The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life

Author

Richard Florida (b. 1957), an American urban studies theorist. He wrote the book while teaching economic development at Carnegie Mellon University; he later moved to the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, where he directs the Martin Prosperity Institute.

Publication Details

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002. ISBN 978-0-465-02476-6. Substantially revised as The Rise of the Creative Class—Revisited (Basic Books, 2012) and reissued in 2019.

Description

Florida argues that the driver of economic growth in the post-industrial city is neither raw materials nor corporate headquarters but people — specifically a "creative class" whose work consists of producing new forms and new ideas. He estimated this class at roughly thirty percent of the American workforce at the time of writing, divided into a "super-creative core" (scientists, engineers, programmers, architects, designers, educators, artists and entertainers) and a wider band of "creative professionals" doing knowledge-intensive work in business, finance, law and health care.

The book's central and most contested claim inverts the usual order of economic development. Rather than people following jobs, Florida argues, jobs increasingly follow people, and people choose places for the texture of everyday life there — what he calls "quality of place." Cities compete for this population by supplying what he abbreviates as the three T's: Technology, Talent, and Tolerance. To make the claim measurable he constructed a set of indices, including a Bohemian Index (the concentration of working artists and musicians), a Gay Index, a Talent Index and a composite Creativity Index, and correlated them against regional high-technology growth.

Key Ideas

• Quality of place. Not amenities in the civic-boosterism sense — stadiums, convention centres — but street-level density, authenticity, and the availability of experiences.
• Thick labour markets. Creative workers pick cities offering many possible employers rather than one good job, because their careers are expected to be discontinuous.
• Weak ties. Florida draws on Mark Granovetter's work to argue that creative-class sociality favours large numbers of loose acquaintances over small numbers of deep, place-bound bonds.
• The no-collar workplace. Dress codes, hours and hierarchy relax, but the working day expands to fill the whole day.
• The erosion of leisure. Time, not money, becomes the scarce good; leisure is reorganised into short, intense, schedulable experiences.

Criticism

The book drew sustained critique from urban geographers, most influentially Jamie Peck's "Struggling with the Creative Class," which read Florida's programme as a supply-side urban policy that dressed gentrification in the language of tolerance. Critics noted that the indices measure correlation, not causation, and that cities pursuing creative-class strategies frequently produced displacement rather than broad prosperity. Florida himself substantially conceded the point in The New Urban Crisis (2017), which treats winner-take-all urbanism and the inequality it produces as the sequel to the story he first told.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

The creative class is, in practical terms, a class defined by its interfaces. Its work is portable, screen-mediated and asynchronous; its social life runs on ambient intimacy and weak ties maintained by devices; its relationship to place is chosen rather than inherited. Florida describes the economic conditions under which a population becomes fully technologically mediated without describing the mediation itself — which makes the book a useful companion to accounts that start from the device rather than the city.

Related Reading

• Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access
• Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty
• Ambient Intimacy
• Time and Space Compression