The creativity of people have been measured in human capital studies most commonly with tertiary degrees. However, some argue that creative people like Bill Gates or Steven Jobs wouldn't count in this kind of approach. They say creative occupations indicate the best regional development. I believe something lacks from the narrowing to professionals. First of all, entrepreneurs may miss from occupation classifications. Second, some may have an occupation not considered creative, but can be highly creative in free time. Third, not only persons are creative. Also organizations, firms and the likes may be as creative. All this considered, I believe creativity correlated to regional development can be found best in social media.
We did some regression analyses with the traditional occupation indicators. We compared how well analyzing Twitter activity related to creativity added value to the analysis. Compared to 34,1 % explanation power of creative occupations, even 59,1 % of GDP per capita could be explained with Twitter activity related to creativity. When predicting regional development with both, occupational indicators as well as Twitter indicators, the explanation raised even 73,2 %. From these figures, it is evident that creativity is related to innovative economic growth. Also potential growth is predicted in third article of my PhD thesis, which is currently almost in the half way. Already now it could be said that examining creativity in social media is more fruitful predicting innovative growth than former methods of analysing the level of education or occupational divisions.
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Okey, maybe the term is not the most innovative, like the horses were the accelerator of the innovation cluster in Helsinki Metropolitan Area. I'm sure it's something else, like the products of the creative professionals who have concentrated in that cluster (which btw, now in this presentation, looks like a doughnut:).
Be that as it may, a vast majority of the members of the creative class live in that doughnut, or horseshoe, and almost all the knowledge intensive workplaces locate in that one cluster. Only a few tiny concentrations of creative class and innovative firms lay outside the main cluster. I decided to form only one large cluster to the Helsinki Metropolitan Area based on analyses, because it felt the most natural thing to do. Remembering the flows of information it is not hard to see that the neighbourhoods with the high points from the analyses forms not an archipelago but a cluster of chained islands. With the history in master planning it is too the most natural thing to form larger objects from the smaller entities. If policy implications are dear, I could state that every penny invested in that cluster will pay off positive amounts of money and other much seeked products of the information age city: namely innovations and productions. Also, talking about the humans in the cluster, it emerges human capital there, which is essential in producing the just explained benefits of innovative and productive city . Often the talk concerns creative people, but the people outside that class or movement or just a lifestyle or something, are forgotten. But hey, don't worry about the workforce with less or no skills. They benefit from the investments to the cluster too. It is calculated that in American cities every creative job generates five low-skill workplaces! Another recommedetion would be that you can't create a new cluster outside the cluster. They just don't make it (Porter 2010). But, if you are working with Vantaa, you might have noticed first the points of creativity and innovativeness in Vantaa. The former flourish in Western Vantaa and the latter one in the central parts of the city. A cluster formed of one or two neighbourhoods are not bad at all. After all analysis has estimated the creativity and innovativemess of the neighouring areas as well. So the points in Vantaa could be thought of as larger entities than just one district. And if you think of the division of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, so called "pienalueet" (what on earth it would be in English; minor areas? ;D) are still quite large, despite the name they have. Because these clusters are maybe not so large, they are significant (estimated with spatial statistics), that they are most warmly recommended to be directed all kind of developments in. Also in Eastern Helsinki, widely criticized as socially and ethnically segregated area, has also it's tiny clusters. However, these clusters could grow or merge in the main cluster not so far from them. On the other side of social spectrum, fighting against segregation, the city of Helsinki has pumped loads of money to Eastern Helsinki, but besides some bright stars, like Myllypuro, not much positive has evolved what comes to research I have read. With the results of the paper visible and bearing in minds Porter's wisdom of the theory he created, it is clear that the city of Helsinki could rethink the areas where the funding should be aimed at geographically. It is important to remember that I believe that Porter not by any means meaned that the areas outside the clusters could be left on their own and segregate from the areas belonging to the cluster and funded exclusively. Areas with the ability on innovation or human capital production should of course be funded with different objects than the areas with no significant potential. I have done the collection of Twitter data from European metropolises. Currently I'm mining data from US metropolitan areas over 500,000. Theoretical framework of the paper considering twitter activity in Europe focuses on digital social capital, thus electronic capital, or e-capital. Article from US cities lean to idea of the creative cities, which have been in fact conceptualized already way earlier than Florida's Creative class (e.g. Landry & Bianchini (1995). I believe there is still some shortage of mapping exercises for the geography of the creative cities. Especially researched from the angle of creativity in social media. That should be the most up to date space where the creativity is present. Not forgetting the geographical space of the creativity, i. e. creative cities. The first data collected were tweets containing word research. I believed research would represent creativity, i.e. by examining relations of the tweets in hashtagify.me. There's number of other key words coming, so we can rank US cities regarding different key words related to creativity in social media. The final outcome will be re conceptualizing the economic geography related concept of "The creative cities". Regression analyses will tell whether the creativity present in social media affects metropolises economy. Heat maps of different key words related to creativity will give us a series of maps dealing with larger clusters formed from the creative cities. This one table presenting twitter activity in the field of research tells us that Washington D.C. is also the research capital of the United States. The other well-known research clusters seems to lay in Bay Area, The Triangle and East coast. I would also like to share the data of tweets containing word research. The next step for me is to make a heat map of it and find spatial clusters of digitally creative cities. In addition, I collect the rest of the data and do the same kind of rankings and heat maps for other key words as well. I hope you find the data beneficial, too :)
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Photo by Rob Hurson
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July 2018
AuthorJuho Kiuru, geographer living in Helsinki, Finland. |