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.
Urban-life guru Richard Florida talks about mega-regions, the future of the Portrait Gallery and the reasons Ottawa can’t rest on its laurels
Aaron Hotfelder recently interviewed Professor Florida about why the choice of where to live is more important than ever, why it’s a decision so often overlooked, and how to find the perfect city for you.
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.
For The Realtor.Com Addict Who Dreams Of Living Somewhere Else-If She Could Only Figure Out Where
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.
