ancient cities

188 Creative Class
has also resulted in a dramatic shift in the location
of major events. In 1991, Chicago’s McCormick
Place hosted 28 of the Tradeshow Week 200 meetings,
but by 2005 that figure had dropped to 15
events with 532,000. New York has seen its count
of 200 events fall from 30 in 1991 to 16 for 2005.
Las Vegas won out over competing cities, increasing
from 22 major events in 1991 to 44 events in
2005, encompassing 34 percent of the total exhibit
space used by all Tradeshow Week 200 events.
The combination of no real growth in convention
attendance, major supply expansion, and a shift to
newer communities has made convention centers far
less consistently productive public investments than
often assumed, yielding quite modest actual economic
impact. Feasibility studies for New York
City’s Jacob Javits Convention Center had forecast
that it would house about 1 million convention
attendees per year, each of whom would stay and
spend money in the city for three to four days.
Actual delegate attendance at the Javits Center
at first exceeded those forecasts, with a peak of 1.9
million in 1990. In the face of the competitive
market, delegate attendance fell to 962,000 for
2004. A recent consultant study found that the
Javits Center yielded just 660,000 annual hotel
room nights from out-of-town visitors—a fraction
of the 2 to 3 million annual hotel room nights
forecast by the studies in the 1970s, or about 3
percent of the city’s total annual hotel room
demand recently.
Convention facilities in other nations have
developed in a different manner from those in the
United States. In Europe and Asia, large exhibition
halls or trade fairs, often privately owned, are
typically located at the edge of the urban area.
These exhibition halls, such as Germany’s Messe
Hanover (5.3 million square feet) and Messe
Munich (4.7 million) or Italy’s Fiero Milan, dwarf
the largest American counterparts. Within historic
urban core areas, specialized congress or conference
centers of far smaller size, such as the Palais
de Congrès in Paris or London’s Queen Elizabeth
II Conference Centre, provide auditoriums and
rooms to accommodate traditional meetings.
Heywood Sanders
See also Growth Machine; Sports Stadiums; Tourism;
Urban Design; Urban Planning
Further Readings
Judd, Dennis and Susan Fainstein, eds. 1999. The Tourist
City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Nelson, Robert, ed. 2004. Current Issues in Convention
and Exhibition Facility Development. Binghamton,
NY: Haworth Press.
Petersen, David C. 2001. Developing Sports, Convention,
and Performing Arts Centers. 3rd ed. Washington,
DC: Urban Land Institute.
Sanders, Heywood. 2005. Space Available: The Realities
of Convention Centers as Economic Development
Strategy. Research Brief, Brookings Institution,
Washington, DC.
Cr E a t i V E Cl a s s
The creative class refers to people who share a
common interest in, and ability to create, meaningful
new forms of economic activity. It is comprised
of two groups: the supercreative core and creative
professionals. The supercreative core group consists
of those employed in fields such as science and
engineering, high technology, research, the arts,
and design. Its members produce innovations that
can be readily applied and broadly used, such as
designing a piece of software or writing a musical
composition. The second group, creative professionals,
includes workers in knowledge-based professions
such as financial services, health care, law,
and business management. By relying on extensive
knowledge, these professionals engage in creative
problem solving and seek innovative solutions.
Creative workers generate economic growth
through developing technological innovations,
advancing scientific thinking, and increasing
knowledge. Therefore, a high concentration of the
creative class is thought to be linked to the economic
growth of a city. One estimate is that the
creative class accounts for roughly 30 percent of
the U.S. workforce, or about 40 million workers.
Only one third of the workforce, they earn roughly
50 percent of all the wages and salaries. The creative
class also possesses nearly 70 percent of all
discretionary income, more than double that of
workers in manufacturing and services combined.
In 1998, the term creative class was developed
by social scientist Richard Florida in a study that
found that high-technology professionals—typically