This is an interesting critqiue of Richard Florida, who seems to be very popular in many different circles for his theories on “The Rise of the Creative Class.”
These parts of the critique were relevant to me:
At the conference I ran into my old friend John Thackara, who founded the Netherlands Design Institute and currently runs the Doors of Perception conferences in Amsterdam and New Delhi. We had a series of tortured conversations about how design is being deployed in increasingly predictable ways. Eventually Thackara got around to pinning the problem on Florida. “It’s all kind of tied up to the notion of a creative class,” he remarked. “For good or ill, design sits bang in the middle of that category. It’s quite remarkable how many city planners and developers I’ve met over the last couple of years who walk around either carrying or quoting this book as if it were a bible of how to make their city hip and modern and successful.”
and also…
Florida has taken something qualitative and turned it into something quantitative. That’s what social scientists do. It’s their special form of creativity. But in his argument in favor of economic development based on the arts and on businesses favored by the kind of people who enjoy the arts, he seems to have exaggerated either the size or the creativity of his Creative Class. I don’t have any more faith in the prevalence of Florida’s class than I do in the so-called values voters who cropped up after the elections. Both groups exist in nature but have been somewhat inflated for the sake of argument.