Key points
- Porter: firms innovate more in clusters where they compete and cooperate nearby, with suppliers and universities.
- Florida proposed attracting the creative class and in 2017 admitted it produced unaffordable, unequal cities.
- Markusen: the creative class is too broad a category; what matters are each place's concrete networks and sectors.
Innovation as the engine of urban development is the thesis that cities prosper when they concentrate firms, talent and institutions able to generate new ideas, products and sectors, and since the 1990s it has guided the economic strategies of most large cities. Three authors formulated it with different emphases: Michael Porter, who in The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990) explained innovation through clusters, geographic concentrations of firms, suppliers and institutions; Richard Florida, who in The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) attributed it to the capacity to attract creative professionals; and Ann Markusen, who studied why some regions retain activity, the sticky places, and warned against easy recipes.
Michael Porter: clusters and the advantage of proximity
Porter supplies the mechanism of proximity. His analysis of Silicon Valley, Italian fashion or Californian wine showed that firms innovate more when they compete and cooperate near one another, share skilled workers, suppliers and tacit knowledge, and have universities and demanding customers. His 1995 article on the competitive advantage of the inner city applied that logic to poor neighbourhoods, proposing that urban policy stop subsidising and create market conditions. Porter's influence shows in the cluster policies and technology parks almost every region adopted.
Richard Florida: the creative class and its self-critique
Florida shifted the focus from firms to people. His thesis is that the creative class, scientists, engineers, artists, designers, knowledge professionals, chooses where to live by quality of life, tolerance and diversity, and that firms follow; cities should therefore invest in culture, public space and openness before industrial estates. The recipe was adopted by hundreds of mayors. Fifteen years later, in The New Urban Crisis (2017), Florida himself acknowledged that the cities that followed it successfully became unaffordable and that the concentration of talent had produced an urban inequality his book had not foreseen.
Ann Markusen: sticky places and the critique of the creative recipe
Markusen is the critical voice from within. Her concept of sticky places in slippery space, from 1996, explains why activity stays in certain regions, through networks of firms, public institutions, military bases or universities, and not in others, and her studies of artists showed that they contribute to the local economy through their work and organisation, not by attracting others. In 2006 she criticised the notion of the creative class as a category too broad, mixing occupations with nothing in common and serving to justify image policies, and defended concrete industrial strategies, training and support for existing sectors.
22@, Kendall Square, Amazon HQ2 and Sidewalk Labs: the costs in practice
Practice confirms the warnings. Innovation districts, from Barcelona's 22@ to Kendall Square in Cambridge, have generated jobs and value, but have also raised housing costs and displaced residents of the industrial neighbourhoods they occupied. The competition to attract headquarters, such as the auction for Amazon's second headquarters in 2018, cancelled in New York by neighbourhood opposition, and projects such as Sidewalk Labs' smart district in Toronto, abandoned in 2020, show that innovation as urban strategy has costs in land, data and democracy. The gentrification of San Francisco's tech neighbourhoods is its extreme case.
The lesson of Porter, Florida and Markusen, read together, is that innovation is a real engine but neither automatic nor free. Cities innovate through proximity, talent and institutions, and those three ingredients can be cultivated; but without affordable housing, without sharing the benefits and without support for the economy that already exists, innovative growth produces the unequal city Florida ended up describing. The question for any urban innovation strategy is who works, who lives and who stays in the city that results.
Frequently asked questions
What is a cluster according to Michael Porter?
It is a geographic concentration of firms, suppliers, institutions and universities in one sector, such as Silicon Valley or Italian fashion, where nearby competition and cooperation, shared skilled workers and tacit knowledge make firms innovate more.
What criticism has the creative class theory received?
Ann Markusen noted that it mixes occupations with nothing in common and serves to justify image policies, and Richard Florida himself acknowledged in The New Urban Crisis that the cities that followed his recipe became unaffordable and more unequal.
