Rana Florida is CEO of The Creative Class Group, founded by her husband world renowned urbanist Richard Florida. It is a global advisory firm composed of expert researchers, academics, and business strategists. Their proprietary data and research, gives companies and regions leading insights to achieve growth and prosperity.
Dr. Richard Florida is a world-renowned American urban theorist and public intellectual who focuses on social and economic theory. He’s a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a Distinguished Fellow of the NYU School of Professional Studies. Over the years, Florida has tried his hand at many roles, from teaching the next generation of academics to working as an editor and correspondent for none other than The Atlantic magazine, where he was appointed Senior Editor in 2011. He majored in political science and earned a degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University. Florida is best known for his concept of the creative class and its implications for urban regeneration, which he articulated in his bestselling books The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), Cities and the Creative Class (2003) and The Flight of the Creative Class (2006). Florida’s theory posits that metropolitan regions with high concentrations of tech workers, artists, musicians, LGBTQ people show higher levels of economic development. Florida refers to these groups collectively as the “creative class”.