Creative Class

Research universities increasingly function as a key hub institution of the knowledge economy – from Stanford University’s role in Silicon Valley to MIT’s role in greater Boston’s Route 128 high-technology complex, from the University of Texas in Austin to the rise of the North Carolina Research Triangle, not to mention Carnegie Mellon’s role in Pittsburgh’s regeneration. But what are the world’s leading centers for university research?

To get at this, my MPI team and I used the recently released Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) to chart the locations of the world’s leading 500 research universities by the city and metro region where they are located. The map below, by the MPI’s Zara Matheson, shows the geography of academic research centers across the world.

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Here’s a fantastic video, “Love Letters to Syracuse,” that illustrates the transformative, community-building role public art can play. For the project, artist Steven Powers painted bold, vivid messages about the city across old train bridges. The messages came from residents who were asked what they loved or hated about the community. See for yourself (via the Sustainable Cities Collective).

A LOVE LETTER TO SYRACUSE from samuel j macon on Vimeo.

That’s the title of this Wall Street Journal story on a new Rockefeller Foundation Initiative to support the creative class.

To assure the city remains the cultural and creative leader of the world, the Rockefeller Foundation is giving more than $3 million to support local artists and arts organizations.

More than 400 applicants vied for a chance to receive two-year grants, ranging from $50,000 to $250,000. Eighteen winners were chosen, including Bowery Arts & Science, to project the works of poets onto walls and buildings in city neighborhoods and the City University of New York Institute for Sustainable Cities in partnership with Artist as Citizen, to create an online atlas that traces the city’s environmental transformation and maps out the future of the city’s environment …

“It’s a new business model that builds the financial resilience of the arts sector while maintaining the artistic capacity,” says Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

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My article, “Talent, Technology and Tolerance in Canadian Regional Development,” with Kevin Stolarick and Charlotta Mellander is out in the fall issue of The Canadian Geographer.

Here’s the abstract:

This article examines the factors that shape economic development in Canadian regions. It employs path analysis and structural equation models to isolate the effects of technology, human capital and/or the creative class, universities, the diversity of service industries and openness to immigrants, minorities and gay and lesbian populations on regional income. It also examines the effects of several broad occupations groups—business and finance, management, science, arts and culture, education and health care—on regional income. The findings indicate that both human capital and the creative class have a direct effect on regional income. Openness and tolerance also have a significant effect on regional development in Canada. Openness towards the gay and lesbian population has a direct effect on both human capital and the creative class, while tolerance towards immigrants and visible minorities is directly associated with higher regional incomes. The university has a relatively weak effect on regional incomes and on technology as well. Management, business and finance and science occupations have a sizeable effect on regional income; arts and culture occupations have a significant effect on technology; health and education occupations have no effect on regional income.

The full study is here.

Striking and eerily beautiful aerial photographs of housing developments stymied by the housing bust (via Barry Ritholz, The Big Picture).

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My past several posts have looked at the density of key variables across America’s metropolitan regions. Today, I turn to the density of a subset of the creative class – the density of artists and cultural creatives. My own earlier research, which landed me on “The Colbert Report” of all places, showed that metros with higher proportions of employed artistic and cultural workers also have higher incomes, higher rates of innovation, and higher housing prices. The reason is not that artistic and cultural creatives are more likely to launch new businesses or invent new products, but that their location in an area signals that a community is open to diverse groups of people who are open to new ideas and self-expression. The concentration of artistic and cultural creatives in a place is a sign of a local ecosystem that is more conducive to generating new ideas and mobilizing resources around them.

Our measure for the density of artistic and cultural creatives is the number of artistic and cultural creative workers per square kilometer. The map below shows the density of artistic and cultural creatives across U.S. metro regions. The median density of artistic and cultural creatives across all U.S. metros is only .08 per square kilometer. The densest metros have more than four artistic and cultural creatives per square kilometer, while the average metro has less than a tenth of a cultural worker. (more…)

Video of Richard Florida’s talk at yesterday’s The Economist Ideas Economy event in NYC.

In this, the third in my series of posts on density, I look at the density of the creative class. More than 35 million Americans are members of the creative class, making up roughly a third of the workforce. The creative class is a measure of human capital that looks at what occupations people work at rather than whether they earned a college degree. The creative class includes workers in science and technology, business and management, health care and law, and arts, culture, design, media, and entertainment.

The map below shows the density of the creative class across U.S. metros. The median density across all U.S. metros is roughly 8.4 creative class workers per square kilometer. The densest metros have more than 140 creative class workers per square kilometer, while the least dense have less than one. (more…)

My research team at the Martin Prosperity Institute just released a new report on Toronto in the Creative Age. Several things really stand out.

First, Toronto is still coming into its own as a major North American metro. U.S. metros in the Northeast and Midwest had significant expansion a whole lot earlier, but Toronto has seen substantial growth since the 1950s, sort of like a Sunbelt metro. Since then, it has transformed from a sleepy metro into a large and rapidly growing one, fueled by massive immigration and growing across almost every knowledge and creative  industry.

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Last Friday, my list of America’s Brainiest Cities ran over at The Daily Beast. Boulder topped the list, which comprised a mix of larger knowledge-intensive metros like Washington, D.C., Boston, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle, and college towns like Ithaca, Charlottesville, Madison, Iowa City, and Durham, North Carolina, among others.

The map above, prepared by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute, shows the performance of all U.S. metros on our Brainiest Metros Index developed with my colleague Charlotta Mellander. The index is based on three variables: (more…)