Stephen Colbert famously grilled Richard Florida about one of the more controversial statements made by the urban studies theorist. Florida maintains the presence of gay and bohemian residents in a neighbourhood is positively correlated with rising house prices.
It is findings like these that have made Who’s Your City? a must-read book. An academic by profession, Florida has crafted this book as a self-help guide for people who are planning to relocate. Choosing the right city or region is vitally important, especially for those who work in the creative economy.
Florida’s previous book was The Rise of the Creative Class, in which he explored a new class of people whose economic function is to be innovative and creative. Building on that work, Florida poses a big question for readers: In the creative economy, does it matter where we live and work? With extensive research to back his thesis, he demonstrates that our economic and social wellbeing is intimately tied to where we reside.
21st Century Economic Development
Who’s Your City? was written partly to refute an oft-cited maxim that where we live doesn’t matter in a flat world that is digitally connected. Florida’s team has generated maps that show the distribution of economic development is anything but flat; rather it is spiky, with a few mega-regions, or clusters of cities within regions, accounting for most of the growth.
The maps show distinct peaks and valleys on a global scale. Higher level economic activities like innovation, design, finance and the media tend to cluster in a select group of locations. These centres are magnets for creative people who want to collaborate with other people like themselves.
Examples of mega-regions in North America include the Boston-New York-Washington corridor and the Toronto-Buffalo-Rochester region. Florida warns policy makers this peak and valley growth is intensifying in spite of the spread of digital technology.
Cities Have Personalities Too
Drawing on the field of psychology and the pioneering research of Gosling and Rentfrow demonstrating the geographic clustering of personality traits or types, Florida and his associates have mapped these traits onto cities. Just as some people are either neurotic or agreeable (but rarely both), so cities or clusters of cities tend to have personalities. Understanding these differences is a first step in deciding where to move.
Chicago, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis are examples of cities that are extroverted or outgoing; these cities score low on other dimensions of personality, such as agreeableness. Agreeable and conscientious types would be better off locating to the Sun Belt: cities like Richmond, Virginia or Orlando, Florida.
Perhaps the biggest lesson for policy makers and urban planners is that while older industrial centres traditionally attracted employees who were conscientious and agreeable, these same traits do not serve well at a time when manufacturing jobs are disappearing. What are called for are innovative and creative thinkers; unfortunately, the creative class doesn’t want to locate to these dying centres, preferring places like New York or Toronto.
Choose Your City
Florida’s team developed a tool called the Place Finder. The final section of the book explains how to use the tool to identify personal priorities when it comes to place, as a prerequisite to selecting the ideal location(s) to live and work. It would be interesting to find out what success or frustrations users have experienced in applying the tool.
Florida mocks himself toward the end of the book, querying why an academic would write a self-help book. If the book has a flaw, it is the author’s breezy transitions from erudite research results to folksy reflections culled from his familial past. This is a minor quibble in an otherwise thoughtful guide to how cities really work. Don’t make a move without it!
Andree Iffrig - Andrée Iffrig LEED AP is a writer and award-winning graduate architect. She uses her broad background in environmental design and ...
