Chicago’s Creative Class

http://www.citylab.com/work/2011/10/worlds-leading-creative-class-countries/228/

What is the Creative Class?

Diversity, art, culture, and above all tolerance are the things that make up the category of people known as the creative class. The creative class has become the hot topic in economics because apparently the new key to economic growth lies on the ability to attract the creative class and portray their values and ideas into businesses. Some of the cities already portraying this include San Francisco, Austin, San Diego and Boston all at the top according to their high creativity index.

According to Richard Florida, creativity index is measured by the following factors and then ranked accordingly. The first of the factors is the creative class’ share of the workforce, or in other words the percentage of creative workers. The second is the rank according to the percentage of creative workers. The third column on the list is the high tech index, this is measured using the Milken Institute’s Tech Pole, a widely used and respected pole. This is followed by an innovation ranking, which is measured using patents per capita. Finally, there is a diversity ranking that is measured by the Gay Index. Although the Gay Index is not the only thing that measures diversity it is a reasonable measure for the city;s openness to new people and ideas.

Creative Class in Chicago

Although Chicago is not high on the ranking of the most creative cities, there is definitely the potential here to be at the top of that list in the near future. As a city Chicago is very diverse whether you are looking at ethnicity, religion, jobs, and sexual orientation there will always be a variety. Looking back at what it means to be creative, the importance in diversity is big because it allows people to work freely without fear in criticism.

Currently in Chicago about 35% of the metro area is composed of people from the creative class. This is actually a pretty high percentage considering that 43% of the workers in the city fall under the service class and given that there are so many service industries needed in a city like Chicago just so that everything can function. These are the people cooking, cleaning, selling, and doing many other low wage jobs, There could be some ways that these people can be creative but for the most part they will remain in the service class.

Therefore, the best way to increase our percentage of creativity in Chicago might be to convert the remainder of the people which are in the working class or as many of those people to join the creative class. As time passes the working class in Chicago has become smaller and smaller, and it could be because the kind of jobs that they used to do are now being replaced by machines or other more efficient means. As Richard Florida mentioned, everybody had the ability to be creative, so why not give these people the chance to do so.

Given that under the creative class we have people in many fields from science and technology, to art, law, and even health-care I don’t see how Chicago is not moving up in the rank. We have some great Universities like Illinois Tech that ranks very high as far as technology and engineering, there’s UIC and their great medical programs and the many other universities in the Chicago area providing the city with a larger population of creative class people. All we need is more jobs and opportunities in the city to make these people stay here. This should not be very hard to do given the aesthetics of the city, we have a great downtown area and surely there are companies that would love to move their facilities to Chicago and start recruiting from within.