The title of this piece - "Why I Don't Love Richard Florida" (which actuallly sounds like a great short story title) - depends on knowing who Florida is. (See Creative Class for a speedy skinny - essentially, hipness sustains city vibrancy more than big mass projects).
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.
These days every time I walk down, say, Rivington Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, or Fifth Avenue, in Brooklyn's Park Slope, I notice how the distinctions between the hip places are beginning to blur. One cool business district looks pretty much like the next, just the way one suburban mall looks pretty much like the next. And once you start thinking about creativity in terms of class, hipness as a monoculture seems like the inevitable outcome.
For another take on the relations between hip counterculture, and its marketisation, see the vastly illuminating set of interviews that Ken Goodman aka R.U.Sirius recently did with Raw Story, around his new book on the counterculture. The interlocutors are Thomas Frank, Joseph Heath, and Douglas Rushkoff.
I think this is a big issue: what might an authentic urban vitality be? At what point might policy makers and planners in cities push their embrace of difference too far, turning it into the kind of identikit designerism the Metropolis writer sees? (See the magus Momus on the perils of this). Or, from a ludic perspective, is this just unsophisticated pining for a simpler, less mediated world?
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