Creative Populations tend to be Pretty Dense

Richard Florida reiterates the case made by economists and economic geographers for at least a generation:  innovation tends to come from places with a high density of skilled people.  Yet, as Florida points out, most measures of skill and talent are expressed on a per population basis (e.g., the percentage of the population with a college degree).

What if you change the metric to per square mile?  How does that change our understanding of creative places?  Not that much.  New York and LA still lead the pack.  But when researchers tried to isolate the places that have higher concentrations of talent than would be predicted based strictly on population size, it gets interesting.  (Click on the graph to see it full size.)

Some interesting observations throughout this post.