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

International Bestseller

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, Whos Your City? provides indispensable tools to help you choose the right place for you.

Its a clich of the information age that globalization has made place irrelevant, that one can telecommute as effectively from New Zealand as New York. But its not true, Richard Florida argues, relying on twenty 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 Whos 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 isnt necessarily what a retiree is looking for. You have to find the place that suits you best: a boho-burb neighbourhood isnt likely to be the best fit for patio man.

So, for the first time, Whos Your City?ranks cities by their fitness for various life stages, rating the best places for singles, young families, and empty nesters. It summarizes the key factors that make place matter to different kinds of people, from professional opportunities to the closeness of family to how well it matches their lifestyle, and provides an in-depth series of steps to help you choose the right place wisely.

Sparkling with Richard Floridas signature intellectual originality, Whos Your City? moves from insights to studies to personal anecdotes, from a startling Singles Map of the United States to surprising data on the difference aesthetics makes to peoples sense of place. A perceptive and transformative book, itis both a brilliant exploration of the fundamental importance of place and an essentialguide to making what may be the most important decision of your life.