Did Richard Florida Create Gentrification?

Judging from the scorn heaped on Richard Florida for his new book "The New Urban Crisis" one could believe that this man single-handedly created this new crisis of "winner takes all" and of the two very disparate cities by writing his first book "The Creative Class".



Urban demonstration

His "creative class" and his observations about the world being spiky, are a more elegant expression of the German proverb which states that "the devil always shits on the same pile". Progress has always been lopsided. Now decrying it looks like a late awakening for which the author is rightly derided. Far from congratulating the man for having gained new insights during the last 15 years, the New Republic ridicules him for simply being "nimble".

While cynicism can be fun, a critique from the left should be a bit more analytical, more historical, and less ad hominem. We will use a bit of Marx to put the critique back on its feet.



When Florida wrote the "Rise of the Creative Class" in 2002, the financial crash of 2007/8, the foreclosure crisis, the red hot pace in which some US cities gentrified, and a real estate developer and casino owner President were all future events which even dyed-in-the-wool Marxists could not have predicted even though they always predict calamity as inevitable in capitalism.  Marx' Kapital predicted mergers, incredible concentrations of power, overproduction and value destruction to get rid of whatever surplus. Except Marx didn't predict that capitalism would be around as long as it has or as nimble as it has proven to be. In the last round of nimbleness capitalism rediscovered US cities, some of which had been given up for good. Had Florida a role in that?

"I got wrong that the creative class could magically restore our cities, become a new middle class like my father's, and we were going to live happily forever after. I could not have anticipated among all this urban growth and revival that there was a dark side to the urban creative revolution, a very deep dark side. [..] cities are gentrifying, people are being priced out, displaced from their homes. I think we need a new vision for cities that combines an optimistic viewpoint with an understanding of the challenges that re-urbanization brings." (Florida in the Houston Chronicle 2016)

Favorite punching boy for the left: Richard Florida

Florida is a self-described left leaning book author. To blame him for the ills of the divided American city, bifurcated by race and class, is as absurd as blaming millennials, creatives and hipsters. To explain reality by a description of it or a term for it ("the creative class") contradicts Marx' Historic Materialism, in which not ideas form reality but material conditions, such as the productive forces. It is a staple of left ideology that "The multitude of productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society" (Marx, The German Ideology). To blame a wordsmith like Florida for the bad outcomes of a hyperventilating capitalism would make a real Marxist laugh.

Marxists would actually agree with Florida that the productive forces have progressed to a point where productivity doesn't depend any longer on human labor as muscle power. That the production relations are operated in the interest of profit-making and not to satisfy human needs is certainly nothing new. Marx already stated that capitalism has solved the problem of production, but that it couldn't solve the problem of distribution and that capitalism had outlived its social usefulness because  "material productive forces of society [are] in conflict with the existing relations of production" (Marx, A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy). If the accumulation of wealth becomes so concentrated that the mass of people can't afford the goods, capitalism stumbles into another crisis, because, as Robert Reich correctly states in his video "Inequality for All", no economy can prosper without a thriving middle class. The idea that crisis makes progress is deeply ingrained into left thinking, unfortunately to the point that incremental reform is frowned upon as way of prolonging capitalism. In that view creatives are simply useful idiots for "the system".

Chicago street unrest 1968

From a historic materialism perspective one could say that in his first book Florida made observations about production concluding that it is increasingly dependent on creative brain power. In his second book he simply confirms that capitalist production is prone to producing crisis and increasingly antagonistic conditions. He merely observed that cities shifted dependency from deep water, rail access or commodities to knowledge infrastructure and quality of life. It really isn't the messenger's fault, then, that the "theory" of the Creative Class is as some critics say "narcissistic, shallow, immature, and racist (the creative index is negatively correlated with large populations of racial minorities) [and seeing] the world in terms of how they can extract their own gratification from it" (John December).

No doubt, the proselytizing of members of the Ueberbau  (Marx term for the superstructure of ideas and culture spanning over top of the production base) can be grating. Their simple explanations and remedies of and for complex societal shifts, are usually too limited to be a good explanation and even less a prescription for a practical path to the future, whether their names are Richard Florida, Andres Duany (New Urbanism), Putnam (Bowling Alone), David Rusk (Cities without Suburbs) or Doug Rae (Shrinking Cities). The slogans and single cause explanations come and go without really changing the base or the system. Thus, the criticism of Richard Florida is confusing cause and effect or as he himself often noted:  "correlation is not causation".

Richard Florida: New book, old crisis

This confusion is pervasive and goes far beyond one author and the unfortunate title of the book that catapulted Florida to fame. In fact, the entire liberal center-left has become the favorite punching bag for the "real" left, who likes to speak in the name of the working class, or other disenfranchised groups such as Black Lives Matter or immigrants since the Democratic Party establishment anointed Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders and subsequently lost the election.  Now fundamentalists from the left and the right agree on ridiculing the urban "liberal elite" escalating the divide from the urban to the national scale and to urban versus rural.

Bucking the trend: Macron in France

The French election is a bump on this road even though it shaped up in a familiar formation:  Jean Luc Melenchon played the role of Bernie Sanders,  Emmanuel Macron the role of Clinton and Le Pen, of course was Trump. Except, the French lived up to being the birthplace of enlightenment.

The left tendency to eat their own is known from history, not only after the French Revolution. "Wer hat uns verraten? Sozialdemokraten!" (Who betrayed us? Social Democrats!) was a slogan of the radical left denouncing Germany's Social Democrat (liberal) chancellor during the 1920's Weimar Republic. The young German democracy dissolved and the result became one of the worst periods in human history. This experience should not only make Germans appreciate a more rational approach, even if the problems the right and the left describe are, no doubt real. If global peace, prosperity and wealth have overall increased and not decreased after Marx, it is because of reforms, ingenuity, creativity, trade, travel, the exchange of ideas, and persistent organizing, even though the world is still waiting for a system that provides better distribution. We know with certainty that neither Mussolini nor Chavez offered better distribution in the end and should know that walls, tariffs and restrictions won't make the world a better place either.

What this all mean for cities? Florida's observation that cities are still in a crisis in spite of the urban renaissance is a very American way of looking at cities, because both, the dereliction of cities and the come-back, have not been as accentuated elsewhere in the world. Europe, Japan and some more established South American countries never abandoned its cities the same way the US did through the suburban boom years. In emerging economies cities show similar ailments as England or the US showed during industrialization: incredible growth combined with deplorable slums and poverty, examples range from Caracas to Calcutta and from Bangkok to Lagos.

Florida divides urban observers into the two camps of optimists and pessimists, that, too, a strictly American perspective since outside of the US hardly anybody ever doubted that the future is urban.

A gaping intellectual divide splits leading urban experts into two distinct camps: urban optimists and urban pessimists.
The urban optimists focus on the stunning revival of cities and the power of urbanization to improve the human condition. For these thinkers (myself among them, not too long ago), cities are richer, safer, cleaner, and healthier than they have ever been, and urbanization is an unalloyed source of betterment. The world, they say, would be a better place if nation-states had less power, and cities and their mayors had more.
In stark contrast, the urban pessimists see modern cities as being carved into gilded and virtually gated areas for conspicuous consumption by the super-rich with vast stretches of poverty and disadvantage for the masses nearby. Urban revitalization, in the pessimists’ view, is driven by rapacious capitalists who profit by rebuilding some neighborhoods and running others down. Global urbanization is being foisted on the world by an unrelenting neoliberal capitalist order, and its defining feature is not progress and economic development, but slums, along with an economic, humanitarian, and ecological crisis of staggering proportions.

The distinction between optimists and pessimists is an apolitical one and is less the result of analysis as one of self reflection of the author. The bifurcation between have and have-nots, Florida's spikiness,  has been around for most of history and is the very reason why Marx wrote his manifesto in the first place. In the US the division has accelerated since, at least, when Ronald Reagan was president, long  before Florida wrote any bestsellers. The divisions are the most accentuated where capitalism reigns most unfettered;  ironically that now also includes former communist cities.

Creativity and innovation have always propelled the means of production, it has simply taken on a bigger role now. What is new is that new methods of production could reverse the past trend of ever larger cost of production which, as Marx explained it, required ever larger accumulation of capital and therefore forced mergers and concentration. The new technologies allow low capital disruptive start-ups. It wasn't part of Marx teleological path to socialism that Musk's Tesla company would be valued higher than General Motors, but he did envision that under communism production would no longer be alienated, but become an expression of creativity and desires allowing people to pursue each day another trade. Florida didn't make that point about the Creative Class, but he could have.


Increasing US income inequality

History to date shows that the answers to the unchecked enrichment of a very few lies less in Marx' revolution than in continued organizing, in laws and regulations and yes, government (!) to balance capitalism's innovation and productivity increases with social, moral and human principles. The much maligned "liberals" or social democrats of Norway, Sweden, Switzerland or even the Neo Confucianists of South Korea and or social policies of Japan have created systems in which cities prosper with much less racial or class division,  with fewer slums and without masses that are deprived of even a basic safety net, even though these systems, too have come under increased stress since the global financial crisis.


After Florida's second book the path to better distribution remains uncertain. But it is certain that no city or country can prosper in the long haul if large parts of the population are excluded from access to opportunity.



Klaus Philipsen, FAIA



Forbes about the new book "The Urban Crisis"
The New Republic: Richard Florida, Mr. Creative Class, Is Now Mr. Rust Belt

City Journal: The Curse of the Creative Class

The American Prospect: The Ruse of the Creative Class
Forbes: Richard Florida Is Wrong About Creative Cities
Richard Florida:  What Critics Get Wrong About the Creative Class and Economic Development
Livable City - Unequal City The Politics of Policy- Making in a « Creative » Boomtown
Robert Reich Video: Inequality for All
Richard Florida: Confronting the New Urban Crisis (CityLab)

The book, Baltimore: Reinventing an Industrial Legacy City is my take on the post industrial American city and Baltimore after the unrest. 
The book is now for sale and can currently be ordered online directly from the publisher with free shipping. 

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