Brain power's brave new world

By ANDREW LAXON

Professor Richard Florida was strolling across the campus at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University on a beautiful spring day when he saw a table of young people wearing blue T-shirts inscribed Trilogy@CMU.

He knew Trilogy was a software company in Austin, Texas, with a reputation for recruiting the university's brightest students. So he asked them if they were recruiting.

"No, absolutely not," they replied. "We're just hangin' out, playing a little Frisbee with our friends."

A long way to come for a Frisbee game, thought Florida. He started talking to a young man in a tank top, with spiked multi-coloured hair, full-body tattoos and multiple ear piercings. An obvious slacker, decided the professor. Probably in a band.

The slacker turned out to be a top student, who had just signed the highest-paying deal of any graduate in the history of his department with the "non-recruiting" Frisbee players.

Florida was intrigued by the young man's thinking. Why would he want to leave Pittsburgh, a big city with top universities, symphony orchestras, art museums and sports teams, for Austin, a relative backwater with no professional sports teams or cultural facilities to match the Pennsylvania city?

Simple, he replied. The company, the people and the work were important, but the clincher was living in Austin - lots of young people, a thriving music scene, ethnic and cultural diversity, fabulous outdoor recreation and a great nightlife.

He knew Pittsburgh well and had received several good job offers. But he felt the city lacked the lifestyle options and tolerance he craved. "How would I fit in here?" he asked.

To Florida, an urban redevelopment guru coming to Auckland this week for the Knowledge Wave conference, this man is a representative of the creative class - a new breed of knowledge workers, artists and free-thinkers who drive today's economy.

He believes society has moved on from an "organisational" era shaped by corporations to a creative era, in which almost a third of the working population now think for themselves or "create meaningful new forms" in some way.

It might sound a little hazy, but Florida's book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, has been getting a lot of attention in America.

Readings of the national best-seller, which peaked at 32 on Amazon.com's top 100 list, have been packed. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants Florida's ideas on rebuilding Ground Zero - Florida has obliged with a report suggesting Lower Manhattan should change from high rise finance to a people-friendly downtown area.

If his theories are right, a lot of important people should be feeling uncomfortable. He is scathing about city leaders who invest millions in sports stadiums when the new creative class wants more cycleways and neighbourhood art galleries.

And he attacks the politically fashionable promotion of young families as a city's most desirable asset.

Wrong, says Florida. What you really want is more young people - who work hard and can afford to take more risks - plus bohemian artists, immigrants with fresh ideas and gays.

He uses a gay index to calculate a city's diversity and tolerance, as a good indicator of its receptiveness to different kinds of people and ideas.

Florida says the creative class is headed by a "super-creative" core of scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers and architects, and the "thought leadership" of modern society - nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion-makers.

These people, who he estimates make up 12 per cent of the workforce, might design products, invent strategies or compose music for a CD.

The common element is that they produce new forms or designs which society finds useful.

Behind them are creative professionals in knowledge-intensive industries such as high-tech businesses, financial services, legal and healthcare professions, and business management.

They use their detailed grasp of complex knowledge for creative problem solving. They don't usually come up with new methods or products, but they think on their own, exercising judgment and juggling new and old approaches to find solutions.

Florida calculates that the creative class in America comprises 38 million people or about 30 per cent of the workforce, up from 10 per cent at the turn of the century and less than 20 per cent as recently as 1980.

He ranks the long-term economic potential of US cities on a creativity index, which combines their creative class share of the workforce, high-tech industry, innovation - measured in patents per head of population - and diversity, measured partly by the gay index.

America's top five cities with more than 1 million people are San Francisco, Austin, San Diego, Boston and Seattle, closely followed by Washington and New York.

There is no information on how New Zealand cities rank but Auckland - stumbling from traffic congestion rows to its own stadium debates - seems likely to get some feedback this week.

Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast is already on record as a Florida fan and wants to build on the capital's new image as a trendy cultural centre.

Florida says his theories developed almost accidentally at first. When he was a boy in Newark, New Jersey, his father owned a factory. He used to tell his son it was the knowledge of the workers that made the factory, not the machines.

Later Florida watched Newark and his father's factory decline. He got his PhD in housing and urban dynamics, became a university professor and wrote books on venture capital and globalisation. At Carnegie Mellon he became part of an attempt to make Pittsburgh a high-tech city.

Then he heard that Lycos, a new internet search engine company spun off from the university, was moving to Boston. At first he couldn't understand why - Pittsburgh seemed to have everything Lycos needed.

He gradually realised that Lycos moved because Boston had far more talented workers - in business terms "human capital".

He started asking creative people in Pittsburgh and elsewhere how they chose places to live and work.

The answers came back - diversity, lots of jobs rather than just "a job", and plenty of outdoor sports, arts, music and nightlife. Many asked for activities they didn't do themselves but liked to know were available.

The gay index developed when Florida compared notes with a colleague who was researching where homosexuals liked to live, and found their results were similar.

They gradually decided the common factor was a mix of creativity and diversity. Florida later combined this with high technology to invent his creativity index.

He says it may look unconventional but it outperforms our conventional way of measuring human capital, which is the number of people with a BA degree or higher.

Florida's theory is certainly about as far from the traditional economic development model as it gets.

Until recently, most people assumed that company location drove growth.

Governments fell over themselves to offer tax incentives to multinationals - Australia and New Zealand frantically courted Motorola a few years ago - only to be jilted when another country offered better tax breaks or cheaper labour.

But his ideas have been acclaimed all over the US - except in his adopted hometown, Pittsburgh, where he has bluntly concluded that the city's leadership "just doesn't get it".

City planners have dismissed his ideas as unworkable in the current economic climate. Letters to the editor and talk show callers accuse him of trying to make the city a yuppie haven.

Last month, he said he was considering offers to take his $20 million Creativity Institute to the bright lights of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago or Washington.

"The thing with Pittsburgh is, does Pittsburgh want it?" he told the local Tribune-Review.

"What a great way to market Pittsburgh to say that Pittsburgh gave rise to these theories that are being embraced all over the country. Instead, they're saying, 'Get the hell out'."

Hometown defensiveness aside, Florida does seem to have a rose-tinted view of counter-culture, not to mention a tendency to confuse creativity with trendiness and a new wave of positive stereotypes.

His catchy ranking systems for cities and companies seem to assume that people who enjoy rock climbing, cycling and Ultimate Frisbee are automatically gifted.

On the other hand, radio sports talk listeners will be dismayed (or perhaps unmoved) to learn how low they rank in the creativity stakes.

And it will be interesting to see how local businesses respond this week to his assessment of the Austin way, or as he sums up the new corporate attitude: "You're a creative. You want to play in a rock band at night and do semiconductor work in the day? C'mon! And if you want to come in at 10 the next morning and you're a little hung over or you're smoking dope, that's cool."

If they don't agree, they probably just don't get it.

Put your city to the test

Herald Special Report - February 18, 2003:
Knowledge Wave 2003 - the leadership forum

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