Richard Florida dans le Washigton Monthly (et Québec alors?)

Via SmartMobs, un article de Richard Florida (auquel je faisais référence ici) publié dans le Washington Monthly de janvier/février 2004.

L’auteur de The Rise of the Creative Class mène dans cet article une charge en règle contre les politiques protectionnistes et traditionnalistes du gouvernement républicain de Georges W. Bush. L’argumentaire développé dans Creative Class War est intéressant, mais ce qui l’est encore davantage ce sont les explications très simples et les exemples que Richard Florida choisis pour expliquer pourquoi il est plus déterminant que jamais pour une ville d’être attrayante aux yeux des gens créatifs.

Il y a plusieurs éléments à retenir dans ça pour la présentation que je devrai faire en guise d’amorce au Forum économique de la région de Québec, qui se tiendra le 24 février prochain.

Chose certaine, Québec a bien des atouts pour attirer les gens créatifs… et il ne fait pas de doute que les principales faiblesses de la ville sont sa faible capacité d’accueillir des immigrants et sa relative peur de la différence et de la marginalité (vive la diversité!).

Il ne faudra pas perdre ça de vue dans les prochaines semaines… je pense que les premiers projets concrets de la cité éducative devrait cibler ces handicaps.

Je conserve quelques extraits du texte de Richard Florida, qui me semblent particulièrement importants ce soir… et je les fais suivre de liens vers une foule de documents dont j’ai trouvé les références sur le site de l’auteur et qui contiennent BEAUCOUP d’informations utiles dans le contexte où nous souhaitons faire de Québec une cité éducative.

Les gens créatifs suivent les projets stimulants

« [Peter Jackson] realized, he told me, that with the allure of the Rings trilogy, he could attract a diversely creative array of talent from all over the world to New Zealand; the best cinematographers, costume designers, sound technicians, computer graphic artists, model builders, editors, and animators.

When I visited, I met dozens of Americans from places like Berkeley and MIT working alongside talented filmmakers from Europe and Asia, the Americans asserting that they were ready to relinquish their citizenship. Many had begun the process of establishing residency in New Zealand. »

L’immigration se fait en fonction de la personnalité des villes…

« Talented, educated immigrants and smart, ambitious young Americans congregated, during the 1980s and 1990s, in and around a dozen U.S. city-regions. These areas became hothouses of innovation, the modern-day equivalents of Renaissance city-states, where scientists, artists, designers, engineers, financiers, marketers, and sundry entrepreneurs fed off each other’s knowledge, energy, and capital to make new products, new services, and whole new industries… »

De nouvelles villes émergent actuellement comme pôle de création dans le monde

« Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. They’re doing it through a variety of means–from government-subsidized labs to partnerships between top local universities and industry. Most of all, they’re luring foreign creative talent, including our own. »

Il ne faut jamais rien prendre pour acquis…

« But the bigger problem [is] that for the first time in modern memory, top scientists and intellectuals from elsewhere are choosing not to come here. We are so used to thinking that the world’s leading creative minds, like the world’s best basketball and baseball players, always want to come to the States, while our people go overseas only if they are second-rate or washed up, that it’s hard to imagine it could ever be otherwise. And it’s still true that because of our country’s size, its dynamism, its many great universities, and large government research budgets, we’re the Yankees of science. But like the Yankees, we’ve been losing some of our best players. And even great teams can go into slumps. »

Des opportunités pour le Centre des congrès de Québec et pour l’Université Laval…

« The altered flow of talent is already beginning to show signs of crimping the scientific process. « We can’t hold scientific meetings here [in the United States] anymore because foreign scientists can’t get visas, » a top oceanographer at the University of California at San Diego recently told me. The same is true of graduate students, the people who do the legwork of scientific research and are the source of many powerful ideas. The graduate students I have taught at several major universities — Ohio State, Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon — have always been among the first to point out the benefits of studying and doing research in the United States. But their impressions have changed dramatically over the past year. They now complain of being hounded by the immigration agencies as potential threats to security, and that America is abandoning its standing as an open society. Many are thinking of leaving for foreign schools, and they tell me that their friends and colleagues back home are no longer interested in coming to the United States for their education but are actively seeking out universities in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. »

La culture, le métissage… et la balance économique!

« America’s music industry has been, for decades, the world’s standard setter. The songs of American artists are heard on radio stations from Caracas to Istanbul; their soundtracks are an integral part of the worldwide appeal of American movies. The profits earned from American music exports help keep America’s balance-of-payments deficits from getting too far into the red zone. Yet part of what makes American music so vital is its ability to absorb and incorporate the sounds of other countries–from American hip-hop picking up Caribbean Reggae and Indian Bhangra beats, to hard rock musicians using industrial instrumentation from Germany. For American artists and fans, not being able to see touring foreign bands is the equivalent of the computer industry not getting access to the latest chips: It dulls the competitive edge. »

Ne pas se laisser distraire… Éducation, éducation, éducation… est-ce que je vous l’ai dit? Éducation!

« Our loss of access to high-level foreign talent hasn’t drawn much attention from political leaders and the media, for understandable reasons: We seem to have bigger, more immediate problems, from the war on terrorism to the loss of jobs in the manufacturing, service, and creative sectors to China, India, and Mexico. But just as our obsession with the Soviet Union in the last years of the Cold War caused us to miss the emerging economic challenge of Japan, our eyes may not be on the biggest threat to our economic well-being. »

Talents, Innovation, Tolérance…

« For several years now, my colleagues and I have been measuring the underlying factors common to those American cities and regions with the highest level of creative economic growth. The chief factors we’ve found are: large numbers of talented individuals, a high degree of technological innovation, and a tolerance of diverse lifestyles. Recently my colleague Irene Tinagli of Carnegie Mellon and I have applied the same analysis to northern Europe, and the findings are startling. The playing field is much more level than you might think. Sweden tops the United States on this measure, with Finland, the Netherlands, and Denmark close behind. The United Kingdom and Belgium are also doing well. And most of these countries, especially Ireland, are becoming more creatively competitive at a faster rate than the United States. »

Talent, diversity, brainpower… spectacular waterfronts, beautiful countryside, and great outdoor life [dites, on parle de Québec?]

« Though the data are not as perfect at the metropolitan level, other cities are also beating us for fresh new talent, diversity, and brainpower. Vancouver and Toronto are set to take off: Both city-regions have a higher concentration of immigrants than New York, Miami, or Los Angeles. So too are Sydney and Melbourne. As creative centers, they would rank alongside Washington, D.C. and New York City. Many of these places also offer such further inducements as spectacular waterfronts, beautiful countryside, and great outdoor life. They’re safe. They’re rarely at war. These cities are becoming the global equivalents of Boston or San Francisco, transforming themselves from small, obscure places to creative hotbeds that draw talent from all over–including your city and mine. »

Immigration, immigration, immigration

« Without these immigrants, our high-tech economy would be unthinkable. Intel, Sun Microsystems, Google: All were founded or co-founded by immigrants from places like Russia, India, and Hungary. Nearly a third of all businesses founded in Silicon Valley during the 1990s were started by Chinese- or Indian-born entrepreneurs »

L’exode des cerveaux… c’est aussi aux États-Unis qu’au Québec que cela se passe! (Comment on dit déjà? Ah oui: quand on se regarde, on se désole… quand on se compare, on se console!)

« All the current Democratic aspirants to the White House have whacked Bush for undermining our alliances and diplomatic capabilities through his unilateralism. A few, including Sen. John Kerry, have criticized the president as « anti-science. » But none seems to have understood–or at least articulated–the disastrous economic consequences of these Know-Nothing views. In the post-1990s global economy, America must aggressively compete with other developed countries for the international talent that can spur new industries and new jobs. By thumbing our nose at the world and dismissing the consensus views of the scientific community, we are scaring off that talent and sending it to our competitors. »

Le besoin de politiques qui font monter tout les bateaux avec l’eau… (une image entendue lors des rencontres pré-forum)

« The challenge for the GOP, if it wants to avoid running the economy into the ground, is to stop sneering at the elites, the better to win votes in their base, and to start paying attention to economic policies that might lift all boats. The challenge for Democrats, if they want to win, is to find ways of reaching out to the rest of the country, to convince at least some of its many regions that policies which operate to the interests of the creative class are in their interests as well. »

DOCUMENTS DIVERS trouvés sur le site de R. Florida
(l’angle économique souhaité par la Chambre de commerce se trouve probablement dans cette perspective…)

The Creative City (… a plan of action report from Cincinnati Tomorrow)

Chasing the Rainbow (Is a gay population an engine of urban revival? Cities are beginning to think so)

The New Creative Economy: Vancouver’s Competitive Advantage

Competing for Talent (Implications for Social and Cultural Policy in Canadian City-Regions)

Competing on Creativity: How Canada’s city regions stack up

The Memphis Manifesto [note: une idée dont s’inspirer pour le (dans les suites) du Forum?]

Reste plus qu’à ramasser tout ça!