The Making Of The American Creative Class

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America's consumer culture was centralized in midtown Manhattan to an extent unparalleled in the history of the modern United States. Within a few square miles of skyscrapers were the headquarters of networks like NBC and CBS, the editorial offices of book publishers and mass circulation magazines such as Time and Life, numerous influential newspapers, and major advertising agencies on Madison Avenue. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, secretaries, and other white-collar workers made advertisements, produced media content, and enhanced the appearance of goods in order to boost sales. While this center of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices many white-collar workers challenged the managers and executives who directed their labors. In this definitive history, The Making of the American Creative Class examines these workers and their industries throughout the twentieth century. As manufacturers and retailers competed to attract consumers' attention, their advertising expenditures financed the growth of enterprises engaged in the production of culture, which in turn provided employment for an increasing number of clerical, technical, professional, and creative workers. The book explores employees' efforts to improve their working conditions by forming unions, experimenting with alternative media and cultural endeavors supported by public, labor, or cooperative patronage, and expanding their opportunities for creative autonomy. As blacklisting and attacks on militant unions left them destroyed or weakened, workers in advertising, design, publishing, and broadcasting in the late twentieth century were constrained in their ability to respond to economic dislocations and to combat discrimination in the culture industries. At once a portrait of a city and the national culture of consumer capitalism it has produced, The Making of the American Creative Class is an innovative narrative of modern American history that addresses issues of earnings and status still experienced by today's culture workers.

The Making of the American Creative Class narrates the history of workers in New York's publishing, advertising, design, and broadcasting industries and their efforts to improve their working conditions, set against the backdrop of the economic dislocations of twentieth-century capitalism.

Argues that United States' creative class is fighting for survival and explains why this should matter to all Americans.

Richard Florida outlines how certain cities succeed in attracting members of the 'creative class' - the key economic growth asset - and argues that, in order to prosper, cities must harness this creative potential.

A provocative new way to think about why we live as we do today-and where we might be headed. Initially published in 2002, The Rise of the Creative Class quickly achieved classic status for its identification of forces then only beginning to reshape our economy, geography, and workplace. Weaving story-telling with original research, Richard Florida identified a fundamental shift linking a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing importance of creativity in people's work lives and the emergence of a class of people unified by their engagement in creative work. Millions of us were beginning to work and live much as creative types like artists and scientists always had, Florida observed, and this Creative Class was determining how the workplace was organized, what companies would prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities would thrive. In The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited, Florida further refines his occupational, demographic, psychological, and economic profile of the Creative Class, incorporates a decade of research, and adds five new chapters covering the global effects of the Creative Class and exploring the factors that shape "quality of place" in our changing cities and suburbs.

This cross-disciplinary reader gives students the opportunity to read and write about significant issues across the arts and sciences and to explore how knowledge is constructed and communicated. Thirty-eight contemporary essays are preceded by introductory chapters on writing and reading and are followed by assignment sequences that juxtapose three or more essays with a central theme. Discussion, library and Internet research, and writing activities accompany each reading. While the essays are arranged in alphabetical order, the text also offers alternative thematic and disciplinary tables of contents. The Second Edition of Making Sense presents works by well-known authors such as Annie Dillard, Gloria Anzalduacute;a, bell hooks, Lawrence Lessig, Ralph Ellison, and Nancy Sommers, as well as selections by lesser-known writers from a variety of fields. New! Students will be engaged by the variety of new readings by writers such as Dorothy Allison and Marita Sturken. New images also appear throughout the text, ranging from Depression-era photos accompanying Dorothy Allison's essay to advertisements accompanying Stuart Ewen's essay on consumer style. New! Pre-reading questions—"What Do You Know?" and "What Do You Expect to Discover?"—guide students to uncover what they already know about a topic so they can move with more confidence into their reading of the text. These questions also help students anticipate key ideas and develop their own framework for understanding the readings. New! Updated post-reading questions are now arranged in the following four categories: Reading, Rereading, and Analysis; Responding through Writing: Building an Interpretation; Going Further: Learning from Other Sources; and Applying What You've Learned. New! Ten new assignment sequences invite students to read critically and to practice their revision skills. Topics include "History and Memory," with selections from bell hooks, Ralph Ellison and Julie Charlip, and "Images and Words," with selections from Arlie Hochschild, Richard Florida, and Yi-Fu Tuan. This edition offers two appendices: "Making Sense through Research" and "Writing in the Disciplines," a collection of five essays by academics and professionals on the value of effective writing in a variety of fields.

In the wake of the Great Recession, American cities from Philadelphia to San Diego saw an upsurge in hyperlocal placemaking—small-scale interventions aimed at encouraging greater equity and community engagement in growth and renewal. But the projects that were the most successful at achieving these lofty ambitions weren’t usually established by politicians, urban planners, or real estate developers; they were initiated by community activists, artists, and neighbors. In order to figure out why, The City Creative mounts a comprehensive study of placemaking in urban America, tracing its intellectual history and contrasting it with the efforts of people making positive change in their communities today. ? Spanning the 1950s to the post-recession 2010s, The City Creative highlights the roles of such prominent individuals and organizations as Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Richard Sennett, Project for Public Spaces, and the National Endowment for the Arts in the development of urban placemaking, both in the abstract and on the ground. But that’s only half the story. Bringing the narrative to the present, Michael H. Carriere and David Schalliol also detail placemaking interventions at more than 200 sites in more than 40 cities, combining archival research, interviews, participant observation, and Schalliol’s powerful documentary photography. Carriere and Schalliol find that while these formal and informal placemaking interventions can bridge local community development and regional economic plans, more often than not, they push the boundaries of mainstream placemaking. Rather than simply stressing sociability or market-driven economic development, these initiatives offer an alternative model of community-led progress with the potential to redistribute valuable resources while producing tangible and intangible benefits for their communities. The City Creative provides a kaleidoscopic overview of how these initiatives grow, and sometimes collapse, illustrating the centrality of placemaking in the evolution of the American city and how it can be reoriented to meet demands for a more equitable future.