Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

By: Richard Florida  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5

Publisher: Basic Books

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Interesting Statistics, but Dry Presentation - Read the charts of statistics in the back of the book, but skip the actual text. Unlike some other statisticians who employed co-writers ("Freakonomics" comes to mind), Richard Florida couldn't keep my mind on his prose. Statistics are recycled and explained over and over. Yes, every city has a personality...but where to live is hardly the "most important decision of your life," as the title implies. The statistics don't lie about such measures as happiness, but they also don't tell a compelling story worth reading.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Good but.... - Like all good things, there must be end; so goes this book; very relevant last year but with the real estate market as it stands, all bets are off. That being said, still very helpful and it does a great job at narrowing your options on where and why you would choose a particular place to live.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Interesting, but has too many mistakes - It's frustrating to read books like this. Florida's insightful observations are undermined by the number of errors in this book.

Florida melds psychology, sociology, and economics to try to determine the importance of humanity's displacement from rural areas to cities and, now, megalopolises. Some of the ground he covers is well-trod, but he comes up with a number of ideas that I find insightful. I particularly liked his categorization of urban districts into such places as, e.g., strollervilles (wealthy neighborhoods full of two-year-olds being strolled around by nannies while Daddy is at the law firm and Mommy is either working or doing something else), designer digs (e.g., Aspen, La Jolla), ethnic enclaves (think Fremont, Calif.), preservation-burgs, and boho-burbs (chic neighborhoods, often on old streetcar lines, with lively shopping areas; e.g., the Sellwood district and N.W. 23rd Ave. in Portland, Ore.). The Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland, Calif., is both a strollerville and a boho-burb. Florida goes beyond the usual accolades one might expect to be conferred on such places to point out their drawbacks. It's very well done.

If only Florida and his publisher had taken better care to vet the manuscript before publishing it! I'd read only a few pages before I started noticing typos: paarticular, New "Dehli" (must have excellent pastrami sandwiches), São "Paolo," Brazil (must have changed its official language to Italian). Then I started noticing factual oddities: Seoul, Korea, described in two different and seemingly mutually exclusive categories; San Francisco described as a place in which single women predominate when the accompanying map shows just the opposite. By the end of the book, the number of glitches had made me suspicious of every empirical datum Florida was presenting--so that when I read his statistic that only 1 in 20 U.S. households contains someone living alone, I couldn't trust it. It sounded too low. I went to the Internet and found an Associated Press report that "About 27.2 million Americans lived alone in 2000, accounting for about 26 percent of all households . . . ." That sounds right. A Population Reference Bureau web page confirms that Florida's statistic is highly inaccurate.

In summary, the book is well worth reading for Florida's impressionistic observations, but I'd be careful about relying on any conclusion he draws that is based on empirical data.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
A Good Start, but Creatives Live Everywhere. - Who's your City? has a great conceptual framework and makes you think about the personality of different cities.

In the first section, Why Place Matters, shows some nice black and white 3D maps about economic development. It highlights developing regions around the world and why people with certain talents would tend to congregate together.

However, sometimes opportunities are better for creatives in small towns outside of the most competitive cities. It can be better to be a big fish in a little pond than a little fish in a big pond.

Many of the assumptions could be challenged that provide the basis for his research. Little is said about the business regions outside the large cities.

Creative can be business savvy in rural areas whereas the elites can
be happy with just doing business as usual and afraid to challenge the existing business norms in large cities.

Sometimes business people in rural areas have to be the most creative just to survive. Small time business owners and farmers have made some of the most productive use of the internet of any sector in America.

Many small business owners directly feel the impact of their business decisions, whereas many business elites do not directly feel the impact of their business decisions and can afford to make mistakes and write off billions of dollars of losses and continue to function as a business.

Just studying the areas where patents and scientists are most prevalent does not accurately measure business savvy and creativity. Many patents are filed just for marketing and lawsuit intimidation purposes and have very little business or creative merit.

The second section of the book, the wealth of place, discusses jobs, mobility, superstar cities and where the brain power is.

This section provides a broad theoretical framework with which to think about the issues, but there are so many exceptions to these rules that the suggestions and conclusions appear to be simplistic.

For example, there are outposts of technology all over the country. Silicon Valley is not the only place for high tech computer people. There is Silicon Alley in NYC, Silicon Beach, Silicon Dominion, and many other high tech areas where opportunity might be greater. Many in Silicon Valley are being priced out of the market and are rushing back to the DC area to work for Government contractors that provide excellent opportunities and new cutting edge technology.

Informal business networks in each city around the country have their unique set of knowledge and opportunities for entrepreneurs.

While LA maybe the entertainment capitol of the world, the competition is so tough that many never make it, yet many other cities have a thriving entertainment industry where many people do very well because opportunities abound and competition is low.

Many times innovation happens in small local communities and filters up to the large cities.

The third section, geography of happiness, provides broad guidelines to think about. There is a ten point guide to help with decisions. This can be helpful, but people would do well to do further research on their own when deciding where to move.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Location is EVERYTHING - 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.

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