| | I have been - at various points between the ages of 18 and 36 - a gofer fro a map publishing company, a section editor at an arts alterna-weekly, freelance writer for 3 small newspapers, a retail manager, a buyer and project for a music distribution company, and a museum guide. The idea of lifetime careers or lifetime emplyment has gone the way of the dinosaur.
As I interview for various academic support things, I'm now doing some temp stuff for a net-based marketing research and consultation firm; mostly secretarial stuff, but the work atmosphere is very collegial - no suits and ties, the founder is friends with the Gang of Four and was listening to an X cd in his office on my first day. Most intriguing.
There are two copies of Richard Florida's rather acclaimed The Rise Of The Creative Class laying around the office. I've read chunks of the book - which looks like a watershed work of pop sociology, based on the amount of controversy and discussion it generated. I read other bits of it over the course of this week, in between varied other assignments.
I so strongly believe in what Florida is suggesting, that I'm rather surprised that I also want to argue so strongly against it. Perhaps a Devil's Advocate instinct. Florida's assertions do have some downsides, which he glosses over a bit.
I live in the RTP area of North Carolina (in the creative class top 10, alongside Austin, Seattle, San Fran, L.A., D.C., Boston, NYC, Atlanta and a few other estimable places), and have previously lived in Charlotte (which didn't fare nearly so well). So - this area is cool?
Gay-friendly - yes, very much so - in relation to other places in the South (Atlanta and Miami beat us, but we do have out elected officials in the area, so plenty of progress). Ethnic diversity - again better than anywhere else in the South. Youthful demographics, yada yada.
Creative meccas do have to deal with a certain compression in the job market, the downside of which is lots of underemployed people - there are tons of people in this area who'd much prefer waiting tables here to working corporate in a right-wing sprawl-a-thon like Charlotte. I know plenty of people with masters' degrees here who work retail, as more people move to the area as can be absorbed by the current job market. Having Rolling Stone once pronounce Chapel Hill to be the next Seattle (?) may have been more curse than blessing. Meanwhile, the influx of a bright hipoisie has pressurized the local real estate market, turning this into North Carolina's very own San Francisco, in cost-of-living terms. 70% of the people who work in Chapel Hill can't afford to live here.
And for such downsides, this creative mecca is NO New York. No mass transit. Urban sprawl that has loosely drifted over 4 counties. Smog problems. Civic pretensiousness as a cure for local provincialism. The local gay community is infamously cliquish and casually racist at times. And the rich-poor divide (ahhh...we are still in the South) is stark, and getting worse, with little beyond lip service from leaders in the community. And the area is heavily reliant upon tech-and-net stuff as the cornerstone of the local economy, and as we all know, tech workers are the textile workers of the 21st century - what kinda political shifts will we see when those jobs migrate abroad? There is definitely a smugness, and a lack of forward thinking beginning to creep into the local creative class status, which is why I think that local success may be highly transitory.
The economic divides of the new South (shiny, spotless, explosively growing burgs like Atlanta, Orlando, Charlotte, Raleigh-Cary-Durham, Nashville, Northern Virginia - all standing in stark relief against the declines and poverty in the rural South and older cities like Memphis, Greensboro-Winston and New Orleans) have in some ways been brought out of the closet by recent natural disasters, and hint at a new divide that is just as stark - and may well have just as severe repercussions - as the racial divides of the (not so) old South.
In such an environment, striving to raise the hipness quotient of your city is a band-aid on a head wound - the South still needs to get down and dirty in examining and exorcising it's demons. Until that occurs, the sparkly coolness found in certain enclaves (the nudist/pro-pot-legalization dude who recently ran for mayor in Asheville, NC - another bohemian mecca officially put that city on the freak map, after a Rolling Stone profile) isn't much more than skin deep. Unfortunately. |
