OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

3. PROMOTING LOCAL DEVELOPMENT BY CREATING CULTURAL PRODUCTS
gentrification and the most creative cities or neighbourhoods. Official agencies such
as the New England Council have recently confirmed the existence of such a link. But
the linkage has been hard to achieve, because the rationale and the measures are
far from perfected.
The factors cited often include the proportion of young people in the population,
and their educational level, for these have an impact both on increasing consumption
and on cultural production. This thesis is today known as the “bourgeois bohemian”
or Bobo theory. Economics traditionally addresses the bohemian theme in two distinct
manners:
• One is to examine the variety of lifestyles and its effects: the bohemian consumer
seeks to mark himself off from others, and in this way to assert his freedom (Frank,
1997). In fact, there is a bit of the Bobo in every consumer.
• The other is to investigate the role that lifestyles play in the capacity for
inventiveness (Brooks, 2000).
In support of these ideas, Richard Florida came up with a model that he applied
to the United States (Florida, 2002). He constructed a “bohemian index” comparing
the percentage of bohemians in a given territory with the percentage of bohemians
nationwide. As bohemians, he identified musicians, artists, writers, designers,
photographers and people in related trades. They are generally creators or producers
of cultural assets. Florida found a good number of correlations between this indicator
and the indicators of cultural endowment, population mix, skill qualifications and human
capital. He then examined concentrations throughout the country and found that the
most important, by far, were in New York and Los Angeles. The ratio of concentrations
between the least bohemian regions and the most bohemian regions is 1 : 25. This
pattern corresponds to that for education, especially in areas where bohemians are
numerous 93 .
He then performs regressions between talent and bohemianism, and finds a
strong correlation between the latter (as the independent variable) and the presence
of high-technology or high value-added products (as the dependent variable): the
coefficient is very strong (2.055) and highly significant. A second point - the link
between bohemianism (as the independent variable) and the area’s openness (as
the dependent variable) 94 - is perhaps more debatable : one could as well postulate
the reverse, which leads Florida to take a different tack and to build a hypothesis of
correlation between Bobos, the percentage of the homosexual population, and an
index of racial diversity (the “melting pot” idea). He arrives at a significant coefficient
of 0.505 95 . The resulting interpretation is this: a high concentration of Bobos implies
an open and tolerant place where those who want to express their individuality and
take advantage of it, i.e. everyone with specific talents, will feel at home.
CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005 113