@1: Will, the writer's motives are a critical argument on the Floridian thesis on the so-called new "creativity" as a marker of only economic fuel. The intended audience are urban scholars, planners, critics, economists, and even public sector leadership. The Rise of the Creative Class from its start has been fraught with sloppy holes in Florida's critical analysis of what "creativity" means now.

He used a reductionist lens to argue that only certain people were privileged with the empowerment of "creativity" in the post-factory, post-manufacturing urban economies in North America (and in other selected, G8-located cities). What his argument did was trivialize the meaning of "creativity" and rarefied it artificially so that if you worked anything other than a "creative class job" — city or not — you could only, at most, touch creativity but never possess it.

The "old" model, writ large, was the creative potential of the human spirit generally, in that it could come from anywhere and anyone, regardless their background. Now, in the Floridian model, a stuffy, two-bit lawyer advertising on the backs of bus-stop benches (think Barry Zuckerkorn) is a "creative" while a local sculptor who holds down two hourly wage jobs and then spends weekends arc-welding together works found in scrap yards is somehow not — not any longer. In effect, that devalues human creativity for the creativity afforded by a privileged level of economic class.