Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

It’s the rare public intellectual who admits to making big mistakes. Usually, the rule is to defend everything you’ve ever said, in an attempt to maintain a reputation for wisdom. Richard Florida, the noted urbanist and professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, is among the select few to go back and reevaluate his big ideas.

In his 2002 book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” Florida both anticipated and helped promote the trends that would come to define the U.S. urban revival in the decade that followed. The basic premise was that by creating a good environment for knowledge workers -- both the science and engineering types and the creative artistic types -- cities could attract the human capital that would bring in businesses and ultimately re-invigorate their economies.