Richard Florida - o gúru das cidades criativas. Tendências

Matt Roush summarizes my talk at Detroit's Creative Cities Summit 2.0 earlier this week:

Florida said the market and economic turmoil today is a "fundamental business shift, two or three or four 80-year waves packed into one. This is a massive realignment of how our society is organized."

Saying today's market chaos is reminiscent of the chaos of the 1870s that gave rise to Karl Marx, Florida said that "the economics of financial capital at its end. The era of making billions by trading alone is over. When credit's hard to get, when people can't move billions around easily, there's only one source of capital left, the kind that comes in human beings, in real people, in our communities."

The core of this transformation, Florida said, is that "for the first time in human history, no longer does the ability to capture natural resources or raw materials, and combine them with physical labor and giant masses of capital, those things are no longer the cornerstone of economic growth. All those things can now be moved around. In the advanced world, the only source of economic growth is human creativity."

And Florida said he believes bankers and government officials simply haven't grasped the changes yet. "With all due respect to (U.S. Treasury) Secretary Paulson and the G7, their models are bankrupt. The new models are not in the White House or the parliaments of Europe, they are strategies being conducted on the ground in real communities."

Comentário: Florida tem razão. O mundo, as cidades têm, hoje que se ajustar aos fluxos da nova economia global, e a governação das cidades passará por uma reavaliação dessas políticas públicas (micro), mas que têm, cada vez mais, um impacto no tecido nacional e internacional de que fazem parte. Hoje, o que se faz em Barcelona, se for bom e útil para a vida das populações tende a ser imediatamente aplicado em Lisboa, Porto ou Setúbal. Hoje o mundo é uma vitrine em comparação permanente, e isso permite ver a montra das cidades com mais facilidade e nitidez e corrigir os erros que ainda hoje atropelam muitos de nós que vivemos nas cidades de Portugal.