Who's Your City?: How The Creative Economy Is Making Where To Live The Most Important Decision Of Your Life

Random House Of Canada | December 10, 2010 | Hardcover

International Bestseller

All places are not created equal.

In this groundbreaking book, Richard Florida shows that where we live is increasingly a crucial factor in our lives, one that fundamentally affects our professional and personal prospects. As well as explaining why place matters now more than ever, Who's Your City? provides indispensable tools to help you choose the right place for you.

It's a cliché of the information age that globalization has made place irrelevant, that one can telecommute as effectively from New Zealand as New York. But it's not true, Richard Florida argues, relying on twenty years of innovative research in urban studies, creativity, and demographic trends. In fact, as new units of economic growth called mega-regions become increasingly specialized, the world is becoming more and more "spiky" - divided between flourishing clusters of talent, education and competitiveness, and moribund "valleys."

All these places have personalities, Richard Florida explains in the second half of Who's Your City?, and happiness depends on finding the city in which you can balance your personal and career goals to thrive. More people than ever before now have the opportunity to choose where to live, but at different points in our lives we need different kinds of places, he points out - what a couple of recent college graduates want from their city isn't necessarily what a retiree is looking for. You have to find the place that suits you best: a boho-burb neighbourhood isn't likely to be the best fit for patio man.

So, for the first time, Who's Your City? ranks cities by their fitness for various life stages, rating the best places for singles, young families, and empty nesters. It summarizes the key factors that make place matter to different kinds of people, from professional opportunities to the closeness of family to how well it matches their lifestyle, and provides an in-depth series of steps to help you choose the right place wisely.

Sparkling with Richard Florida's signature intellectual originality, Who's Your City? moves from insights to studies to personal anecdotes, from a startling "Singles Map" of the United States to surprising data on the difference aesthetics makes to people's sense of place. A perceptive and transformative book, it is both a brilliant exploration of the fundamental importance of place and an essential guide to making what may be the most important decision of your life.

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Rating: 5/5

Location is EVERYTHING

Sasha
- Top Book Reviewer
3 years ago
Excellent book! From personal experience I agree that choice of where to live is the most important factor in one's personal happiness.

I grew up in Canada in a Rocky Mountain town called Calgary (home of the Calgary Stampede) north of the Montana border. When I was 16 I skipped town and ran off to Toronto. I fell in love with the city at first sight because I felt welcome in its multicultural inclusive atmosphere. I spent well over a decade of my life in the urban metropolis before family obligation took me back to Calgary in the spring of 2008. My initial impression of Toronto was that for for everything I was told was weird about me as an ethnic kid in Calgary ... it didn't seem to matter there. For example, I had to remind people I was a minoroty many times because they just saw me and not my skin color or ethnic origin. In Toronto I met people who could speak Japanese and French but were of British descent. The city had a global perspective that was really attractive. People were actually interested in other cultures and religions and weren't afraid of them or called them derogatory names. Toronto taught me that it was OK to pursue what one wanted regardless of where they came from. While Toronto has been accussed of thinking itself the center of the universe and being "cold" .... to its credit it is a tolerant city.

To be honest, Toronto and its citizens healed my heartbreak of a childhood experiencing racial slurs in the school playground and being called "brown girl" instead of my name into high school. That is why location, location, location matters number one in determining quality of life.

Being the most multicultural city in the world (by the United Nations) is a real treat. I love the diversity of people, sectors, and the hustle bustle vibrancy of it all. Most of the last several years I lived in Yorkville in the heart of the city and enjoyed the film festivals, easy public transit, Harbourfront and Toronto Island, and just the variety of life one can live in Toronto. The years in Toronto intertwined with sojourns in New York and San Francisco with a foray into London for a time but I always came home to Toronto.

Toronto is very intellectual in that Eastern way and my career has really benefited from the polished style of business there. What I enjoy most about Toronto is that its like New York but livable and still safe compared to other US cities. Its a hub so travel in and out of Canada is easy and hey, Toronto is on the map internationally.

Toronto truly taught me that being colour blind was a good thing. The Calgary of my childhood gave me, as a minority, a different and far less kind experience back then. It could have been my imagination or just adolescence because kids do act different from adults. Nonetheless, I felt something back then that may or may not have been true. The Calgary I came back to now has a bit of Toronto 's cosmo flavor so my experience here as an adult has been as positive as my childhood memories were negative. I have met people who are well-travelled, friendly, and down to earth with a very grounded perspective of life. The city has the most sunshine in Canada and the Rockies are really nearby. Though if you're not an outdoors person it may not matter but once you get used to the physical beauty of Alberta you may be lured to explore more. The main difference to me is that Toronto is at 5.5 million people compared to a mere 1 million and change so I feel like I am in a small town and worried I will get bored.

PostScript Christmas 2008: I did get bored and luck came through .... I'm now in New York City.

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From the Publisher

From the Jacket

1. Do you find Richard Florida's analysis of the new importance of place convincing? Why, or why not?

2. Is the world spiky, or flat, or both?

3. How do you feel about the book's claim that places have personalities?

4. Are you surprised by the findings of Richard Florida's Gallup poll about the importance of aesthetics to people's rating of their home city?

5. Richard Florida acknowledges the influence of thinkers like Jane Jacobs, disagreeing with others such as Thomas Friedman. How do his ideas relate to theirs, or to those of other scholars'?

6. Are you thinking of moving? How will Who's Your City? affect your decision process?

7. Richard Florida presents many personal stories about migration in Who's Your City? - including his own family history. Which story chimed with you most strongly, and why?

8. Do you agree that there are three major points in one's life when one's decision about where to live is most important? If not, why not?

9. How do you see the urban trends Florida identifies - ethnic enclaves, boho-burbs - at work in your own city?

10. What brought you to where you live now? Does the analysis of place in Who's Your City? make you look differently at the trajectory of your life? How?

11. WhosYourCity.com hosts a variety of resources, including a lively discussion board about the merits of different cities. How do the opinions expressed there about your city, or a city you might move to, change your view of it?

12. How useful do you find the book's appendices and its Place Finder in choosing a place to live, or in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the place you live now?

13. Does the economic turmoil of 2009 have any effect your sense of the book's ideas?

14. How does Who's Your City? build on the ideas of Richard Florida's previous books, particularly The Rise of the Creative Class?

15. What map or statistic in Who's Your City? surprised you the most?

16. If you met Richard Florida, what would you ask him about Who's Your City?

17. Will you recommend this book to your friends? Why, or why not?

About the Author

Richard Florida, Author, Who''s Your City? and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

Richard Florida is one of the world''s leading public intellectuals. Esquire Magazine recently named him one of the ''Best and Brightest'' in America. He is author of the national and international best-selling book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which received the Washington Monthly''s Political Book Award and was cited as a major breakthrough idea by the Harvard Business Review. His ideas have been featured in major ad campaigns and such as BMW and are being used globally to change the way regions, nations, and companies compete.

He is founder of the Creative Class Group, an advisory services firm, charting new trends in business and community.

Richard is a regular columnist with the Globe and Mail newspaper and has written articles for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, the Boston Globe and the Financial Times. His new book, Who''s Your City? has been hailed a National Best-Seller, an International Best-Seller and Amazon Book of the Month.

Richard has also been appointed to the Business Innovation Factory''s Research Advisory Council and recently named European Ambassador for Creativity and Innovation.

He is Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute and Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Previously, Florida held professorships at Carnegie Mellon University, a visiting professor at Harvard and MIT, and a visiting fellow of the Brookings Institution. Florida earned his Bachelor''s degree from Rutgers College and his Ph.D. from Columbia University.

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