Technology, Talent and Tolerance in the Creative City (Instructor Video)

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The City and You: Find Your Best Place

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University of Toronto

The City and You: Find Your Best Place

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Welcome to The City and You: Find Your Best Place. I'm excited to have you in the class and look forward to your contributions to the other learners in our community. This free course will provide the knowledge and the tools needed to understand what cities do, why they matter, the forces shaping the greatest wave of urbanization in history, and how to pick the right place for you. The course will also help you develop critical thinking skills. We'll accomplish this by providing evidence of the importance of cities, and why and how they matter to you. Then we’ll ask you to apply what you’ve learned in an exercise which will help you assess your own community and find your best place. This course is accessible and open to anyone who is interested in learning more about cities and the ways they affect our lives. It is organized around five key modules: (1) Why Cities Matter, (2) A World of Cities, (3) The Creative City, (4) The Divided City and the New Urban Crisis, and (5) How to Find the Best Place for You. After completing the course, you will be able to: (1) Identify why cities are the drivers of economic prosperity; (2) Explain the drivers and implications of fast-growing urbanization worldwide; (3) Outline the key characteristics of a creative and innovative city; (4) Describe the social divides and challenges facing cities and the solutions cities are using to address them; and (5) Recognize the trade-offs of staying in your current city versus moving, and identify the best place for you and your family to live. Good luck as you get started, and I hope you enjoy the course!

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The Creative City

Cities have been the fonts of creativity since the dawn of civilization. The clustering of creative people in them and the diversity they bring is what drives key advances in arts, culture, and technology. These wellsprings of human progress have always occurred in our great cities from Athens and Rome to London, New York, and the emerging economies in Asia. This session will help you better understand how the clustering of diverse groups of creative people in cities spurs artistic achievement, scientific and technological advance, and human progress.

The Creative City (Instructor Video)8:52

Technology, Talent and Tolerance in the Creative City (Instructor Video)7:30

How Cities Spur Creativity (Instructor Video: includes discussion of the exercise for this week)4:33

Richard Florida Week 3 Follow-up- Cohort 17:08

Richard Florida Week 3 Follow-up- Cohort 24:11

Richard Florida Week 3 Follow-up- Cohort 32:49

Richard Florida Week 3 Follow-up - U of T Alumni Edition8:57

Rencontrer les enseignants

Richard Florida
University Professor and Director of Cities, University of Toronto
Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management

[MUSIC]

My mom was a very basic kind of woman and she drummed into my head,

if I was going to be successful, I had to excel at the three Rs.

Of course, the three Rs, reading, writing and

arithmetic aren't Rs at all but that's what she said.

So I said if I could develop a formula, a simple idea,

that my mother could grasp, maybe then mayors and

city leaders, it would resonate more than out of an academic community.

And I called it the three Ts, I said for a city to get this kind of creative impetus,

it needed to do three things.

It needed to invest in technology, I had seen this in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh was a technology leader, it had spectacular universities,

it had great technology-based companies.

But what was happening is that technology was bleeding away.

It was moving to other regions, the San Francisco Bay area, Austin, Texas,

Seattle, that were capitalizing on it.

So I said the second T's a no brainer, a city needs to have talent,

it needs to have great schools for its young people but it needs to have

great research universities in places that attract talent.

But also it needs to be able to retain the talent,

I'd often say in Pittsburgh at the time, the great export of Pittsburgh

wasn't steel it was the talented people who were being produced.

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.

[MUSIC]

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

[MUSIC]

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.

[MUSIC]

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.

We were so mesmerized by these giant factories with their giant assembly lines.

With this suburban sprawl that we forgot, and they were quite productive that we

really believed that it was technology and industry that grew our economy.

We forgot that, and now, we're remembering, it's almost as if that

industrial period was a little bit of a historical aberration.

We're not only remembering,

we're kind of getting back to our true roots that it's always been.

That it's the clustering of creative people and

human creativity, actually, not clustering, the flourishing.

The ecosystem conditions that enable creativity to flourish,

that has powered economic growth.

And as those other things have become less important,

as agriculture requires less people to do it.

As industry requires less people to do it, we can begin to see how the clustering

of diverse groups of creative people in cities drives our economy forward.

And I think the one thing I'd really like to take, for you to take away,

is that we've seen this shift from the older industrial city.

The city of just big buildings and big factories and roads and

infrastructure to a city of creativity.

And it's interesting,often times the buildings are the same,

the factory buildings that used to house the industries.

Those loft buildings are not the same ones the creative class is inhabiting.

And Jane Jacobs had a great quote about this,

she often said new ideas require old buildings.

That the old buildings that are flexible and large and could be reprogrammed and

are adaptable,

are the very same places innovative people flock to time after time.

But the big take away I want you to think about, is that what really is part of

our human DNA, what really makes us human, which has always powered our economy,

is this coming together of creativity in cities.

[MUSIC]

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