CREATIVE CITY NEWSLETTER: APRIL 2002

WHITE OAK REPORT

ISSUE IN FOCUS: Marketing and Branding
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Community Development
CREATIVE CORNER: Car Sharing
COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT: Shelby County and Memphis, TN
CULTURE BUILDS COMMUNITIES: NRC Training
CULTURE BUILDS COMMUNITIES: Creative Cities In the News
White Oak Report


:White Oak Report Contents:
Background on Richard Florida
Summary of Remarks by Florida
White Oak Dialogue
Pictures from the conference

This is the main text of the White Oak Report. For a complete copy, including appendices, please contact Beth Belk.

Summary of Remarks By Richard Florida

To help establish a framework for our discussions, we used Richard Florida's research and writing on creativity in his latest book, The Rise of the Creative Class. Richard presented his work demonstrating that the future and survival of regions and their central cities in a 21st century world of global competition of e-commerce is based on their ability to attract the best and brightest from both at home and abroad. Attracting this "Creative Class" to seek employment, grow a business, and raise a family is a key factor in a successful Creativity City agenda.

Our working group at the White Oak Plantation in Yulee, Florida took the context of this work further and placed upon it a matrix of essential issues that focus upon both economic and social equity agendas with a goal to fit the work into a broader civic agenda of value to the creative American community at large.

Richard Florida and his colleagues' work was useful and thought provoking for our Creative City group. Though it has a much broader scope, we have attempted to outline the basic key points in their findings:

1. There is a common misunderstanding that the fundamental nature of economic growth in the New Economy is based on technology, it is actually based on creativity.
2. Creativity comes from human beings. Two facts that economists often ignore are that:
   a. People are both the source of economic growth and a the critical factor of production, and
   b. The "people climate" is more important to economic development than the business climate.
3. The New Economy has created members of a new class - the "Creative Class" - and to ignore the needs of this new group is to deter successful community and economic development.
4. The three factors necessary for economic development are "technology, talent, and tolerance."

Richard also emphasized that place is fundamentally more important to economic development than any other factors. In the new economy, people are seeking challenges as well as a thick labor market. They are willing to move around to find the ideal place with the amenities they desire. We must look at the location decisions of people, however, not those of businesses. The creative class takes a "what's there, who's there, and what's going on" approach to choosing where to locate. Diversity tops the list as a key factor in what they are looking for, as well as low barriers to entry, authenticity of place, and fun, flexible places/opportunities for engagement and free time.