So reads the tagline for this May 2002 story in the Washington Monthly by Richard Florida (a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh) about the relationship between a city’s economic growth and the amount of “creative” people living in that city, or it’s “creative class.”
Despite the somewhat flippant tagline, Florida presents quite a fascinating (and persuasive) thesis — taken from his just published book The Rise of the Creative Class — based on what he calls the “Creativity Index” which makes use, among other things, of something called the “Gay Index” which Florida calls “a reasonable proxy for an area’s openness to different kinds of people and ideas”. He was spurred in his research by the economic development (or lack of it) in Pittsburgh, which despite being a top-ten ranked research and development city, loses many of it’s creative people (and companies) to other cities.
Probably not surprising, but San Francisco ranks number one on Florida’s list of most creative cities, though I hear they’ll soon be losing that rank now that I’ve departed. 🙂 Actually, I was curious to see where other cities I’ve called home at one point or another rank on Florida’s list:
Honolulu: a “bottom-ten” city, ranked 23rd out of 32 on the medium-sized cities list.
Houston: 7th most creative (large cities list)
Tucson (my birthplace many moons ago): 3rd most creative (medium-sized cities)
Lexington, KY: 9th most creative (small-sized cities list)
See where your city ranks.