Revisiting the Creative-Class Thesis

Description

“Creativity and cool are the icing, not the cake.” ~ Max Nathan

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Excerpts from Martha Rosler's essays:

"The Artistic Mode of Revolution: From Gentrification to Occupation"
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“Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism”, (a three part essay)
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Theodore Levitt, Harvard professor of busi­ness administration and marketing, commented on the failure of the Hoover corporation to sell washing machines in Europe: “It asked people what features they wanted in a washing machine rather than what they wanted out of life.”

Levitt, editor of the Harvard Business Review, is credited with popularizing the term “globalization.” In The Marketing Imagination, his bestseller of 1983, Levitt pointed out that as a result of media expansion worldwide, the United States was in a unique position to market its goods everywhere, making its so-called high touch goods—jeans and Coca-Cola—right up there alongside high tech ones (and integrally, along with them, Americanism and the English language) into the world’s most desirable possessions.

A powerful force drives the world toward a converging commonality, and that force is technology … Almost everyone everywhere wants all the things they have heard about, seen, or experienced via the new technologies.

In short, without naming it but simply placing it under the rule of the “imagination,” Levitt defines the new key to marketing dominance as a wholesale subordination of rational product claims to universalized Bernaysian psychological modeling, which is the basis of lifestyle marketing. Levitt refers to homogenization as both the means and the result of globalization. He differen­tiates multinationals from the more forward-thinking global corporations, which, he says,

sell standardized products in the same way everywhere—autos, steel, chemicals, petroleum, cement, agricultural commodities and equipment, industrial and commercial construction, banking and insurance services, computers, semi­conduc­tors, transport, electronic instruments, pharmaceuticals, and telecommu­nications, to mention some of the obvious.

Thirty years on, we have placed many of these categories in Levitt’s rather jumbled array under the rubric of the knowledge industries, including the management of Fordist industrial production (of “autos, steel, chemicals, petroleum, cement, agricultural commodities and equipment, … computers, semi­conduc­tors, … electronic instruments, pharmaceuticals”). Thirty years on, lifestyle politics, as both a unifier and a differentiator, help determine how we live or are supposed to live. People form alliances based on taste, above all via the tribalism of appearance-as-identity. Com­modified lifestyle clusters include not merely possessions but persons, achievements, and children, and they tend to be costly to acquire and maintain. Punk is now another lifestyle choice, albeit an urban romantic one. Along with Goth and other ways of life associated with New York’s East Village, punk also provides the preferred uniform of suburban and small-town mall-dwelling malcontents, while the “Bronxish” hip-hop style, which is popular worldwide, does the same for working-class people of color. In this taxonomy, hipsterism is the lifestyle of arty types—the triumph of surface over substance—and is a direct consequence of the easy availability of cultural goods through technological means.

But there are times when the professionalization of art training in colleges and universities, combined with the capture and branding of artist-led, art­ist-run initiatives—the ones which used to reside outside the purview of art institu­tions—can broaden the social network and the vocabulary of action. It is a commonplace that in a post-industrial economy virtually all work falls in some sense under the reign of the language and symbolic behavior. Certainly, all cultural products are flattened into “information,” mashing together writing, research, enter­tainment, and, of course, art. The popular reception of art and its greatly expanded audience have allowed, in the present moment, a mutual visibility between artists and other underemployed groups, both educated and undereducated. Or perhaps more directly, looking for a series of master texts, the newly professionalized discourse of artistic production settled on Continental theories of aestheticized capital. How else to explain the peculiar position of artists at or near the vanguard of capitalist organization? Thus, even if the tendency may be toward the professionalization and embourgeoisement of artists, along with other members of the symbolic sector, when the future hits a brick wall, those ideas and alliances in potentia can have revolutionary consequences. The artists and artist-run groups, and others belonging to the creative-class demographic—which often overlaps with the group of those who identify as grass-roots activists, whether or not they have been to art school—have been at the center of instituting, strategizing, and energizing the Occupy Wall Street movement at New York’s Zuccotti Park—renamed Liberty Park.

A way of life that relies on virtue and secular good living, as sold to a genera­tion raised on school and media campaigns promoting civic responsibility and morality—such as Just say No to Drugs,16 Smoking Kills, and Save the Earth—is no doubt more likely to be adopted by urban art-school grads than any other demographic group. These are young urban professionals, perhaps, but not the “yuppies” of the past (though I am interested to see that the term has returned). The latter were high-earning lawyers, ad-agency honchos, and magazine editors, while these new young urban professionals are low-level workers and wannabes in their field. City life appeals to members of these industries, which themselves are made up of networks of small shops that benefit from face-to-face relations and the excitements of the urban environment.

The New Creative City

This wave of renewed preference for the city can be traced to the postwar economic boom in Western industrial democracies—I am looking at the United States—which led to the rising affluence of the middle class. Immediately after the war, many city dwellers, having gained some measure of financial security, migrated to small towns and freshly built suburbs, causing urban shrinkage.17 One effect of this depopulation was the evacuation of many city business centers and the failure of many urban industries. But the direction of migration began to be reversed as bored children of the suburban middle class (along with corporate managers and the newly defined yuppies) were drawn to the organized pleasures of city life, not least the museums and theaters, as well as the dizzying mixture of anonymity, community, diver­sity, and possibility that fills the urban imaginary. To point out the obvious, the stultifying, homogeneous experience of life in the suburbs, with its identical malls and fast food joints, doesn’t offer the would-be creative much in the way of identity formation; and insofar as the local exists today, it is found either in the city or in rural small towns, not in fenced-in suburbia.

This repopulation and transformation of cities—from spaces bereft of shops and manufacturing, starved of resources, and inhabited by poor and working-class people or squatters living in ill-maintained housing stock, into spaces of middle-class desire, high-end shopping, and entertainment—took at least a generation. It also required the concerted effort of city leaders. New York’s Soho and East Village had proved, by the late 1970s, that the transformation of old warehouses and decaying tenement dis­tricts into valuable real estate could be accomplished by allowing artists to live and work in them—if nothing else, city government recognized or identified with such people and understood their needs. Those elected officials who might, in an ear­lier era, have supported organized labor, found that such constituencies were fad­ing away. Artists, in addi­tion, were not going to organize and make life difficult for city governments. In the following decades, the Soho model became paradigmatic for cities around the world. (Another popular tactic was to attract small new industrial shops, mostly high tech ones.) But no matter how much the arts (whether the performing arts or the institutionalized visual arts in museums) have been regarded in some cities as an economic motor, that remedy is not applicable everywhere, and not every city has proved to be a magnet for the arts. A new urban theory was re­quired.

The civic usefulness of edu­cated but often economically margin­al young people was first popularized by a young professor of urban planning at Carnegie-Mellon University in post-industrial Pittsburgh. What Professor Richard Florida saw around him in that declining city was neighborhoods made cozy and attractive by the efforts of recent grads, who were setting up coffee shops and small businesses in low-rent locations. The customer-friendly environment—friendly to middle-class customers—emphasized shared tastes passed down since the mid-1960s via schools, music, movies, and magazines, tastes that define a particu­lar niche among the educated, professional middle class. Elements of what might ironically be seen as suburban vir­tue, from recycling to gardening to arts and crafts (perhaps rescued from the lore of small-town Edens by nostalgic lifestyle magazines), were now being brought back to decaying city neighborhoods.

Professor Florida developed a new theory based on selling these congeries of young, generally underemployed people—as well as such subcultural categories as gays, who also tended to congregate in what used to be called bohemian neighbor­hoods—to urban planners as a sure-fire remedy for urban desuetude. (Or apparently selling them, for there is a bait and switch tactic at work here.) His book The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life offered a crafty new turn in business evangelism, creating a catchy new way of thinking about city marketing as lifestyle marketing—much as Theodore Levitt had done for brand marketing—and throwing a lifeline to often desperate city managers. With his apparently systematic analyses, Florida parlayed his popular book into a new job and a consulting career. He is now the head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, and he is consultant to cities, corporations, museums, and nonprofits around the world. Prosperity, like the lovely name Florida, is a keyword. His website says, --"The Creative Class Group is a boutique advisory services firm comprised of leading researchers, communication specialists, and business advisors. CCG combines a pioneering approach of global thought leadership and proven strategies offering clients worldwide the market intelligence critical for competitive­ness and greater economic prosperity."--

I have addressed Florida’s “creative class” thesis in a series of earlier articles; here I offer an abbreviated digest, to flesh out the argument. There is a certain irony to revisiting this matter now, as the long-term financial downturn has cast some doubt on the appeal of creative-class theorizing in the areas under financial strain, but the thesis has had a decade to catch hold, and catch hold it has. Florida’s analyses have struck a chord with city managers by appearing to promote diversity in ways that often replicate what is already in place. Many who have scrutinized at his data have demonstrated the insufficiency of his analyses and thus his conclusions. Critics point out that in relying on standard census categories, he sweeps into the creative class all knowledge-industry workers, from those in call-centers to professional data analysts, scientists, and mathematicians—hardly artists. A consensus on his conclusions is that they amount to the well-established “human capital” thesis of urban development placed within new linguistic frames, and most importantly with the “creative” moniker generously washing over everyone in the knowledge industries. A small, relatively poor group of urban dwellers, the ones offering consumer friendliness and local color, becomes the face of the other, larger, richer, but basically invisible members of Florida’s “supercreative core” grouping. In his shell game, creatives are defined under one shell as people whose mental engagement is at the heart of their work and under another as people who know how to live nicely, decoratively, and cheaply, and under yet another as primarily a high-earning, tax-paying economic grouping. As policy follows prescriptions, inconvenient, poorly accoutered working-class people are marginalized, pushed further out to the edges of the city or to the suburbs, while in the newly reclaimed city precincts, bourgeois predilections—of ego-centered, commodified, and mediated rituals—enfold every milestone in life, from birth to premarital stag and hen parties, wed­dings, baby showers, births, communions, and maybe even deaths.

The Limits of Creativity, and of Liberalism

Many critics naively fail to realize that Florida, like Clark Kerr, is a social lib­eral. Like most neoliberals, he is out there on the rhetorical barricades arguing for tolerance, subsidies, and the right of the creative class to perform the work of the patrician class for little or no compensation. In a strange way, then, he can be taken as the collective projection of a certain branch of the liberal elite. Liberals are happy to celebrate artists, or even better, “creatives”—that amorphous group of brewers, bakers, urban farmers, and baristas—as long as their festivals and celebrations can be sponsored by banks, corporations, and foundations and their efforts civically branded. Architec­tural institutes hold meetings and publish newsletters touting “livable” cities. Arts institutions benefit from the attention of governmental agencies and foundations, but the costs are also worth considering.

Artists, already complicit (wittingly or unwittingly) in the renegotiation of urban meaning for elites, were called upon to enter into social management. Real-estate concessions have long been extended to artists and small nonprofits in the hopes of improving the attractiveness of “up-and-coming” neighborhoods and bringing them back onto the high-end rent rolls. The prominence of art and “artiness” allows museums and architecture groups, as well as artists’ groups, artists, and arts administrators of small nonprofits, to insert themselves into the conversation on civic trendiness.

Artists are hardly unaware of their positioning by urban elites, from the municipal and real estate interests to the high-end collectors and museum trustees. Ironically, perhaps, this is also the moment in which social engagement on the part of artists is an increasingly viable modality within the art world. and young curators specialize in social practice projects. Many artists have gone to school in the hopes of gaining marketability and often thereby incurring a heavy debt burden. Schools have gradually become the managers and shapers of artistic development; on the one hand, they prepare artists to enter the art market, and on the other, through departments of “public practice” and “social practice,” they mold the disciplinary restrictions of an art that might be regarded as a minor govern­ment apparatus. These programs are secular seminaries of “new forms of activism, community-based practice, alternative organization, and participatory leadership in the arts” that explore “the myriad links between art and society to examine the ways in which artists … engage with civic issues, artic­ulate their voice in the public realm.

If the creative-class thesis can be seen as something of a hymn to the perceived harmony between the “creatives” and the financiers, together with city leaders and real-estate interests, guiding the city into the post-industrial condition, perhaps the current grass-roots occupations can be seen as the eruption of a new set of issues related to a new set of social relations of production. The mode of production, we remember, includes the forces of production but also their relations, and when these two come into conflict, a crisis is born. If the creative-class thesis can been seen as something of a hymn to the harmony between the creative forces of production and the urban social relations that would use them to the benefit of cities bereft of industrial capital, perhaps the current grassroots occupa­tions can be seen as the inevitable arrival of the conflict between the creatives and the city that uses them. It is interesting, in this respect, that the battle cry has been “Occupy” (which echoes Florida’s similar injunction to gentrify), that is, to occupy space, to occupy the social and political imagination, in a way analogous to the way previous movements radicalized freedom into emanci­pation, republic into democracy, and equality into justice. Florida says gentrify, we say Occupy.

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Soon after the collapse of the millennial New Economy that was supposed to raise all boats, Richard Florida, in his best-selling book The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), instituted a way of talking about the “creative class”—the same class put center stage by Sharon Zukin, David Brooks, and Paul Fussell—in a way that framed it as a target group and a living blueprint for urban planners.

Florida may see this class, and its needs and choices, as the savior of cities, but he harbors no apparent interest in its potential for human liberation. When Robert Bruininks, the president of the University of Minnesota, asked him in an onstage interview, “What do you see as the political role of the creative class—will they help lead society in a better, fairer direction?” Florida was, according to faculty member Ann Markusen, completely at a loss for a reply. Some who frame the notion of a powerful class of creative people—a class dubbed the “cultural creatives” by Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson in their book of that name published in 2000—see this group as progressive, socially engaged, and spiritual, if generally without religious affiliation, and thus as active in movements for political and social change. In general, however, most observers of “creatives” concentrate on taste classes and lifestyle matters, and are evasive with respect to the creatives’ relation to social organization and control.


Richard Lloyd, in Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City, in contrast to Ray and Anderson, finds not only that artists and hipsters are complicit with capital in the realm of consumption but, further, that in their role as casual labor (“useful labor,” in Lloyd’s terms), whether as service workers or as freelance designers, they also serve capital quite well. The Situationists, of course, were insistent on tying cultural regimes to urban change and the organization and regulation of labor. Sharon Zukin, in her ground-breaking book Loft Living, provided a sociological analysis of the role of artists in urban settings, their customary habitat.4 But urban affairs, sociological and cultural analysis, and the frameworks of judgment have changed and expanded since Zukin’s work of 1982. In his book The Expediency of Culture (2001), George Yúdice leads us to consider the broad issue of the “culturalization” of politics and the uses and counter-uses of culture. Concentrating especially on the United States and Latin America, Yúdice’s concern is with explicating how culture has been transformed into a resource, available both to governmental entities and to population groups. He cites Fredric Jameson’s work on “the cultural turn” from the early 1990s, which claims that the cultural has exploded “throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life—from economic value and state power to social and political practices and the very structure of the psyche itself—can be said to have become ‘cultural.’” Yúdice invokes Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, namely, the management of populations, or “the conduct of conduct,” as the matrix for the shift of services under neoliberalism from state to cultural sectors. Foucault’s theories of internalization of authority (as well as those of Lefebvre and Freud) are surely useful in discussing the apparent passivity of knowledge workers and the educated classes in general. Yúdice privileges theories of performativity, particularly those of Judith Butler and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, over the Situationists’ “society of the spectacle,” describing how identities, including identities of “difference,” are performed on the stage set by various mediating institutions. Indeed, he positions the postwar marketing model—“the engineering of consent,” in Edward Bernays’s potent, widely quoted phrase—at the heart of contemporary politics and invokes the aestheticization of politics (shades of Walter Benjamin!) that has been fully apparent in the US since the Reagan administration. As I have suggested, this channels much political contestation in advanced societies to consumer realms, from buying appropriate items from firms that advance political activism and send money to NGOs, to the corporate tactic of appealing to identity-based markets, such as gay, female, or Latino publics; but also to the corporate need to foster such identities in hiring practices in the name of social responsibility.

In considering the role of culture in contemporary societies, it may be helpful to look at the lineage and derivation of the creative-class concept, beginning with observations about the growing economic and social importance of information production and manipulation. The importance of the group of workers variously known as knowledge workers, symbolic analysts, or, latterly, creatives, was recognized by the late 1950s or early 1960s. Peter Drucker, the much-lionized management “guru,” is credited with coining the term “knowledge worker” in 1959, while the later term “symbolic analysts” comes from economist Robert Reich.

Clark Kerr, a former labor lawyer, became president of the University of California, in the mid-1960s. This state university system, which had a masterplan for aggressive growth stretching to the turn of the twenty-first century and beyond, was the flagship of US public universities and established the benchmarks for public educational institutions in the US and elsewhere; it was intended as the incubator of the rank-and file middle class and the elites of a modern superpower among nations in a politically divided world. Kerr’s transformative educational vision was based on the production of knowledge workers. Kerr—the man against whom was directed much of the energy of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, derisively invoked by David Brooks—coined the term the “multiversity” in a series of lectures he gave at Harvard in 1963.11 It was Kerr’s belief that the university was a “prime instrument of national purpose.” In his influential book The Uses of the University,Kerr wrote: "What the railroads did for the second half of the last century and the automobile for the first half of this century may be done for the second half of this century by the knowledge industry."

Sociologist Daniel Bell, in his books The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), set the terms of the discourse on the organization of productive labor (although the visionary educational reformer Ivan Illich apparently used the term “post-industrial” earlier); Richard Florida claims Bell as a powerful influence. The term post-Fordism, which primarily describes changes in command and control in the organization of the production process, is a preferred term of art for the present organization of labor in advanced economies, retaining the sense of continuity with earlier phases of capitalist organization rather than suggesting a radical break resulting from the rise of information economies and changes in the mode of conducting and managing the labor process.

Theories of post-Fordism fall into different schools, which I cannot explore here, but they generally include an emphasis on the rise of knowledge industries, on the one hand, and service industries on the other; on consumption and consumers as well as on productive workers; on the fragmentation of mass production and the mass market into production aimed at more specialized consumer groups, especially those with higher-level demands; and on a decline in the role of the state and the rise of global corporations and markets. Work performed under post-Fordist conditions in the so-called knowledge industries and creative fields has been characterized as “immaterial labor,” a (somewhat contested) term put forward by Italian autonomist philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato. Within or overlapping with the broad category of immaterial labor are types of labor deemed “affective labor” (Hardt and Negri); these include not only advertising and public relations—and, many artists would argue, art—but all levels of labor in which the worker faces the public, which include many service industries, and eventually permeates society at large.

In “Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur,” Lazzarato writes:

"If the factory can no longer be seen, this is not because it has disappeared but because it has been socialized, and in this sense it has become immaterial: an immateriality that nevertheless continues to produce social relations, values, and profits."

These categories look very different from Florida’s.

Andrew Ross writes that the creative-class concept derives from Prime Minister Paul Keating’s Australia in early 1990s, under the rubric “cultural industries.”17 Tony Blair’s New Labour government used the term “creative industries” in 1997 in the rebranding of the UK as Cool Britannia. The Department of National Heritage was renamed the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and promoted technological optimism, a youth cult, and, in Ross’s words, “self-directed innovation in the arts and knowledge sectors.” Both Ross and the social psychologist Alan Blum refer to the centrality of the idea of constant reinvention—of the firm and of the person—as a hallmark of the ideal conditions of the creative class. Ross points to the allure of the “creative industries” idea for a wide array of nations, large and small, of which he names Canada, the US, and Russia and China—we should add the Netherlands to this list—long before Florida’s particular configuration shifted emphasis away from the industries and to the very person of their denizens, and to biopolitics.

In describing the “creative class,” Florida credits Paul Fussell and gives David Brooks a brief nod. Despite building on writers like David Harvey and perhaps other, unnamed theorists on the left, Florida offers the prospect of a category of “human resources” who will, all unbidden, and at virtually no cost to anyone but themselves, remake your city quite to your liking. Rather than portraying the right to the city, as Harvey had termed it, as the outcome of struggle, Florida’s path to action is predicated on the inevitability of social change, in which the working class and the poor have already lost. I will say more about that a bit later, but first, I’ll consider the creative class itself.

What Florida has called the rise of the creative class Sharon Zukin called, in Loft Living, the artistic mode of production. Zukin, who never quite explains her phrase, describes the production of value and of space itself, interpretable in Lefebvre’s terms. Whereas Zukin traced the entire process from its inception to its present outcome, teasing out the structural elements necessary to bring about urban change and demonstrating how such change affects residents and interested classes, in Florida’s account the process disappears in a welter of statistical number-crunching and empirical markers by which to index the success of the creative class. Crucial to Zukin’s analysis is the eventual displacement of artists, a development not addressed by Florida, whose creative class encompasses high earners in industries extending far beyond artists, the vast number of whom do not command big incomes.

Zukin had already shown that integral to the artistic mode of production is the gradual expansion of the “artistic class,” suggesting how the definition of “artist” expanded and how the epistemology of art changed to fit the sensibilities of the rising middle class. Zukin—writing in 1982—asserts:

"The new view of art as “a way of doing” rather than a distinctive “way of seeing” also affects the way art is taught. On the one hand, the “tremendous production emphasis” that [modernist critic] Harold Rosenberg decries gave rise to a generation of practitioners rather than visionaries, of imitators instead of innovators. As professional artists became facile in pulling out visual techniques from their aesthetic and social context, they glibly defended themselves with talk of concepts and methodology. On the other hand, the teaching of art as “doing” made art seem less elitist.… Anyone, anywhere can legitimately expect to be an artist … making art both more “professionalized” and more “democratized.”… This opened art as a career."

Zukin offers a sour observation made in 1979 by Ronald Berman, former chairman of the US National Endowment for the Humanities:

"Art is anything with creative intentions, where the word “creative” has … been removed from the realm of achievement and applied to another realm entirely. What it means now is an attitude toward the self; and it belongs not to aesthetics but to pop psychology."

I cannot address the changes in the understanding of art here, or the way its models of teaching changed through the postwar period—a subject of perpetual scrutiny and contestation both within the academy and outside it. A central point, however, is that the numbers of people calling themselves artists has vastly increased since the 1960s as the parameters of this identity have changed.

Florida enters at a pivot point in this process, where what is essential for cities is no longer art, or the people who make it, but the appearance of its being made somewhere nearby. As a policy academic, Florida repeatedly pays lip service to the economic, not lifestyle, grounding of class groupings, as he must, since his definition of “creative class” is based on modes of economically productive activity. Economic data, however, turn out not to be particularly integral to his analyses, while the use to which he puts this category depends heavily on lifestyle and consumer choices, and Florida includes in the creative class the subcategory of gay people as well as categories of “difference,” which are both racial/ethnic and include other identity-related groupings independent of employment or economic activity. This does not contradict the fact that we are talking about class and income. Although the tolerance of “difference” that figures in Florida’s scenario must certainly include of people of color working in low-level service categories who appear in significant concentrations in urban locales (even if they go home to some other locale), the creative class are not low-wage, low-level service-sector employees, and artists, certainly, are still disproportionately white.

Florida’s schema is influenced by basic American economic and sociological texts—including Erik Olin Wright’s powerful description of the new professional-managerial class (sometimes called the new petite bourgeoisie to differentiate it from the “old petite bourgeoisie,” a class of small shopkeepers and the like whose declining fortunes and traditionalist world view have left them disaffected or enraged). But Florida’s categories are more directly derived from the US government’s Standard Occupational Classification, or SOC, codes. His creative-class grouping includes “a broad group of creative professionals in business and finance, law, health care and related fields,” who “engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital.” Within it is a “super-creative core [of] people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music, and entertainment … [whose] job is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content.”

Doug Henwood, in a critique from the left, notes that Florida’s creative class constitutes about 30 percent of the workforce, and the “super creative core” about 12 percent. Examining one category of super-creatives, “those in all computer and mathematical occupations,” Henwood remarks that some of these jobs “can only be tendentiously classed as super creative.” SOC categories put both call-center tech-support workers and computer programmers in the IT category, but call-center workers would surely not experience their jobs as creative but “more likely as monotonous and even deskilled.” What is striking in Florida’s picture is, first, not just the insistence on winners and losers, on the creatives and the uncreatives—recalling the social divisions within Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World—but on the implicit conviction that job categories finally do provide the only source of real agency regardless of their content. Second, the value of the noncreatives is that they are nature to the creatives’ culture, female to their male, operating as backdrop and raw material, and finally as necessary support, as service workers. Stressing the utility of random conversations in the street, à la Jane Jacobs, Florida treats the little people of the streets as a potent source of ideas, a touchingly modern[ist] point of view.

In an online consideration of Florida’s thesis, Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser, a right-leaning mainstream critic, expresses admiration for Florida’s book as an engagingly written popularization of the generally accepted urbanist maxim that human capital drives growth, but he fails to find any value added from looking at creative capital as a separate category. Glaeser writes:

"The presence of skills in the metropolitan area may increase new idea production and the growth rate of city-specific productivity levels, but if Florida wants to argue that there is an [effect] of bohemian, creative types, over and above the effect of human capital, then presumably that should show up in the data."

Glaeser ran statistical regressions on the population-growth data on four measures: (1) the share of local workers in the “super creative core”; (2) patents per capita in 1990; (3) the Gay Index, or the number of coupled gay people in the area relative to the total population; and (4) the Bohemian Index—the number of artistic types relative to the overall population.

Glaeser concludes that in all the regressions the primary effects on city growth result from education level rather than any of Florida’s measures and that in fact in all but two cities, “the gay population has a negative impact.” He concludes:

"I would certainly not interpret this as suggesting that gays are bad for growth, but I would be awfully suspicious of suggesting to mayors that the right way to fuel economic development is to attract a larger gay population. There are many good reasons to be tolerant, without spinning an unfounded story about how Bohemianism helps urban development."

Further:

There is no evidence to suggest that there is anything to this diversity or Bohemianism, once you control for human capital. As such, mayors are better served by focusing on the basic commodities desired by those with skills, than by thinking that there is a quick fix involved in creating a funky, hip, Bohemian downtown.

Max Nathan, an English urbanist at the Centre for Cities, an independent research institute in London, observes that “there’s not much evidence for a single creative class in the US or the UK. And although knowledge, creativity, and human capital are becoming more important in today’s economy, more than 20 years of endogenous growth theory already tells us this.”

He concludes, “Creativity and cool are the icing, not the cake.”

As Alan Blum suggests, Florida’s work is directed at “second tier” cities pursuing “an ‘identity’ (as if merchandise) that is to be fashioned from the materials of the present.” Second tier cities tend to glorify the accumulation of amenities as a means of salvation from an undistinguished history, a chance to develop and establish flexibility. Blum’s critique emphasizes the platitudinous banality of Florida’s city vision, its undialectical quality and its erasure of difference in favor of tranquility and predictability as it instantiates as policy the infantile dream of perpetually creating oneself anew. In my estimation, Scandinavian societies seem to have faced the postwar world by effacing history and re-presenting themselves as factories of design; visiting Copenhagen’s design museum, I was amazed that a large wall inscription in the exhibition of the great designer Arne Jacobsen emphasized both his complete lack of “interest in Utopia” and his fondness for white tennis flannels. One can think of many cities, regions, and nations that would prefer to transcend an earlier mode of economic organization, whether agricultural or Fordist, in favor of a bright new picture of postindustrial viability. The collective failure of imagination can be extended to entire peoples, through the selective re-creation, or frank erasure, of historical memory. The entire cast of the creative-class thesis is centered on the implicit management of populations, through internalized controls: in essence, Foucault’s governmentality.

In Loft Living, Sharon Zukin had already put her finger on an unanswerable paradox, namely, the simulacral effect of neatening everything up, of the desired pacification of the city, which, as I have explained, will conveniently replace difficult, unruly populations with artists, who can generally (though not uniformly) be counted on to be relatively docile.

Zukin writes:

"Seeking inspiration in loft living, the new strategy of urban revitalization aims for a less problematic sort of integration than cities have recently known. It aspires to a synthesis of art and industry, or culture and capital, in which diversity is acknowledged, controlled, and even harnessed. [But] first, the apparent reconquest of the urban core for the middle class actually reconquers it for upper-class users. Second, the downtowns become simulacra, through gussied up preservation venues. … Third, the revitalization projects that claim distinctiveness—because of specific historic or aesthetic traits—become a parody of the unique."

The search among artists, creatives, and so forth, for a way of life that does not pave over older neighborhoods but infiltrates them with coffee shops, hipster bars, and clothing shops catering to their tastes, is a sad echo of the tourist paradigm centering on the indigenous authenticity of the place they have colonized. The authenticity of these urban neighborhoods, with their largely working-class populations, is characterized not by bars and bodegas so much as by what the press calls grit, signifying the lack of bourgeois polish, and a kind of remainder of incommensurable nature in the midst of the city’s unnatural state. The arrival in numbers of artists, hipsters, and those who follow—no surprise here!—brings about the eradication of this initial appeal. And, as detailed in Loft Living, the artists and hipsters are in due course driven out by wealthier folk, by the abundant vacant lofts converted to luxury dwellings or the new construction in the evacuated manufacturing zones. Unfortunately, many artists who see themselves evicted in this process fail to see, or persist in ignoring, the role that artists have played in occupying these formerly “alien” precincts.


...MORE: read entire essays above by Martha Rosler at:

The Artistic Mode of Revolution: From Gentrification to Occupation
~ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-artistic-mode-of-revolution-from-gentrification-to-occupation/#_ftn18


“Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism” - (a three part essay):

Part I: ART AND URBANISM, December 2010
~ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/culture-class-art-creativity-urbanism-part-i/

Part II: CREATIVITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS, February 2011
~ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/culture-class-art-creativity-urbanism-part-ii/

Part III: IN THE SERVICE OF EXPERIENCE(S), July 2012
~ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/culture-class-art-creativity-urbanism-part-iii/

Copyright © 2012 e-flux and the author, Martha Rosler

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Rosler
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On authenticity and learning from failure:

"Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Txt Pistols" Malcolm's McLaren's "Reflections on Learning" keynote presented at the Handheld Learning Conference 2009, London. Malcolm discusses his life, the challenges that authenticity faces within a karaoke culture and what we learn from failure. Recorded October 6th 2009. www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-wtmV0fAAg

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