The Rise of Cape Town’s Creative Class
Cape Town Creatives' Club, Cape Town Tourism
23 Nov 2004

Hello everyone. My name is Simon de Haast and I’m here this evening to share some thoughts on a topic that I’m passionate about – and that’s making Cape Town one of the creative capitals of the world.

I get such a kick out of helping people see things in new ways that I decided to start a business that does just that. And in the course of my reading and google gorging about the topic of creativity, I came across some really interesting research that made be really excited about Cape Town.

We all know how on the map this city has become, thanks to the buzz about property, film production, celebrity events etc.

I’m going to talk about another aspect of Cape Town, that of it as being a creative epicenter, thanks to various structural factors in its favour.

And I’m not only talking about creativity for its quality of content, but also how this impacts a region’s economic potential.

Some years ago I came across some work by Richard Florida, a professor of regional economic development in the US.

He wanted to find out why certain regions and cities attracted new businesses, while others struggled to retain them. From questions posed to new graduates like “How do you choose a place to live and work”, his research led him to writing a book called the “The Rise of the Creative Class” in 2002.

First some background.

The increased availability of lifestyle options (whether or not they are exercised) is starting to govern our decisions about where we work, and what kind of place we want to live in.

The world in our eyes is not compartmentalised and structured in neat segments – work, play, home - like our parents’ worlds were. In fact, instead of thinking out the box, we’re living literally out the box.

More and more people are making choices about their lives that allow them to create meaning and purpose on their own terms, and not conforming to social, marketing, or peer, norms and pressures.

Technologists talk of the convergence between different forms of media and digital devices – your cellphone is your camera is your mp3 player.

Similarly, there is a convergence of lifestyles, that the distinction between work/play/home is becoming blurred, even completely challenged. City loft living, for example, is transforming once deeply industrial environments into luxury urban spaces.

What is creativity?
To build the argument that a region’s economic potential is related to its store of creative talent, we need to first clarify what I mean by creativity. I regard it as the raw material to innovation; it’s the behaviours and thinking behind action. Webster’s dictionary puts it as the “ability to create meaningful new forms”.

It comes from people, and the more widely one casts a net for fresh thinking, the more original the result. The alternative to casting wide is to attract the creative fish to one place.

Innovation, (being ideas in action), and creativity (the raw material for innovation) come from the intersection of cultures, beliefs and ways of thinking. It is at these intersections of multiple cultures where creativity is born.

Connecting to South Africa’s natural resource heritage, we have a history of extracting just the base material and exporting it to developed countries for beneficiation, whether it be jewelry or catalytic converters. In the last decade though, we’ve come a long way in the processing and adding value to those raw materials domestically. The same goes for our creative natural resources; we are finding our voice collectively as a nation.

The dotcom era gave us books like “the Death of Distance” – how digital technologies were going to make irrelevant the need to be in physical proximity to add value. For sure, email, IM and related communication technologies allow for collaboration across continents, but nothing beats the buzz of creative space. Clusters are one manifestation of this – just look at lower Green Point or Kloof Street to see the groupings being naturally formed. Watch Muizenburg transform itself into sea lifestyle space. Long Street can in a way be seen as a tourism cluster. Cape Town’s recent tragic history shows the negative impact of ignoring this concept of place as being a well-spring of creativity when the powers that be removed District Six, a massively vibrant meta-cluster.

In fact, the regeneration of clusters can act as catalysts for spurring the creative economy engine, helping to regenerate the city.

Innovation and creativity happens in places, in cities and regional clusters. As Richard Florida puts it: “Cities have become cities of ideas and cities of consumption. They are no longer cities of production….Place has become the central organising unit of our time, taking on many of the functions that used to be played by firms.”

So where is this taking us? It’s clear that there is a new ‘order’ emerging, or as Florida correctly terms, a new class. However our notion of the term class needs to be rethought: A class here is a cluster of people who have common interests and tend to think, feel, and behave similarly, but these similarities are fundamentally determined by economic function – by the kind of work they do for a living.

In this context it is not meant to refer to an elite, nor an excuse to demarcate and develop yuppified areas.

Florida calls this new order the Creative Class, whose primary economic function is to create new ideas, new technologies or creative content. The difference between the Creative Class and other ‘classes’ lies in what they’re primarily paid to do. Those in the Working Class and the Service Class are primarily paid to execute to plan, while those in the Creative Class are paid to create and have considerably more autonomy and flexibility than the other two classes do.

The Creative Class is composed of two dimensions. There is the supercreative core, which are the scientists, engineers, tech people, artists, entertainers musicians – so-called bohemians. In addition to the supercreative core, Florida includes creative professionals and managers, lawyers, financial people, healthcare people, technicians, who also use their ideas and knowledge and creativity in their work.

Whether they are artists or engineers, musicians or computer scientists, writers or entrepreneurs, they share a common creative ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference and merit.

Ok, so we’re seeing an emergence of this so-called creative class around the world.

Why is Cape Town so special you ask? We know it’s an awesome place to live but what makes it have the attributes to become a creative Mecca?

3T
In his research, Florida explored what factors caused a region to attract talent and business. He came up a 3 T theory: technology, talent and tolerance preconditions that help predict regional economic performance.

Technology relates to having a research universities and other institutions, and focused investment in technology.

Talent relates to having a place that attracts and retains talent, one that has the lifestyle options, the excitement, the energy, the stimulation that talented, creative people need. This factor has since been split into two, a fourth T – Territory Assets.

And lastly, tolerance of diversity is necessary to attract all sorts of people – foreign-born people, immigrants, gays as well as straights, punk rockers and maskande divas.

His research team came up with really interesting indicators to measure the relative impact of these predictors:

For technology, they use an innovation index which is a measure of patents in an area of population, and a high-tech index which is an index of high-tech company concentrations.

He measures talent using a creative class index, which is the percent creative class and supercreative core of total population,

Tolerance is measured through a melting-pot index – immigrants, and Gary Gates’ Gay Index, which takes people living in households where partners in the household were of the same sex. Florida goes as far as to say that gays are the canaries of the creative economy. Where gays will be a community – a town or region – that has the underlying preconditions that attract the creative class of people from a variety of backgrounds.

In essence, the theory argues that people are drawn to places not amenties.

As you can imagine, Cape Town would score highly on all these indicators.

On the technology front we have numerous facilities and projects such as the Cape IT Initiative, Cape Biotech Initiative, Capricorn Science Park, TechnoPark in Stellenbosch, viticulture research (the only one in Africa). Hey we even have space man that has just developed a unique flavour of Linux called Ubuntu Linux.

As far as talent attractiveness goes, you only have to look at the huge variety of lifestyle options that people can pursue: mountain biking, surf-skiing, forest walks & hikes, wine farms, opera, world-class jazz…the list really is endless. The Design Indaba is on the global map; Cape Town Jazz festival and the MCQP bash are also. Where else can you hop off a mountain and float down to a Café del Mar style beach bar. This town is Art Deco heaven.

Tolerance for diversity speaks for itself in that Cape Town is one of the gay capitals of the world. The French-speaking car guards outside is another clue to the diverse set of immigrants this town attracts. Yes sure, there’s still plenty of room for downsizing in the xenophobia department, but this city is a magnet from far a field. The melting pot factor really helps to break down unquestioning thinking that permeates a community that has been around for a long time – this so called social capital as actually a big inhibitor to innovative thinking as no one challenges accepted wisdom.

I have to acknoweldge here that this last factor is an area we still have a lot of work to do. Infrastructures issues like transport access is one of the stumbling blocks to the mixing of ideas, above and beyond the attitudes that permeate amongst the the residents of Cape Town. But that is changing.

So where can this take us?

Organising for creativity I believe is an obvious oxymoron. So we must take care not to suggest nor lobby for institutional arrangements to help make a creativity-driven economy prosper. It happens as a natural consequence.

The best the bureaucrats can do is to get out the way, to remove obstacles to letting creatives thrive and prosper. Create enabling environments for this to happen. From what I’m seeing, this is starting to happen, with support for craft based small businesses, SME support through the RED door initiative. The Cape Film Commision streamlining the permit process. Fashion week’s workshops and the organising of a fashion route.

But other stuff can happen. Cape Town can be actively positioned as a destination of choice for creative types; with each Design Indaba for example I see more exposure in magazines like Wallpaper.

This should be sustained through the year. What will make this place thrive is attracting more and more niche travelers, creating more diversity, and getting them to stay. Create a design route.

Set-up sabbatical programmes with overseas design and creative agencies to send their people to Cape Town for a dose freshness and new thinking. I’m busy trying to do that with Virginia-based Play Advertising.

Let’s take the concept of city twinning and pair with other cities that are embarking on their own creativity-led economic development strategies. Immediate examples that come to mind are the Creative London project, Memphis, Michigan’s Cool City initiative and Boston.

Wifi enable the city, giving free access to the web at very low cost. Follow Philiadelphias attempts to create a municipal wireless network – you’re creating foundations for unpredictable stuff to happen.

We have so much to offer the rest of world in the way we think – collectively we must have something special if we managed to navigate the transition to democracy in the way we did.

Ok, so what have I tried to do here? I used Florida’s model of a creative class to re-perceive how Cape Town is viewed, The 3T lens creates a new way to see Cape Town, integrating the various perspectives that people have of Cape Town, and how this can be harnessed, or coalesced into a much bigger force.

Let’s for a minute bear in mind the relevance of this talk of the creative class to the realities right here at home. You can’t eat ideas. Bridging the digital divide won’t create a roof in itself.

What’s different here at home, is that instead of using our creative talents to buy more time to have more leisure or freedom as in the ‘West’, the challenge is to use the abundance of time that we have, that is, our vast labour resources, to creatively develop massively productive solutions using what EF Schumacher called appropriate technologies.

Keying to the Proudly South African movement, lets look to our own collection of wisdom, stories and heritage and not apply without reflection, thinking created in other contexts.

Truly creative and inventive solutions are born in environments of extreme constraints. One way to reframe this within our socio-economic challenges is to see this environment as an incredible palette of opportunity.

Move from the “ we can’t do this because we don’t have that” to a “this is what we’ve got, let’s see how we can make new connections and win.”

Imagine Cape Town and its related projects are doing this, are unlocking mindsets one community at a time. Pretty soon they’ll reach the inflexion point and there’ll be no stopping the momentum.

My goal here tonight has been to put this idea out there to you, to give you another way of looking at this gorgeous city, and to encourage dialogue around this. I am in active discussions with Richard Florida’s team with a view to bringing him out here to talk to key stakeholders as to how to catch this creative class wave. I welcome any challenges to this topic, or ideas around how to catalyse this process.

Since this talk has been about the economic impact of creative industries, let me end off by borrowing from celebrated new growth economist Paul Romer:

He says the economic advances come from ideas. Ideas come from people.

So, creating a people climate must be an integral part of any economic development agenda, not as an add-on or an after thought, but rather as a strong pillar or our economic agenda.

Thank you.

Useful Links
http://www.creativeclass.org/
http://www.memphismanifesto.com
http://www.creativelondon.org.uk
Driving the Creative Industries In the Western Cape [.doc]