The Rise of the Creative Class

As creativity has come to be valued and systems have evolved to encourage and harness it, a new social class is rising. The so-called Creative Class as defined by Richard Florida in his book The Rise of the Creative Class. I skipped the part on the Creative Economy, but I was more interested in the social definition of the members of the Creative Class. A few notes:

The core of the Creative Class include people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technologies and/or new creative content.

Creativity
Creativity draws crucially on our ordinary abilities. Noticing, remembering, seeing, speaking, hearing, understanding language and recognizing analogies: all there talents of Everyman are important. Simonton finds creativity flourishing in place and times marked by four characteristics: “domain activity, intellectual receptiveness, ethnic diversity, and political openness. Practice without process becomes unmanageable, but process without practice damps out the creativity required for innovation

Indentity
Today, the people in my interviews identify themselves through a tangle of connection to myriad creative activities. One person may simultaneously a write, researcher, consultant, cyclist, rock climber, electronic/world music, amateur gourmet cook, wine enthusiast or micro-brewer. The creative individual is no longer viewed as an iconoclast. He or she is the new mainstream. Most members of the creative class do not own and control any significant property in the physical sense. Their property which stems from their creative capacity is an intangible because it is literally in their heads.

Goals
Motivating creative people has always required more than money. It depends on intrinsic rewards and it tied to the very creative content of their work. To ranked factors about work: challenge, flexibility, job stability, peer respect,technology and location.

Location
What they look for in communities are abundant high-quality amenities and experiences, an openness to diversity of all kinds (technology, talent and tolerance), and above all else the opportunity to validate their identities as creative people. The holders of creative capital prefer places that are diverse, tolerant and open to new ideas. Workers in the elite sectors of the postindustrial city make “quality of life” demands, and increasingly act like tourist in their own city. Quality of place: what’s there, who’s there and what’s going on Creative people, in turn, don’t just cluster where the jobs are. They cluster in places that are centers of creativity and also where they like to live.

Workplace
Artits, musicians, professor and scientist have always set their own hours, dressed in relaxed and casual clothes and worked in stimulating environment. They could never be forced to work, yet they were never truly not at work. The no-collar workplace replaces traditional hierarchical systems of control with new forms of self-management, peer recognition and pressur and intrinsic forms of motivation, which I call “soft control”.

Schedule
We work at times when we are supposed to be off and play when we are supposed to be working. This is because creativity cannot be switched on and off at predetermined times, and is itself an odd mixture of work and play. The growth of the Service Class is in large measure a response to the demands of the Creative Economy. Members of the Creative Class, because they are well compensated and work long and unpredictable hours, require a growing pool of low-end service workers to take care of them and do their chores.