Tolerance – The Third Success Factor of Prosperous Cities

“Technology, talents and tolerance”. These three “T’s” mark out the field in which, according to Richard Florida’s growth theory, regions and cities compete for a successful economic future. We have already dealt with technology and talents in articles, in the following we will deal with the third “T”, tolerance, as a success factor of flourishing cities.

Talents – the carriers of creative capital – are the key to the economic success and resilience of a location. In order to be attractive to these talents, cities and regions need not only internationally renowned universities and innovative companies as potential employers. According to Florida, attracting (and retaining) talent will only succeed if the city has a tolerant and stimulating culture. After all, creative and innovative work develops particularly well where openness to new ideas and influences and a productive approach to different perspectives and abilities can be found. This is the only way for the creative city to stand out from conventional location policies and city marketing and be successful in the long term in the competition for the sought-after knowledge workers and creative people.

Cosmopolis

The dynamism and innovative power of cities has always been the result of a continuous influx of ideas, goods and people. Immigrants not only import new ideas and skills, but also their contacts at home. Port cities were so innovative because, even if they did not permanently host their immigrant populations, they were connected to other places and provided a temporary refuge for people and things that circulated around the globe. Too

the astonishing success of the city of Athens in the 5th century BC was due in large part to its openness to outside influences and the fact that over a third of its free population was foreign-born (Wilson 2022).

Even today, there is a significant economic impulse from immigrants, for example in Silicon Valley in California. Around a third of the companies based there were founded by immigrants. Just over half of U.S. billion-dollar startups (unicorns) have at least one immigrant founder, and 80 percent of these companies have an immigrant in a key position (Visual Capitalist 2023).

Openness also refers to the proportion of foreign-born residents, the so-called melting pot index. The metropolises in the Florida Ranking have a high proportion of the foreign-born population compared to the national average (Fig. 12). Zurich, London, Vienna, Amsterdam, Munich and Frankfurt, at 31 to 42 percent, are even well above the average of European cities (below 20 percent) (Eurostat 2022).

However, the statistics on foreigners and foreign-born people do not give a complete picture of a city’s diversity and diversity. They do not provide any information about what percentage of the population are children or grandchildren of immigrants. In addition, they do not provide any information about the diversity of nationalities or their position within the city. The city of Amsterdam is particularly known for its cosmopolitanism. People from more than 180 countries live there, without any group dominating.

In addition, another 50 percent of residents have at least one parent born outside the Netherlands (so-called allochthonous). These details highlight the enormous complexity of diversity and integration of different cultures and nationalities within cities.

Tolerance and openness

Since the proportion of migrants in German and European cities will continue to grow in the future, they can hardly afford a destructive approach to integration and cultural diversity in the long term. Following Richard Florida’s thesis, namely that regions will only be economically successful in the future if they show a positive appreciation of international and social diversity, there should be a change of perspective in the integration debate, which has so far had rather negative connotations. In this sense, the focus should be much more on the social and economic opportunities and potentials and these should be promoted in a targeted manner.

Recent studies show that a structural lack of a welcoming culture can significantly hinder the recruitment of skilled workers from abroad (ZEW, InterNations 2024). In particular, (large) companies with an international orientation and internationalised structures therefore refrain from investing in regions with a high level of xenophobia. Xenophobia damages the image and attractiveness of a business location and thus its future viability. For example, the current flight of the AfD threatens to increasingly burden East Germany as a business location.

An open and tolerant environment is therefore directly related to economic development and is therefore a decisive location factor (and not just an optional quality feature) for operational decisions. This is also, but not only, about the regional ability to include and integrate foreign or ethnic groups into companies and society. Florida also understands tolerance to mean a relaxed and non-discriminatory coexistence of people of different sexual orientations and a relaxed approach to different lifestyles and ways of working.

In order to make these qualities measurable, Florida refers to indicators such as the proportion of homosexuals in the total population (“Gay Index”) or the proportion of writers, musicians, actors, painters, etc. in combination with the number and diversity of the cultural infrastructure of the city or region (“Bohemian Index”). In particular, the gay index shows an astonishingly high correlation with local creativity and regional growth (Merx 2006).

The LGBTQ² index (Fig. 13), on the other hand, shows how LGBTQ-friendly selected European cities are. Among other things, the current state of LGBTQ rights, laws and freedoms, public attitudes towards LGBTQ members and the size of the local “Pride” community were taken into account. The evaluation shows that Richard Florida’s top 15 occupy the top spots and are among the 50 most LGBTQ-friendly cities in Europe. London, Amsterdam, Madrid and Berlin make up the top 5 of the LGBTQ index with Manchester, with London clearly ahead of the other metropolises.

Nightlife as a location factor

The creative class seeks – and creates – an open and dynamic environment. To attract the best talent, cities need to create an urban ecosystem that is specifically tailored to the needs of the knowledge economy. This includes not only cafes and first-class restaurants, but also street food stalls, a vibrant (sub)cultural life, a diverse entertainment scene and a lively nightlife. The presence of restaurants and bars as well as entertainment facilities such as theatres, live music clubs and discotheques is seen as a concrete location factor in the recruitment of young people in the education and career entry phase and is accordingly an integral part of the city marketing keyboard of almost every major European city.

An analysis of the bars and restaurants displayed on the tourist website Trip Advisor shows that nightlife is mainly concentrated in the selected European cities and is an indication of the appeal of these metropolises (Fig. 14). Among the German cities, the nightlife in Berlin in particular can keep up internationally. With its internationally recognized music club scene, the German capital has a figurehead that is also actively used in city marketing – not only for tourists, but also for the recruitment of talent.

The most successful cities and metropolises are above all those that allow for contrasts. “Only rawness, contrasts and conflicts give a city its exciting flair, its pulsating energy. […] Bad pubs and even worse dive bars on the one hand, glamour and wealth on the other – it is precisely the contradictory and unsettling that gives the big cities their energy.” (Ben Wilson).