Ten years ago, Richard Florida published a path-breaking
book about the forces that were reshaping our economy, our
geography, our work, and our whole way of
life. Weaving story-telling with reams of original
research, he traced a fundamental theme through a host of
seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the
growing role of creativity. In the decade since, we
have endured a series of world shattering events—from the
collapse of the tech bubble to 9/11 to the economic
meltdown of 2008—any one of which might have been
sufficient to derail the forces he described Instead,
the drive towards creativity as only intensified, both in
the US and across the globe. In late 2011, the social media
site LinkedIn reported that the word most used by its
members to describe themselves was “Creative.”
In this newly revised and expanded edition of his now
classic book, Florida has brought all of its statistics up
to date (and provided a host of new ones); further refined
his occupational, demographic, psychological, and economic
profile of the Creative Class; incorporated a decade’s
worth of his own and his colleagues’ quantitative and
qualitative research; and addressed his major critics.
Five completely new chapters cover the global effects
of the Creative Class and explore the integral features and
factors that shape “quality of place” in our rapidly
changing cities and suburbs. Florida delves into the roles
played by technology, race, and poverty in perpetuating and
exacerbating income inequality and the pervasive influence
of class throughout every aspect of society. Throwing down
the gauntlet, he proposes a dramatic new social compact for
our time—one that can turn our emerging Creative Economy
into an enduringly Creative Society.
We currently inhabit a strange period of interregnum in
which the old order has collapsed and the new order is not
yet born, Florida writes. The old order has failed;
attempts to bail it out, to breathe new life into it or to
somehow prop it back up are doomed to history’s dustbin.
The key is not to limit or reverse the gains that the
Creative Class has made but to extend them across the
board, to build a more open, more diverse, more inclusive
Creative Society that can more fully harness its
members’—all of its members’—capacities.