Flattery will get you everywhere.
Or so it seemed when Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class” became the must-read for a number of civic policymakers, city planners, techies, artists, arts administrators and public officials. Even mayors were devouring it – among them Baltimore’s Martin O’Malley and Denver’s John Hickenlooper.
In “Rise” (Florida has since written the “Flight of the Creative Class”), he believes that the United States is in the midst of a tremendous economic sea change.
It’s the sort of paradigm shift, he argues, that is as life altering as the one that heralded the Industrial Age. And the people at the heart of this change make up a new class. These often highly educated, transient professionals are forging a new social entity: the creative class. The thesis will be at the center of a conference in Denver this weekend.
But hold on a minute, says Joel Kotkin, an urban historian from Los Angeles.
“His (Florida’s) whole shtick is based on arts and creativity as the center of everything. There’s something very narcissistic about this thing,” he said in a telephone interview. “But media types and arts people, they love it because it puts them in the center of the universe.”
And who wouldn’t want to be part of the vanguard in an exciting shift in the way Americans live?
“I’m more skeptical than that,” said Kotkin, author of a best seller himself, “The New Geography.”
How skeptical Kotkin is and how much Florida has refined his arguments about the creative class will get an airing this afternoon when the two meet as the keynote conversation of a two-day conference called “Culture, Commerce, Community.” The conference is sponsored by the Denver Office of Cultural Affairs and the Colorado Council on the Arts, as well as the Lab at Belmar, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, and the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts.
Far from being a confab of the uncritical, the conference looks ready to engage on a key issue: What are the benefits the creative sector can deliver for cities, and what are the pitfalls of catering to it?
“I think I say far more strongly in ‘Flight of the Creative Class’ that the people nervous about this are people who feel left out,” Florida said. “They’re scared, they’re anxious. And their fears are being stoked with an argument about family values.
“In order to capitalize on the wealth and opportunity the creative economy promises, we can’t do that by simply investing in high tech and arts and cultural sectors,” he said. “We have to spread its benefits, and we have to include more people.
“There is no way you can build an economy on 30 percent of the labor force. The creative economy is no panacea for the deep social and economic inequities that face us. In fact, left to its own devices, it currently is making them worse.”
It’s reasonable to ask: How, will a city like Denver, which boasts about its high number of college graduates, resolve its shameful public high school dropout rate? What should we make of revitalized downtowns like LoDo that don’t figure children into their design? What about the have/ have-not divide that exists between the first-tier and more community-based cultural institutions?
Broadening notions of what actually constitutes “cultural vitality” is essential to making a term like “creative class” not only more inclusive but meaningful.
Maria-Rosario Jackson, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Urban Institute and director of its Culture, Creativity and Communities Program, kicks off the conference.
“One of the things we’re doing is redefining this idea of ‘cultural vitality,”‘ said Jackson. “We’re really trying to move beyond the most typical ways of thinking (about) becoming a world-class city with a city ballet and opera.
“For us, a more interesting dimension is what creative practices are people engaged in, not only at the professional level but the amateur level,” she said. “It’s not about participating through audience or consumption – that’s a piece of it. It’s also about making, teaching, doing, supporting.”
Cultural institutions have their own have/have-not dynamic. It’s the divide that Chip Walton, producing artistic director of Denver’s Curious Theatre, hopes to address today on a panel called “Democratizing the Arts.”
“I like to think about a cultural community as an ecology,” said Walton. “So you got to be able to have both an ecological balance in terms of size of organization and diversity of organization. You also have to make sure the voices in the organization are included in the dialogue.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
“Culture, Commerce, Community”
CONFERENCE|King Center, Auraria Campus, Friday and Saturday |$65-$185|Registration 8 a.m.-9 a.m., Friday at the King Center|For information go to www.c3colorado.org.
