By David Crossley

Richard Florida is professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University, and he is one of those rare people whose voices carry a message powerful enough to transform economies and people’s lives.

Florida’s central message is that in the “knowledge economy” people are the resources from which wealth is created, cities are the places where people do that work, and the cities that attract the most creative, innovative people will enjoy the greatest success.

“The ticket to faster and broader income growth is innovation,” Florida says. “The goal for metropolitan areas must be to foster innovation and adaptation — in infrastructure, in institutions both public and private, and on the part of individuals.”

This is a challenge for a place like Houston. Although Florida places our metropolitan area in seventh place in his “creativity index,” we wind up 39th in innovation.

The professor goes pretty far with his thesis, and his new book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” makes the claim that “Because creativity is the driving force of economic growth, in terms of influence the Creative Class has become the dominant class in society.”

So who are these creative people, and how do you attract and keep them? Generally speaking, Florida finds that they are people who want the opposite of what city builders have been creating for the last 30 or 40 years. They seek places that are tolerant, diverse, and open to creativity. Florida says cities that want innovation and growth of wealth must “make quality-of-place a central feature of regional economic development strategies.”

We have been having this discussion about quality of life and quality of place in Houston for a few years now, and seem to be having a difficult time understanding what it means. The danger under pressure is that those people who believe there is a quick cosmetic fix will commandeer scarce resources and waste them on trivial but expensive gadgets.

For example, after losing the Olympics bid, the analysis of why seems to boil down to three possibilities: Houston just isn’t interesting enough a place to attract and entertain visitors (especially foreign visitors), Houston’s “image” or “brand” needs retooling, or Houston needs some sort of “icon” like the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower.

The idea that people go to Paris or New York to see an iconic structure is just silly, of course, but that might not stop Houstonians from trying to get one built. Ideas include some sort of 500-foot woman appearing to wander through the city, a tower very much like the Eiffel Tower, and a gigantic tribute to the space program.

The image issue is skin work, an attempt to cover a wealth of blemishes with flashy marketing. While the city could indeed use some refurbishing in this department, we have to understand that the people who have spent millions in public dollars over a couple of decades to create the current image are the same people who want more money to make things worse. (It might be a different question if the issue was turned over to the creative class.)

What remains as real is the issue of Houston not really being an interesting place for visitors. This is roughly the same as not being an interesting place to live for the kind of people Florida describes. There are many things that need doing to improve this situation, but the biggest two are the creation of a significant urban place and the slowing of the destruction of the neighborhood fabric everywhere, particularly by freeway construction and expansion.

We have talked before about the “super core,” that area centered on the new light rail line and extending many blocks east and west. This is an area slightly smaller than Manhattan, which is obviously the richest and most interesting urban place in the United States, and is the center of creativity as well. Preventing this area from becoming a sprawling suburban disaster is going to be very difficult.

A huge process is getting underway in Houston to weigh our pluses and minuses and to explore our real dreams and explode our false myths. You will surely hear more about this over the next 12 months, but for now let’s consider that we are at a moment in our history when we can actually decide something about our common future. We’ll test a lot of ideas and we’ll spend a lot of time thinking about our neighborhoods and about cars and roads and a hundred other subjects.

But in the end, our greatest test will be whether we are prepared, as we once were long ago, to innovate. Are we willing to take chances and explore ideas from everywhere and everyone, and to work them into solutions for a future that is uniquely Houston, but diverse and rich enough to support the thousand eccentricities of the “creative class” as they challenge us to accept new ideas, and to turn them into genuine wealth for our region?

David Crossley is President of the Gulf Coast Institute, which leads the Livable Houston Initiative. For more information, go to www.livablehouston.org