*I feel sorry for Dr. Florida. His only misstep is that he was loud and eloquent about some loose, big ideas he had that were kind of all right, for kind of a while. He got pretty famous for his insights and did okay by it money-wise, and some people always resent success. But it's not like he's got anything like Trumpian oligarch money or influence. He's just a famous professor.
*Florida's seems to think that his problem is the obstreperous peasants (like Rob Ford), but his real problem is the planet's income disparity; if the yahoos had some folding money again, they wouldn't be yahoos at all, just Joe Sixpack tailgating with his pals at NASCAR, as happy as a clam.
*Soon creative-class areas in various cities are gonna be on fire, flooded, or blacked-out rather a lot, due to the ongoing climate crisis. So then Florida's ideas of creative prosperity will look even more archaic. But that doesn't make him "wrong" or evil or anything; he's just a guy who had his thumb on the pulse for a while, and then the patient developed other, rather worse symptoms.
*I have a lot of tolerance for Florida's kind of thinking; if his work had a big vogue that was short in duration, so what? It's not like he ever claimed the steely metaphysics of a mathematical physicist.
*Even in math and physics, which certainly have a lot more rigor than humanistic studies in "urbanism" and "creativity," there are areas of study that go in and out of vogue. I wouldn't scorn a mathematician for being way into "chaos theory," even though we've got a ton of real chaos nowadays, and you never see the chaos theory of the 1990s being applied to it. If I met such a mathematician, I wouldn't say, "oh well, deterministic cellular automata used to be hot in the 1990s, so you must be wrong and also bad." I'd just buy him a beer and ask what was up lately. He'd probably reveal something that was quite interesting and also deeply unpopular and obscure.
Let's beat up pundits who have big good-time ideas that only last fifteen years
(...)
His 2002 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class hit on what now seems blindingly obvious: that the “clustering force” of young creatives and tech workers in metropolitan areas was leading to greater economic prosperity. Don’t waste money on stadiums and concert halls, or luring big companies with tax breaks, he told the world’s mayors. Instead make your town a place where hipsters want to be, with a vibrant arts and music scene and a lively cafe culture. Embrace the “three T’s” of technology, talent and tolerance and the “creative class” will come flocking.
Florida was essentially holding up a mirror to an urban revival that was already well under way. But he packaged his findings in a such a digestible, marketable form – complete with snappy rankings such as the “Bohemian Index”, encouraging cities to compete for a place on his lists – that the message was irresistible to policymakers across the globe. Soon, no town was without its own arts and creativity strategy, innovation hub or pop-up poetry corner.
Fifteen years on, it hasn’t quite turned out as he planned....
