Diamond in the rust

Financial Times - April 25, 2009
By Henry Hamman

“Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears. Oh! Hard Times, come again no more. While we all sup sorrow with the poor: There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears.”

More than a century after the Pittsburgh native Stephen Foster – perhaps the greatest American songwriter of the 19th century – wrote this, his words ring true.

Yet residents of Lawrenceville, the area where Foster was born and raised, are hoping that, in this recession, the hardest of times might pass them by. After all, no less an authority than Richard Florida, the urban studies theorist, has called their community “an example of the kind of place that can be a ‘next neighbourhood’.”

Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and professor of business and creativity at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, knows Lawrenceville well. Before decamping to Canada he was on the faculty of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. He did the research for the book that made his name, The Rise of the Creative Class there, and he thinks Lawrenceville – with its inexpensive housing stock, growing number of restaurants, bars, arts outlets and specialty shops – has what it takes to attract and keep precisely the type of people he describes in that book – the designers, engineers, technology workers and artists he sees as the drivers of contemporary economic growth.

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