Richard Florida's The Rise Of The Creative Class

What is a “creative city”? What is the “creative class”? “A creative city is a city that has a brand, and reflects a personality” (Landry 2000). Richard Florida says in his book The Rise of The Creative Class “I define the Creative Class to include people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology, and new creative content. (Florida, 2002)" Richard Florida’s idea of people being creative could help improve careers and cities that do lack some creativity, but Florida’s concepts of creativity, the “creative class”, and the “creative city” is a complex idea. Creativity is the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially

It’s an important topic that Florida has a lot to say. Florida in his book says “A Creative Economy requires diversity because every human is creative-creativity cannot be contained by categories of gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.” But also Florida goes on to saying “Creativity must be motivated and nurtured in a multitude of ways, by employers, by creative people themselves, and by the places we live.”(Florida, 2002). Florida’s words are controversial in this part of his book because he says humans are creative but then goes on to saying that creativity has to be motivated and nurtured in different ways. Whereas, if Florida would have said creativity in a person could either come from within or could be ‘motivated and nurtured’ would cancel out any suspicious a “regular person” would have with Florida’s theory because he would not broadly characterising a

These two concepts are similar because they both require being in a city and being creative in order to succeed in becoming a ‘creative city’ or trying to brand a city a certain way. Brooklyn Zoo-How the Nets took over BK in six easy steps by Rembert Browne is a great example on how a city succeeded in branding itself. Mr.Browne in his article talks about a professional sports team located in Brooklyn that was not recognized because of its location surroundings, and overall appearance. The city of Brooklyn then took it upon themselves to be creative and innovated and build the professional basketball team a stadium. The stadium that was built was not just a regular nice looking building, it was said to be “When you emerge from the depths of the Atlantic Avenue train station, chances are that within 15 steps your eyes will find the monstrosity that is the Barclays Center. It’s huge — like a meteor landed on Flatbush Avenue, someone hooked LED lights to it, installed a Starbucks, and designated it an arena.” (Browne, 2012). Not only did the city go all out with the stadium but they also invited Jay-Z to the stadium. ““Put your lights up, don’t be afraid. It’s just Brooklyn.” —Jay-Z, Barclays Center” (Browne 2012). By Jay-Z acknowledging the stadium all of his followers and admirers would want to acknowledge the stadium as well. Florida’s concepts can