The Creative Class Revisited

The following sections are included:

• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Contents

In this introductory chapter, we contextualize and briefly describe the intellectual contributions of the different chapters in this book. Following this chapter, which comprises Part I of this book, there are 11 chapters and each of these chapters addresses a particular research question or a set of questions about the creative class. Part II of this book consists of two chapters and this part focuses on alternate conceptual approaches to the creative class. Part III also contains two chapters and this part concentrates on analytics. Part IV consists of five chapters and this part sheds light on a variety of regional perspectives on the creative class. Finally, the two chapters that make up Part V take a retrospective and a prospective look at research on the creative class. In the concluding section of this chapter, we offer some reflections on the cornerstones of creative class theory as advocated by Richard Florida two decades ago.

We study the properties of economic growth in a region that is driven by the activities of the so-called creative class. On the consumption side of our regional economy, we focus on an infinitely lived creative class household, and on the production side of this same economy, we concentrate on a final good that is produced using creative and physical capital. In this setting, we first define and then characterize a competitive equilibrium for our regional economy. Second, we show that this competitive equilibrium is Pareto optimal. Third, we demonstrate that sustained growth in this regional economy is impossible when the value of a key parameter of the production function is less than or equal to unity. Fourth, we specify the conditions in our model that need to hold for there to be sustained economic growth. Fifth, we study what happens to the share of physical capital in our region’s total income. Finally, we analyze what happens to the asymptotic growth rate of physical capital and consumption when a regional authority taxes the returns from physical capital.

The purpose of this chapter is to advance understanding of the particularities of the creative labor market and its effect on the performance of the creative workforce. We first review the underlying theory of the labor market and discuss the main transformations that impact the creative labor market, as well as the issues facing many creative workers, including ‘new forms of employment’, compensation, portfolio career, collaboration, and competition. Subsequently, we develop the existing body of research to fill a gap in the existing literature through a model of creative workers’ performance. We develop our argument that creative workers manifest particular characteristics in terms of work motivation, job, and life satisfaction as first-layer drivers to creative performance. The second-layer drivers determine the performance of the first-layer drivers. Here, we include work purpose, work autonomy, and workplace quality as constructs that positively influence work motivation, job satisfaction, and life satisfaction, as the main drivers of creative performance.

Richard Florida envisaged an ever-expanding creativity class as the creative content in occupations would increase over time and make new occupations qualify as creative class occupations. We suggest that this conjecture may best be verified by using a continuous creativity score rather than an essential static classification. Our main contribution is twofold: We construct a continuous score based on the fast-developing research on natural language processing techniques and we apply this score instigating Florida´s conjecture. Based on two million job postings for Norway from 2002 to 2020, we confirm the conjecture. In particular, it seems that the creative content in many low-end occupations has increased.

Creative city theory has gained much popularity and has become a policy scenario for cities around the world (Gross et al., 2021). Cultural facilities have been positioned as a central element and deployed as a means to attract the creative class. This reasoning has led cities to embark on huge promotional projects of investment in expensive facilities, thinking that this can make any place a hip city and a tolerant living environment that can be a magnet for the creative class. In this chapter, we sought to determine the most discriminating/influential dimensions of creativity, using a wide range of variables in the Global Power City Index (GPCI) and the Legatum Prosperity Index data and employing a variety of semi-supervised learning controlled by alignment tests, as well as the Random Forest regression algorithm. Our results show that, consistent with Florida’s thesis, cultural amenity-based strategies are a crucial lever of urban prosperity. They are followed by the extent of infrastructure that enables trade and market access. Therefore, what attracts talent also affects the ability to attract business but to a lesser degree. We also show that social tolerance, the basic tenet of Florida’s thesis, does not appear to be a sufficient indicator to explain differences in urban development across cities rather it is urban amenities that matter most. Their presence is a strong signal for talent, for economic actors, and also for companies looking for a favorable environment to set up and develop. Thus, attracting the creative class is not a matter of sprinkling culture and cultural facilities here and there but of placing them at the heart of a system of economic development that also aims at the blossoming of investments and market access conditions.

In February of 2004, Richard Florida appeared at Detroit’s Orchestra Hall to talk about his creative class theories. Amid spotlights cutting across the sky and a packed house, it was definitely a star turn. The focus of the talk was on how any city, even Detroit, could pursue the creative class and enjoy the economic growth benefits they were purported to bring. Seventeen years later, it is time to ask the following: What about Detroit?

Detroit emerged as a model of urban-industrial decline in America, if not the world. Perhaps even more telling than the City’s 2013 bankruptcy, its economic collapse is effectively illustrated by a population exodus: a net loss of 1.25 million people since 1960, including a loss of almost a quarter million people just between the 2000 and 2010 census. Yet, following the successful resolution of the bankruptcy and new municipal leadership, the narrative has shifted to Detroit’s recovery and resilience. Detroit began to be defined as a comeback kid, a cool place for young hipsters to start businesses and buy homes, and a hotspot for tourism with a vibrant art and restaurant scene. Did the creative class save Detroit? This chapter tells a story of the efforts to attract the creative class in the world’s poster child of urban decline. In doing so, it poses and answers the following questions:

• 1. What policies has Detroit used to attract and retain the creative class and help them prosper?
• 2. What evidence is there of success in attracting creative individuals and businesses?
• 3. Has a focus on downtown amenities and the creative class positively impacted economic conditions throughout the city?
• 4. And, most importantly, what have been the racial and economic equity implications of the rise of the creative class in Detroit?

The COVID-19 pandemic led to a large increase in the practice of working from home, with over one-third of US-employed individuals involved in remote work (for coronavirus reasons) in May 2020. This study examines the effects of having a creative occupation on remote work between May 2020 and September 2021. Results show that individuals with Creative Economy occupations were more likely than others to work from home for COVID-19 reasons, which is consistent with creative workers having more job flexibility and a greater ability to adapt to economic shocks. Although members of the creative core (e.g., programmers, artists, and scientists) and creative professionals (e.g., financial analysts) were both able to pivot to remote work at the beginning of the pandemic, heterogeneity in the effects on working from home in later months suggests that individuals in the creative core were more apt than creative professionals to return to pre-pandemic work arrangements.

Previous research suggests that members of the creative class seem to have been resilient following the 2008 economic crisis. COVID-19, however, once again raises the question of how will the creative class fare. Existing studies focus on the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on the creative industries, but very few consider the potential pervasive effect of the pandemic on individual workers. Moreover, there is a lack of studies that investigate the experience of specific groups in the creative class, even though their experiences are expected to vary considerably. Given this state of affairs, the purpose of this chapter is to address these gaps in the literature by exploring and describing the experience of Romanian performers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Greater economic complexity is related not only to diversification but also to the sophistication of production and the setting of diverse and unique knowledge that drives economic development. The Economic Complexity Index assessed in 79 districts of Slovakia has confirmed the growing dominance of agglomeration and the disadvantages of more peripheral regions. A long time series of data from the last 30 years has revealed how the artificial territorial organization of job creation policies in each district, enabled by central state planning, has gradually disintegrated. The self-organization of the complex economic system has created a new spatial equilibrium with the concentration of economic complexity in the newly created capital city Bratislava and several regional centers.

The analytical framework gives a threefold view across district, industry, and time as a way of predicting future trends. Changes have occurred in the economic landscape of the country with the creation of spikes in the west of Slovakia as well as affecting urban–rural relationships. The formerly industrialized country has begun to discover a creative sector, finding its way in the midst of industrial lock-in, especially the automotive sector. Košice, Slovakia’s second largest city, subsequently serves as a micro-level study whose trajectory has shifted away from heavy industry thanks to ICT investment and the successful European Capital of Culture project. The creative industry has been brought to the forefront of the city’s social progress, significantly increasing its attractiveness for the life of the creative class. The micro-scale of the city reveals the gradual occupation of territory by the creative sector, particularly by culture and arts, ICT firms, and R&D entities.

This research clarifies the mechanism of creating shared value for the creative classes in Japan’s agriculture and rural development from a new perspective by introducing the mixed methods research that combines both qualitative and quantitative aspects in a mutually complementary manner. It will also draw policy implications for cultivating rural creative classes based on simulation analysis. The results from latent class analysis applied to a questionnaire survey targeting farmers clarified that there are a certain number of farmers who can be positioned as a creative class in Japan. Their characteristics are young, female, living in mountainous or living in urban areas, and working on business diversification. They have a high motivation to start a business, especially for business diversification and social business, and have a strong network of entrepreneurs. On the other hand, the results of qualitative analysis of four cases revealed that organizational learning, creativity, and accumulation of social capital are three key factors for creating shared value through cognitive innovation (demonstration of collective knowledge) in agriculture and rural development. Furthermore, the results from the simulation of evolutionary game dynamics on the rural creative classes in Japan revealed that there are a high-level equilibrium and a low-level equilibrium that make it easy or difficult to realize shared value creation. The current situation of agriculture and rural areas in Japan is close to the low-level equilibrium. Therefore, policies to cultivate rural creative class by fostering entrepreneurship and education on food and agriculture, raising the creativity, effective altruism, and social capital of producers and consumers are required for sustainable agriculture and rural development.

Florida’s approach to urban and regional development focusing on innovation and the creative class spurred an awareness of how space and particularly soft locational characteristics are related to economic performance. In the light of two decades of theoretical discussions and empirical findings, this chapter reflects on three aspects of Florida’s creative class approach. First, the definition and measurement of the creative class, second, the role of contextual differences for the outcome of the relations that are argued in the approach, and third, a discussion of what has changed in the last 20 years since Florida launched his book and to what extent the arguments are valid today with a specific reference to Europe.

The Rise of the Creative Class, which was originally published in 2002, has generated widespread conversation and debate over both its theory and empirics. This chapter recaps the key tenets of the creative class theory of economic development and discusses the key issues in the conceptual and analytical debate it has inspired.

The following section is included:

• Index