If it did, Florida would see that cities are more affordable and function better in countries where people respect each other more. The New Urban Crisis doesn’t look far beyond the US and UK. This has led in the last few decades to pay in the US and UK rising faster at the top than at the bottom. Yes, inequality and housing prices have risen but this is partly because people in the US and, to a lesser extent, in the UK were fooled into believing that some people were worth far more than others and that housing in some cities was worth more than it really is. Whether they work in the creative or service sector is beside the point. Similarly, while it’s true that whole neighbourhoods are no longer saturated by one social group or another, working class people still predominate almost everywhere – especially in London where the large majority of people are struggling in some way to get by, pay the rent, the mortgage, maintain their jobs and bring up their children. ![]() Surely, we are all creative to some extent. But they cannot be easily divided into those who are creative and those who are not. People can be divided into social classes: we have been doing it with census data since 1911. ![]() Presumably the taxi driver was “service class” and Florida, who describes himself as “one of the world’s leading urbanists”, is a “creative”, but is what he is creating useful or harmful? Just above his map of London in the book, he claims that “surprisingly, there is not a single tract in London where the working class makes up a plurality of residents…” That claim is wrong, of course, but so are many of the ideas in this flawed book.
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