The creative class is a group of people that social scientist Dr. Richard Florida, Hirst Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, believes are a key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the USA. Richard Florida (1957, Newark NJ) is an American sociologist and economist. ... George Mason University, also known as GMU or simply Mason, is a public university in the United States. ... A post-industrial society is a proposed name for an economy that has undergone a specific series of changes in structure after a process of industrialization. ... A city is an urban area, differentiated from a town, village, or hamlet by size, population density, importance, or legal status. ...

The "Creative Class" concept is controversial, as is Florida's methodology. He breaks the Class into two broad sections, derived from standard SOC codes data sets: The Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) System is a United States government system of classifying occupations. ...

• Creative Professionals: "Knowledge workers" and expanding to include financial planners, doctors and lawyers.
• Super-Creative Core: This comprises about twelve percent of all U.S. jobs. This group is deemed to contain a huge range of occupations (e.g. architecture, education, computer programming) with arts, design, and media workers making a small subset.

Knowledge worker, a term coined by Peter Drucker in 1959, is one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace. ...

Background

The social theories advanced by Florida have sparked much debate and discussion. Florida's work would propose that a new or emergent class, or demographic segment made up of knowledge workers, intellectuals and various types of artists is an ascendant economic force, representing either a major shift away from traditional agriculture- or industry-based economies, or a general restructuring into more complex economic hierarchies.

The theses developed by Florida in various publications were drawn from - among other sources - US Census Bureau demographic data, focusing upon economic trends and shifts apparent in (at first) major US cities, with later work expanding the focus internationally.

The nebulous creative class has been on the rise for at least four decades; with an economic shift towards technology, research and development, and the internet (and related fields) building within the overall postwar economies of many countries.

A number of specific cities and regions (California's Silicon Valley, Boston’s Route 128, The Triangle in North Carolina, Austin, Seattle, Bangalore, India, and Dublin, Ireland) have come to be identified with the these economic trends; in Florida's publications, the same cities are also heavily associated with the "creative class." Official language(s) English Capital Sacramento Largest city Los Angeles Area  Ranked 3rd  - Total 158,302 sq mi (410,000 km²)  - Width 250 miles (400 km)  - Length 770 miles (1,240 km)  - % water 4. ... A view of downtown San Jose, the self-proclaimed Capital of Silicon Valley. ... Nickname: City on the Hill, Beantown, The Hub (of the Universe)1, Athens of America, The Cradle of Revolution, Puritan City, Americas Walking City Location in Massachusetts, USA Counties Suffolk County Mayor Thomas M. Menino(D) Area    - City 232. ... Route 128 is a circumferential or ring highway in eastern Massachusetts with Boston at its center and surrounded by the concentric Interstate 495. ... The Research Triangle, commonly referred to as the Triangle, is a region in the piedmont of North Carolina in the United States, anchored by the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill and the major research universities of North Carolina State University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina... Nickname: Location in the state of Texas Coordinates: , Country United States State Texas Counties Travis County Government  - Mayor Will Wynn Area  - City  296. ... “Seattle” redirects here. ... Bangalore (ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು in Kannada) is the capital and largest city of the state of Karnataka in India. ... This article is about the city in Ireland. ...

Creative class occupations

The creative class is a class of workers whose job is to create meaningful new forms. The creative class is composed of scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and architects, to name a few. Their designs are widely transferable and useful on a broad scale, as with products that are sold and used on a wide scale. Another sector of the creative class includes those positions which are knowledge intensive. These careers usually require a high degree of formal education. Examples of this sector are health professionals and business management. Their main job is to think and to create new standard approaches for fixing the problem at hand. Creativity is becoming more valued in today’s global society. Employers look at creativity as a channel for self expression and job satisfaction in their employees. 38.3 million Americans and 30% of the workforce in America identify themselves with the creative class. This number has increased more than 10% in the past twenty years. In short they are shaping a new culture for the America of the 21st century. A knowledge economy is either economy of knowledge focused on the economy of the producing and management of knowledge, or a knowledge-based economy. ... Look up Creativity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

The creative class and the global economy

The creative class is not a class of workers among many but in reality it is the class that will bring any country who has them to great economic power and growth. The main advantage to a creative class is that it creates outcomes in new ideas, high-tech industry and regional growth. Even though the creative class has been around for centuries, the U.S. was the first large country to have this creative class that deals with information technology in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1960s less than five percent of the U.S. population was part of the creative class which is now 26%. Seeing that having a strong creative class is vital in today’s global economy, Europe is now almost equal with America's numbers for this class. Competition has developed as to who can attract the creative class to their cities. The world economy can be represented various ways, and broken down in various ways. ...

Places of high creative class populations

Florida's research of census and economic data, presented in works such as Cities and the Creative Class and The Rise of the Creative Class, as well as Bobos in Paradise, by David Brooks (whose "bobos" roughly correspond to Florida's creative class), have shown that cities which attract and retain the creative class prosper, while those that do not stagnate. This research has been gaining more and more traction among members of the business community, as well as among politicians and urban planners. For instance, Florida and other creative class theorists have been invited to meetings of the National Coference of Mayors and numerous economic development committies, such the Denver mayor's Task Force on Creative Spaces and Michigan Governor Granholm's "Cool Cities" initiative. Bobos in Paradise is a book by David Brooks, first published in 2000. ... This article refers to the state capital of Colorado. ...

In Cities and the Creative Class, Florida devoted several chapters to a discussion of the three main prerequisites of creative cities--though there are many additional qualities which distinguish creative magnets. Basically, for a city to become a magnet for the creative class, it must be an example of "the three 'T's" of Talent (have a highly talented/educated/skilled population), Tolerance (have a diverse community, which has a 'live and let live' ethos), and Technology (have the technological infrastructure necessary to fuel an entrepreneurial culture).

As Florida showed in The Rise of the Creative Class, and Cities and the Creative Class, cities like Buffalo, New Orleans and Louisville are examples of those which have tried to attract the creative class but, in comparison to cities which better exemplify the "three 'T's", have failed. The creative class is looking for cities that better accommodate their cultural, creative, and technological needs—cities such as Chapel Hill, San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Nickname: Location of Buffalo in New York State County Erie County Government  - Mayor Byron Brown (D) Area  - City 52. ... New Orleans is the largest city in the state of Louisiana, United States of America. ... “Louisville” redirects here. ... Nickname: Location in North Carolina Coordinates: , Country United States State North Carolina Counties Orange, Durham, and Chatham Founded 1793 Government  - Mayor Kevin C. Foy Area  - City  19. ... This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. ... Nickname: Location in the state of Texas Coordinates: , Country United States State Texas Counties Travis County Government  - Mayor Will Wynn Area  - City  296. ... City nickname Emerald City City bird Great Blue Heron City flower Dahlia City mottos The City of Flowers The City of Goodwill City song Seattle, the Peerless City Mayor Greg Nickels County King County Area   - Total   - Land   - Water   - % water 369. ... Nickname: Location in Multnomah County and the state of Oregon Coordinates: , Country United States State Oregon County Multnomah County Incorporated February 8, 1851 Government  - Mayor Tom Potter Area  - City 376. ...

Florida and others have found a strong correlation between those cities and states which provide a more tolerant atmosphere toward gays, artists and musicians for example (exemplified by Florida's "Gay Index" and "Bohemian Index" developed in The Rise of the Creative Class), and the numbers of creative class workers that live and move there.

Research involving the preferences/values of this new socio-economic class has shown that where people choose to live can no longer be predicted according to old Industrial Age models (such as "people will go to where the jobs/factories are"). Sociologists, Urban Studies theorists, etc. have noted that a gradual, and broad shift of values has been afoot over the past decade. Creative workers are looking for cultural, social, and technological amenities/climates in which they feel they can best "be themselves".

See also

• Netocracy

Netocracy was a term invented by the editorial board of the American technology magazine Wired in the early 1990s as a standard replacement for the clichéd term the digital class, the concept of netocracy was later picked up by the Swedish philosophers Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist for...

External links

• CreativeClass.com
• Fennville: A Haven for the Creative Class - An article about the city of Fennville, Mich., which is an example of a city being transformed by the "creative class."
• Creative Class Codes - County-level measures of creative class from USDA's Economic Research Service.

References

• On the Poverty of Experts: Between Academization and Deprofessionalization. Hartmann, Heinz, Hartmann, Marianne. 1982, vol 34, iss 2, pg 193
• Fussell, Paul. Class, especially chapter titled "Class X". 1983.
• Ray, Paul H. and Sherry Ruth Anderson. The Cultural Creative. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000
• Scott, Allen J. “Creative Cities: Conceptual Issues and Policy Questions,” Journal of Urban Affairs, 28, 2006, 1 – 17.

Web References

• Cleveland, Harlan. “After Affluence, What?”. October 1977. Aspen Instit Humanistic Studies November 3, 2005. [1]
• Saenz, Tara Keniry. “Portraits of U.S. High-Technology Metros: Income Stratification of Occupational Groups from 1980-2000”. March 2005. U Texas, Austin November 31, 2005. [2]