Obstacles to Retaining the Creative Class
Some years back, I asked an urban planner of the city of South Bend for some recommendations in his chosen profession. After Jane Jacobs and her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities , he recommended reading Richard Florida, and I quickly picked up and read The Rise of the Creative Class from 2002. Now, more than a decade later, I come to his 2006 follow-up The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent . Richard Florida, the director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, researches the social, economic, and demographic factors that drive the contemporary world economy. In The Rise of the Creative Class , Florida argues that those whom he describes as the creative class are a key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the U.S. Cities like Austin, Chapel Hill, Portland (OR), San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. exemplify...