Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

383 Pages·2008·5.003 MB·English

by  Richard Florida

ECONOMICS / CURRENT EVENTS
R “Florida is one of the smartest working–life observers in the country.”
—BUSINESSWEEK.COM
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lace is not only important, it’s more important than ever. In fact, choosing a place to live is as
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important to our happiness as choosing a spouse or career. And some regions, recent surveys A
show, really are happier than others. In Who’s Your City?, Creative Class guru Richard Florida R
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reports on this growing body of research that tells us what qualities of cities and towns actually make Y O U R
INTERNATIONAL
people happy—and he explains how to use these ideas to make our own choices. Where we decide to live F
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is a crucialdecision in each of our lives, and Who’s Your City?helps us to take full advantage of our range
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of choices.
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“Such research could be the most important anyone undertakes.”
—LA TIMES
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“An illuminating narrative of demography and urban and economic development.”
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—JOHN GAPPER, THE FINANCIAL TIMES
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HOW THE CREATIVE ECONOMY
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O IS MAKING WHERE TO LIVE D
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RICHARD FLORIDA is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals, U L
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and was named one of the Best and Brightest by Esquire Magazine. #
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He is a regular columnist for The Globe and Mail and author of the C 1
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bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class.He is the director of the I 59
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Class at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He is ? /09 C
ative founder of the Creative Class Group, located in Washington, DC, F LOR ID A YA
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© Toronto, Pittsburgh, and Europe. He lives in Toronto with his wife, Rana. M
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www.creativeclass.com Y
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$16.00 US B
Cover design by Gray318 L
ISBN 978-0-465-01809-3 K
51600 S
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A Member of the Perseus Books Group AUTHOR OF THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS E
www.basicbooks.com R
9 780465 018093
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WHO’S YOUR CITY?
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WHO’S YOUR CITY?
How the Creative Economy Is Making
Where to Live the Most
Important Decision of Your Life
Richard Florida
A MEMBER OF THE PERSEUS BOOKS GROUP
NEW YORK
0465018093-Florida:Layout 1 4/20/09 9:45 AM Page iv
Copyright © 2008 by Richard Florida
Hardcover first published in 2008 by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Paperback first published in 2009 by Basic Books
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this
book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South,
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Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200,
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or e-mail [email protected].
Designed by Timm Bryson
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available for the hardcover edition:
ISBN: 978-0-465-00352-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-465-01809-3
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For Rana
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If everything that exists has a place, place too will
have a place, and so on ad infinitum.
—Aristotle
How in the image of material man, at once his glory
and his menace, is this thing we call a city.
—Frank Lloyd Wright
The large towns and especially London absorb the
very best blood from all the rest of England; the most
enterprising, the most highly gifted, those with the
highest physique and the strongest characters go
there to find scope for their abilities.
—Alfred Marshall
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Contents
1 The Question of Where 1
Part I:Why Place Matters
2 Spiky World 17
3 Rise of the Mega-Region 41
4 The Clustering Force 61
Part II:The Wealth of Place
5 The Mobile and the Rooted 79
6 Where the Brains Are 91
7 Job-Shift 101
8 Superstar Cities 127
Part III:The Geography of Happiness
9 Shiny Happy Places 147
10 Beyond Maslow’s City 161
11 Cities Have Personalities,Too 187
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viii CONTENTS
Part IV:Where We Live Now
12 Three Big Moves 217
13 The Young and the Restless 223
14 Married with Children 251
15 When the Kids Are Gone 275
16 Place Yourself 287
Acknowledgments 307
Appendices 311
Notes 335
Index 359
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1
THE QUESTION OF WHERE
I
’m not easily shaken. I like to think of myself as a
guy who can take just about anything in stride. But when I
was asked to appear on the Colbert Report in July 2007, I felt
my stomach drop. Just a few months prior, I’d told my wife,
Rana, how nerve-racking it would be to do an interview with
Stephen Colbert. It’s the one show that puts butterflies in my
stomach. His technique of disarming mindless punditry through
smart and edgy commentary is brilliant, but tough to fend off.
He has an uncanny ability to stay in character—that now-famous
bloviating right-wing talking head who grills his guests at a
rapid-fire tempo, leaving them dumbstruck. I’m a regular
watcher of the show and big fan, so I’ve seen how embarrassing
it can be for guests who can’t keep pace. But after some per-
suading from Rana and my team, I decided to give it a shot.
I took along some backup. Rana, my colleague David Miller,
and his wife, Emily, all accompanied me on the high-speed
Acela train from Washington, D.C., where we then lived, to
1