Getting Out of Place: The Mobile Creative Class Takes on the Local. A UK Perspective on the Creative Class

Richard Florida's notion of a “creative class” and the role that mobile knowledge workers can play in the economic development of cities and regions have been highly influential in UK policy circles. In a climate of hunger for “evidence-based policymaking,” Florida's attempt to quantitatively measure, through the use of “indices” of various sorts, the conditions that he deems necessary for successful city-regions, have proved popular with policymakers, keen for what appear to be empirical approaches to policy development.

This chapter aims to trace and critically examine that phenomenon. In particular, it seeks to understand why the work of a hitherto respected but relatively obscure economic geographer, should prove so popular with policymakers. It argues that the combination of some much-needed “good news” for British cities, still recovering from de-industrialisation and job losses, and a technocratic approach, well-suited to the “post-ideological” politics of the time, proved an irresistible combination.