There’s a lot of buzz these
days about a “creative class,” the discovery of Richard Florida, a
professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh. Florida’s ideas are laid out in one of those books more
discussed than read: The Rise of the Creative Class and
How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday
Life.
What he has identified is an evolving
socio-economic group that is, says, our hope for cultural vitality
in the 21st century. According to Florida, “if you are a scientist
or engineer, an architect or designer, a writer, artist or
musician, or if you use your creativity as a key factor in your
work in business, education, health care, law or some other
profession, you are a member” of the creative class.
His
main point is that local economic development is no longer a matter
of developing a favorable business climate through building
business parks or offering tax incentives. The challenge is to
create a “people climate” that will attract this creative class.
Once it arrives, Florida says, economic development will follow,
both from things the creative people start up and from companies
that will come looking for creative people.
Florida’s
focus is so narrowly metro-urban that he considers Boulder, Colo.,
to be sort of “rural.” But a lot of the restless types Florida
describes have been finding their way to the West’s small
towns for a long time.
According to Florida, what
attracts creative types to a place are technology, talent and
tolerance. He tends to think of technology in terms of high-tech
industries, and that is not a noticeable strength in most rural
communities, although many are developing high speed access to the
Internet. Florida sees the presence of a major research university
as a huge advantage in the creative economy, concentrating both the
technological research and the talent needed to spur development.
Western State College, in Gunnison, Colo., where I teach,
is close to being the kind of creative hub Florida envisions. When
I came to Western in the late 1980s, the college was charged to
develop interdisciplinary programs built around the unique
qualities of the college’s natural and cultural setting.
Majors in recreation and environmental studies came out of that
mandate, but both programs are still fishing for their connection
to place so that they truly prepare people for creative lives in
the region. Colleges like Western State could be turning the young
“redneck hippies” they attract into inspired entrepreneurs. They
could then go out to create the restoration economy that other
Florida-type think tanks such as the Rocky Mountain Institute
espouse: businesses that do well by doing good in the creation of
environmentally-friendly products and services.
As for
tolerance, Florida noticed that his index of urban places with
strong economic development in the 1990s had a high degree of
correlation with a colleague’s index of gay-friendly places. Not
all creative people are gay, of course, but there’s probably a
higher percentage of gays in the creative class than in American
society in general, just as there is probably a higher percentage
of malcontents, nerds, obsessives, idiot savants and others who
are, by nature or nurture, out of step with what passes for normal
in America.
Mountain townies are fond of quoting a
journalist who claimed it wasn’t love of fellow man that led people
to places where people were few. It was more an attitude of
indifference — a willingness to let everyone go to hell in
his or her own way with neither help nor hindrance. That’s
tolerable tolerance.
Perhaps Florida is mostly putting a
new wrap on common wisdom. In interesting times — including
the founding of this country — we have always depended on
creative people coming together to strike the flint of their minds
against the steel of systems they neither particularly like nor are
liked by.
That process usually starts in “fringe” places
— dying neighborhoods taken over by bohemians, or decaying
rural towns in beautiful places taken over by post-urbanites. But
whether you call them a creative class or redneck hippies, I say,
let’s bring them on.
George Sibley is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He writes in Gunnison, Colorado,
and teaches at Western State College.
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