The creative city and the creative class

Published in 2002, The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002) helped crystallize substantial conceptual and practical interest in the creative city. [...] Here, the consumption preferences of workers were not only subservient to the microeconomic demands of the firm, but the firm even controlled worker housing and consumption. [...] The development of industrial suburbs at the periphery of cities during the late nineteenth century (Walker and Lewis, 2001) provides another example of the primacy of the industrial firm over the industrial worker. [...] Both the creative city and creative class approach recognized this shift in the mobility of labor and the role of cities and spaces as containers for this more mobile labor. [...] It has grown from roughly five to ten per cent of the workforce at the turn of the 20th century to roughly a third or more of the workforce in the advanced economies by the early 21st century.