Last night, I saw this film - Fast Runner at the SIFF. It was an amazing film about an Inuit tribe and their passion and politics all within the span of 3 hours (Ian stop rolling your eyes! It won the Palm D'or at Cannes). The landscape was beautiful, of course - Artic snow and purple skies, later turning to summer and spring -- a pattern of greys, browns, greens... The people were amazingly good actors - delivering lines in the first entire Inuit language film... Also the plot line throwing out the romanticized notion of the "gentle people", they were just as bloodthirsty as your Shakespear tragedy...
Back to Civilization, Salon interviewed author/professor Richard Florida about the Creativity Index of Cities and what it means to the vitality of where you're living. Very compelling arguments - but also somewhat too simplistic -- of course creative people are going to want to be around other creative people, of course diversity brings out creativity, of course gays and ethnic groups promote the arts, of course companies who have creative challenges and incentives thrive better than those with just monetary reasons... However, he does back some of this up with some data. I'd be interested in reading his book and seeing what stands out.
Some of this of course doesn't take into account the "Cheap Rent" index either... He does, however, acknowledge the fact that the creative index can chase out the locals and service industry because the rents are too high... And a good part of this is that if you can afford to live in the city, you have to accept the fact that city living is not going to resemble the idyllic suburb dream (3 bedroom homes, big bathrooms, 2 cars, etc)...
I also found the talk of conservative cities vs liberal cities to be a bit one-dimensional. I think more goes into play than just tolerant people... Histories and legacies unfortunately are ingrained so much into places like Detroit and Pittsburgh that you can't divorce the two and start to have a clean break... On a small scale, I think of places like Medford - the place where I lived and though how much there might be pockets of liberal thinking, they're ingrained in their redneck ways so much that it makes it impossible to do anything different than lumber or grow pears... (even if the former industry has to be euthenized)... The more I read this, the more I am wondering if Seattle isn't sliding down the Creative index (even though we rank in the middle)...