The City as Modern Muse

Florida wondered.

"It looks like an attempt to recreate an urban fabric," he said. But, "can you really build something new that has those organic neighborhood qualities? That's a big open question."

"People don't want to live in something prefab, especially since we've all left family behind," he said later. "We want to go somewhere real, to be part of something bigger than us. Value comes from authentic-ness."

Creative-class types, after all, value authenticity. They prefer "streets lined with a multitude of small venues" such as coffee shops, restaurants and bars with live performances and exhibits, art galleries and bookstores, which set the stage for overlapping social scenes, Florida writes in "The Rise of the Creative Class."

For members of the creative class, "this kind of 'scene of scenes' provides another set of visual and aural cues they look for in a place to live and work," he writes. "You may not paint, write or play music, yet if you are at an art-show opening or in a nightspot where you can mingle and talk with artists and aficionados, you might be more creatively stimulated than if you merely walked into a museum or concert hall, were handed a program, and proceeded to spectate."

"I believe people are creative. Creative people are not just knowledge workers," he said, standing at the counter at Franklin's, a Hyattsville restaurant, waiting for a BLT.

Though Florida said he considered sandwich-making a creative endeavor, many service-sector jobs don't make the cut when it comes to the number-crunching part of his argument. He defines the creative class by occupation, rather than by traditional measures such as employer or education. It includes not only the stereotypical bohemians, such as artists, dancers, and writers -- classified as "super creatives" -- but also accountants, lawyers, mathematicians and computer programmers.

All told, the definition covers about 47 percent of the Washington workforce, making the region much more than a government town, according to research by Steven Pedigo, one of Florida's former students and now the research manager at the Greater Washington Initiative.

Florida ticked off the presence of XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc., Discovery Communications Inc., Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and liberal economics writer William Greider, as examples of the dynamic.

Such a constellation of people and companies and interests forms "organically," Florida said. In 2000, developers encouraged telecom and tech companies to move to the next destination on Florida's August city tour, First and M streets NE, the heart of NoMa. A few came, but the migration trickled to a halt as the dot-com boom went bust.

The area has since shown signs of life with the opening of a Metro station, XM's headquarters and growing interest from developers. But standing on First Street, Florida said he found the idea of an organized technology corridor laughable. "The whole idea you can create a technology district as a real estate solution doesn't work," he said. A Google-esque endeavor was never going to take root there without nearby universities pumping out the necessary talent to create it, he said.

The conditions necessary for technological innovation are not unlike the ones that produced local punk-rock band Fugazi in the 1980s, Florida explained later, flashing his knowledge of the local music scene.