The article below is somewhat dated but I found it interesting nevertheless when thinking about its implications on Singapore. Also happy to note which university Prof. Florida, the academic cited here, is from(Go Tartans!). I would propose a additional 'T' in Singapore's case--namely "Temperature". That would be a negative factor for the rise of the creative class on the island, I'm afraid. It's also funny to note that since this book came about, obviously some government official read it because in the years since then, Singapore has become more and more accepting of homosexuals(one of the factors covered under "Tolerance") in her usual government-prompted ways--legalized gay bars, permitted bartop dancing ( my gawd! :) ) for example.
Yet I see many signs that Singaporeans are beginning to venture out on their own. Many old friends started their own companies doing a variety of stuff. Dare I say that the air seems less stifling nowadays?
(source: The Sunday Times (Singapore) 14 July 2002, by Zuraidah Ibrahim)
Where the creative class goes, success follows, their presence of absence can make or break a city.
Technology, talent, tolerance. They define the new creative class which a city must attract and retain, says a new major US study. ZURAIDAH IBRAHIM explores the issue FOR Singapore to thrive economically, it must accept immigrant talent, artists and homosexuals. At least, that is what a major new study of American cities suggests.
Richard Florida, a professor of regional development at Carnegie Mellon University, surveyed 49 urban centres with populations of at least one million, to try to discover the secrets of economic dynamism.
His findings, contained in a book published last month, point to the importance of what he calls the 'creative class'. He defines this class as that band of people whose job is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content.
They include not just people in science and engineering but also architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment and other cultural producers. They see themselves as separate from two other classes - the working class and the service class.
Where the creative class goes, success follows. Their presence or absence can make or break a city, Prof Florida argues. Right now, they make up about 30 per cent of the American workforce.
His book, The Rise of the Creative Class, has created a buzz in the US, where there has always been fierce competition between regions for investments and jobs.
He rejects the infrastructure approach of the many regions that are trying to clone Silicon Valley by creating R&D parks, office complexes, technology incubators and the like.
'This is essentially betting the future on an economic development model from the past,' says Prof Florida. Especially controversial is his contention that cultural and lifestyle factors have hard economic impacts.
The creative class is not just peopled by 'knowledge workers' but also by bohemians that are not normally associated with high economic productivity.
Florida rejects the long-held belief that workers move to where companies and jobs are. The creative class has other motives when choosing where to live. The 'power of place' has never been more important than for the creative class, he argues. The creative class wants to be where there is a happening scene, a pulsating music and arts environment, and a tolerant and diverse population. Thus, a city needs to focus on getting the right 'people climate'.
'This entails remaining open to diversity and actively working to cultivate it, and investing in the lifestyle amenities that people really want and use often,' he says.
Based on his focus groups and a range of astute observations, he points out that the creative class prefers an eclectic range of activities where music and the arts are equally prized alongside technical innovation.
Prof Florida offers the theory that economically successful cities that can attract and retain the creative class are those that possess the three Ts - technology, talent and tolerance.
So how do homosexuals come into the equation? Gays are a proxy determinant of how tolerant and diverse a place is. 'To some extent, homosexuality represents the last frontier of diversity in our society, and thus a place that welcomes the gay community welcomes all kinds of people,' says Prof Florida. Cities that have gays and bohemians in abundance are more likely to have creative class workers, a deep high-tech industry and consequently, strong economic growth.
Florida tethers this argument to various statistical findings. He applies a 'Gay Index', constructed by a fellow Carnegie Mellon academic, to rank regions by their concentrations of gay people. He also devises a bohemian index, which measures the number of artists, musicians and the like. After crunching the numbers, he finds that there is a strong correlation between high concentrations of gays and bohemians on the one hand, and economic performance on the other.
The gay and bohemian indices are related to the depth of cities' high-technology industry, measured by the size of their software, electronics and engineering sectors.
Put simply, where there are gays, there are geeks and vice-versa.
Based on his studies, he concludes that San Francisco is the most creative city in the US, followed by Austin, Texas, and San Diego, California. San Francisco has the highest concentration of high-tech savvy people, high-tech industries, and a high degree of innovation, as measured by patents filed per capita. Long known as the gay capital of the US, it unsurprisingly scores high on the bohemian and gay indices.
Even when the extreme case of San Francisco is removed from the analysis, Florida still finds a high correlation between high numbers of gays and high number of high-tech industries.
He says that Austin as well as Dublin, Ireland, are two cities that 'get it' in their bid to draw the creative class. He contrasts them with his own hometown, Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh, despite being a university town with high rankings on innovation and technology, is not successful at retaining talent. His diagnosis: Pittsburgh, an industrial town that has been an innovator in many fields, is a city trapped in the success of its past.
The problem is not about economics alone but a rigid culture and attitudes that drive away talented people. And as they leave, the impetus for change also goes with them.
Reactions in the US to the book have been mixed. City leaders are beating down his door to hire Prof Florida as a consultant, but some fellow academics have described it as a faddish piece of work. Mr Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist, points out that the theory fails to account for the sterling success of non-tech centres like Las Vegas, which ranks 47 out of the 49 cities surveyed on the creativity index.
In many ways, the ingredients that Prof Florida finds in those cities that 'get it' are the same ones that Singapore has on its own checklist of plans that are in progress, whether it is in creating top-notch universities, investing heavily in R&D and creating a 'Renaissance City' that pulsates with life and its nurturing of the arts.
However, there are other features that are less compatible with Singapore's approach. In particular, Prof Florida is not impressed by cities that emphasise only the needs of traditional nuclear families. He notes that the leaders of many cities want to cater exclusively to married couples with stable family lives in the middle and upper-income brackets. But this is not the way to build a great city, because 'a successful city needs a range of options to suit all kinds of people', most importantly young talent.
The book is also scathing about cities that have developed as copycat reproductions of other cities, with 'canned experiences', such as large retail malls and theme attractions. The creative class, the author says, desires authenticity in the settings it finds itself in. His argument resonates with the appeals by architects and artists in Singapore who have opposed the Government's headlong rush to renew the city and develop theme parks like Sentosa and Chinatown, at the expense of authentic local colour.
He acknowledges that the creative class can be a fickle lot. They change their minds and move on.
What security is there for cities like Singapore? Unfortunately, he does not have an answer.
Still, providing amenities and focusing on the arts are proposals that are easier to swallow for a conservative city than the idea of emulating San Francisco's bohemian and gay scene. In Singapore, nuclear families are the norm, making up 82 per cent of households. How much diversity can Singapore tolerate without unsettling those parents who want to raise their children in a culturally safe or even conservative environment?
Is it possible to embrace the bohemians and gays and yet remain a traditional family-affirming place? Are there cities that have made that transition from an emphasis on conservative family values towards more tolerance for the creative class?
In an interview with Sunday Review, Prof Florida says this is what virtually all top-scoring US cities have done. The transition towards more liberal values occurs as part of economic development.
He says that Singapore, like other cities that want to succeed, has no choice. Otherwise, it will be in trouble: 'Because its creative class will leave and migrate.'
* * * * *
Comparing cities: San Francisco and Singapore
Richard Florida in his new book, The Rise of the Creative Class, identifies San Francisco as the most creative city in the United States based on several measurements. How does Singapore compare?
While statistical comparisons are hard to come by, here are some observations of similarity and difference.
BOHEMIANS AND GAYS IN THE CITY
San Francisco
The city has a strong gay community, and is among the most progressive in the country in its attitudes to homosexuality. Local politicians have run for election openly as homosexuals. The mayor, Mr Willie Brown, has officiated at gay 'marriages'.
In the 1960s, the Bay Area was a centre of hippie culture. It continues to attract artists and musicians, although in the last few years, many have complained about being driven out by high rents due to the dot.com boom.
San Franciscans pride themselves on their own local music, authors and artists.
Singapore:
Homosexual sex continues to be illegal, and gays have been stopped from organising themselves officially. The Government says that it will not go out of its way to enforce the law, but that the majority of Singaporeans are not ready for homosexuality to enter mainstream culture.
Gay culture therefore remains underground.
Places for artists to gather, while growing, are not comparable to San Francisco. Artists complain that Singaporeans' materialistic culture makes it hard for young people to choose alternative paths.
HIGH-TECH INDUSTRY
San Francisco:
The city's backyard is Silicon Valley, which has been the hot-bed of technological innovation for almost half a century. Silicon Valley is the headquarters to some of the biggest tech companies in the world, including Intel, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Apple and Oracle.
In the 1990s, the San Francisco Bay area ranked No. 2 in the number of patents filed in the country, or about 49,120 patents in a population of 6.5 million, or about 0.7 [Error! See footnote 1] patents annually per 1,000 people.
Singapore:
Creative Technology is about the only homegrown high-tech company of note. While it does not have many homegrown tech giants, Singapore is the regional headquarters to a number of tech firms. The number of patents granted last year was 7,570, or about 1.9 patents per 1,000 people.
More than 97 per cent of these were filed by non-residents, including multi-nationals such as IBM and Sony.
So, bohemians need not apply?
In another study released earlier this year, sociologist Robert Cushing of the University of Texas reported that conservative cities with durable social institutions tend to be less creative.
His study of 100 American cities concludes that 'individualistic and polarised communities' where talented people of diverse backgrounds junk tradition, join boycotts, sign petitions and participate in local reform groups, are the very cities of ideas.
Responding to a report of that study, Straits Times correspondent Andy Ho, in a commentary piece published in The Straits Times on June 7, 2002, argued instead that Singapore should not adopt a hands-off approach.
'For one thing, bohemianism simply leads to dissipation, but creativity is hard work. For another, intervening in the creative process may actually help creativity,' he asserted.
He cited author John Irving, who first made his name with the bestseller, The World According to Garp, as saying his writing is 'one-eighth talent and seven-eighths discipline'.
'His own students who succeed creatively, he observes, are not the most talented ones but, rather, those with the greatest stamina, and who are obsessed with writing well,' the columnist said. 'More must be done to create opportunity, space and time for people to learn the work skills necessary to do deeply-engaging work. Those skills may cross disciplinary lines.'
But, he maintained, 'there is no need to smash durable institutions'.
Fostering creativity calls not for a hands-off approach but, rather, principled and targeted intervention. Intervening to promote multi-disciplinary training and trans-disciplinary work can lead to new ideas, he said.
Coincidentally, in a letter to the Business Times, Dr Linda Lim, the Singapore-born Professor of Corporate Strategy and International Business at the University of Michigan Business School, made the point that foreign talent is not the mobile workforce that soapbox columnist Rod Wyatt made it out to be.
There are many reasons for the relatively shorter stay of competent expatriates in Singapore, but the lack of a night-life is not one of them. 'It is quite possible that the availability of night-life matters more to...'fly-by-nighters' who are less likely to be committed to a particular location and thus more likely to turn over in their jobs and countries for superficial reasons,' Dr Lim wrote.
She said that most expatriates she knew were motivated more by career challenge and opportunities for personal growth than the availability of night entertainment.
MELTING POT
San Francisco:
In 2000, about 28 per cent of the San Francisco Bay area population were foreign-born, an increase of 60 per cent since 1990. Asians and Hispanics account for two-thirds of the immigrants. Immigrants may come into the area as hired foreigners but soon become their own bosses, founding more than one-third of start-ups.
Singapore:
In 2000, one in four people living in Singapore were not citizens or permanent residents. The Republic is trying systematically to attract foreign talent. While the Government has cited several numbers to show how they contribute to the economy, many Singaporeans are unconvinced that the right type of talent is entering the country.
* The study covers 49 cities with over a million people ** The rankings are based on:
* The 'creative class' share of the workforce
* The number of patents filed per capita
* The presence of high-tech industry as measured by the software companies and the strength of the engineering sectors
Footnotes
1. The Sunday Times made a computational error here. The ratio should be 7.6 per 1,000, not 0.7
