Few purveyors of big ideas have as much riding on a single notion or catch phrase as Richard Florida does with the “creative class.” Florida’s idea of a group of highly mobile, Mac-toting professionals driving economic development has sold him a lot of books, spurred a lucrative speechmaking and consulting career, and gotten him a well-paid perch at the University of Toronto. As important, it has given the admittedly status-conscious academic—previously, an anonymous professor in Pittsburgh—a kinship with the progressive elites that his theory affirmed. He is our premier celebrity urbanologist, whose home page features a clip of Bono mentioning him on a panel with Bill Clinton.

All of which explains the awkwardness of the current moment for Florida: His theories about how to boost city economies have, quite simply, been discredited. Rather than provide universal uplift, as he promised in his 2002 treatise, The Rise of the Creative Class, the clustering of high-earning professionals in areas rich in his “three T’s” of technology, talent, and tolerance has exposed inequalities both between and within cities. (Florida’s advice for low-wage service workers has been to find ways to “creatify” their work—unions or minimum wages were rarely mentioned.) And his ideas haven’t just failed on policy grounds; they’ve been rejected by voters as well, in places like Toronto, where Rob Ford rode a populist backlash against bike lanes and downtown arts initiatives to tabloid stardom, and New York, where Bill de Blasio won a landslide victory by running directly against the “luxury city” ideal of a mayor who explicitly echoed Florida. Ever since the economy fell apart, the creative class (which Florida defined loosely enough to include bankers along with Web designers) has come to look less like savior than culprit.

Florida is nothing if not nimble, however. Far from abandoning the field or holing up at the library to devise a new theory, he is simply recalibrating his pitch. In fact, he is less interesting as a thinker now than as a case study in how an “intellectual rock star” (as Fast Company called him in a line featured on his website) preserves his viability.

In October, Florida addressed the Remaking Cities Congress at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, his former employer. The conference was a follow-up to an important 1988 summit on the fate of postindustrial urbanism and, for Florida, a chance to present his new talking points. As he began his remarks, Florida seemed as assured as ever: With his evangelizing zeal, resolute geniality, and bro-ish good looks, he embodies the TED talk ideal. He dropped names left and right (“I just spent two days with Larry Summers ...”). But his tone was self-conscious verging on defensive.

Pacing faster and faster, jabbing a finger for emphasis, he talked up his Newark roots and avowed that he hailed from a “neo-Marxist tradition.” He wanted the skeptics to know that his image of being a cosmopolitan trend-spotter unconcerned with the working poor was off base. “I didn’t build my theory of the creative class by studying latte bars,” he said. “I knew nothing about that. ... What did I study when I moved to Carnegie Mellon? Factories.”