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Cities and the Creative Class

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Cities and the Creative Class

By: Richard Florida  

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Average Customer Rating: 1.0 out of 5

Description:
Cities and the Creative Class gathers in one place for the first time the research leading up to Richard Florida’s theory on how the growth of the creative economy shapes the development of cities and regions. In a new introduction, Florida updates this theory and responds to the critics of his 2002 bestseller, The Rise of the Creative Class. The essays that make up Cities then spell out in full empirical detail and analysis the key premises on which the argument of Rise are based. He argues that people are the key economic growth asset, and that cities and regions can therefore no longer compete simply by attracting companies or by developing big-ticket venues like sports stadiums and downtown development districts. To truly prosper, they must tap and harness the full creative potential of all people, basing their strategies on a comprehensive blend of the 3 Ts of economic development: Technology, Talent, and Tolerance. Long-run success requires a reinvention of regions into the kind of open and diverse places that can attract and retain talent from across the social spectrum – by allowing people to validate their varied identities and to pursue the lifestyles and jobs they choose.

Publisher: Routledge

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
Not Worth the Time - This honestly might be the worst book I've ever read. I'm a senior in college and was forced to read it for a Sustainable Urban Engineering elective class, and wow what a waste of time. I've never seen an author repeat himself more than Florida did here. He was saying the same things (really, check it out) on, say, page 140 as he was on page 35...that basically cities need to invest not in tax abatements to attract high-quality and talented businesses and people, but need to focus on increasing diversity and quality of life through developing amenities like good social scenes. The book is filled with a bunch of charts, tables, and graphs, backing up his claims that talent and the creative class flock to diverse regions with lots of stuff to do (which, really in my mind isn't groundbreaking information), but they again are extraordinarily repetitive. The book could have easily been condensed into a short article in and I would have gotten just as much out of it.

Customer Review: 1 out of 5
This book is lousy - My hunch is this is a cheap sequel. Not a lot of discussion, just a lot of (regression) results reporting. Extremely repetitive. Moreover, given that this often verves into being fairly social science (as opposed to pop), the causal linkages seem pretty poorly established. If you want to read this for professional reasons (social science or urban planning), most of this could be ignored; if you want to read this for personal (i.e., recreational) reasons, it's really boring.

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