The real creative class

Abstract

A 'creative class' mania now pervades many cities and communities across the global west and beyond. Even in Shanghai, the new kid on the global city block, old warehouses on a recreated riverfront advertise 'creativity' in plain view of 'old economy' recycling centres and traditional housing quarters. These cities purportedly face a new grim and stark reality-dark and deepening global timeswhich hovers to batter and sear their economic fortunes. As urban prognosticator Felex Rohatyn (in Scrimger and Everett 1999) noted relatively early on at a US Conference of Mayors Meeting, 'we can not ignore [how] globalization [and new business people] has obliterated frontiers. Public officials who ignore this do so at their constituent's peril.' The proposed antidote is neat and tidy: more entrepreneurialism, economic tautness, and creative-civic beings and spaces. This new pragmatism posits creative subjects and spaces as needing cultivation, attraction, and pampering. The unequivocal call: find these creative people and manufacture these spaces or die. This essay does not interrogate the truthstatus of that global fear. Instead, we argue that the term 'creative class' in this urbangrowth rhetoric has been grossly mis-applied and is a class-based, mystificatory concept. We suggest, first, that the real creative class in these cities is the poor. We chronicle their immense contribution to the contemporary urban economy, and their deft resourcefulness and ingenuity in a remarkably creative everyday round. This point reworks creative-class guru Richard Florida's own assumption that the key features of a creative population is their central contribution to city economic solvency and the use of daily ingenuity. We suggest, second, that applying this revised conception of the creative class to spur city growth and development would be irrational. Cultivating this true creative class and replenishing their creativity (a supposed necessity) would require that public policy keep the poor mired in poverty and spatially managed and controlled. Finally, we suggest that this true creative class (the poor) is

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