A Brief History of Suburban Creativity

The power of not being with the in-crowd

Goethe in the Roman Campagna, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, 1787.

At the weekend I wrote about how George Michael and Wham! were born of the suburbs. I want to say a bit more about why suburban environments are conducive to creativity, this time via a detour to eighteenth century German Romanticism. Yes, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley have more in common with Friedrich Schiller and Johann Goethe than you might think.

In 1827, Goethe replied to a letter from his fellow poet, Johan Eckermann, who had recently met the renowned French scientist, André-Marie Ampère. Eckermann was astonished at how young Ampère was, for one so accomplished. Goethe said:

“We in middle Germany have had to buy dearly enough such little wisdom as we possess. For at bottom we lead an isolated, miserable life! Very little culture comes to us from the people itself, and all our men of talent are scattered across the country. One is in Vienna, another in Berlin, another in Königsberg, another in Bonn or Düsseldorf, all separated from each other by fifty or a hundred miles, so that personal contact or a personal exchange of ideas is a rarity.”

Goethe contrasted the dispersal of German talents with the situation in France:

“But now imagine a city like Paris, where the outstanding minds of the whole realm are gathered in a single place, and in their daily intercourse, competition, and rivalry teach and spur each other on, where the best from every sphere of nature and art, from the whole surface of the earth, can be viewed at all times ... and you will understand that a good mind like Ampère, having grown up in such plenitude, can very well amount to something in his twenty-fourth year.”

In his rueful paean to Paris, Goethe was anticipating the arguments of an American sociologist called Richard Florida (I’m sure he’d have been thrilled to learn this). About twenty years ago Florida put forward a highly influential theory: that economic growth is driven by a “creative class” of people working in science and technology, art, and entertainment. Far-sighted urban planners should do everything they can to attract members of this class to urban centres, including cultivating a vibrant nightlife.

One of Florida’s key arguments was that creativity thrives on density. In areas where lots of people are crammed together, talented individuals are more likely to have serendipitous collisions: to inspire each other, and to build informal networks through which ideas are exchanged and realised.

In recent years, the shine has come off Florida’s theory. In SoHo, New York, one of his prime examples, the creative class was long ago forced out by rocketing rents; the only scene there is hedge fund managers who like to shop at Prada. And maybe creative people care more about affordable housing, good schools and decent public transport than being near cool nightclubs.

We don’t need to go into the arguments for and against Florida’s theory here - for now it’s useful to understand that a bias towards the city and against the suburbs (in the broadest sense) has been a long-running theme of discussions about innovation and creativity. You’re either where the action is, at the centre of cultural production, or condemned to the parochial margin. You’re either hanging with the hip kids or deprived of the lifeblood of creative interaction.

History suggests, however, that there’s something to be said for places that are far from the action.

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