danmelton.net

Tolerance and the Creative Class

Tolerance manifests at the regional level through a process of urban social movements. In the case of gay and lesbian tolerance, this requires concentrated gay and lesbian communities. In the Creative Class thesis, creatives are drawn to regions with strong diverse urban communities. These communities tend to foster diverse urban scenes where creatives can interact with diversity inspiring creativity. This relationship implies a consumption-orientated approach to diversity. Creatives consume the scene, not necessarily contribute to it. In this sense, diversity becomes an amenity. Is this a purely consumptive relationship?

To test this, I collected data for same-sex households, Creative Class workers, foreign-born immigrants, and bohemians at the tract level across the nation’s metropolitan regions. If creatives consume diversity and then go home, we should see a spatial difference or mismatch in the residential locations of these populations. Florida’s argument that highly creative cities tend to attract higher proportions of creatives and diversity is supported by the data. Cities that score increasingly higher on the creativity index also attract a broader array of residents. However, his argument that creatives live with diversity is not supported.

The Creative Class overwhelmingly lives in the suburbs. Only about 20% of Creative Class workers reside in the central city where as the majority of diversity lives in central cities. Unlike same-sex partnered, foreign-born and bohemian households, the Creative Class does not concentrate nor live in diverse tracts in any significant percentage regardless of suburb or central city. Only in the highest creative regions, do creatives concentrate in diverse tracts at a discernable level, mostly in the central city. Diverse spaces appear to be just the ‘country clubs’ of knowledge workers, suggesting that creatives only network or play in diverse enclaves.