Cities and the creative class

Author: Richard Florida

Abstract: From the seminal work of Alfred Marshall to the 1920 studies by Robert Park to the pioneering writings ofJane Jacobs, cities have captured the imagination of sociologists, economists, and urbanists. For Park, and especially for Jacobs, cities were cauldrons of diversity and difference, creativity and innovation. Yet over the last several decades, scholars have somehow forgotten the basic, underlying themes of urbanism. Generally speaking, the conventional wisdom about regional development for the past two decades has been that companies, firms, and industries drive regional innovation and growth, and thus there is an almost exclusive focus in the literature on the location, and more recently the clustering, of firms and industries. From a policy perspective, this basic conceptual approach has undergirded policies which seek to spur growth by offering firms financial inducements, incentives, and the like.