Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In his modern classic The Rise of the Creative Class , urbanist Richard Florida identifies the emergence of a new social class that is reshaping the twenty-first century's economy, geography, and workplace. This Creative Class is made up of people-engineers and managers, academics and musicians, researchers, designers, entrepreneurs and lawyers, poets and programmers-whose work turns on the creation of new forms. Increasingly, Florida observes, this Creative Class determines how workplaces are organized, which companies prosper or go bankrupt, and which cities thrive.

Florida offers a detailed occupational, demographic, psychological, and economic profile of the Creative Class, examines its global impact, and explores the factors that shape "quality of place" in our changing cities and suburbs. Now updated with a new preface that considers the latest developments in our changing cities, The Rise of the Creative Class is the definitive edition of this foundational book on our contemporary economy.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

A decade after the first edition (CH, Dec'02, 40-2276), Florida (Univ. of Toronto, Canada) reexamines his ideas concerning the transformation of an economy driven by services, which previously supplanted manufacturing, into one driven by creativity. A discussion of what creativity means can be summed up in two ways. First, it distinguishes humans from other animals. Second, it is the essential ingredient in increased standards of living. As Florida quotes Paul Romer, real progress depends on "better recipes, not more cooking." Society responds by rewarding the creative class with higher incomes (roughly two to three times higher, on average, than workers in other sectors earn) and with more dependable incomes (unemployment rates under 5 percent in the most recent recession). The increased importance of creativity brings into sharp focus Schumpeter's description of capitalism as "creative destruction." Ideas emerge and social norms become obsolete. The personal and professional lifetime commitments of an earlier era are relics yet to be replaced with new compacts that are received with anything near consensus. The optimistic conclusion is that all people are creative beings, so perhaps the solutions to the problems stemming from that creativity are not beyond us. Summing Up: Recommended. All collections and readership levels. J. M. Nowakowski Muskingum University

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Richard Florida is university professor in the University of Toronto's School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, a distinguished visiting fellow at NYU's Schack Institute of Real Estate, and the cofounder and editor at large of the Atlantic 's CityLab.