(2005-04-22) Jacobs Florida Packaging

KarrieJacobs on the Creative Class concept being used simply as bland formula. At the conference I ran into my old friend John Thackara, who founded the Netherlands Design Institute and currently runs the Doors of Perception conferences in Amsterdam and New Delhi. We had a series of tortured conversations about how Design is being deployed in increasingly predictable ways. Eventually Thackara got around to pinning the problem on Richard Florida. "It's all kind of tied up to the notion of a Creative Class," he remarked. "For good or ill, design sits bang in the middle of that category. It's quite remarkable how many city planners and developers I've met over the last couple of years who walk around either carrying or quoting this book as if it were a bible of how to make their city hip and modern and successful.".. I'm not saying that an accountant or a corporate manager can't be creative--surely the Enron debacle proves otherwise--but when you read how Florida defines this Creative Class, it's hard to distinguish them from our old friends from the 1980s, the yuppies.