![]() | |
Author | Richard Florida |
---|---|
Subject | Environmental psychology, Creative class |
Genre | Non-fiction |
Publisher | Basic Books, Random House |
Publication date | March 2008 |
Media type | |
Pages | 374 |
ISBN | 978-0-465-00352-5 |
OCLC | 316823460 |
304.2/3 22 | |
LC Class | GF21 .F56 2008 |
Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life is a non-fiction book written by Richard Florida. [1] The book advances Florida's previous work on the locational choices of people and businesses. He adds a dimension of environmental psychology by assigning psychological profiles to urban regions according to the dominant personality traits of the people who live there. For example, the New York metropolitan area and the ChiPitts area have the highest concentration in the United States of people whose dominant personality trait is neuroticism. [2] The book ends with a ten step guide to choosing a location best suited to the reader's personality and life situation.
Since the 2002 publication of The Rise of the Creative Class , Florida has enjoyed academic and commercial success in his study and promotion of the concept of a creative class, or a cohort of highly innovative, highly creative individuals who are sought after by businesses. Who's Your City?, Florida's fourth book on the subject, combines scholarly research with a lighthearted self-help tone.[ citation needed ]
Some critics questioned the assumption that the target audience, those easily able to move, would consult the book for advice on moving, but also found the book provides a valuable insight into the impacts of locational choices on the urbanized world.[ citation needed ]
Economic geographer Richard Florida came to prominence when he popularized the concept of a creative class, or a subset of individuals whose work involves creativity and innovation. Florida's previous three books, The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), Cities and the Creative Class (2005), and The Flight of the Creative Class (2005), link the creative class with wealth generation and argue that the individuals in the creative class choose to locate in places with strong cultural and recreational activities, as well as an interesting nightlife. Cities that have offered those activities have attracted innovative people, and despite high land and labor costs, businesses have chosen to re-locate to those areas in order to access them. With the success of his creative class theories, Florida founded a consulting firm, called the Creative Class Group, to advise local governments and other organizations about how to attract creative and innovative people. Florida, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College in Pittsburgh until 2005, wrote his next book, Who's Your City?, after moving to George Mason University's School of Public Policy. By the time he agreed to move to the University of Toronto he was deemed an "academic pop star". [3] Upon his arrival, he was personally greeted by the mayor of Toronto and the premier of Ontario. Articles in the National Post and Toronto Star heralded his move, [4] an article appeared in the magazine Style at Home featuring his new house, and he was given a regular column in The Globe and Mail . [5]
The thing to remember is that when it comes to place, like most other important things in life, we can't have it all. There are real tradeoffs to be made. Many people who move for their careers will give up the joy of being near family and lifelong friends. Those of us who choose to stay close to family and friends may give up economic opportunity.
Florida, Who's Your City?, page 7.
Who's Your City? is divided into four parts with a total of 16 chapters. The first part presents data that suggests the world's population and economy are becoming increasingly geographically concentrated into few mega-regions, such as BosWash and the San Francisco Bay Area. Thomas Friedman's Flat World Theory, or his assertion that distance and place is becoming irrelevant, is countered by Florida with maps of population growth, economic activity, innovation (as demonstrated by patent registration), and scientific discovery (as demonstrated by residence of the most heavily cited scientists). Florida's maps show "spiky" concentrations in these mega-regions, although each region does not necessarily rank high in each category. For example, the Taiheiyō Belt ranks high in innovation but low in scientific discovery, and Indian and Pakistani cities show high population concentrations but low economic activity. Florida explains the existence of these geographical spikes by insisting that talented individuals tend to cluster to one another, creating a (non-linear) multiplier effect that attracts additional talented individuals to that geographical area.
The second part of the book presents evidence that globalization is creating a new class divide: those who are able to move to a different community to take advantage of opportunity and those who are rooted. This mobile class of people are differentiating urban areas in terms of values, culture, economic specialization, and other factors, and businesses are following the most talented people to these cities despite high land prices and labor costs. Florida also insists that a disproportionate amount of wealth is being generated in those cities which have been successful in attracting the creative class. Finally, globalization has reduced the importance of resource extraction and manufacturing in the economy and increased the importance of fields in which the creative class participate.
The third part of Who's Your City? examines the role of "where someone lives" as a factor of happiness. Florida's "Place and Happiness Survey", which he conducted with The Gallup Organization, shows that higher incomes and levels of education produces more community satisfaction, married people tend to be more satisfied with their community than singles, as older people as compared to younger people. In addition, renters are slightly more satisfied with their living arrangements than home owners, and people are generally satisfied with where they live.
Adding psychological profiles to his previous work, Florida was able to find strong connections between the Big Five personality traits and regions in the United States. For example, neuroticism is concentrated in the New York metropolitan area and the ChiPitts area, agreeableness and conscientiousness in the eastern Sunbelt area, extraversion in the Chicago metropolitan area, the St. Louis/Nashville/Atlanta area, and the South Florida area. Openness seems to be concentrated in the BosWash and the San Francisco Bay Area. Florida explains the results by linking the dominant forms of employment in the areas with the personality traits: manufacturing regions require people who are agreeable (i.e., they follow rules) and conscientious (they work with dangerous machinery), areas with high immigrant populations require that their residents exhibit openness, and management and sales-related jobs need workers with extroversion. Florida was also able to find that his "Gay and Bohemian Index", which connects gay and artistic communities to high growth and wealth generation areas, is a proxy for regions with large concentrations of the openness personality trait.
The final part of the book suggests that most people have three significant moves: when leaving their parents' home, when starting a family, and when retiring (or when their own adult children move out). When young people leave their home (or when they complete college), they tend to locate to areas that offer attractive job markets, cultural or recreational amenities, and rank high in quality of life factors. When they get married or have children, people choose areas that are perceived as safe and family-friendly. Florida suggests using a "Trick-or-Treater Index" to gauge if parents feel safe allowing their children to go door-to-door on Halloween. He also cites Catherine Austin Fitts' "Popsicle Index", which gauges how far are parents willing to allow their children to walk to buy a treat. Once retired, or when their adult children move away, people tend to gravitate towards similar areas as young people, if it is close to their grandchildren, but in quieter neighborhoods that provide opportunities for hobbies or for a second career.
Who's Your City? was intended to be a self-help book, based on scholarly research and an academic theory, that provided a reader the mental framework necessary to match their personality and life situation with the optimum city to reside. [6] Florida drew upon his past research on the geographical aspects of wealth generation and locational decisions of members of the creative class, as well as theories and opinions of other academics, like Jane Jacobs, and even those who have been critical of Florida's work, like Tim Harford. [7] New research included a psychological aspect to his theory. Maps, graphs, tables, and indices illustrate the text. The book has been described as having a "lighthearted tone...[that] doesn't always work", [8] "earnest...[with] forced exuberance", [9] and wandering from a broad "discussion of the world economy to home-buying advice". [10] Doron Taussig of Washington Monthly described the book as a hybrid between "academic form" and "professional-advice-giving". [3] [11] Several reviewers noted that while a popular audience is the target, the book is also of interest to professionals or students of the topic. [12] [13] [14]
Who's Your City? was published as a hardcover in March 2008 by Basic Books in the United States and Random House Canada in Canada. A year later, the trade paperback version was published in the United States. After Canadian reviewers commented on the US-focus of the book, a revised Canadian version, with some studies and maps expanded to include Canada, was published by Vintage Canada as a trade paperback. [15] [16] [17] [18] An international version was published overseas. [19] Excerpts were published in The Globe and Mail newspaper and Fast Company magazine. [20] [21] [22]
While critics recognize the value in Florida's work, many found the premise behind Who's Your City? flawed. [23] The reviewer for Salon.com wrote it was questionable that "anyone, least of all a member of the creative class, would need such a self-help book. ... Ambitious people already have a clear sense of where they need to be, and wannabes know but can't get off their rusty dusties and go". [24]
Awkwardly straddling two universes, the academic and the self-help, Who's Your City? fails to fully satisfy on either front. But as in his other books, Florida simplifies and broadens the conversation, deftly mixing disparate ingredients from economics, urban studies, demographics and sociology into one easily digestible narrative; his work is valuable—and duly famous—for making otherwise arcane topics accessible to the everyman.
Edward Featherstone, The Next American City [6]
Several critics noted that Florida sounded too eager to coin terms and that some of the pop cultural references and anecdotes were awkward. Environmental psychologist Michael Dudley pointed out copy-editing errors such as misspellings, and complained that Florida ignored existing literature on the topic of the connections between personalities and places. [16] Likewise, Tom Hutton in the journal Economic Geography noted the absence of influential academics Allen Scott and Peter Hall in the text. [13] The reviewer in The Chronicle of Higher Education found the chapter that examined the Big Five personality traits to be the best part of the book. [25] In The Globe and Mail, reviewer Joe Berridge wrote, "Like all self-help books, it suffers from the assertive blandness of soft psychologizing", but called Who's Your City? an "informative, insightful, imaginative book". [26] Reviewer Nathan Glazer in The New Republic commented on the inappropriate urban area conglomerations like Delhi–Lahore, and geographical scales such as metropolitan areas. [27] Steve Sailer of The American Conservative wrote a negative review and called Florida's conclusions "professionally cautious" so that they would not harm his consulting career. [28] The review in the Library Journal recommended the book for all libraries and stated that "Although the text is occasionally overloaded with trendy demographic jargon, this thought-provoking and seminal work will surely be studied, not only by scholars but...by consumers pondering a move". [14]
John Philippe Rushton was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.
Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that examines personality and its variation among individuals. It aims to show how people are individually different due to psychological forces. Its areas of focus include:
Indigo children, according to a pseudoscientific New Age concept, are children who are believed to possess special, unusual, and sometimes supernatural traits or abilities. The idea is based on concepts developed in the 1970s by Nancy Ann Tappe, who claimed to have been noticing indigo children beginning in the late 1960s. Her ideas were further developed by Lee Carroll and Jan Tober. The concept of indigo children gained popular interest with the publication of a series of books in the late 1990s and the release of several films in the following decade. A variety of books, conferences, and related materials have been created surrounding belief in the idea of indigo children and their nature and abilities. The interpretations of these beliefs range from their being the next stage in human evolution, in some cases possessing paranormal abilities such as telepathy, to the belief that they are more empathetic and creative than their peers.
An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for the normative problems of society. Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or as a mediator, the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by either rejecting or producing or extending an ideology, and by defending a system of values.
Richard L. Florida is an American urban studies theorist focusing on social and economic theory. He is a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a Distinguished Fellow at NYU's School of Professional Studies.
Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being careful, or diligent. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly. They exhibit a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; they display planned rather than spontaneous behavior; and they are generally dependable. It is manifested in characteristic behaviors such as being neat, and systematic; also including such elements as carefulness, thoroughness, and deliberation.
The creative industries refers to a range of economic activities which are concerned with the generation or exploitation of knowledge and information. They may variously also be referred to as the cultural industries or the creative economy, and most recently they have been denominated as the Orange Economy in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Political psychology is an interdisciplinary academic field, dedicated to understanding politics, politicians and political behavior from a psychological perspective, and psychological processes using socio-political perspectives. The relationship between politics and psychology is considered bidirectional, with psychology being used as a lens for understanding politics and politics being used as a lens for understanding psychology. As an interdisciplinary field, political psychology borrows from a wide range of disciplines, including: anthropology, economics, history, international relations, journalism, media, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology.
The creative class is the posit of American urban studies theorist Richard Florida for an ostensible socioeconomic class. Florida, a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, maintains that the creative class is a key driving force for economic development of post-industrial cities in the United States.
The World Without Us is a 2007 non-fiction book about what would happen to the natural and built environment if humans suddenly disappeared, written by American journalist Alan Weisman and published by St. Martin's Thomas Dunne Books. It is a book-length expansion of Weisman's own February 2005 Discover article "Earth Without People". Written largely as a thought experiment, it outlines, for example, how cities and houses would deteriorate, how long man-made artifacts would last, and how remaining lifeforms would evolve. Weisman concludes that residential neighborhoods would become forests within 500 years, and that radioactive waste, bronze statues, plastics, and Mount Rushmore would be among the longest-lasting evidence of human presence on Earth.
The Post-American World is a non-fiction book by American journalist Fareed Zakaria. It was published in hardcover and audiobook formats in early May 2008 and became available in paperback in early May 2009; the Updated and Expanded Release 2.0 followed in 2011. In the book, Zakaria argues that, thanks to the actions of the United States in spreading liberal democracy across the world, other countries are now competing with the US in terms of economic, industrial, and cultural power. While the US continues to dominate in terms of political-military power, other countries such as China and India are becoming global players in many fields.
Megaregions of the United States are generally understood to be regions in the U.S. that contain two or more roughly adjacent urban metropolitan areas that, through commonality of systems—of transport, economy, resources, and ecologies—experience blurred boundaries between the urban centers, such that perceiving and acting as if they are a continuous urban area is, for the purposes of policy coordination, of practical value. The antecedent term, with which "megaregions" is synonymous, is megalopolis, which was coined in relation to the Boston through Washington, D.C., corridor in the Atlantic Northeast, by Jean Gottmann in the mid-twentieth century. America 2050, a project of the Regional Plan Association, lists 11 megaregions encompassing urban regions in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. As of December 2000, these clustered networks of American cities contained an estimated total population exceeding 280 million persons.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to geography:
The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity is a book published in April 2010 by Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. The book puts into context Florida's urban development theories, with the financial crisis of 2007–2008, to describe the future of cities. The Great Reset looks at the economic incentives which have driven American society in the past. Florida compares the recession to two similar periods in recent history, the 1870s and the 1930s. The book is divided into three parts, how past resets have shaped development, how different cities are positioned, and what trends will emerge from the reset.
The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis is a 2010 non-fiction book written by Jeremy Rifkin. It connects the evolution of communication and energy development in civilizations with psychological and economic development in humans. Rifkin considers the latest phase of communication and energy regimes—that of electronic telecommunications and fossil fuel extraction—as bringing people together on the nation-state level based on democratic capitalism, but at the same time creating global problems, like climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation. Rifkin extrapolates the observed trend into the future, predicting that Internet and mobile technology along with small-scale renewable energy commercialization will create an era of distributed capitalism necessary to manage the new energy regime and a heightened global empathy that can help solve global problems.
Sally Hogshead is a New York Times bestselling author, National Speakers Association Hall of Fame speaker, chief executive officer of How to Fascinate and a former advertising executive.
A creative economy is based on people's use of their creative imagination to increase an idea's value. John Howkins developed the concept in 2001 to describe economic systems where value is based on novel imaginative qualities rather than the traditional resources of land, labour and capital.: Compared to creative industries, which are limited to specific sectors, the term is used to describe creativity throughout a whole economy.
Ron Friedman is a psychologist and behavior change expert who specializes in human motivation. He is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, CNN, Fast Company, and Psychology Today, as well as the author of the best-selling non-fiction book The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace.
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is an American academic and author. She is the James Irvine Chair of Urban and Regional Planning and Professor of Public Policy at the University of Southern California.
In the field of personality psychology, Machiavellianism is a personality trait centered on manipulativeness, callousness, and indifference to morality. Though it has nothing to do with the historical figure or his political thought, the trait is named after the political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, as psychologists Richard Christie and Florence Geis used edited and truncated statements inspired by his works to study variations in human behaviors. Their Mach IV test, a 20-question, Likert-scale personality survey, became the standard self-assessment tool and scale of the Machiavellianism construct. Those who score high on the scale are more likely to have a high level of deceitfulness and a cynical, unempathetic temperament.