Sure, listicles are devices to get us to crawl past ads but when it's a positive one for Detroit I bite. Since this comes from Forbes, a long-running reputable business publication it carries a little more cred.
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As to methodology...
To find America’s Most Creative cities, we started with America’s 50 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas [[MSAs) and Metropolitan Divisions [[MSADs), home to half the U.S. population. MSAs and MSADs are cities and their surrounding suburbs as defined by the Office of Management and Budget. We then ranked these places based on four metrics. While other such lists measure creativity by the presence of art galleries and patents granted, we felt these wouldn’t get at the heart of a city’s true creative spirit. [[Galleries better indicate the presence of successful art sellers rather than makers. And patent trolls have skewed the validity of patents as a reliable indicator.)
To capture a more organic, art-music-entertainment-design form of creativity, Sperling’s Best Places [[Forbes’ content partner for this list) searched for cities where people are actively engrossed in creative projects. We looked at sites where people promote or manage their projects—creative funding platforms Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and music sites Bandcamp and ReverbNation—measuring the number of projects or artists per site as compared to the local population.
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