Richard Florida, Who’s Your City?

I found Richard Florida’s new book, Who’s Your City?, a fascinating, thought-provoking read. I have my questions about aspects of Florida’s research, but his thesis is compelling. The book is built around three key ideas:

1. Despite all the hype over globalization and the ‘flat world,’ place is actually more important to the global economy than ever before.

2. Places are growing more diverse and specialized–from their economic makeup and job market to the quality of life they provide and the kinds of people that live in them.

3. We live in a highly mobile society, giving most of us more say over where we live.

Florida argues that though people have historically given a great deal of thought to life’s who and what questions (who should I marry? what should I do with my life?) and largely ignored the where question (where should Iive?), today’s economy is making the where question more important than ever before. Indeed, “For the first time ever, a huge number of us have the freedom and economic means to choose our place.”

Building off his earlier work (ie., The Rise of the Creative Class), Florida makes the case that today’s economy is driven by three key factors: talent, innovation, and creativity–factors that “are not distributed evenly across the global economy.”

These factors are clustering together in urban areas (today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas), or in what Florida calls mega-regions:

Cities have always been the natural economic units of the world. But over the past several decades, what we once thought of as cities, with central cores surrounded by rural villages and later by suburbs, have grown into mega-regions composed of two or more city-regions, such as the Boston-New York-Washington corridor. Mega-regions are more than just a bigger version of a city. In the way that a city is composed of separate neighborhoods, and like a metropolitan region is a new, natural economic unit that results from city-regions growing upward, becoming denser, and growing outward and into one another.

According to Florida, the world economy takes shape around a couple dozen mega-regions. The core of the American economy is “made up of roughly a dozen mega-regions…,” most notably the Bos-Wash, Nor-Cal, and So-Cal mega-regions.

Florida argues that the clustering of certain types of jobs and certain types of people in various mega-regions is creating more clearly defined personalities for cities, hence the title of the book.

Five broad personality types are, according to Florida’s research, beginning to typify various mega-regions:

It’s these creative clustering, economic, personality factors of mega-regions/cities that Florida presents as rationale for taking a second look at the where question.

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  Selfishly, I was pleased to see that the San Francisco Bay Area ranked at the top of most every one of Florida’s rankings (most innovative region, best city for various life-stages, etc.).

• Sadly, as Florida briefly notes in his book, the economic factors at work in America’s mega-regions are increasing the gap between the very rich and the very poor.

• Strategically, I think Florida’s research is helpful to the Christian community, especially to church planters and church planting organizations wanting to plant churches in regions where the gospel can be leveraged for catalytic impact.

For more information about Richard Florida and his book, go to Who’s Your City? To check out Richard Florida’s interesting blog, go here. And, if you’re thinking about moving, you’d benefit from consulting Florida’s “Best Cities” chart: