Adam Greenfield’s shared some thoughts in advance of his talk for the World Congress on Information Technology:
People are creative; industries, not so much. And cities?.
The sprawling cohort Florida anoints as creative for the purposes of making his case have so little in common otherwise that it’s hard to ever imagine them constituting a coherent constituency, voting bloc, market or audience.
I also wish somebody would tell me just which fields of human endeavor constitute these supposed “creative industries.” The laundry list of criteria that have been advanced strikes me as more self-congratulatory than diagnostically useful…
I’ve been bothered for some time by uses (inspired by Richard Florida or not) of “creatives” that seem to imply a group set apart who garner some special set of entitlements. [Such thinking was particularly clear in the twitter chatter about the Digital Economy Bill a couple of weeks ago]. Adam nails some of that here, coupling it with the usual sensible thinking about urban policy.