Richard Florida, who has made popular the phrase, the Creative Class, recently published an article, “America’s Looking Creativity Crisis” in the Harvard Business Review of October, 2004.
In a report prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Enterprise, Opportunity and Innovation (who comes up with these awful titles), he and others, argue that,
Creativity has replaced raw materials or natural harbours as the crucial wellspring of economic growth. To be successful in this emerging creative age, regions must develop, attract and retain talented and creative people who generate innovations, develop technologyintensive industries and power economic growth. Such talented people are not spread equally
across nations or places, but tend to concentrate within particular city-regions. The most successful city-regions are the ones that have a social environment that is open to creativity and diversity of all sorts. The ability to attract creative people in arts and culture fields and to be open to diverse groups of people of different ethnic, racial and lifestyle groups provides distinct advantages to regions in generating innovations, growing and attracting hightechnology
industries, and spurring economic growth. (Competing On Creativity: Placing Ontario’s Cities in North American Context, Meric S. Gertler, Richard Florida, Gary Gates, and Tara Vinodrai. November 2002. Report prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Enterprise, Opportunity and Innovation and the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity.)
It is depressing where Hamilton is in many of the indexes in the report – usually below the Canadian average, except in the “Diversity and Mosaic Index.”
The report suggests that,
The main area where Canadian city-regions apprear to lag (behind the US) is talent. … This consistently low performance relative to their counterpart city-regions in the United States
likely reflects, at least in part, the somewhat divergent economic structures in the two countries. Especially in Ontario, manufacturing activity (in which even highly skilled workers may not have a bachelorís degree) remains a considerably more prominent source of employment than it does in many American city-regions. Nevertheless, it also indicates a generally lower level of educational attainment across the board for residents of Canadian city-regions.
Ontario ñ and Canadian metropolitan regions generally ñ perform much better on the creativity (Bohemian Index) and diversity (Mosaic Index) measures. (p. 21)
The report suggests that we have strength in social and cultural, but need more talent, by which they mean university-educated people. “The one consistently less impressive finding concerns educational attainment levels, where Ontarioís and Canadaís city-regions perform less well than their US counterparts on the Talent Index.” (p. 24) As for the wider implications,
These results also have wider implications for public policies related to urban development and growth management. They suggest that Ontarioís and Canadaís city-regions ought to reinforce and strengthen their urban character by using planning tools that encourage higherdensity growth, diverse, mixed-use urban redevelopment, and the preservation and accentuation of authentic, distinctive neighbourhood character. (p. 25)
So, let us stop paving valleys in order to fuel suburbs and invest in a creative Hamilton!