Richard Florida’s best selling book ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’ (2002) set out the blue print for an urban revival which was to capitalise on the economic prosperity of young workers in metropolitan areas. He defined a fast-growing, well-paid and well-educated (Florida, 2002) section of the workforce as the creative class, with members commonly working in industries such as technology, journalism, the arts, entertainment, finance and more. According to Florida, the creative class centre around an ethos of individuality, creativity and individual merit (Florida, 2002) while their affinity to quirky and accepting places meant that towns and businesses adopt strategies aimed to attract creative people (Florida, 2002). During the seminar for this session, we discussed the reason behind this idea being so popular. We concluded that Florida’s work was exactly what neoliberal policy makers wanted to hear, with the creative workforce representing an ideal vehicle to ‘pave the way for a post-welfare era’ (McRobbie, 2018: 35). Almost 20 years since his book was published, Florida’s optimistic world view of a civilisation of young workers defining a new social and economic geography (Florida, 2002) has not quite unfolded how he predicted.

To bring in some context, after the 1997 election of Britain’s New Labour government, the term ‘creative industries’ was adopted to account for the jobs commonly filled by members of the creative class. This new set of ‘ideas and policies privileging the capture of collective creativity as intellectual property’ (De Peuter, 2011: 418), is what brought about a new creative economy. Although falling in line with Florida’s ideas, traditional ‘cradle-to-grave jobs have been outpaced by non-standard work’ (De Peuter, 2011: 418), resulting in a landscape where labour precarity and job uncertainty have become an increasingly defining feature (De Peuter, 2011). Florida also failed to account for the fact that the self-romanticism of creativity would be taken advantage of by businesses (McRobbie, 2018), meaning the idea of work without protection is sold as ‘exciting compensation’ (McRobbie, 2018: 35) for being a member of the creative class.

(Russo, 2019)

So if the reality for many people working in the creative industries is job insecurity, where are the highly educated and well paid workers (Florida, 2002)? This begs another question to do with the diversity of Florida’s creative class, which seems to represent a ‘new assemblage of the middle class’ (McRobbie, 2018: 35). For those who aren’t white, middle class workers, there is an additional labour struggle that must take place to battle against prejudice before getting into interesting work (McRobbie, 2018). Florida’s ideas have been labelled elitist and blamed for the rich getting richer (Wainwright, 2017) and when taking into account the growing precedence of the post-fordist economic model (De Peuter, 2011) which sees businesses aim to access ‘labour like water’ (De Peuter, 2011: 419), you can begin to see why.

As an idea, the creative class is a pleasant thought where like minded individuals drive the economy via the development of intellectual property. While for some people this is the case, the reality is that the creative economy is a ‘neoliberal idiom’ (De Peuter, 2011: 418) which takes accountability and responsibility away from big businesses and places it on the shoulders of the individual.

References:

De Peuter, G., 2011. Creative economy and labor precarity: A contested convergence. Journal of communication inquiry, 35(4), pp.417-425.

Florida, R. (2002) The rise of the creative class (Vol. 9). New York: Basic books.

McRobbie, A. (2018) Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries. John Wiley & Sons.

Russo, C. (2019) ‘The Creative Class: Big Business Builders’ [image] Available at: https://www.therobinreport.com/the-creative-class-big-business-builders/ [Accessed: 22 November]

Wainwright, O. (2017) ‘‘Everything is gentrification now’: but Richard Florida isn’t sorry’. Guardian. 26 October 2017. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/oct/26/gentrification-richard-florida-interview-creative-class-new-urban-crisis [Accessed: 21 November 2020].