The Five-Taco Ride
It’s been a particularly illuminating week. Any beliefs I had that I was successfully balancing dissertation-writing with on-the-bike fitness came to an abrupt end around four hours into a long ride from Oakland to Mt. Diablo and back. The ride - ostensibly a “five-taco ride,” representing the number of taco-truck tacos wolfed down at the [...]
Pittsburgh: Robots Are Cooler Than Cows
One of the keys to building a sustainable, creative economy is leveraging a city or region’s assets and engaging the citizens with those assets. A great piece in today’s WSJ highlights how Pittsburgh, PA and Carnegie Mellon University (where Richard taught/lived for years) has supported its citizens’ efforts to learn about and build robots - [...]
World’s Richest Dropouts
Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Richard Branson. According to this story in Forbes, 73 of the world’s 1,125 billionaires dropped out of school along the way. An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal reports on research that says preschool is counterproductive - keep the kids home with mom and dad longer. Finland, where kids [...]
The Urban Style Exchange
What is a hipster? Being a DJ in the contemporary North American urban nightlife scene, it’s a question that I get to ponder a lot. Last month, on their cover, Adbusters ran a story called Hipster: The dead end of Western civilization characterizing them as: one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior [coming] [...]
Architecture and the Hippie Movement
Seems the sixties and the hippie movement around the Bay Area had a big impact on architectural innovation a la Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, as well as music, popular culture, food (Alice Waters), and technology. Zahid Sardar, writing in the San Francisco Gate, reviews Alastair Gordon’s new book, Spaced Out: Crash Pads, [...]
Canada’s Creative Economy
A new report out by The Conference Board of Canada states that the culture sector directly contributes about $46B CDN or just under 4 percent to Canada’s overall GDP in 2007. The economic impact on the economy is much broader - $85B CDN in 2007, or just over 7 percent of total real [...]
Eastern Creativity
Zoltan Acs has an interesting report on global entrepreneurship which finds Tokyo as the least entrepreneurial city of any his team measured. What are we to make of this? When I go to Tokyo I am amazed at the creativity. A walk through Harajuku, Omote-sando, Ginza, Kichijoji, or any number of [...]
Following the Kids
In Who’s Your City?, I wrote that the old trend of kids moving home after college was beginning to give way to a new one - boomer parents following their kids to more exciting cities. According to this New York Times report, it’s starting earlier than that. I’d heard about affluent parents buying condos for [...]
It’s Easy Being Green
Any change or innovation tends to beget unexpected consequences. One that Cisco Systems did not expect was that implementing mobile technologies alongside a novel workplace layout can significantly reduce a company’s paper usage. When Cisco Systems created a new concept workplace for its general administrative division, they sought to improve collaboration, not reduce the amount [...]
Another (Frivolous) Casualty of Global Warming
Im already lamenting the end of the shopping bag the gorgeous kind, you know, with maybe satin or grosgrain handles, like from Hermes or Donghia or Laduree in Paris. The kind you may hold onto for years, cant bear to toss. And the whole ritual of having your purchase lavishly swathed in tissue paper, [...]
In the last 5 years, Richard Florida has penned two national bestsellers, The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class. His books before that, especially The Breakthrough Illusion and Beyond Mass Production, paved the way for his provocative looks at how creativity is revolutionizing the global economy.
Florida has authored pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Economist, The Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Chronicle for Higher Education, U.S. News and World Report and more. His next book, a look at the way that people choose the places they live and how that affects everything from their real estate to their families, is due out in 2008.
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Creative Class is a registered service mark of Richard Florida
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