Dark Fertile Chaos

Or: Why Richard Florida should read James Scott

In Seeing Like a State, Yale University geographer James Scott sets up a book-length treatise on failed attempts to rationalize (read: dominate and oversimplify) various landscapes throughout history with a parable: the story of scientific forestry.

Invented in late 18th century Saxony and Prussia, the “scientific forest” was an attempt to improve efficiency and revenue by resolving the messy, chaotic old-growth forest – with its hodge-podge copses, disorganized tumbles of fallen timbers, messy brambles and wasteful vacant clearings – into neatly productive rows of self-same trees that would maximize the woodlands’ capacity.

Any naturalist today could predict what would come of these attempts. Minus the decaying logs, clearings for creatures whose droppings enrich the forest floor, host plant species for birds who spread seeds, brambles to shade young seedlings, and multitudinous other intricacies that contribute to the ticking of arboreal clockwork, the woods suffered and – by only the second generation of planting – production fell drastically. The long-accumulated soil capital of the diverse old-growth forest had no way to replenish itself.

Now to the concrete jungles of millennial America, where we’ll situate Richard Florida’s best-selling trio of books – The Rise of the Creative Class, Cities and the Creative Class, and The Flight of the Creative Class. A primary economic shift has taken place, from physical production – industrial manufacturing – to the production of ideas. Cities have lost their middle class to the suburbs and their manufacturing to the tugging forces of globalization and labor outsourcing. In Florida’s view, human creativity has replaced raw materials and physical labor as the primary generator of economic value. Thus, catering to what he calls “the creative class” is a key strategy in revitalizing depressed, decaying city centers.

Florida noticed how artists, bohemians, and other radicals he calls the “creative core” often makes inroads into degraded neighborhoods, searching for affordable rents and flexible spaces, and adding an injection of culture that then attracts the rest of the creative class. The avant-garde core makes a previously unattractive area “hip,” paving the way for physical redevelopment, followed by a second wave of technophiles, entrepreneurs, and educated young professionals — all of whom spark economic development.

Thus, Florida posited, rather than investing in large-scale, cost-intensive public projects like sports arenas and infrastructure to spark economic development, cities would do better to mimic and spread the culture produced by the creative core — attracting the creative class at large, and all the trickle-down (or up, depending on one's perspective) benefits it would surely confer.

Writing at the height of the dot-com bubble, Florida easily won over urban planners, economic developers and academics alike, pointing out how cities who scored high on his creative indices (“Gay Index,” “Bohemian Index”) had correlating high levels of economic growth.

Of course, what Florida describes is a process that is already (sometimes painfully) familiar to the creative-types on whom his theories hang. As developers rely increasingly on their ability to market artistic counter-culture to produce trendy urban communities, artists and other members of the creative core become not only the inadvertent catalysts gentrification, but ultimately its victims as well. Certainly, this is a rather inconvenient (read: exploitative) system for the creative core, who, driven by rising real-estate prices in newly “revitalized” areas, is shuffled continually from place to place in search of affordable rents – to say nothing of the original populations of the so-called “degraded areas,” whom Florida fairly well ignores completely.

A decade after Florida’s theories first drew such widespread adulation (along with plenty of clients, no doubt) it’s unclear whether there has been much economic benefit for anyone other than the economist himself.

But even now, Florida (who has refined his theories, for instance, to take increased post-revitalization housing costs into account) and his detractors seem to be missing the point: creativity is not an end result to be “achieved,” it is a process.

Much like the scientific forest that consumed its soil capital after only one generation, Florida’s artist-driven gentrification engine relies on cultural capital that it, too, fails to replenish. The process of appropriating culture is more than simply unfair to those who produce it, and from whom it is requisitioned.  This “instant culture” method of development is superficial and unsustainable, as it undermines those it depends on.  Furthermore, driven by money and market to its logical ends, this cultural consumption contributes to the very same placelessness, lack of authenticity, and stagnation that it seeks to remedy.

Artists, musicians, bohemians and gays may move into a neighborhood and bring with them their underground clubs, bars and galleries. But as soon as developers swoop in and replace all those grimy, chaotic, generative spaces with a more stagnant version – coffee shops and music stores that seek to emulate avant-garde culture while making it non-threatingly hip and easily accessible for all – something is lost. Like the microflora of healthy soil break down a fallen tree, the creative core “digests” the decaying city, allowing life to spring up anew. When that culture is co-opted – made legible, efficient, marketable like those self-same trees – it is no longer able to survive. The trick is to re-imagine the process Florida describes not as a linear flow – from degraded neighborhood to artist enclave to haven for the upwardly mobile to prosperity for all – but rather, as a cyclical, self-perpetuating system like that chaotic old growth forest, where all parts of the life cycle – towering tree, fallen log, decomposing soil and new shoot – are present all at once.