But I said in order to do those two things, because both technology and
talent could move, a city needed to be tolerant.
It needed to be open to diversity because
creativity is this very interesting human resource.
It does not respect, it will not respect the social categories of race, gender,
sexual orientation, age, physical ability, creativity cuts across.
And the places that were most successful were the places that could
not only attract and retain, but top the creativity of everyone.
One of the things that I came across was that in the San Francisco Bay area,
where these startups were coming from, between a third and
50% of those start ups were founded by a new American.
Somebody who wasn't born in the United States who happened to be foreign born and
come from another country.
So I began to see, very importantly, that creativity required these three inputs
technology, talent, and tolerance, and to be successful you needed to do all three.
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So what I began to realize at the time, is that the things to these we're doing,
they may have been appropriate for the old industrial economy,
or the business driven economy.
But they weren't, necessarily, the kinds of things they should be doing for
the new knowledge or creative or talent-driven economy.
One thing cities were doing were these big mega projects,
building stadiums that cost like a billion dollars each for
baseball and football teams or building giant convention centers or
investing huge amounts of money in arts institutions.
I call them in the book the SOBs, the symphonies, the operas, and the ballets.
What I began to see is that it was smaller things that really mattered,
it was the kind of things that really people want in their community.
They wanted walkable streets,
they wanted cafes to go to, they wanted good schools nearby.
All of these really small scale things, and
I called that a quality of place, not quality of life, quality of place.
That what people really want is a place that has this quality
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The second thing we did after that with a group of people, is create a second index,
because I wanted to understand these kind of artistic and
cultural things which people called amenities.
Was there a better music scene was there a better art scene?
So we did a very simple thing, we simply looked at the places more artists and
musicians were likely to work, we called it a bohemian index.
That bohemian index, like our gay index,
was also very closely associated with places that were more innovative,
that had higher incomes, that had higher rates of economic growth.
And the reason isn't because artists or gay people start more companies.
It's because places that have a bigger arts and bohemian community have a bigger
open-mindedness, they have a bigger mental map if you will.
They're the kinds of places that are more likely to enable people to take risks,
that don't have this kind of homogeneous outlook, have a very broad-minded outlook.
And therefore, the same kind of places that were attractive to the gay
community or lesbian community, or that were attractive to artists and
cultural creatives are the same kind of places that entrepreneurs find attractive.
And what's interesting is now we find this massive migration of high
tech venture capital start-ups into these very same neighborhoods.
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If we look back through all the millennia, we'll see that the most clustered and
densely developed, and diversed places of their time were always the most
creative and the most economically flourishing.
This has happened from when we were in caves, and developing cave paintings and
simple tools.
This happened when we developed great cities like Rome, Vienna, and Paris, and
Berlin and London.
This isn't something new, but
what happened is during the Industrial Revolution, I think we forgot it.