Who's Your City?

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 cliche 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 20 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 neighborhood isn't likely to be the best fit for patio man. Sparkling with Richard Florida's signature intellectual originality, Who's Your City? moves from insights to studies to personal anecdotes, 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.