This ran recently in The Walrus – a short letter in response to a longer, very interesting article by my esteemed University of Toronto colleague Mark Kingwell. It is just this kind of dialogue that is so very important and needed to make Toronto – and all cities – better, more prosperous, and more just places. I am delighted to be part of such a vibrant, challenging intellectual milieux.
Creative Differences
Mark Kingwell offers up a compelling diagnosis for the declining state of social justice in Toronto (“Justice Denied,” January/February), and it could not be more timely. Recently, my colleague J. David Hulchanski of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Urban and Community Studies released a landmark report on the splintering of Toronto into three separate cities, defined by increasing economic polarization.
But if Kingwell gets Toronto right, he gets me wrong. Perhaps it is because he has been too heavily influenced by certain critical reactions to my ideas. I do not think that cities should be made into playgrounds for what one neo-conservative critic called “homosexuals, sophistos, and trendoids.” My work is based on the premise that every single human being is creative. I note that in advanced countries like the U.S., roughly 30 percent of the workforce is currently engaged in creative occupations (playing a role more or less equivalent to that of the working class during the heyday of industrial capitalism). But I take great pains to point out that this arrangement is untenable in the long run, in that it neglects the creative talent and energy of the remaining 70 percent.
I share Kingwell’s concern about unchecked economies. Global market forces, left to their own devices, are leading to greater economic disparity between countries, regions, and cities, including Toronto. As our city becomes bigger, wealthier, more productive, more innovative, and more of a global player, it also becomes more stratified.
Kingwell rightly points out that this offends our notion of social justice.
But I am interested in identifying not just the problem but the solution, which has led me to look at the laws of motion that power societies. And this, believe it or not, is why I am hopeful. Quite possibly for the first time in human history, the growth of the economy requires further development of human creative capabilities.
I bet on Toronto (moving my family and academic work here) for a reason. While our city is far from perfect, I believe it is the city in the world that is best prepared to engage in this shift, building a society that honors and integrates the creativity of all its people.
Richard Florida
Toronto, ON
April 29th, 2009 at 10:06 am
I think there’s an immediate assumption that focus on “creative” or “intellectual” classes is automatically elitist AND exclusionary. There’s of course no reason to think that’s going to be the case, but it does seem to be at least part of North American culture.
What is often missed is that people who are the creative/intellectual types aren’t there to defend their “position” – they instead prefer to help people get more access to creative outlets and intellectual improvement opportunities.
It’s easy to turn creative/intellectual types into “the other” I suppose – and assume they in turn will do likewise.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:21 am
I am currently working on the development of a program that means to address this issue. It is inspired by your work, as well as Steve Johnson’s work on Emergence and Frans Johansson’s Medici Effect. We are developing what looks like a mix between leadership training and social innovation lab where social change leaders learn, work and connect with creatives from other sectors. Will keep you abreast of our progress.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Richard Florida is “Stuff White People Like”. What one neo-conservative critic called “homosexuals, sophistos, and trendoids”, this conservative critic call SWPLs.
Richard Florida is the dean of “SWPL Studies”.
BTW, Richard, “neo-conservative” means something completely different than what you’re using it to mean. I seriously doubt that your critic is a former Trotskyist who switched to the conservative side because of the Cold War in the 1970s.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Global market forces, left to their own devices, are leading to greater economic disparity between countries, regions, and cities, including Toronto. As our city becomes bigger, wealthier, more productive, more innovative, and more of a global player, it also becomes more stratified.
Economic stratification, in and of itself, is not negative, and “social justics” is not necessarily good. The least economically stratified country in history was Maoist China.
The forces causing economic stratification are many. Globalism is only one, and perhaps not the strongest. Things like associative mating and the cultural transmission of middle class values (or lack of it leading to a pervasive underclass) are out there. How would one know to what extent one is dominant over the other, or interacting?
April 29th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Kingwell gets it exactly right.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
I think it’s sometimes important to separate out Florida’s theories from how they get applied on the ground. While Florida does call for some forms of economic and social justice, often his ideas are implemented in politically expedient ways, for instance a city building a skate part or cafe and calling it a “creative class policy.” This is always a challenge for academic theories that need to be simplified for popular consumption.
April 29th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Richard,
As someone who straddles the line between Creative Class and Service Class (if those are the correct distinctions – I’m a semi-professional writer/actor who supplements his income with cleaning and other service work) I’ve read your work with great interest. But I think that if there’s a weakness in what you’ve presented so far, it’s that you haven’t addressed these ’social justice’ issues.
I’m not coming at this from a particularly ‘lefty’ viewpoint, but on both sides of the equation I live under, what should society do about people like me?
As an artist, I spend a lot of time working in the margins. I get paid for some of my work, but usually not a lot, and there’s quite a lot I do that could be called either ‘To Fill Portfolio’ or ‘following my muse’. This does not put enough bread on the table for me to live on.
As a service employee, I’m a cog in a machine. I actually do like manual work as a secondary income source, because I’m left with a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, but most of the creativity I experience is thinking of something else while I’m working. I’m aware that a good deal of what I do could be replaced by automation in the not too distant future, so then what? What ‘creative work’ can I be doing then? What about my coworkers?
I’m placing myself in this context as an example of what that ‘other 70%’ consists of, as well as to demonstrate that there’s a fair bit of variation within the creative class itself.
So my challenge is this: What needs doing to help someone like me?
April 30th, 2009 at 1:03 am
I don’t know from Toronto, but I wish Kingwell could still write like a newspaperman. He spends the first page congratulating himself on having actually been a beat reporter (between stints in grad school in the US & England), then drifts into three pages of rambling so abstract as to be unintelligible.
He says some good things: “A city, like a people, shall be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable citizens” and “A city is an opportunity for justice”. But I can’t find a coherent argument for how he would like to achieve this, nor even how the “bobo’s” are preventing it.