The ideas of Richard Florida on creative cities are not entirely novel. In many respects, he builds on the work of America’s well-known urban guru Jane Jacobs. Who are both ‘visionaries of the vital city’? (Hospers, 2003a). To start with Richard Florida: this American academic has been H. John Heinz III professor of Regional Economic Development at the Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh. In July 2004 he moved from Pittsburgh to Washington and started lecturing at George Mason University, Virginia. He has also been a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. His book The Rise of the Creative Class was published in 2002. It was an instant bestseller and the prestigious Harvard Business Review has named it one of the breakthrough ideas for 2004. In November 2004 Cities and the Creative Class will be published, the prequel to Rise, consisting of essays, articles and other papers. In March 2005 Florida published The Flight of the Creative Class. The book is dealing with the results ofeconomic globalization and why America, according to him, is losing the competition for talent. After these books on the meso-level (The Rise) and the macro-level (The Flight), Richard Florida intends to focus on the micro-level of the workplace with a third book to be titled The Creative Edge.
Unlike Florida, Jane Jacobs is not in academia. Jacobs may be in her late eighties but she is still as passionate as ever in her study of cities. Trained as a journalist in New York ‘this little old lady in tennis shoes’ now lives in Toronto where she has written a lot on the ‘hustle and bustle’ of cities. Common sense, close observation and personal experience are the factors guiding her investigations. Her first book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is a real classic and reshaped the way urban planners think about their profession. Over the years Jacobs has elaborated her vision on cities as economic engines in The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984). Recently, she has explored the philosophical side of life, searching in her books Systems of Survival (1992), The Nature of Economies (2000) and Dark Age Ahead (2004) for the moral foundations of business and societal life. In these works too, however, she continues to insist on the importance of creative cities for socio-economic development: in the end, she says, it is the unplanned chaos of the urban environment that is the driving force behind our welfare and well-being.
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发表于 2011-10-8 14:59:05
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