Who’s Your (Southern) City?

Tyler Farwell p. June 2009 - Swiped from Southern Spaces Journal - Click for Source

The Oxford American magazine website published a brief interview with Richard Florida this week, focusing on Southern U.S. cities’ positioning in the quiet competition to draw creative talent to the workforce.

As the interview is part of the magazine’s free online content, rather than published in print, the format of the interview is loose, and questioning posed to the Rise of the Creative Class / Who’s Your City author and sociologist is a little roundabout. However, as always, Florida’s responses are concise and careful and the discussion is interesting. Though Florida often conservatively draws back from prescribing any kind of cultural shifting, instead focusing more in the realm of city planning and corporate creative worker migration, he’s stretching out a bit in communicating his understanding of many creatives’ needs to balance authenticity and contemporary opportunities in their local communities.

There are really so few metropolitan areas in the South that do draw a “creative class” workforce, and have the local economies to support the evolution that is required for continued competition. And these places do have tough days ahead as the recession lingers on (in some southern local economies, a depression has been in place). Though I don’t like the idea of  super-metropolis markets like “Char-Lanta,” “Hou-Orleans,” and “Dal-Austin” evolving in the South, mostly because I see much authenticity being lost as these cities sprawl together in all the wrong ways, I do find myself willing to cast off some tradition for the sake of getting to a place where increased creativity and innovation are happening in my backyard.

It is a tricky balancing act though – we cherish and seek this authenticity, welcoming the idea of a new here while longing for a bit of there.  At times, it seems there’s not much authenticity left in some of these “New South” locales.  We are building and evolving our communities, in the South and elsewhere in the U.S., but it’s challenging to keep a grip on the tools for doing so, and to inform the many little decisions that continually coalesce into larger scale change.

There are ways in which I get really frustrated reading Richard Florida’s analyses, but it definitely gets me thinking and encourages me to consider new perspectives. And I always welcome the opportunity to better inform my decisions, and to gain insight into how to maintain a better grip on the tools we need to encourage positive change in our localities.