Back in 2002, my husband, Professor Richard Florida, published the international best-seller The Rise of the Creative Class, an analysis of the forces that are reshaping our economy, our geography, the work we do, and our whole way of life. In it, he argued that just as our economy shifted from an agricultural basis to an industrial one in the late eighteenth century, we were entering a new epoch in which the most significant driver of economic growth is human creativity.
We know that the type of traveller targeted by the LE collective is a unique breed: creative, rebellious and unpredictable. That’s why we’ve collaborated with the Creative Class® Group, a global think tank comprised of leading researchers, academics and strategists, to bring you exclusive research and insight that will enable you to understand their very modern mindset.
Human expression has fostered joy, community and understanding in societies across time and place, helping individuals to connect in meaningful ways. Arts and culture tap into this universal drive toward expression and enrich our lives immeasurably, whether by promoting a sense of wellbeing, sharing ideas, cultivating beauty or prompting self-reflection and imagination. Our cities and communities would be sterile without the arts and the creativity and emotion they impart. We feel that dance is an important part of ar ts and culture and a power ful form of human expression, one that enhances our quality of life and contributes to our individual and social growth.
As a CEO, mother of two and frequent globetrotter, Rana Florida lives in the intersection of business, art, architecture, creativity and culture. But what of fashion, and where does it feature in her life? We needed to know, and so we met with the Creative Class Group CEO in the home she shares with her husband Richard, the international bestselling author, professor and urbanist. Their home is a perfect example of their design-led lifestyle, their vision executed by the ultra-creative firm Studio Pyramid and the interior designer Sasha Josipovicz.
Take ten million trees, 3.9 million people, 180 languages and dialects, the 7th largest stock exchange, the longest street in the world, and a renowned film festival. Throw in universal healthcare, the 8th largest LGBTQ2 pride parade, and the most rollicking Caribbean street festival anywhere, and you have Toronto. North America’s fourth largest city might also be its least understood and, with a broad mix of cultures, the hardest to classify. At times, the scene here can seem disparate, caught between affected grunge and unsettling flash, complete with a campy cadre of overdressed socialites. But then again, part of this metropolis’s beauty lies in its ability to make most anyone feel at home.
As Chief Executive Officer of the Creative Class Group, Rana Florida manages new business development, marketing, consulting, research and global operations serving such diverse clients as BMW, Converse, IBM, Cirque du Soleil, Audi, Zappos, and Starwood Hotels – to name just a few.
What is your morning routine?
I usually get woken up with a karate chop blow to the face; sometimes coming at me from both directions by 1 and 2-year-old feet. I will then untangle my hair from a puppy or cat wrapped around my head for warmth before tiptoeing like a ninja out of bed at 6 am. I will then check and respond to a crazy amount of work emails, both from clients and my team. I’m OCD, so will make sure every bed is made in perfect military fashion, the house in order, and dog, cats, babies all fed and dressed. I’m trying to take 15 minutes each morning to learn to meditate and clear my head before starting the workday.
Q: Rana, tell us more about your background. What were you doing before The Creative Class Group?
A: My parents – first generation immigrants from Jordan – drilled the importance of education into me and my siblings. They wanted us all to become doctors or lawyers. I was not drawn to either profession, so I went to business school without a clue as to what I would end up doing. I just knew that I wanted to land a high-level corporate job and I did just that, in Washington, DC. I was super excited by my six-figure salary and bonuses but was not happy. I was stuck commuting in traffic all day, I had crazy bosses and I had no control over my time and schedule.
Rana Florida is a CEO, Entrepreneur and best-selling business Author. As Chief Executive Officer of the Creative Class Group, Rana Florida manages new business development, marketing, consulting, research and global operations serving such diverse clients as BMW, Converse, IBM, Cirque du Soleil, Audi, Zappos, and Starwood Hotels – to name just a few. Rana has over two decades of experience in corporate strategy, communications and marketing, having executed marketing initiatives for the likes of Disney Live and Starbucks. She is well known as a writer on business and leadership, having written for Fast Company, Inc.com, and the Huffington Post. Rana Florida has also served as a guest business analyst on The Today Show and been featured in The New York Times, Vogue Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and more. Her one-on-one high profile interviews have covered notables – from President Bill Clinton and First Lady Michelle Obama to Andre Agassi, and many more. Rana Florida has also been h
The Laguna Beach LGBTQ Heritage & Culture Alliance, along with Visionary Sponsor and real estate investment firm Laguna Beach Company, and Title Sponsor, Bank of America, today announced registration is open for Diversity and The Creative Economy, a symposium featuring international best-selling Author and Urbanist Richard Florida. The symposium will be held on Monday, April 29, 2019 at Montage Laguna Beach from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. and will provide a platform for community members, local business, civic, legislative, cultural and educational leaders to discuss how inclusion and creativity can foster economic mobility and prosperity for Orange County. A portion of the event’s proceeds will be donated to Laguna Beach Pride 365, Club Q Laguna at Laguna Beach Seniors and The Blaze Bernstein Memorial Fund.
A new report says Miami is the seventh least-affordable large metro area in the world.
The recent report by urban researchers Richard Florida and Steven Pedigo says the Miami region’s housing unaffordability crisis reinforces its high levels of inequality.
The Miami metro — which spans Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties — aspires to become a hub for entrepreneurship and innovation, and it is making dramatic progress. According to research conducted by the Miami Urban Future Initiative, a joint effort of Florida International University’s College of Communication, Architecture and the Arts and the Creative Class Group, both venture capital investment and venture capital deals have increased more than threefold in the region since 2005.
Childhood, interrupted. I was born in Newark. My dad worked at the Victory Optical factory making eyeglass frames, and we lived in the Italian district of Newark. My parents had a rental apartment overlooking Branch Brook Park. Later we moved close by to North Arlington, New Jersey, because of the Catholic school, Queen of Peace, where my brother and I went. It’s the suburb that’s featured in the opening credits of The Sopranos.
On February 22, the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce Pillar Trustee Board hosted their inaugural Goals conference where business leaders, city officials, residents and stakeholders discussed challenges and opportunities facing Miami Beach. More than 150 guests attended the event and heard remarks from City of Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber , Leading Urbanist Richard Florida and Marketing Strategist Bruce Turkel.
A new report has found that six in 10 employed adults in South Florida are spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent. That’s the highest of any metro area in the country.
Philadelphia has long been one of my favorite cities. Having grown up in New Jersey and gone to college at Rutgers, I’ve been visiting, and tracking, the city since the mid-1970s. I saw it in perhaps its most hard-pressed days and cheered on the stunning revival of its downtown area over the past decade or so. I’ve been visiting even more now, as the inaugural Philadelphia Fellow sponsored by Drexel University, Thomas Jefferson University, and the University City Science Center, where I have been working with local stakeholders and academics to benchmark where the city stands on key metrics and to develop strategies for the future.
South Florida’s bid to attract Amazon’s HQ2 may have come up short when it came to landing the big prize. But in a panel discussion Tuesday, regional leaders said the bid process itself has galvanized the tri-county area to think and work more collaboratively.
“This process showed an extraordinary level of regional cooperation, done in a record amount of time,” said urbanist Richard Florida, who led the discussion of the panel, “What Did We Learn From Our Amazon Adventure.”
This is an opportunity for the mega-corporation to broker a new deal with the city and state
The pace at which new condos are added to Toronto’s red-hot housing market is nowhere near enough to fulfil the needs of a veritable surge of renters and would-be buyers, according to a recent report by Altus Group Ltd.
Since 2005, only around 60 purpose-built rental buildings have been erected in the market, offering a total of 11,620 new units over the 13-year period from then to the present.
We’re used to thinking of high-tech innovation and startups as generated and clustered predominantly in fertile U.S. ecosystems, such as Silicon Valley, Seattle, and New York. But as with so many aspects of American economic ingenuity, high-tech startups have now truly gone global. The past decade or so has seen the dramatic growth of startup ecosystems around the world, from Shanghai and Beijing, to Mumbai and Bangalore, to London, Berlin, Stockholm, Toronto and Tel Aviv. A number of U.S. cities continue to dominate the global landscape, including the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, but the rest of the world is gaining ground rapidly.
Meet The Creative Class Group – A Data-Driven Advisory Services Firm Working With Cities, Regions And Organizations Around The World
Venture Café Philadelphia will kick off its first Thursday night gathering on November 29 with prominent urban studies theorist, Richard Florida. The inaugural Venture Café Philadelphia Thursday gathering will take place from 3 – 8 p.m. at the newly opened 3675 Market Street where the University City Science Center is headquartered.
Richard Florida is one of the world’s leading urbanists. He is a researcher and professor, serving as University Professor and Director of Cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, a Distinguished Fellow at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, and a Visiting Fellow at Florida International University.
Toronto Mayor John Tory’s resounding victory last month gave him an “historic mandate,” as he put it. He’ll need it, because the city he is leading is badly stuck, unable to address the deep challenges it faces. Indeed, the mayor must use his hard-won political capital to make headway on four key fronts.
First and foremost is affordable housing. Tory has said he will make housing and housing affordability a priority of his second term, declaring that “we must do more to speed up the increase in supply of affordable housing.”
lobalization strikes again. The latest target is entrepreneurship.
For decades, promoting start-up firms through venture capital and other methods of business investment seemed a peculiarly American strength. It has nurtured countless tech firms, including titans such as Facebook, Google and Apple. Americans have been duly proud. It reinforced a sense of national exceptionalism, because other countries couldn’t easily duplicate it, if at all.
En estos tiempos, la clave para el desarrollo económico de América Latina ya no solamente incluye sus materias primas y sus manufacturas, sino también un recurso ilimitado aunque ignorado por muchos: el inmenso potencial creativo de la región. La creatividad forma indiscutiblemente parte del ADN de las sociedades, ciudades y barrios latinoamericanos,
De creatieve klasse heeft in veel opzichten de stad gered, alleen blijkt nu dat niet iedere stedeling deelt in het succes. Door
stijgende woonkosten gaapt een steeds diepere kloof tussen stadsbewoners. Daarom moeten we werk maken van inclusief
urbanisme, betoogt stedelijk geograaf Richard Florida.
Richard Florida, the well-known economist and urban theorist, says the Capital Region of Albany is one of the top 25 areas for the young and ambitious.
With Amazon’s search for its second headquarters or “HQ2” finally over, it’s time for Greater Miami to get back to the business of building its own economy. The fact that Miami was selected as one of 20 finalists out of the 238 cities that applied to the original request for proposals reflects the tremendous strides the region has made in the economic development arena.
While recent headlines have blared about the Trump administration’s multi-front trade war with Canadian dairy farmers, Chinese manufacturers and the European Union’s steel, aluminum and automotive industries, a much larger economic threat has gone virtually unnoticed. The high-tech startups that have provided the U.S. with a powerful edge in fields such as computers, software, mobile devices, biotech, the internet and an array of digital platforms now face rapidly increasing pressures from foreign competition. This looming crisis of American innovation could undermine the nation’s long-running global advantage in bringing to market the next new technology, the next new industry, the next big thing. It may well be the gravest challenge yet to America’s century-plus hold on global economic hegemony.
Can creativity be the basis of prosperity in Latin America? Richard Florida calls for a bet on Latin ingenuity to fight against inequality in the region.
If city and civic leaders want an example of how instrumental the private sector can be in the transformation of a city, they can look at billionaire investor Dan Gilbert. Gilbert and his family of companies were highlighted during a Monday afternoon session for CityLab, a three-day conference at the GM Renaissance Center with participants from 156 cities across 27 countries. He sat down for a chat with Richard Florida, co-founder and editor at large of CityLab.com and senior editor of The Atlantic.
A City Focused Provocateur Who Thinks Global and Acts Local. For anyone interested in Detroit’s growth, we recommend diving into Florida’s work.
We caught up with him in town for the thought provoking City Lab conference—the organization he co-founded and serves as Editor-at-Large for.
Canada, we increasingly hear, is becoming a global leader in high-tech innovation and entrepreneurship. Report after report has ranked Toronto, Waterloo and Vancouver among the world’s most up-and-coming tech hubs. Toronto placed fourth in a ranking of North American tech talent this past summer, behind only the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and Washington, and in 2017 its metro area added more tech jobs than those other three city-regions combined.
It goes without saying: Ours is a divided nation. But the real boundary doesn’t run between Blue or Red states, liberal and conservative ideologies, or urban versus rural regions. No, the real divide in America is one of scale. Richard Florida and Mick Cornett belong to different political parties, and differ sharply on a number of policy views. But they share a core belief that our country’s future lies in Local America.
Toronto is a city on “the brink” of not fully realizing its potential and must think about a new model for growth if it wants to thrive and stand out as an example of a modern global metropolis, says urban studies expert Richard Florida. Speaking at Urban Land Institute Toronto’s symposium on Toronto urbanism, Florida, one of the world’s leading urban thinkers and a professor at the University of Toronto’s school of cities and Rotman School of Management, said Toronto is an incredible city but one that faces significant challenges including housing affordability, a “worsening class divide” and woeful traffic congestion.
Long considered the gateway to Latin America, Miami takes steps to become a truly international city.
A shadow hangs over Toronto after Sunday’s shooting on the Danforth. The recent killing spree follows on the heels of a vehicle attack on Yonge Street this spring and a raft of shootings, including one with small children in the crossfire last month. The city’s international reputation as a multicultural success story seems at risk, as Torontonians fear they are succumbing to the twin threats of gun violence and terrorism vexing other global cities.
Richard Florida is studying the evolution of cities. After their decline and then their gentrification, he notes that today the major international metropolises are inaccessible to those who work there. Read more in this French interview.
Torontonians like to sound off on Americans’ inability to deal with guns and gun deaths. But Toronto’ s inability to deal with the car creates its own killing fields. Today, more Torontonians die from being hit by cars than from being killed by guns. In 2016, nearly 2,000 pedestrians and 1,000 cyclists in the city were hit by cars. Of these, 43 resulted in fatalities.
Growing cities such as Hong Kong are at the epicenter of what Richard Florida has dubbed “the new urban crisis,” with the city’s success sending house prices soaring out of reach of the average resident. The author and urbanist, who is director of cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto, spoke at the 2018 ULI Asia Pacific Summit in Hong Kong.
Miami ranks first among large U.S. metros for the share of its residents who are immigrants (41 percent of the population), placing the metro ahead of San Jose, L.A., and San Francisco, according to a new research brief from the FIU + CCG | Miami Urban Future Initiative (MUFI). The report also finds that Miami ranks first among large U.S. metros according to the amount of merchandise goods, commodities, and cargo that it transported internationally in 2016 ($1.5 million tons).
Miami ranks first among large U.S. metros for the share of its residents who are immigrants (41% of the population), placing the metro ahead of San Jose, L.A., and San Francisco, according to a new research brief from the FIU + CCG | Miami Urban Future Initiative (MUFI). The report also finds that Miami ranks first among large U.S. metros according to the amount of merchandise goods, commodities, and cargo that it transported internationally in 2016 ($1.5 million tons).
Ontario’s recent economic success is the product of longer-run investments in universities, arts and culture; advanced research in key fields like artificial intelligence; openness to immigrants; and a growing commitment to place-making and city-building. This economic advantage will be significantly diminished if Doug Ford becomes premier of Ontario. Comparisons are already being made between Mr. Ford and Mr. Trump, as well as between Mr. Trump and Mr. Ford’s late younger brother, Rob, the original North American populist. All three positioned themselves as advocates for the “little guy,” slashing taxes and cutting back government. Like Mr. Trump, Doug Ford has even hired actors for campaign events.
This article references the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports : Can Low-Wage Workers Find Better Jobs?
authored by Richard Florida, Todd Gabe, and Jaison R. Abel. There is growing concern over rising economic inequality, the decline of the middle class, and a polarization of the U.S. workforce. This study examines the extent to which low-wage workers in the United States transition to better jobs, and explores the factors associated with uch a move up the job ladder.
There is growing concern over rising economic inequality, the decline of the middle class, and a polarization of the U.S. workforce. This study authored by Richard Florida, Todd Gabe, and Jaison R. Abel, examines the extent to which low-wage workers in the United States transition to better jobs, and explores the factors associated with uch a move up the job ladder.
”The Creativity index appeared to be one of the best metrics to understand sales performance at Cirque. And correlation are strong, therefor we will be now using this metric to anticipate sales performance and better forecast.
Alexandre AlleMarket Insight Advisor, Cirque du Soleil
