The Rise of the Creative Class
– Richard Florida

“Cities have realized that they can attract educated people and they don’t need good schools to do it.”

The Creative Class is a posited socioeconomic class identified by American economist and social scientist Richard Florida, a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. According to Florida, the Creative Class are a key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the United States. [From: Wikipedia.com]

Fl

orida’s first national bestseller received the Washington Monthly’s Political Book Award and was cited as a major breakthrough idea of 2004 by the Harvard Business Review.

Toronto’s Globe and Mail called it “an intellectual tour de force, scholarly yet colorfully written,” and its ideas have been implemented and called on for inspiration in communities and cities across the United States and the world. [From: Creativeclass.com]

The national bestseller that defines a new economic class and shows how it is key to the future of our cities.

The Rise of the Creative Class gives us a provocative new way to think about why we live as we do today – and where we might be headed.

Weaving storytelling with masses of new and updated research, Richard Florida traces the fundamental theme that runs through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing role of creativity in our economy.

Just as William Whyte’s 1956 classic The Organization Man showed how the organizational ethos of that age permeated every aspect of life, Florida describes a society in which the creative ethos is increasingly dominant.

Millions of us are beginning to work and live much as creative types like artists and scientists always have – with the result that our values and tastes, our personal relationships, our choices of where to live, and even our sense and use of time are changing.

Leading the shift are the nearly 38 million Americans in many diverse fields who create for a living – the Creative Class.

The Rise of the Creative Class chronicles the ongoing sea of change in people’s choices and attitudes, and shows not only what’s happening but also how it stems from a fundamental economic change.

The Creative Class now comprises more than 30 percent of the entire workforce. Their choices have already had a huge economic impact. In the future they will determine how the workplace is organized, what companies will prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities will thrive or wither. [From: Barnesandnoble.com]

“You know what they say, they say we want our kids back. We want them to stop leaving. What they don’t say is that they want other people’s kids to move there.”

“A powerful, insightful book that reveals the core of regional advantage in the knowledge economy. Never before have I seen anyone capture so succinctly the values and desires of the new ‘creative class’ and the essence of human capital and the creative ethos. This is a book you will read cover to cover and feel enlightened by every chapter.” ~John Seely Brown, Former Director, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and co-author of The Social Life of Information

“The Rise of the Creative Class is an insightful portrait of the values and lifestyles that will drive the 21st century economy, its technologies and social structures.

To understand how scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other self-motivated, creative people are challenging the traditional structures of the 20th century society, read this book.

It will convince you that success in the future is not about technology, government, management or even power; it is all about people and their dynamic and emergent patterns of relationships.” ~Lewis M. Brancomb, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.  [From: Amazon.com]