Creative Class

Ken Gray at the Ottawa Citizen outlines the case in a very, very interesting article:

Cities do not consist of freeways, buildings, transit systems,
houses, malls, sidewalks, hydro wires, sewers, water mains, snowplows,
corporations or government.

Good cities consist of good people.
Like a vibrant company, they tap their best people — those with
intelligence, energy, integrity, goodwill and a large well of
experience — to do the best things. With a critical mass of good
people, all the other elements of urban living — transit, wealth, a
healthy environment … the list goes on and on — fall into place.

The
key to successful cities in this age of increasingly specialized labour
demand and a slowly eroding petroleum economy is to attract topnotch
people who can adapt to the fundamental changes occurring in our
community now.

I’ve been getting to visit and to know Canada’s city-regions much better over the past nine months. Now working on the Canadian edition of Who’s Your City? our team is amassing integrated North American data.  So Gray’s column is most insightful and helpful. I’d love to see similar pieces on other Canadian cities and metros.  And promise to have more to say about this in the coming months … and certainly with the release of the Canadian edition of the book.

The full story is here.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 9:52 am and is filed under Cities, Community Strategies, Creative Class Consumption, Live. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.