Be creative -- or die

My sense is that competitive advantage in this new creative age is highly constructive. And I don't think Detroit and Pittsburgh should be counted out. What Austin did was they really hustled. In the 1980s and 1990s they said, "We want to grab some of these high-tech companies," so they did that. They were very sophisticated about going out and recruiting the Motorolas, the Intels, the IBMs. But they never just stopped there the way other cities have. The second thing that happened was that under the leadership of entrepreneur George Kozmetsky and others, they built a culture of entrepreneurship. So Kozmetsky began very early on saying, "We're not just going to steal companies, we're going to build our own," and then, very sophisticatedly, they went after major research dollars and built up the research capacity, they really went out and recruited top talent, they created a talent magnet at that university.

And then, what I think is the key factor that distinguishes Austin from Pittsburgh and Detroit, was that in addition to doing all of that, they said, "We're going to make this a fun place to live. We are going to somehow create the 'Austin lifestyle.'" You heard this back in the '80s, that Austin is a place for singers, songwriters, that "once people come to Austin, they never want to leave."

They created a lifestyle mentality, where Pittsburgh and Detroit were still trapped in that Protestant-ethic/bohemian-ethic split, where people were saying, "You can't have fun!" or "What do you mean play in a rock band? Cut your hair and go to work, son. That's what's important." Well, Austin was saying, "No, no, no, you're a creative. You want to play in a rock band at night and do semiconductor work in the day? C'mon! And if you want to come in at 10 the next morning and you're a little hung over or you're smoking dope, that's cool." I went to the Continental Club -- I was invited by Austin's leading political officials -- and we went to see Toni Price the singer-songwriter, and there were hippies smoking dope right there on the back porch.

The point is, this sense of having fun, being yourself, expressing yourself fully, is valued. But as long as people continue to try to prop up the downtowns, throwing money, burning money, by building stadiums and convention centers, it's not going to happen. Cities have become cities of ideas and cities of consumption. They are no longer cities of production, and people in Detroit and Pittsburgh keep thinking, "We're going to have a headquarters, we're going to have the stadium, mom and dad are going to come from the suburbs and take little Johnny to the game, we're going to have retail." That's just not what drives a city now. What drives a city we know increasingly are good places to live, great neighborhoods, great cafes, night life, places to have fun. Austin saw this from day one.

But I think any big city, at this level of population, more that a million, if they really wanted to, can turn it around. The hopeless places are the Enid, Oklahomas, the Youngstown, Ohios, the small places with huge working-class backgrounds, or places that are service-class centers that aren't tourist destinations. They're all at the bottom of my lists. They're the places that are just being completely left behind. So size really is an advantage. If you're big, you can offer a lot of options and do a lot of things. If they wanted to. The thing is, with places like Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, St. Louis and some of the Sunbelt cities in a different way, is that they don't want to change. The creative people are either unempowered or the institutional structure that exists disempowers them.

Not surprisingly, many large cities made the top of the indexes -- Boston, New York, Chicago -- but San Francisco seems like the archetypal city. One line in the book says, "The legacy of the '60s is not Woodstock, it's Silicon Valley." How does all that fit together?

Being a child of the '60s, I kept thinking about the Mamas and the Papas, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and the early San Francisco music scene. Then I read this book called "Fire in the Valley," written 20 years ago about the early Silicon Valley, and you look at the pictures and it's just mind-blowing! You have photos of the traditional engineers wearing bowties next to these hippies with long hair. I mean, think about Jobs and Wozniak with hair down to their butts going in and asking Don Valentine for money. I interviewed Don Valentine, he said, "I didn't care what Steve Jobs looked like, I didn't care that he didn't have any shoes." In other areas these people would have been run out the door.

The '60s cracked the bohemian/bourgeois split, and California is the place this stuff starts to brew. It became very early on a kind of capitalism that recognizes that you don't have to have all this bullshit organizational, bureaucratic nonsense to be successful. San Francisco was a place where weird people could find a place. In these corporate organizational-based communities where you have the country-club type of atmosphere, there was no place for a different or eccentric person there.

But your findings aren't painting an entirely sunny picture.

No. What's happening with the location choices and migration patterns of the creative class, because these people are very mobile, we're really getting a set of regional haves and have-nots. We're getting these regions that are increasingly creative-class regions -- whether that's San Francisco or Boston or Washington, D.C. -- and then we're getting regions that are being completely abandoned. You're getting a tale of two classes and two geographies.

Also, certain cities, certain regions, are becoming creative-class enclaves and what's happening is that the working classes and the service classes are just moving out. They're either moving out to suburban or exurban areas in those regions, or they're moving to other regions. So clearly you're having these wholesale creative-class migrations into places like San Francisco, Austin, Boston, Washington, D.C., Boulder, and then the indigenous populations, the working-class and service populations, are having to leave because they just can't afford to live there anymore.

That's a terrible thing on lots of levels, not the least of which is the ultimate contradiction that some of these creative-class places are going to face: that they're going to drive out a lot of the creativity that comes from people who are not "in" the creative class but who are incredibly creative. As the book points out, a lot of creativity comes from so-called disadvantaged or ghetto neighborhoods. If you wipe them out, then you wipe out the ability not only for low-income folks to use the creativity that comes from their own communities, but you make it harder and harder for artists and other culturally creative types to relocate to places because they can no longer afford it. Then sooner or later that place is going to become boring.

The best thing that happened to San Francisco was the damned NASDAQ collapse and the high-tech recession. That was San Francisco's saving grace. I mean, San Francisco was becoming completely yuppified. And sooner or later, as has happened in the past, it's going to consume the creativity and erode the creativity that made San Francisco a technologically as well as culturally and artistically creative place.

How does the creative class fit into or define the future?

The basic challenge is that the society is splitting into the creative haves and have-nots by region. We're getting regional winners and losers. As the creative class migrates to the places that provide the economic and lifestyle options they desire, this could be very threatening to national unity. As the creative class concentrates in ethnically diverse, racially diverse ways, the people that are left behind are resentful. And that's a powder keg.

Also, right now the creative class is inward-looking and selfish. For years members of the creative class thought they could just live the good life, with their SUVs, fantasy kitchens and designer clothes. However, in the past the great emerging classes -- whether that was the bourgeois, the nascent capitalist class overthrowing the old feudal monarchy and ushering in a period of maker-driven capitalism and democracy, or the working class unifying to demand an eight-hour workday, higher wages, health benefits -- the creative class has to take responsibility and develop a vision in which all members of society can participate and benefit. It's an obligation.

They have to grow up and take responsibility. We can't just point our finger at Bush or at Congress or at local political leaders and say, "They just don't get it." We have to take responsibility for the society we're driving. If not, the social and political consequences are dire. The creative class has to look beyond itself and offer members of society a vision in which all can participate and benefit from. That's the challenge of our age.

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