The Creative City (Instructor Video)

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From the course by University of Toronto

The City and You: Find Your Best Place

50 ratings

University of Toronto

The City and You: Find Your Best Place

50 ratings

Welcome to The City and You: Find Your Best Place. I'm excited to have you in the class and look forward to your contributions to the other learners in our community. This free course will provide the knowledge and the tools needed to understand what cities do, why they matter, the forces shaping the greatest wave of urbanization in history, and how to pick the right place for you. The course will also help you develop critical thinking skills. We'll accomplish this by providing evidence of the importance of cities, and why and how they matter to you. Then we’ll ask you to apply what you’ve learned in an exercise which will help you assess your own community and find your best place. This course is accessible and open to anyone who is interested in learning more about cities and the ways they affect our lives. It is organized around five key modules: (1) Why Cities Matter, (2) A World of Cities, (3) The Creative City, (4) The Divided City and the New Urban Crisis, and (5) How to Find the Best Place for You. After completing the course, you will be able to: (1) Identify why cities are the drivers of economic prosperity; (2) Explain the drivers and implications of fast-growing urbanization worldwide; (3) Outline the key characteristics of a creative and innovative city; (4) Describe the social divides and challenges facing cities and the solutions cities are using to address them; and (5) Recognize the trade-offs of staying in your current city versus moving, and identify the best place for you and your family to live. Good luck as you get started, and I hope you enjoy the course!

From the lesson

The Creative City

Cities have been the fonts of creativity since the dawn of civilization. The clustering of creative people in them and the diversity they bring is what drives key advances in arts, culture, and technology. These wellsprings of human progress have always occurred in our great cities from Athens and Rome to London, New York, and the emerging economies in Asia. This session will help you better understand how the clustering of diverse groups of creative people in cities spurs artistic achievement, scientific and technological advance, and human progress.

The Creative City (Instructor Video)8:52

Technology, Talent and Tolerance in the Creative City (Instructor Video)7:30

How Cities Spur Creativity (Instructor Video: includes discussion of the exercise for this week)4:33

Richard Florida Week 3 Follow-up- Cohort 17:08

Richard Florida Week 3 Follow-up- Cohort 24:11

Richard Florida Week 3 Follow-up- Cohort 32:49

Richard Florida Week 3 Follow-up - U of T Alumni Edition8:57

Meet the Instructors

Richard Florida
University Professor and Director of Cities, University of Toronto
Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management

[MUSIC]

If you think about where cities come from.

Our first human settlements kind of grew up around areas that

the soil was fertile and you could plant crops.

Or around natural waterways and ports and harbors.

And that's the way we settled, and we built these bigger and bigger communities.

And we developed trading routes.

And then we had this sort of massive event called the Industrial Revolution.

We took raw materials and we combined them with human labor power.

And we built these giant factory centers.

They often said industrialization went hand-in-hand with urbanization.

That's surely what I learned when I was in undergraduate school.

And so our cities, say since the year 1870 or 1880 or

certainly since the 1900s, grew up around industries.

Our whole theory of cities is, there was a central area of offices and towers.

And around that developed an area of factories and warehouses and

around that came kind of working class housing and the after.

I guess in the 1950s and sixties, we had the development of more roads, cars,

suburbs got bigger and certain industry moved out.

But for all that time,

our cities really were bounded, created by these kind of hard assets.

Either where there was raw materials, or where these giant ports and

factory complexes were located.

[MUSIC]

But you probably know, certainly if you lived in the advanced countries,

that over the past 30 years or so, we've seen de-industrialization.

Our economy's no longer powered by factories.

Factories have moved not only to the suburbs, they've moved to other countries.

They move to Mexico or China or wherever.

In fact, in a place like the United States,

this is kind of an interesting statistic.

Only about 20% of the workforce today is engaged in blue-collar work of any kind.

And only about 5 or 6% of the work actually makes thing in factories.

And you have to think about, well, what kind of happened to cities?

And what happened is that cities became less powered by these physical attributes

and much more powered by knowledge, by ideas, by where people located.

[MUSIC]

I was actually on sabbatical leave at Harvard.

And I went to my office one day and I picked up the copy of The Boston Globe,

the local paper.

And the headline in the business section was that one of the companies that was

a Carnegie Mellon startup.

It was a company called Lycos, early internet search company.

This was about the late 90s or early 2000s.

Why it had moved.

It had moved from Pittsburgh to Boston, and for

the life of me, I couldn't figure that out.

So I called people I knew at the company back at Carnegie Mellon, and

the answer that came back really surprised me.

Lycos was moving from Pittsburgh to Boston not because Boston was cheaper.

In fact, Boston was more expensive.

Real estate was more expensive, people were more expensive, taxes were higher.

There were no bribes or incentives that were used to attract this company.

In the words of the people at Lycos,

the reason they were moving is because the people they needed to grow the business

were more readily available in Boston than they were in Pittsburgh.

And that's when I decided really to write this book and begin to try to think

about why economic development in cities were not just powered by companies,

and by transportation routes and by infrastructure.

Why cities were powered by people.

And I remember, almost as if it was yesterday.

I went to the library, and at that time we actually went more to the library,

it wasn't the age of Google and the Internet.

And I was browsing these shelves in the library and

I saw this book, it's called the Handbook of Creativity.

It was written by a famous psychologist named Robert Sternberg.

And the opening line of that book, I'm not going to get it perfectly, but

it was something like, if you come across a great artist or a great musician.

Somebody, like Andy Warhol or

Pablo Picasso or Louis Armstrong or John Coltrane or Jimi Hendrix.

If you come across a great business builder, someone like Steven Jobs or

Bill Gates.

A great entrepreneur, a great CEO, a great politician.

You have come across a person with the same attributes, a creative person.

Marx and the other classical economists,

they made an argument that it wasn't just physical labor that powered the economy.

Yes, it was people working in factories that were important and

using their skills.

But the argument they were making is that what separated people from other species

was the fact that we use our physical abilities, right, our artisanal abilities,

our physical skill, our hands and our backs, to make things.

And that's what separated us from other species on the Earth.

But when you think about it,

it's not really our physical attributes that separate us.

So that's when the idea hit me that what we were doing is not just moving to

a knowledge-based city, or an innovation city, or a high-tech city, or

information city.

That what we were moving from was an industrial city to something new.

And it was a creative city.

It's not just the knowledge that we acquire as human beings.

It's not simply the information we create or the technologies we build.

It's really the creativity which is sort of inextricably a part of us.

At the turn of the 20th century,

more than 50% of people in the advanced countries worked on farms.

A growing number of us began to work in factories.

Less than 5% of us were members of this creative class.

That's scientists, technologists, innovators, professionals in business and

management, law, and healthcare, and then artists, cultural creatives, designers.

By the year 1950, we had become a fully working class, industrial society.

Now 50% of us worked in factories.

The number of people who worked on farms had actually declined to about 5 or

6% of the workforce.

Less than 10% of us were members of this creative class.

It's really beginning in 1980 that we see this big shift.

Between 1980 and now today, in those 35 or so years,

the knowledge base, the creative class, the artist, the musicians,

the professionals, the techies, kind of explode.

And in an advanced country today, like the US and Canada,

a third of our workforce are members of this class.

But if you take a country like Singapore, or Hong Kong, or

the Scandinavian countries, it's already over 40%.

Now if you zoom in from there and you look at big cities,

San Francisco, Boston, London, Amsterdam, it's well over 40%.

And as you go closer to the urban cores of those cities,

it's 60 or 70 or 80 or 90% of the workforce.

In an advanced country today, we have 5 or 6% percent of our people making things,

another 15% percent or so doing blue-collar work, and about 1 or

2% doing agriculture.

So this creative class, which is a third of the workforce overall, but

more than that in big cities, is really the driving force of our time.

That third of the workforce accounts for more than half of all wages and

salaries paid and about three-quarters of all discretionary income.

It's kind of the trend-setting class.

I was writing this book, The Rise of the Creative Class, and it had,

like, a dozen different titles.

And my editor at the time said, I was doing all of this analysis

of the rise of different kinds of knowledge workers and what was happening.

And he said, you know, Richard, you've identified a new class.

Think about what you've done.

You've just identified a group of people who literally are different from the old

working class.

So basically, my father was a member of the working class.

He worked in a factory and like millions upon millions of other people in America

and Canada, across the world, he used his physical ability.

What I was talking about was the rise of a new group of people who tended to live in

cities, who were using their minds, and their intellect, and their creativity.

[MUSIC]

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