85701 - Week 3

The Creative Era

The idea of the work place as a dark dingy brutalist building without fresh air, communal spaces and windows to the outside world has become a bit of an urban legend now. I suppose the idea was to stop people remembering there was an outside world, remembering their family and friends and good times happening outside the office - thus they'd stay and work until the work was done. Now it seems, at least in the best cities, this idea has not only been subverted, but used for the benefit of the company itself. Now buildings have lobbies with pebble gardens, tropical aquariums, companies have child minding areas for employee's children, companies have communal areas, coffee carts, even company basketball teams. The idea of life has been brought into the office. And companies fight to locate themselves in cities where there is diversity - music and art enthusiasm, cultural diversity, varying recreation and altogether a sense of creative life.

This is apparently, all to attract people like gays, rock chicks and spikey-haired dudes with slogan t-shirts. People, as it seems to me who would be offended by being called a collective "class". But as Florida defines them, the creative class are people working in "a wide variety of industries---from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts" (2002).

The idea of the company and largely the city itself changing in order to attract these people, is apparently something of a new phenomenon (Florida 2002) but nothing very strange for someone in their early 20's, living in a progressive city like Sydney. I can completely understand the diversity of ideas, enthusiasm, passion and debate brought to companies by these kinds of people, that smaller cities are lacking.

Newcastle is one of these cities, losing the 'creative class' because such people gravitate to Sydney and Melbourne where they can find their culture and others like them. Now, not every city can be a creative city, and not everyone can be a part of the creative class. So, does this phenomenon create exclusion? Will it eventually mean cities will be inhabited by certain kinds of people only, who fit into its creativity or lack there of?