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FOR WHAT IT IS
WORTH, this appeared in The Oregonian today, interviewing economist and author
Richard Florida. I’m excerpting
for the comments about building and/or attracting a creative class as an economic engine. For the full interview and an
interesting Creativity Index, see
attached. He dismissed tax
incentives to lure business and addressed the urban-rural divide, which many
states grapple with, saying that universities held the key to bridge that
divide, acting as an ecosystem making
the “community more open, more
meritocratic, more risk-taking”. The author spoke at the Americans for the Arts conference here last
weekend. - KWC Flying
the Rainbow Flag @ http://www.oregonlive.com/business/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/business/105559253160881.xml A city’s open attitude spurs growth, economic expert says: Q. In your latest
book, "The Rise of the Creative Class," you count 38 million Americans in the creative
class. But in the Portland area, it would
include such a variety of people, from shoe designers to lumber CEOs. What brings them together? A. The working class
150 years ago looked like a bunch of different kinds of people -- a welder, or
a pipefitter, an electrical worker, an assembly worker -- and all those people
thought they were different. The creative class right now looks really
different. It looks like an
artist, a poet, a scientist, an engineer, a designer, a manager, a lawyer or a
doctor. But, in fact, what's common to those
people is that all of us use our knowledge, our intelligence and our creativity
to create economic value. We use
our human creativity rather than our physical labor. Q. How does an
economic strategy for attracting those people differ from traditional means of
attracting employment? A. I say two things.
You clearly need to have an ecosystem which is attractive to creative
people. But perhaps more important
than that, you need to be able to tap and harness the creative talents of
everybody. Creative people vote with their feet, you know. They have the ability to go where they
find exciting, innovative, creative places. You have to be able to attract those people, but you also have
to be able to harness and mobilize the talents of everyone, not just certain
supercreatives. The places that
have these kind of people are job generators. They attract companies and
generate companies. The strategies to
attract them, I think, are really simple.
You have to be an open place where these people can feel comfortable and
validate their identity, whatever that is. That's really the key. Q. More specifically, do you have any
examples you can point to of cities that have employed meaningful strategies? A.
Jane Jacobs talked about this 40 years ago in "The Death and Life
of Great American Cities." You need to have neighborhoods.
What we do in cities, many cities, is all the wrong things. We knock down our downtowns, we build
giant convention centers and malls, we construct these giant stadium complexes,
and we say, "Well, if we have that, we'll be a major-league city, and
we'll attract companies and people." Well, the thing that
happened when I did my research is, nobody said they wanted that. What did they want? They wanted neighborhoods that
work. They want a lot of different
restaurant choices. They want not
only art museums and great cultural facilities; they want a music scene, an art
scene; they want to be able to go out and walk their dog in the dog park. Q. Portland's a textbook example of Jane
Jacobs' theories on the ground, but our economy's in the tank. What are your thoughts about how to
resuscitate it at this point? A. I think I know why your economy's in
the tank, because it's been a manufacturing-based, a high-tech
manufacturing-based economy. You
bet your future on semiconductor manufacturing and a few other things. I think that proves Jane's theory or my
theory that what
you really want to do is have a flexible, adaptable entrepreneurial economy. ..Your economy's going
through a transition. What's
interesting, though, is in this economic transition, it's not creative jobs that are being
eliminated. In general, the jobs that are being
eliminated at the highest clip in the United States are still manufacturing
jobs. The faster you shift the
Portland economy to more of a creative economy, the better and more resilient
it'll be over the long run.” About
the author: Richard Florida, Prof of Regional and Economic
Development, Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh; visiting fellow Brookings Institution Center on Urban
and Metropolitan Policy, Washington DC. Founder and principal, Creativity Group and Catalytix. Author, “The Rise of the Creative Class:
And How it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life”. See www.creativeclass.org/ www.heinz.cmu-edu/~florida/ and www.catalytix.biz/ |
GRAGG Flying the rainbow flag attitude spurs growth.doc
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