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The Creative Compact: An Economic and Social Agenda for the Creative Age

Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class and one of the world's leading social theorists and public intellectuals, believes that human creativity is the engine of economic growth. In this final installment of Professor Richard Florida’s Creative Compact, Florida concludes his argument for a new social compact that will ensure our future economic success. Florida reasons that although the United States faces real security issues, it is imperative that we maintain an open society. Florida concludes that the United States must take the lead is forging a Global Creativity Initiative that would focus on developing new approaches to investing in people. Professor Florida is a keynote speaker at the National Conference on the Creative Economy, hosted by Fairfax County, October 24-25, 2007, where he will present his latest thinking on how the Creative Economy will affect companies and communities. To register for the conference, visit this link.

[Principle 1: Every Human Being is Creative, Principle 2: Encourage Entrepreneurship Across the Board, Principle 3: Expand Innovation, Principle 4: A Social Agenda for Creativity, Principle 5: Restructure Education for Creativity, Principle 6: The University as Creative Hub, Principle 7: Make Every Community a Creative Community, Principle 8: Leverage the Local]

Principle 6: The University as Creative Hub

Universities are the hubs of the Creative Economy. America’s strong university system is the source of much of our best scientific, social, and creative leadership. To this point, though, our modern conception of what universities could or should be has been somewhat limited. The tendency to see universities primarily as the laboratories of new research and technology has grown particularly acute in the last 20 years. They do indeed serve our society as technological and scientific laboratories - and amazingly productive ones. But they are much more than that.

Universities also do a remarkable job of fostering the other 2 T’s of economic growth: talent and tolerance. On the one hand, they are undeniably our strongest talent magnets, attracting (as we’ve seen in previous chapters) the best and brightest to our shores. They are the Ellis Islands of the creative age. A huge percentage of the high-tech entrepreneurs that power places like Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, and the Research Triangle came here originally to attend graduate school. Not surprisingly, almost all of our leading creative regions have one or more great universities.

Higher education institutions are also the community entities that, perhaps more than any other, have opened up city after city and college town after college town to the world. In this respect, they are bastions and breeders of tolerance. A university, with its tendency towards openness to ideas, people, and practices not always considered mainstream, is a natural source of diversity - ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural.

Universities and colleges also serve as key building blocks around which older cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh can rebuild. Whenever I am asked how to save Detroit’s economy, my answer is the same: Ann Arbor. The future of the Detroit region in the creative age lies more with the technology, talent, and tolerance engine that is Ann Arbor than in stadiums and a refurbished Renaissance center.

Principle 7: Make Every Community a Creative Community

The world is not just flat; it is also spiky. Globalization increasingly takes shape around city-regions with large concentrations of talent. Leading scholars concur that urbanization economies are the decisive drivers of economic growth, more important even than technology and innovation. As I argued in Rise of the Creative Class, cities are the key economic and social organizing units of the creative age. They promote economies of scale, incubate new technology, and match human capital to opportunities, ideas to places, and innovations to investment. They capitalize on the often-chaotic ecosystem that creates previously unforeseen financial, scientific, social, political, and other linkages to one another.

Urban centers are therefore a core element of the infrastructure of creativity and competitiveness. Yet, in the United States, we have relegated cities and urban policy into a social policy afterthought. At best, cities have been conceived as the responsibility of mayors and city planners. At worst, they have been denigrated as “reservations” where the poor are allowed to exist.

In today’s creative centers, affordable housing and commercial space is being wiped out at an alarming rate. It is yet another irony of the creative age that as we rediscover the importance of vibrant cities, we threaten to choke off the very street-level energy that creates a vibrant city. We must find a healthy balance that allows real estate development to occur in ways that support rather than choke off our creativity and innovation engines. One strategy that will be crucial in striking this balance in our creative centers will actually be to find ways to bolster our older, declining cities. Even as technology enables allows us to work from virtually anywhere, a key fact of the creative age remains its tremendous geographic concentration. The creative economy has emerged and remained largely concentrated in but a handful of leading regions by in the United States and in most countries around the world. It is imperative to decentralize and to spread the benefits of the creative economy - to enable people in a much wider range of regions to participate fully. Bringing a wider number of regions into the creative economy will also help to take the pressure of the leading creative centers which are experiencing levels of growth, sprawl, inequality, and housing in affordability which threaten to choke off the very innovation and growth they have given rise to.

Our older cities are filled with the industrial use architecture, the factory buildings and warehouses that provide the “garages” so crucial to economic innovation. Plus, this infrastructure is already in place. These older urban centers prove fertile playgrounds for the human imagination - but only if we look at them as an opportunity, and not a blight. Such an expansion of urban investment is a win-win-win situation; it reinvigorates our older centers, takes the pressure off the new ones, and results in a stronger overall system of cities with which the U.S. can compete against the rest of the world in the global creative economy.

Principle 8: Leverage the Local

Most of all we need to leverage the local. Cities function not only as economic drivers, but also as social and political laboratories. The real policy innovation in the US and around the world no longer comes from national legislatures or federal bureaucracies but from cities and mayors crafting new, non-ideological solutions to pressing social and economic problems. I always like to say that when I meet local officials in my travels through America and around the world I can’t even tell who is a Democrat from who is a Republican, a liberal from a conservative. Both are working pragmatically to solve real problems.

America needs to utilize this asset, leveraging the local as its laboratories of democracy. America’s “federalist system” since its inception, has encouraged experimentation and learning across states and cities. We may have more problems than we know what to do with, but we also have plenty of latitude in figuring out how to deal with those problems. Other countries with more nationalized or centralized planning and policy have never brought the social and political creativity to the table that the U.S. in able to infuse into its economy. These 'laboratories of democracy,' will continue to provide us with many of our best solutions in the creative age.

Richard Florida, Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, is a keynote speaker at the 2007 National Conference on the Creative Economy, hosted by Fairfax County, October 24-25, where he will present his latest thinking on how the Creative Economy will affect companies and communities. Sponsored in part by FORTUNE magazine, the conference will examine the role that a strong, creative workforce plays in the growth and success of businesses and communities in an information-based economy. To register for the conference, visit http://www.creativeeconomies.org.

Thousands of companies have chosen Fairfax County, Virginia, located minutes from Washington, D.C., as the best place to position their business.  Fairfax County, which the U.S. Department of Labor described as the private-sector job leader in the Washington area, is home to seven Fortune 500 companies, 5,400 IT companies and more than 360 foreign-owned firms.

A U.S. Department of Labor study called Fairfax County the private-sector job leader in the Washington area, and a Time magazine columnist described Fairfax County as "one of the great economic success stories of our time."  With a talent pool like that, you know your options will never run dry. Fairfax County also features a quality of life that's hard to beat, with a top-ranked public school system, excellent public services, innovative George Mason University and Northern Virginia Community College, and access to Washington’s historical and cultural activities. 

To find out what Fairfax County can do for you and your business, contact the award-winning Fairfax County Economic Development Authority. It has experts to guide you as you plan for your business– at no charge.  Call 703-790-0600 or check out www.FairfaxCountyEDA.org.