Just as Richard Florida finally thought he was comfortably settled in Toronto, the city which embraced him with open arms upon his arrival has become increasingly hostile to his theories. Foremost among his critics are the Creative Class Struggle, a Toronto collective whose explicit purpose is to challenge Richard Florida, the Martin Prosperity Institute at U of T – created specifically for him – and his theories on the creative class.
I must admit that upon reading his breakout work, The Rise of the Creative Class, putting dollar signs on certain demographic groups and ranking cities based partly on a Bohemian Index made me more than a little uneasy. But, as I was told by another Spacing blogger who attended the recent Creative Class Struggle debate last week, some criticisms are better than others.
Under the radar of the media, however, has been a longstanding critique in academia of Florida’s creative class that preceded – and likely inspired – some of the growing grassroots opposition to Florida’s work now surfacing in Toronto. Foremost among those is Canadian geographer Jamie Peck, whose 2005 article “Struggling with the Creative Class” threshes out the causes of that uneasiness that many of us feel to Florida’s theories.
In defence of Florida, he is in part a victim of his own success. As a recent article in the Star points out, he knew before moving to Toronto that most of his critics “will come from the left,” rather than from the social conservatives he faced south of the border. Florida also claims in the Star’s piece that he finds himself “intuitively agreeing” with many of the concerns being levelled against him in Toronto.
In the end, it comes down to one key word: correlation. Is Florida simply elaborating on observed economic phenomena (he comes from an economics background) or do his widely popular books that reduce demographics to monetary value implicitly disadvantage underprivileged groups and promote their exclusion from creative – and prosperous – cities?
The next issue of Spacing magazine will feature an interview with Richard Florida where he addresses many critiques of his work.
Photo by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
20 comments
Didn’t know he came from economics. That makes total sense. Oscar Wilde should have said, an economist “knows the cost of everything, and the value of nothing.”
There is an interesting counterpoint in today’s Globe in an article comparing Waterloo to Toronto on the basis of patents per employee. On that scale, Waterloo could be considered twice as creative as Toronto, but so much depends on what you value as “creation”.
Florida struck me as a one-trick pony from his writings where everything had to fit his model. I’m sure he has managed to convince a few people of his worth at UofT, but he seems to have disappeared into that academic bubble with little impact on the life of the city.
The term “correlation” is central to this debate. Does “A” cause “B”, or simply happen alongside it due to some other “C”? What other factors are at work?
By the way, according to the Star article linked above, Florida’s pay at UofT is $346,041.48.
The next time people here feel like bashing overpaid members of unions, they might turn their sights to academia.
I’m a little split how I feel on Florida, myself. He has some interesting ideas, and he definitely knows what he’s talking about when it comes to urbanism (you can see this easily if you read Who’s Your City?), but the whole creative class things… I don’t know. It seems a little too much like an overly neat way of pigeonholing the prosperity of urban areas, and I do worry about the implications of his theories on the urban poor. There are some interesting facets to his work, but it’s certainly worth criticizing and questioning it at the same time.
Steve> Most academics make no where near what Florida makes. Most have years of schooling and training (often loads of debt) — to use academia as a foil to counter “union bashing” (does that include the people who ask about the sick days issues? and other questions about what a job is worth) is ideological extremism.
All this talk about overpaid academics and union bashing… All I know is I’d far rather have my garbage removed (much less have a nurse available in the hospital) than ever hear the mention of ‘the creative class’ again.
I’m really glad to hear that people are providing critiques of RF.
One of the ‘holes’ in his single thesis is that these ‘creative areas’ are continually over-taken by corporate non-creative types. For example, Queen West around John and Peter used to be really interesting and the artists have had to constantly move further west because of increasing rents, then the Drake thought they were clever by leap-frogging this movement – but the artists just made a right turn at Ossington!
Another problem with his singular idea is that most artists or creative people are, gasp, poor!
Steve, “patents per employee” is a restricted and meaningless metric: it completely ignores the arts, which is a large part of the “creativity” that RF is talking about. Even in technical fields, it skews towards corporate R&D, which explains why Waterloo’s output is so high.
Furthermore, U of T’s faculty is not unionized, so your gratuitous swipe at “overpaid” academics misses the mark.
As an academic who’s doing well but making nowhere near RF’s money, I think I’m paid about what my work is worth. And it’s pretty clear that you have no idea what you are talking about.
RF’s ideas are often less than accurate. For instance, I think it was Glaeser that actually crunched the numbers and found that RF’s indexes predicted next to nothing in the US, with cities like San Fran or Boston remaining stagnant while places like Houston or Phoenix absolutely exploded, despite their rather middle class and suburban nature.
CCS types though seemed more insulted by the notion that economics applies to bohemians and gays than any underlying soundness of Florida’s work, though. Reading through their website most of their arguments just consist of left wing boilerplate about social justice and inequality. It usually has nothing to do with Florida or his ideas. Just that yuppie grad students at York don’t like that, tight jeans and beards aside, they can be economically accounted for like every other shmuck.
It doesn’t matter whether Florida is right or not. This is about keeping the chattering classes, especially at the Globe, contented that we’re a “big time” city.
For those who criticise Florida’s paycheque, remember the Raptors are about to hand a guy who bounces a rubber ball 10,000,000 a year, not 300,000. But he’s Turkish so the Star is contented because this validates their pet topic, diversity.
“But he’s Turkish so the Star is contented because this validates their pet topic, diversity.”
mark: that about as ignorant a comment I’ve seen on here by you, and I like your commentary. Turko and his agent clearly stated that Toronto’s diversity was a reason for him to come and play for the Raptors. The Star, and the Sun for that matter, are running with that “pet” topic. And to refer to diversity as a pet project is demeaning on so many levels.
Florida’s back round is technically urban policy and planning, not economics. Interestingly, he is trained as as classical Marxist, and you can see this in his attention to class or class divisions. He just take it in a different direction than most other marxists.
monica – kindly don’t preach. I’m an immigrant too and will be contributing to Toronto’s diversity long after Mr. Tà ¼rkoÄŸlu has collected more in five years than I will make in a lifetime and gone to live somewhere else.
No Mark, she’s right. What is your point: that the Star writes too much about diversity in a city where half the population is immigrants? Or that we should worry more about the salaries of professional athletes than publicly-funded academics?
You bring up interesting points from time to time but this one was weak.
A little late to the table but I am hard pressed to find many union workers at UofT on the 100K list. The largest union on campus, USW, has one pay scale group that can make over 100K.
http://www.hrandequity.utoronto.ca/groups/union.htm
When sorting by job position of the 2034 employees on the 100k list, I don’t really see many, if any, positions that could be held by union members.
http://www.usw1998.ca/salaries_2007.xls
The term class struggle has an interesting aspect, because the so-called “creative class” does not consume much more than other classes. However, they do seem to validate their existence in a traditional class struggle manner: by fighting over space and social validation with other classes. In this case, they appear to prefer targeting industrial workers.
More interestingly, the creative class seems to engage, as you would expect, in particularly bitter struggles over symbols. Consider the battle over 48 Abell, which so many commentators painted as a struggle over gentrification, when in fact 48 Abell did not meet safety standards for a dwelling place, and a non-profit groups (St. Clare’s Multifaith housing) has a plan in place to provide more, and cheaper rent-geared-to-income apartments, including artists’ live-work spaces that would cost less than 48 Abell does now. Having uttered the word gentrification, community groups opposed to the triangle redevelopment did not, it seems, bother to look into what this supposed “gentrification” actually entailed.
Or take the battle over Toronto City Centre Airport, which Community AIR, in its early days, cast pretty explicitly in terms of the “creative class” displacing industrial workers:
In all of this, the airport, while the most prominent industrial target of the “creative class”, does not have that honour alone: see Redpath Sugar also gets its share of attacks.
Wow, people are still talking about Richard Florida.
“In the end, it comes down to one key work: correlation. Is Florida simply elaborating on observed economic phenomena?”
Florida can’t hide behind the argument that he’s simply following what the data are telling him. The science behind Florida’s argument has been called into question (See Ann Markusen’s article entitled “Urban development and the politics of a creative class: evidence from a study of artists” in Environment and Planning A 2006, Volume 38). That means that not only is the creative class thesis morally questionable, it’s also empirically unfounded.
Hey guys… thanks for posting on this. I’m looking forward to reading the interview in the upcoming issue.
There is so much that can be said about the problems with Florida’s theories and how they have been applied.
For now, I’ll just note a recent study indicating that artist members of the so-called “creative class” still see a widening gap between the wealth they create for cities and the wealth they actually earn: http://tinyurl.com/l8xyv4
money is not the only metric of poverty. the creative class may or may not have money, but it is vocal, educated and well-connected.
florida’s theory of the creative class as the driver of city economies happens to dovetail nicely with the creative class’s own self-important narrative of urban growth in which it is both hero and victim…how long since we’ve heard a story of gentrification that includes the people who lived in “depressed” neighbourhoods BEFORE the artists condescended to take up residence and make them awesome? THIS is the kind of erasure of the genuinely poor and otherwise socially marginalized that (i hope) critics such as these are looking to examine. i frankly don’t care about florida and his mansion, or the creative class and their struggles, but i DO care about the centrality they’ve assumed in the governing of our city and the allocation of its resources (and not just financial ones).
how much press was devoted to leslieville’s farcical fight against a new “wal-mart” next to its big-box no frills versus the complete demolition of the local shopping centre in don mills (which was just as vehemently opposed by its own residents, particularly the elderly, but languished in total media obscurity) and its replacement with a high-end plaza residents can’t afford to shop at? or the same in morningside? how much money is poured into more charrettes for the waterfront while there are kids in the far reaches of etobicoke and scarborough who not only have never seen the lake, but don’t even know it exists?
has ANYONE paid any attention to the ethiopian community that’s been steadily opening up (formerly shuttered) businesses around moss park? or noted that chinese supermarkets are moving in to serve communities that chain supermarkets have abandoned in the suburbs (see the new Best Win in the vacated Price Chopper north of the parma court housing complex on vic park for a recent example)? and why, oh why, is anyone looking to question the dominance of the creative class in the city’s culture and public policy holding their “town hall” at a downtown art gallery?