Geography
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class of 2002 ends with a clarion call for a post-industrial, post-class sensibility: 'The task of building a truly creative society is not a game of solitaire. This game, we play as a team.' Florida's sentiment has been echoed across a broad and interdisciplinary literature in social theory and public policy, producing a new conventional wisdom: that class antagonisms are redundant in today's climate of competitive professionalism and a dominant creative mainstream. Questions of social justice are thus deflected by reassurances that there is no 'I' in team, and that 'we' must always be defined by corporate membership rather than class-based solidarities. The post-industrial city becomes a post-political city nurtured by efficient, market-oriented governance leavened with a generous dose of multicultural liberalism. In this paper, we analyze how this Floridian fascination has spread into debates on contemporary urban social structure and neighbourhood change. In particular, we focus on recent arguments that London has become a thoroughly middle-class, post-industrial metropolis. We evaluate the empirical claims and interpretive generalizations of this literature by using the classical tools of urban factorial ecology to analyze small-area data from the UK Census. Our analysis documents a durable, fine-grained geography of social class division in London, which has been changed but not erased by ongoing processes of industrial and occupational restructuring: the central tensions of class in the city persist. Without critical empirical and theoretical analysis of the contours of post-industrial class division, the worsening inequalities of cities like London will be de-politicized. We suggest that class-conscious scholars should only head to Florida for Spring Break or retirement. © 2012 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
Publication Title
City
Publication Date
2012
Volume
16
Issue
4
First Page
395
Last Page
421
ISSN
1360-4813
DOI
10.1080/13604813.2012.696888
Keywords
class, creative class, London, Marxism, segregation, Zizek
Repository Citation
Davidson, Mark and Wyly, Elvin, "Class-ifying London: Questioning social division and space claims in the post-industrial metropolis" (2012). Geography. 115.
https://commons.clarku.edu/faculty_geography/115
Copyright Conditions
Contains the manuscript copy of this article.
Included in
Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons
