Who’s Your City Features and Reviews

The Bergin Book Report highlights Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City?

Now that Florida has stimulated further debate about the correlation between location and happiness, OA publisher Warwick Sabin asked him to apply his theories to the American South, where a sense of place has always mattered most.

Whether you’re a city lover, have a keen interest in our economy, or an arm-chair social scientist seeking to understand global trends then this book will give you much to ponder.

Columnist Rheba Estante’s personal perspective on how your city of residence brings joy or sorrow.

The Financial Post’s top ten

Tim Harford finds out why deciding where you live could be the most important decision of your life.

PLACE matters. It affects your career chances, your choice of life partner, and, according to transplanted American economist Richard Florida, your chances for personal happiness and fulfillment.

Richard Florida presents a potent argument for why a few cities are emerging as extremely successful economic powerhouses, while most are in decline. Florida argues that we are now able to choose a place to live from cities around the country and all one needs to do is match a city’s personality and social possibilities with our individual needs and preferences also arguing that these needs can change with
different stages — early career, raising a family and retirement — of life.

In 2002, with his best-selling book The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida kick-started a national conversation about cities can attract the kind of people that will help them grow and compete.

Book reviews by Dr. Albert Mohler

Florida argues that where you lives affects everything from how much money you make to how happy you are.

Globalization and technology have created new options of working from anywhere, but that hasn’t de-emphasized the importance of where a worker lives. Arguably, place is becoming more important.
Reprinted and/or posted with the permission of Daily Journal Corp. (2008)

Throughout and since his successful campaign for Lexington mayor, Jim Newberry has cited the writings of urban studies theorist Richard Florida, whose best-selling Rise of the Creative Class has contributed to a surge of urban revitalization efforts from coast to coast.

Richard Florida says cities must pander to creative types

We assume in an age of globalization that it doesn’t matter where you live: Technology allows us to do our jobs from home, be it on a tropical beach or in a rural community. Best-selling author and urbanologist Richard Florida disagrees.

Bestselling author, academic, and prominent public intellectual Richard Florida talks to Joseph Planta about his latest book, Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Random House, 2008).

For the first time ever, says author and Toronto University’s Business and Creativity Professor Richard Florida, many of us have the freedom and economic means to choose our place — and the opportunity to find the place that fits us best is even more important than choosing a career or even a spouse.

Richard Florida on NPR says many of us have the freedom and economic means to choose our place — and the opportunity to find the place that fits us best is even more important than choosing a career or even a spouse.

Author Richard Florida argues that for people in creative fields, it’s important to live near each other in order to spark innovation and drive regional economies.

Richard Florida took on Thomas Friedman and challenged his notion that the world is flat – suggesting instead that it is “spiky” by pointing out that the real economic activity happens within cities, not countries and that it DOES matter where you live even though technology has seemingly made it easier to do business anywhere.

Florida maintains that where you decide to live has far-reaching consequences, and as the title suggests, this decision may be the most important one that you ever make.

Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions. Each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes. It turns out these personality types are not spread evenly across the country. They cluster and how they cluster tells us much.

Florida — social theorist, geographer, urban planner and guru of the globalization debate — believes the place we choose to live has more of a bearing on future success and happiness than the more micro-level decisions of career and relationships.

Everyone has heard the theory by now: Thanks to the Internet and other high-tech elements of globalization, the world is flat. That is, economic forces are increasingly spread across a world without boundaries, helped by everything from faster transportation to the Web.

Seattle already has the ingredients of what author Richard Florida calls a superstar city: an abundance of talent, knowledge industries, tolerance and the kind of dense, urban fabric that encourages the creative class to thrive.

“If everything that exists has a place, place too will have a place, and so on ad infinitum.” — Aristotle. It’s not very often that the author of a book discussing economics and sociology for a general readership starts with a quote by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. But when the writer is the thought-provoking intellectual Richard Florida — who claims in his new book, “Who’s Your City?,” that the selection of where to live ranks as life’s most important decision — it’s easier to see why he found Aristotle’s quote both appropriate and prescient.

“Success and contentment may depend as much on choice of location as on choice of spouse or job”.

Discussion of three maps in Who’s Your City?

Portland and Who’s Your City?

Calgary and Who’s Your City?

The Singles Map

Richard Florida wants us to add another dynamic to the life-altering decisions we make: where we live

Considering your next big career move? In exclusive excerpts from his new book, “Who’s Your City?,” Richard Florida explains why that decision should be all about location, location, location — and profiles the top new regions for great jobs and companies.

How Toronto fell over heels for an American urbanist named Florida.

Which cities have a surplus of single men (or women)- and what that means for the country

Book review by The Candaian Press that says forget flat world theory of globalization

Review by Andrew Welsh-Huggins of the Associated Press

Denver grabs lofty rank in global economy

Book Review Time Out Chicago

“…the most entertaining chapter addresses America’s distribution of what psychologists call the “big five personality traits”:

Here are the top 10 hardcover fiction and non-fiction books in Canada compiled by Maclean’s magazine.

Financial Times review of Who’s Your City?

“Who’s Your City? is an emotional call to action for people to live in cities and towns that best suit their personalities” says the Australian Financial Review.

Who’s Your City? ranks in at 2nd best seller by the West Side Barnes and Noble in El Paso.

‘Economic Geographer’ Richard Florida says location matters more than ever in today’s global economy, which is powered by a surprisingly small number of places.

We make three critical choices in our modern, globalized lives. One’s job: What to do? One’s partner: Who to do it with? One’s home: Where to live?

Toronto Globe and Mail-Richard Florida always believed the world was shaped primarily by social and economic factors. Then he discovered the central role played by psychology.

How places are experiencing unprecedented decline and threaten to become tomorrow’s slums.

William R. Winkeke and why Madison is a fine place to live

Rotman School of Management Press Release for Who’s Your City?

It’s a mantra of the age of globalization that where we live doesn’t matter. We can innovate just as easily from a ski chalet in Aspen or a beachhouse in Provence as in the office of a Silicon Valley startup.

Book review by Linda Stankard of BookPage

…this thought-provoking and seminal work will surely be studied, not only by scholars but more importantly by consumers pondering a move…