argue that not only do those employed in cultural occupations directly contribute to economic growth, but, “Artists’ creativity and specialised skills enhance the design, production and marketing of products and services in other sectors.” This argument about spillover effects is a live one and a current topic of research and policy interest (Work Foundation 2007). Empirical evidence for this assertion remains under-developed, however, particularly in the context of specific places (rather than the economy as a whole), one problem in the UK being that data about creative occupations is rather unreliable at the local level. Elsewhere however, Markusen is rather critical of what she sees as Florida’s conflation of the rather fuzzy notion of “creativity” with academic qualifications, and she argues that in doing so, Florida simply tells us that high human capital is associated with economic growth, which may be so, but has little to do with creativity. On the other hand, she argues, the creativity, inventiveness, or adaptability of large sections of the non-graduate workforce is left out. Florida’s numbers tell us little about the content of peoples’ job or the skills required to perform them. As Shearmur (2007) observes, the argument that better qualifications lead to economic growth is in itself highly contested, not least because rising qualification levels may simply be an indicator of “credentialism,” and, perhaps more importantly, it is difficult to separate “knowledge” in the form of qualifications from social status and family background. Although Florida recognises that creativity is present in a variety of jobs (including, famously, his hairdresser and housekeeper, Florida 2002:76), his public policy prescriptions, by concentrating on particular occupations,
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are firmly aimed at attracting elites, a strategy which may well result in shutting out other workers essential to the running of cities (Massey 2007). Other commentators object to what they see as Florida’s simplistic treatment of complex urban economies. Berry (2005) comments that while Florida’s data presents correlations between distinct phenomena, he ignores the systematic linkages, hierarchies and asymmetries between urban centres and the degree to which this is a product of their history. As Montgomery (2005:10) puts it, “Perhaps the most serious shortcoming is that Florida fails to relate the emergence of leading cities in the creative economy to pre-established traditions of wealth creation and innovation.” Yeoh (2005) argues similar problems are arising in South East Asia, where she claims “the use of cultural imagineering, urban mega-projects and iconic architecture” in urban regeneration is even more spatially concentrated, than elsewhere, widening the gap between those cities that see themselves as global players and those, “at the bottom of the hierarchy which are perceived to be structurally irrelevant to the current round of global capital accumulation (Yeoh 2005: 955). This is not to say that in terms of economic performance, cities are static and that being a world city or the dominant city within a national economy is the sole criterion for either attracting a “creative class” or developing creative sectors. But it does suggest that Florida’s bandwagon is not perhaps one onto which every city should leap.
4. Running to stand still
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Another important question to ask about Florida’s work is the degree to which a prescription developed in the specific context of North America can be made to work elsewhere. The first thing to say is that economic development based largely on labour mobility is unlikely to work in the UK, as Britons are much less geographically mobile than people in the US. Only about 10 per cent of households move every year in England, of which only about 1 per cent move between regions (Donovan et al. 2002). Moreover, even in countries where geographic mobility is higher, such as Australia, the number of favoured places to which the creative class will move is generally very small. In a regional analysis (National Economics 2002), based on Florida’s work, those parts of Australia deemed to be “winning regions” (that is, those with high level of patenting, with a highly-qualified labour force, and that attracted migrants) were all in the central areas of state capital cities, predominantly Sydney and Melbourne. A central thrust of Florida’s argument, that work now moves to people, rather than people to work (Florida 2002:7) is also contradicted by evidence on migration from elsewhere. Various commentators (eg. Shearmur 2007; Boyle 2006) have argued that Florida’s arguments about causality are simply wrong – high levels of labour mobility do not in themselves create growth, rather growing cities and regions suck in migrants. In Shearmur’s analysis of migration data for Canadian cities, he finds large flows of migrants towards Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa, and only modest flows towards Montreal, which Florida lauds as particularly creative (Stolarick and Florida 2006). Shearmur’s conclusion is that it is more reasonable to assume that human
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capital flows increase as economic performance improves, rather than the other way round. As he comments, it is not that the processes Florida describes never occur; no doubt some cities have managed to develop their economies by attracting or retaining graduate labour, but this cannot be generalised across cities and regions. Moreover even where cities appear to be “winning” in the contest for global talent, is it really the amenities, cultural facilities and sense of tolerance that attracts them? In a series of interviews with graduate migrants to Dublin, a city which has benefited from an economic boom in recent years, Boyle (2006) finds some evidence that the lifestyle of the city, in Dublin’s case, particularly its bar scene, does attract young migrants. But his research concludes that “differential labour market opportunities,” in other words, better jobs, remain the primary reason for migration. As Max Nathan (2005: 4) argues from his own work on UK cities, the growth of “city centre” living “has not yet changed the basic patterns of lifecycle migration – people come to big cities as young singles and leave as older families”. And, as in Boyle’s work on Dublin, it appears to be consumerism, rather than the arts, which provides the lure. As one of Boyle’s Dublin migrants comments, “Dublin is so cosmopolitan it’s untrue, here they drink every night, like during the week, it doesn’t matter what night you go out” (Boyle, 2005:421); a notion of “cosmopolitan” that some arts advocates might find difficult to get fully behind. A more interesting question is why, in a country like Britain, with a relatively low level of internal migration and where graduate labour tends to move in only one direction, from the rest of the country to London and the South East (Massey 2007), such a prescription would ever be so heartily embraced. One answer is undoubtedly to do with contemporary politics. At a time when, as Doreen Massey (1994) has commented, “the seeking after a sense of place, has
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come to be seen by some as necessarily reactionary,” Florida’s hymn to mobility chimed with much “new economy” rhetoric about globalisation, fluidity and flexibility. This rhetoric of course sits paradoxically alongside what Turner (2007) calls the “immobility regime” of surveillance and control over migrants, refugees and other “undesirable” aliens. Nevertheless, a positive view of “desirable” migration suits those of a neoliberal persuasion (Gibson & Klocker, 2005) who view cities and regions simply as players in a global market or, in Florida’s case, in a global competitiveness league. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the UK government and others had absorbed the idea that there was an inevitability, and even desirability, in the destruction of old industrial capacity and the reinvention of the economy as post-industrial. In this story, the industrial values of craft, traditional skills, and embeddedness in local community had became defunct, if not downright dangerous, and the future lay in a kind of economic bohemianism, or what Eagleton (2003) calls, “the postmodern cult of the migrant.” For regional cities in the UK, this approach represents a very real challenge. On the one hand, many city leaders have absorbed the rhetoric of the “new economy” completely, economic development documents are full of rhetoric about innovation and novelty, the notion of an increasingly globalised economy is unquestioned, and the virtues of competition among places are generally celebrated. On the other hand, the shift in jobs from manufacturing to services, undoubtedly benefits some parts of the UK more than others (Massey 2007). The difficulty with competitions is that they tend to produce more losers than winners. One of the attractions of the creative industries strategies adopted hitherto by UK cities was that they were seen as attempts to release the talents and abilities of the
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local population. The great majority of employment in the creative industries was in the freelance, small and micro-business sectors, all of which had low entry barriers (Leadbeater and Oakley 1999), and the distinctiveness and rootedness of much cultural activity seemed to offer an opportunity for places to negotiate a role within global flows of ideas, rather than simply be “subject” to them.
5. Local heroes – the case of Sheffield A good example of this approach can be seen in the case of Sheffield in the north of England. With a history of popular music from Joe Cocker in the 1960s by way of Jarvis Cocker in the 1990s to the Artic Monkeys, two universities, and a fragile, though intermittently successful, videogames sector, Sheffield has many of the ingredients that are considered necessary in the development of creative industries. Hence the decision was taken, as far back as the late 1980s that, as part of a plan of economic diversification resulting from the collapse of the city’s steel industry, there would be a clear focus on the development of these industries. Paul Skelton who led the (then named) Cultural Industries team at the Council was aware of the need for diversification when he arrived in Sheffield, but argued2 that you needed to look at what local people can do. “Financial services were considered,” he says, “but Sheffield had no track record in it and in fact it all went to Leeds.” An approach to economic development “rooted in the community” was favoured, which resulted in the opening of the Leadmill Arts Centre, followed by Red Tape studios, a publicly-owned recording studio, and then what became the Cultural Industries Quarter (CIQ), a set of supported workspaces for small cultural businesses,
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In an interview with the author 12
on the edge of the city centre. This commitment to stimulating local production, rather than a focus on inward investment was not uncharacteristic of creative industries developments of the time, though it was perhaps particularly pronounced in the case of Sheffield. The relative slowness to develop consumption space around the CIQ was attributed by some commentators to the city’s historical focus on steel production (Leadbeater and Oakley 1999). Sheffield had always been about “making things” rather than buying them, and this proved a hard habit to lose. The CIQ Agency, the body that now runs the quarter, reports that there are now over 300 organisations, employing over 3000 people, within three quarter square miles of the site, a mix of private sector creative businesses, publicly-funded agencies, social enterprises and traditional or “non-creative” companies (see www.ciq.org.uk). Yet it remains dominated by micro and small businesses, in a pattern repeated across the UK. Although many cities, smaller towns and even rural areas have developed some level of economic activity in creative industries, London and the South East remain by far the biggest concentration of them, accounting for 57 per cent of all British creative workforce jobs (Freeman 2007). Importantly, London’s concentration of business and financial services helps maintain this uneven distribution, as over half (53 per cent) of the demand for creative industry products comes, not from households or individuals, but from other businesses. Between 2001 and 2004, creative industry employment fell by 10 per cent in London, compared to 5 per cent for financial and business services employment. The last year for which data is available, 2004/05, shows a significant rebound for both. This close link between creative industries and other business and financial services
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allows London to confidently predict that it will “remain at the centre of creative industry growth in the UK as a whole” (Freeman 2007: 3). While other countries, even those with more “federal” political systems, such as Canada or Australia, also show this pattern of concentration of creative industry sectors, the attempt to develop creative industries in regional cities faces particular problems in the UK. The UK has a highly centralised political culture, and public investment, from sporting facilities to universities, remains concentrated in London and the South East. The development of a “knowledge economy” model of economic development in the UK has exacerbated this uneven picture (Massey 2007; Hudson 2006). As Hall (2004) argues, the UK is unusual, a small island dominated by one huge city and the “mega-city region” around it, thus as Nathan (2005) argues, even if the creative class theory worked, it would not benefit most UK cities, competing for a “creative core” of workers who will be thinly spread outside of London. Other countries will face similar choices. Although China has 90 cities with more than a million inhabitants, three regions, the Yangtze River Delta (including Shanghai), the Pearl River Delta (including Guangzhou) and the BoHai Rim (including Beijing) account for 15 per cent of the population, but 45 per cent of GDP. There is thus a clear question about the degree to which concentration matters, about the links between the creative sector and other business services, and about what level or scale is required to realistically undertake development in these sectors. But rather than investigating these questions and perhaps developing strategies that genuinely play to local strengths, many policymakers have seemed content (or have seen little option) but to play a sort of 'me too’ game; even one they can only lose.
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In this way, the acceptance of Florida’s arguments, in many ways the reverse of what Sheffield and other UK cities were trying to do in the 1980s and 1990s, represents an exhaustion of possibilities, rather than an opening up of them. 6. Creative Anywhere A look at the latest attempt to revise and restore Sheffield’s fortunes shows how Florida’s idea has been absorbed into the bloodstream of economic development thinking in the UK. The current incarnation comes in the form of a “city regeneration company” branded Creative Sheffield. The title is not an accident, though its remit in fact covers the whole economy and has nothing to do with the creative industries per se. Like many “city marketing” strategies, the primary audience for “Creative Sheffield” appears to be outside the city. “People, businesses and investors,” we are told, “are all becoming increasingly sophisticated consumers of place,” (Creative Sheffield 2005: 13). No longer is this distinctiveness understood as being inherent in the place, it is now the job of the city regeneration company to “create a distinctiveness for Sheffield,” in order to combat what is described as its “low profile” nationally. As Barnes et al. (2007) argue, in the UK, creative city strategies had hitherto concentrated on or at least prioritised, the development of creative industries, whereas in Australia, and in parts of South East Asia (Yeoh 2005) it has been more common for councils to interpret creative city strategies as being focussed on consumption spaces such as cafe districts, retail, landscaped parks and public spaces. Sheffield, it seems, is now following this route. For “Creative Sheffield,” while the creative industries are mentioned as part of the city’s economy, they are simply listed alongside a collection of other economic
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activities, from sports science to biomedical and healthcare technology. Inward investment, which was very consciously not promoted as a driver of the city’s earlier creative industries strategy, has now become the foremost part of the “wealth creation agenda,” and Creative Sheffield's mission is to “increase demand” for the city. Far from building on its heritage in steel production and manufacturing, we are told that the city does have an easily recognised raison d’etre, something which will presumably come as something of a surprise to its citizens. The vision of the future presented is that of one decoupled from the past. Unlike another former steel town, Florida’s old home of Pittsburgh, which he lambastes for being “trapped in the culture of a bygone era (2002:216),” Sheffield is being made anew. The question is, does such an approach stand any greater chance of success than the creative industry strategies that preceded it?
7. The politics of attracting the creative class Perhaps the most stinging critiques of Florida’s work have been those that have concentrated on the potential social consequences of a Floridian urban strategy. North American critics (Peck 2005; Scott 2006, Markusen 2005) have accused him of legitimising gentrification, and paying insufficient attention to the issues of inequality and racial discrimination. Hui et al. (2004: 30), while refraining from criticising Florida directly, suggest that his attack on social capital (Putnam 2000) and seeming celebration of more individualistic pursuits and weak community ties are unlikely to work with the grain of “Asian values.” Markusen (2005) argues that Florida’s treatment of diversity is “glib,” focussing on the presence of gay people and migrants in the population, while paying relatively little attention to the exclusion of African-Americans from the picture.
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Florida admits (2002: 80) that the paucity of black faces in “the world of high tech creativity,” poses an “intriguing challenge to the kind of diversity that members of the creative class are drawn to.” Given the undoubted cultural influence of African Americans in everything from popular music to fashion and the language patterns of young English speakers everywhere, it is hard not to conclude that Florida's slight treatment of the race issue reflects his desire to present an optimistic picture of the urban changes his creative class is leading. Others argue that Florida’s urban policy prescriptions are not only insufficiently attuned to the problems of inequality, but actively promote them. In terms of public spending on culture, for example, Florida’s (2002:259) preference for “street-level culture” means that resources may be made available for certain kinds of cultural consumption (restaurants, bars, night-clubs, a music scene), while others (such as historic buildings) may be neglected. While funding for cultural amenities has always reflected certain kinds of taste preferences (traditionally high art over popular culture), an over-concentration on the amenities that attract the young or bohemian at the expense of others could be equally counter-productive, as well as undemocratic. Other sorts of public spending can similarly be skewed. As Barnes et al. (2007) argue, in their study of Port Kembla (a suburb of Wollongong in New South Wales), undergoing a “revitalisation” strategy, Florida’s ideas have become almost “canonical” among Australian local government policymakers. The refashioning of Port Kembla as an idealised “urban village” is not a simple process of a particular urban vision being imposed on disempowered social groups but nevertheless, the preference of elderly residents for a high street that provided basic services such as a
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supermarket, a doctor or a bank, is likely to be superseded by one with “alfresco dining, street markets and decent coffee (Barnes et al. 2007: 348).” It is clear that focusing attention on the actions and investments needed to attract the creative class (for which read young, single men) may well lead to a neglect of other policies, from affordable childcare to good schools, or public transport that may apply to older or poorer citizens or female workers. The “non creative” class are thus marginalised twice; once because their consumption preferences and needs do not reflect that of the creative class, and secondly because the effect of an influx of the creative class may well raise land and housing prices and drive out the provision of more basic services (Massey, 2007).
8. Conclusions While it builds on the work of other human capital researchers and attempts to quantatively measure the phenomena it describes, there are clear problems with the uncritical acceptance of Florida’s work by many urban policymakers. The first is that very few cities and regions in the world are likely to be successful in this particular global race; the second is that where they are, “success” will be unequally shared in a context of growing inequality. While Scott argues that the recent resurgence of film and music industries in different parts of the globe, together with changes in technology and rising education levels, presents at least the potential for a more polycentric global future with a variety of centres of global cultural production, he also warns that, “a vision of the world's cities marching towards some sort of creative utopia, needs to be held strongly in check” (Scott 2006: 12).
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As we have seen in our discussion of the UK, the number of cities that can realistically hope to have the creative industries as a major sector in their economy is relatively small and even in this case, as Scott (2006:12) argues, “developments of this type will most likely continue to exist only as enclaves in an urban landscape where poverty and social deprivation still widely prevail.” Florida’s prescriptions and the acceptance of them by policymakers thus take place within a context of knowledge-based development that is leading to increasing polarisation and inequality (Barry 2005; Hudson 2006; Massey 2007) across the world. Florida’s own work suggests that in the US, city-regions that rank highest in terms of the development of a “creative economy” (using his measures) also rank highest in economic inequality. Similarly, Hudson (2006) argues that in the UK, regions with a more service-based economy and higher-levels of highly qualified workers have more unequal patterns of income distribution. Even in London, the UK’s most “successful” knowledge based economy and the centre of its creative industries, official accounts admit that “formidable wealth-generating capacity coexists with truly staggering levels of economic disadvantage” (GLA, 2002: ix). As Hudson (2006) comments, this means that even governments with stated egalitarian aims or political histories will find themselves “running to stand still” in terms of tackling income inequality. This leaves them with formidable challenges, particularly in the context of cities, where many of these issues are concentrated. While criticism of Florida’s work within an Asian context has focussed on its normative prescriptiveness (Kong et al. 2006) or its insensitivity to Asian cultural values (Hui et al. 2003), rapidly growing spatial and social inequality will
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increasingly pose a series of political questions that current “knowledge based” economic approaches seem unable to answer. The UK’s story may be instructive here. Creative city and creative industry strategies, explicitly developed in the context of de-industrialisation and job losses, have been replaced by ones that look certain to exacerbate the problems brought about by those changes. In the former case, it could well be argued that creative industry economic development has done little to improve the position of regional cities vis a vis London or the position of marginal groups vis a vis the already advantaged (Oakley 2006); in the latter case there is no intention to even attempt this. The challenges facing policymakers should not be underestimated, as even Florida’s most severe critics (Peck 2005) admit there appears to be precious few options out there, particularly in developed economies. The UK’s particular experience in these sectors has not been without its failures, but the embrace of a new set of approaches, based on Florida’s creative class idea, seems likely to bring neither greater economic success, nor a liveable urban future for many citizens.
Acknowledgements. Thanks to Justin O’Connor, Lily Kong and Mirko Petric for comments on an earlier draft.
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