The Creative and Cultural Economy

The Bozeman Area Chamber of Commerce won’t support the Arts at City Center project if it means higher taxes or if anyone outside the downtown area must pay for it, the organization said in a letter to the city.

Most of all, make education a priority and create systems that encourage entrepreneurs to capitalize on locally produced knowledge.

Today is Wednesday, November 19, a day that in 1863 dawned bright and crisp in a small Pennsylvania hamlet, where a tall man with a sad face mounted a small horse and, long legs dangling…

Richard Florida has some advice for Toledoans who want their city to be a hotbed of creative energy: Don’t try to be another San Francisco.
"The world does not need another San Francisco,"

As Richard Florida in Rise of the Creative Class reminds us, the “creative” have always been the engine of economic success and social change.

"If a good business climate was all that mattered, then everybody would be moving to Buffalo," Florida said. "If you look at where companies are going today, it’s some of the most expensive cities in the world — New York, Chicago and San Francisco." "To me, the three T’s of economic development are technology, talent and tolerance," he said. "But you need all three. Too much emphasis on technology and you wind up like Pittsburgh. Too much tolerance, and you’re Miami or New Orleans — great places to visit, but you can’t work there."

But staying alive, and taking its place with Seattle, Austin and San Francisco on the list of hot U.S. cities propelled by the talent and creativity of their population, are two quite different things.

Launched as a social-justice endeavor in the 1920s by New England society ladies aiding women of the mountains of Appalachia, the arts-and-crafts movement now includes thousands of blacksmiths, weavers and potters from Santa Fe to Sanford, N.C. Its growing acceptance as an "economic development tool" is driven by aging Baby Boomers spending heaps of cash in artist meccas like Asheville, Boone, and Pittsboro. North Carolina trails only New York and New Mexico in sales of American handiwork.

These cataclysmic events, called the Missoula Floods, took place at the end of the last Ice Age, 14,000 years ago.

“I feel like I´m watching a movie I already know the ending to,” Pontello said. While he likes that Boise offers a good job and proximity to the outdoors, the nature of some high-tech work will allow employees to work from more remote locations, away from the problems of a growing city.

“It´s getting easier and easier for me to leave,” Pontello said. “What´s going to keep me from moving to Montana?”