The Toronto Star reports on a backlash against Richard Florida’s Creative City policy proposals.
Here’s a sample excerpt on the kind of local opposition that is emerging:
“Richard Florida’s exotic city, his creative city, depends on ghost people, working behind the scenes. Immigrants, people of colour. You want to know what his version of creative is? He’s the relocation agent for the global bourgeoisie. And the rest of us don’t matter.”
Honeymoons, typically, are short. For Florida, who arrived in Toronto just over two years ago to head the Martin Prosperity Institute, a University of Toronto think-tank created just for him, it’s officially over.
Shakir, a community advocate, was speaking at a public forum organized recently by the art magazine Fuse, and the group, Creative Class Struggle. Its website leaves little to the imagination: “We are a Toronto-based collective who are organizing a campaign challenging the presence of Richard Florida and the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, as well as the wider policies and practices they represent.”
The forum was its coming-out party – the beginning, they say, of a wider campaign, as the site explains, “to reclaim our institutions, our city, and our elected governments” from Florida’s best-known pitch: That future economic health for cities relies on broad-brushstroke boosterism of creative professionals, bohemianism, cosmopolitanism and diversity, and the warning that cities that don’t embrace it will be left in a death-spiral of post-industrial decay.
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“Richard Florida’s exotic city, his creative city, depends on ghost people, working behind the scenes. Immigrants, people of colour. You want to know what his version of creative is? He’s the relocation agent for the global bourgeoisie. And the rest of us don’t matter.”
Honeymoons, typically, are short. For Florida, who arrived in Toronto just over two years ago to head the Martin Prosperity Institute, a University of Toronto think-tank created just for him, it’s officially over.
Shakir, a community advocate, was speaking at a public forum organized recently by the art magazine Fuse, and the group, Creative Class Struggle. Its website leaves little to the imagination: “We are a Toronto-based collective who are organizing a campaign challenging the presence of Richard Florida and the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, as well as the wider policies and practices they represent.”
The forum was its coming-out party – the beginning, they say, of a wider campaign, as the site explains, “to reclaim our institutions, our city, and our elected governments” from Florida’s best-known pitch: That future economic health for cities relies on broad-brushstroke boosterism of creative professionals, bohemianism, cosmopolitanism and diversity, and the warning that cities that don’t embrace it will be left in a death-spiral of post-industrial decay.”
Is there also scholarly rigor to this critique?
Here’s another excerpt:
“Innovation as the catalyst for economic growth is as old as the idea of an economy itself, though Edward Glaeser, in his review of Rise of the Creative Class, gives Florida some credit for cross-pollinating it with creative bohemia.
But in the same breath, Glaeser takes on its statistical basis, Florida’s bohemian index. Using data from 242 cities provided by Florida, Glaeser, an economic geographer, found that the overall “bohemian effect” on economic growth in America was driven by two of the 242: Las Vegas and Sarasota, Fla. “Excluding those cities,” he wrote, meant that “bohemianism becomes irrelevant.
“Given that I will never believe that either Las Vegas or Sarasota stand as stellar examples of bohemianism, I will draw another conclusion,” he wrote: “skilled people” – not artists, by any measure – “are key to urban success.”
The author also speaks with Richard Florida, who defends his record.
From the comment field, another defense of his record:
“still find Florida’s stuff compelling. I have 2 of his books & find them readable & thought provoking. It seems he is being blamed as the messenger. I work in community development, mostly in small & rural communities. If they do not pay attention to broader quality of life issues & things that attract or keep their creative people, they will not thrive. Everyone knows there is more to community vitality than just the creative people (e.g. housing affordability, social justice – see – CIEL – www.theCIEL.com – Community Vitality Initiative).”