A Creative Manifesto…

by Richard Florida

Click HERE to download the Manifesto

The Most Important Decision of Your Life…

Increasingly, the place you choose to live will help determine your success in business, in finding a life partner, and in living a fulfilling life. In fact, it may be the most important decision of your life.
I believe that we are in the beginnings of a shift as fundamental as the industrial revolution was over a century ago—one that will have as dramatic an impact on how people live and work. Furthermore, it will have a dramatic impact on where they live and work.

Here’s why:

1. The world is moving to a creativity based economy. The places that succeed will be the ones that stay ahead of the curve and are able to adapt quickly.
2. This creative economy is based on creative people—not just artists and musicians, but engineers, scientists, architects, and educators. These are whom I call the creative class, people who work with their minds to create new things with value.
3. Creative people can live wherever they want. This means the creative economy is different from the older industrial or agricultural economies, where resources like iron or coal, or location on trade routes, were what determined business location. The new resource is people, and they’re mobile.
4. Creative people cluster. They move to places where there are other creative people for them to interact with.

Why Some Cities Are Creative Winners…

In the 1990s, I was an academic economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, studying urban economic development. And Pittsburgh—despite world class universities, professional sports teams, cultural institutions and a trained workforce—was one of the new economy’s losers. Its educated young people left, new industries didn’t form, and unemployment was growing.
I started looking at cities that were the winners and what they had in common. Working with a team of graduate students and researchers, I identified three characteristics of cities with dynamic economies that we came to call the Three T’s.

1. Talent. These regions had lots of college-educated people. But we thought there was something deeper, and what we found was that they had concentrations of people in certain creative professions, which we named the Creative Class.
2. Technology. The creative economy regions had lots of high tech companies, and they excelled at innovation (measured by numbers of patents). Most economists agreed on these measures of success. But as I searched for why some cities were attracting these people and businesses, we dug into the demographics and came up with some surprising and controversial findings in our third T.
3. Tolerance. Our research found that the cities that were succeeding in the first two T’s had a third thing in common—they were open to many different kinds of people, ideas and lifestyles. The three distinct groups that were identified with creative class cities in high numbers were Gays, Immigrants and Bohemians (artists and musicians).

Click HERE to download the rest of the creative manifesto, including a ten-step process for deciding on a new place to live..

About the Author

Richard Florida is the Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, and the founder of the Creative Class Group, a for-profit think tank that charts trends in business, communities and lifestyles. Florida has held professorships at George Mason University and Carnegie Mellon University, has taught as a visiting professor at Harvard and MIT, and is a former senior scientist with the Gallup Organization. His national best-seller, The Rise of the Creative Class, was awarded the Washington Monthly’s Political Book Award and Harvard Business Review’s Breakthrough Idea Award. Florida’s next book, Who’s Your City?, will be released March 10th, 2008.