Rick McGinnis writes:
The idea of some sort of vaguely defined creative class as a benign invasion, reviving run-down areas once home to workers or industry with their peculiar and mysterious social, cultural and economic alchemy, had a lot of appeal to the sorts of people who run cities – politicians, developers and realtors, mostly.
(…)
The major flaw with his theory, however, is that he insists on describing things like suburbs or jobs or amenities with a particular lens, rendering it utterly unrecognizable to the people for whom sharing some common understanding is crucial. Florida’s apparently unsuccessful idea of a creative class revolution is just one more example of the division that seems to be pulling us apart socially by turning language into code more than communication; we are using the same words, but we are not talking about the same things. This is what inspired Brexit, Rob Ford, and Donald Trump, three recent developments that apparently baffled Florida and his colleagues, if you believe his new book, and baffled them with clear signs that a growing part of the citizenry doesn’t share their conventional wisdom, and has become wholly unable to trust “experts.”
