Comments on: Cities and Skills

By: URENIO Portal: Innovation, Environments of Innovation, Intelligent Cities and Regions » Blog Archive » The Complementarity Between Cities and Skills

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:24:08 +0000

[...] Via: Creative Class Blog [...]

By: Bigger cities more productive | Spotted by Locals - cityblogs by locals

Bigger cities more productive | Spotted by Locals - cityblogs by locals — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:07:30 +0000

[...] (Via this article on CreativeClass.com – by Richard Florida) [...]

By: Edmundo

Edmundo — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:13:04 +0000

Associated with the presented correlation, there is a complicated per worker productivity distribution to consider: some fields are more productivity than others not only because of intensive knowledge production, but mainly because of shared/open information/experience interchange.
My point is the following: pharmaceutical/medicine is not so productive as other fields with effective channels of communication and shared research/inovation (e.g. open source software and creative commons’ shared products).

By: David

David — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:29:07 +0000

RS -

Most likely a combination of the two. High skilled cities would tend to crowd out low-skilled people because the preponderance of employment opportunities will require advanced skills. The altenative is that there are large extremes between high-skilled and low-skilled work and not much of a traditional low to middle, middle class base of people. I see that playing out in my area: pockets of high-skilled areas and related jobs, and larger swaths of poverty. This is especially prevalent for cities that have seen their (fairly) low-skilled manufacturing base dry up. It really becomes an either/or scenario. Either you have skills that are in demand and contribute to the creative economy, or you do not and struggle.

By: RS

RS — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:49:43 +0000

I often wonder, is that large skilled cities accumulate human capital with more intensity than smaller ones or rather that they regurgitate less skilled people with more intensity than do smaller ones.

Either one should cause the concentration of skills to increase in the former.