Greater Bangor’s creative economy

Bangor has embraced the now-popular economic development strategy of enhancing and promoting the region’s creative economy. This idea, based on the research of economist Richard Florida and others, stresses the importance of human creativity to regional economic growth.

Whereas other development strategies, such as the recruitment of manufacturing plants, rely on tools like tax incentives and industrial parks, programs based on the creative economy attempt to attract “creative talent” and stimulate the creative process through cultural and artistic development, embracing diversity, and supporting lively downtowns.

The recent drafting of a City of Bangor Municipal Cultural Development Plan along with the upcoming Blaine House Conference on the Creative Economy suggest that efforts are underway at both the local and state levels to bolster the creative economy. In order to measure the outcomes of future efforts, it is important to get a handle on the current size of the creative class in the Bangor Region relative to other areas around the United States.

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One of several indicators of the creative economy, used by Richard Florida in his book “The Rise of the Creative Class,” is a measure of a region’s “creative talent.” Florida defines the creative class on the basis of a person’s occupation, and he includes jobs such as computer programmers, scientists, educators, artists, doctors, musicians and engineers. Using occupational data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Florida then calculates the percentage of a metropolitan area’s total work force that is comprised of the creative class.

We employed Florida’s methodology, with a slight modification to account for self-employed individuals, to measure the relative importance of the creative class to the Bangor Region. Using the most recent information available, we found that creative occupations make up 31.1 percent of total employment in the region. This ranks the Bangor Region 71st out of 329 U.S. metropolitan areas and 15th out of 25 metropolitan areas located in the New England states.

Although the percentage of workers in the creative economy varies widely from the top to the bottom of our list, 138 of the U.S. metropolitan areas had between 28 and 34 percent of employment in creative occupations. Thus, a one-percentage point increase in the Bangor Region’s creative class would increase its national ranking from 71st to 49th. (Incidentally, in the recently published paperback edition of Florida’s book, the Bangor Region ranks 51st out of 276 metropolitan areas in terms of creative talent.)

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Comparisons to other U.S. and New England metropolitan areas are revealing, but it is also interesting to compare the Bangor Region to other metropolitan areas that are similar in size. We ordered the 329 metropolitan areas included in our analysis from largest to smallest in terms of population size, and focused on the ten areas just larger and smaller than the Bangor Region. This set of 21 metropolitan areas, which includes Lewiston-Auburn, ranged in population size from 77,668 to 102,720 people in 1999. When compared to these similar-sized metropolitan areas, the Bangor Region has the largest percentage of employment in creative occupations.

The figures presented above suggest that Bangor has a relatively large creative class compared with other similar-sized areas. But, behind these numbers, questions remain about the composition of Bangor’s workforce and how it stacks up to other regions and hotbeds of creative activity. Much of the information presented in Professor Florida’s book focuses on designers, scientists, engineers and other high-technology occupations, which are in relatively short supply in Bangor. (In fact, the Bangor Region ranks 269th out of 276 U.S. metropolitan areas in Florida’s “high technology index.”)

Thus, it is still an open question whether the Bangor region can foster the types of creative energies portrayed in Florida’s book that result in substantial economic growth. In truth, no single policy, local investment or event will lead, by itself, to a sustainable creative economy. However, we do know it requires a collective mindset that encourages risk taking, supports new ideas, and tolerates different viewpoints. Local investments and policies based on these principles are worthy of strong consideration.

This commentary was prepared by Todd Gabe and Thomas Allen, assistant professor and associate scientist, respectively, in the Department of Resource Economics and Policy at the University of Maine; and Kathryn Hunt, a research associate at the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy at UMaine.