Melting pots, empires and creativity

A good idea from CreativeClass.org: they took a look at cities by employement to try to identify which cities dominate the creative area.

How? Well, they focused on the ones that have more than 10% of the national employement for creative occupations and especific creative fields.

These are some of their findings:

- Advertising/ Marketing is dominated by New York in shear numbers.
- LA and New York are the hotbeds for arts, media, and design.
- Houston has a stronghold on engineering.
- Washington, DC is a research town.
- Boston is, not surprisingly, strong in biosciences.
- Technology hotspots: Silicon Valley and Washington, DC.

This conclusions (not so surprising after all) seems to reinforce a theory I have been developing for some time: the most creative cities tend to be the ones that for different reasons are or have been great 'melting points'.

I enjoy creativity and that is one of the several reasons I love cities like NYC, London, Barcelona, Marseille, Rome and Buenos Aires among others.

Some of those cities have become melting pots because they were harbors since ancients times and some others because at some point or another they were the center of an empire. Creativity feeds and nurtures from previous ideas and open mindness and is when different ideas bump into each other influencing one another, that they fused and they give birth to new ideas.

Big cities (where survival is harder) and big melting pots (where is difficult to be too narrow minded) are therefore the best places for creativity to flourish.

But not all is lost for smaller cities. We have a bigger melting pot out there, one that is accessible to millions: internet. And thousands of websites have become a new path for creativity to surface everywhere.

See complete report here