Defining the Creative Class – Who are the

"Being a creative is a state of mind–"an attitude, a mentality that covers all ages," even people for whom retirement is already an option…The big difference is that for a couple generations we assumed that suburbs equal prosperity, and cities equal decline. All the buzz now about young creatives suggests why we’re now far less sure."

by Neal Peirce in the Washington Post Writers Group

Contributed by Abhijeet Chavan for Planetizon

Young Creatives–Who Qualifies?

Just what does it take to be a "young creative"–a member of the newly celebrated class of talented people who are said to be sparking local economies, rejuvenating tired old cities and adding energy to every field from the arts to engineering?

To qualify, do you have to work full time in one of those glittering occupations? Live in a city? Do you even have to be young?

The subject riles up lots of people, as I discovered in wide-ranging reaction to a recent column in which I reported about the "Memphis Manifesto," written and promulgated in May by 100-plus mostly young creatives from across the United States.

Being a creative is a state of mind–"an attitude, a mentality that covers all ages," even people for whom retirement is already an option–wrote Lucy Meade, director of business development for the Richmond Renaissance and one of the Memphis Manifesto writers.

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MEMPHIS MANIFESTO IDENTIFIES 10 PRINCIPLES FOR BUILDING IDEA-DRIVEN COMMUNITIES

One hundred “young creatives” from around the country recently gathered in Memphis to develop a call to action around the ideas raised in Richard Florida’s best-selling book, The Rise of the Creative Class.

(Thanks to Southern Compass http://www.southern.org for passing this along.- Russ)

“Ideas are the growth engines of tomorrow, so the nurturing of the communities where ideas can flourish is the key to success,” says the group in the preamble to its “Memphis Manifesto.”

The manifesto spells out ten key principles for building successful idea-driven communities, including: 1) cultivating and rewarding creativity; 2) investing in the creative ecosystem, such as arts and culture, entrepreneurs, and lively neighborhoods; and 3) embracing diversity.

See http://www.creativeclass.org/acrobat/manifesto.pdf.

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Some of us, 20 or 30 or even more years past being a brash twenty- or thirty-something, like that idea!

The definitional dilemma goes back to the images of what creatives seek out in a community. Richard Florida, author of "The Rise of the Creative Class," and other fans of the new idea say this includes places with high counts of gays, counterculture "Bohemians," and even some tattoo parlors to indicate a town tolerates diversity and different ideas.

Florida’s more precise definition of the creative classes ranges from scientists and writers to forward-thinking people in business, law, technology and health care. But the counterculture talk easily leads one to think just of the young.

For the record, the group of creatives that assembled to write the Memphis Manifesto–urging a new openness to new and brash and creative ideas in communities nationwide–was tilted to young professionals. But it did have a scattering of people of many ages, Republicans as well as Democrats, multiple races and suburbanites balancing out the dedicated urbanites.

How much depth is there to the creative class, even if you agree it exists? Harrison Marshall of North Carolina should be a card-carrying young creative. He’s a self-described planner-landscape architect-photographer-musician-cook married to a museum educator-master gardener-baker, living "in Raleigh’s only `artists’ colony’ neighborhood."

Most of the explosive growth in Raleigh has been fueled by tech and telecom professionals working for companies in and near the Research Triangle Park, notes Marshall. But are most of them creatives? No–"most of them are dull, living a conventional suburban lifestyle," aloof from civic life, content with their existence in and near "suburban cul-de-sacs, malls and commercial strips with the usual assortment of national big boxes and chains."

And that’s not all, Marshall asserts: "Whether they’re gentrifying parts of San Francisco or expanding the north Raleigh sprawlurbs, the last thing most tech types want is diversity." Rather, they’re the strong social force "behind mediocrity, sprawl, bad schools and exclusivity." Plus, they’re often footloose, tending to "view communities as disposable commodities."

Foul call, reply some young creatives. Employment sites in the suburbs aren’t generally drawing creative workers these days, they assert. And if Raleigh’s sprawl is being driven by tech firms, they believe the blame should be placed on the governments, universities and companies that decided decades ago to locate the Research Triangle Park away from the centers of Raleigh and Durham.

Young creatives, it is acknowledged, aren’t predictably active in civic affairs. "It’s always the case that a few people make a big difference in a city. The others watch (often with skepticism) and (later) enjoy," notes Carol Coletta, the Memphis radio journalist and consultant who launched the Memphis Manifesto project. Why, she asks should it be different with the creative class?

So what’s going on here? Is there a conscious separating out of types of people, whether they’re truly "creatives" or not? Bill Bishop, talented writer/analyst on social trends for The Austin American-Statesman, e-mailed that suggestion to me.

"The cool parts" of the Research Triangle Park area, noted Bishop, are Chapel Hill (home to the University of North Carolina) and battered but trendy Durham (home of Duke). "If you want a tech job and warm weather and suburban living, you move to Raleigh or Dallas. But if you want a tech job and warm weather and something funky, you move to Chapel Hill, Austin or Atlanta’s Midtown."

The same choices, when one thinks of it, exist across America–suburban and conventional, on the one hand, or more urban and funky on the other. The divisions "look like two different worlds," Bishop notes, "because, quite literally, they are."

The big difference is that for a couple generations we assumed that suburbs equal prosperity, and cities equal decline. All the buzz now about young creatives suggests why we’re now far less sure.

Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is [email protected].

http://www.postwritersgroup.com/archives/peir0630.htm