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A Different Kind of Different
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Business New Haven
6/10/2002
By: BNH
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American cities must attract members of the new “creative class” with hip neighborhoods, a vibrant arts scene and a gay-friendly atmosphere lest they risk going the way of dying post-industrial cities like Detroit.
That's the conclusion reached by Richard Florida, a professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and author of the brand-new book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (Basic Books, 2002).
Florida argues that the world has moved away from the old “organizational” era of corporations and homogeneity and into a “creative” era led by a vanguard of some 38 million workers - from scientists to IT professionals to artists and musicians - with a wide variety of lifestyles and needs.
What this sea change portends for cities is that instead of “underwriting big-box retailers, subsidizing downtown malls, recruiting call centers and squandering precious taxpayer dollars on extravagant stadium complexes,” public policy-makers should seek ways to attract the creative class by cultivating the arts, music, nightlife and quaint historic districts - to develop places that are fun and interesting instead of corporate and mall-like.
Florida somewhat surprising charts a high correlation between gays and the creative class generally. Calling gays “the canaries of the creative economy,” Florida says that gay-friendly communities are more likely to attract creative workers of every lifestyle persuasion.
Not even six weeks after its release date, Florida's book has generated the sort of buzz (and a rapid ascent up Amazon.com's bestseller list) usually reserved for trash fiction or celebrity tell-alls.
Are you listening, New Haven and Hartford?
In truth, New Haven would probably fare pretty well on the Florida creativity indices (the author's listing of the “best” U.S. cities such as Boston and San Francisco and the “worst,” including Detroit and Memphis, include mainly cities with one million-plus populations, although the “Hartford region” ranks 18 out of 49, right in-between Philadelphia and Phoenix).
The Elm City doesn't lack for creative types, and its status as home to a world-class university would seem to make its knowledge base secure for the future.
Nevertheless, sometimes New Haven isn't entirely comfortable making its own way on its own terms. Where other Northeastern cities long ago ceased to be places of production in favor of places of consumption, some New Haveners in positions of leadership can't seem to let go of outdated paradigms and obsolete models (remember the Williams Steel debacle?).
Yale voted with its pocketbook to abandon the unique funk of the old Broadway in favor of sleek chain-store sameness. And many critics believe the Williams Jackson Ewing plans to reinvent the center-city mall send us hurtling down the same path that eviscerated downtown's human-scale retail in the 1960s and '70s.
With more than its share of artsy bohos, grad students in seemingly permanent state of arrested development percolating subculture that has nothing to do with places like the Shubert or Long Wharf, New Haven would do well, Florida would argue, to build on its true competitive advantages, to be “a place where weird people could find a place.” Especially when the “weird” people are smart, energetic and creative in the non-chamber of commerce sense.
The visionaries who made New Haven great the first time around may not have been “weirdos” in the 21st-century sense of the word, but they dreamed and dared to be different.
So should we. BNH
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