• AUTHOR/LECTURER: Richard Florida
• WhosYourCity.com – The Choice of Where to Live – The Rise and Flight of the Creative Class
• The Breakthrough Illusion
• Why do people move?  How do we pick the cities that we move to?
• First derivative: Decision based on choosing a career; but, how do you make that choice?
• Second derivative: Your influences – family, guidance counselor, yourself (happiness)
• Where to live – what to do – who to do it with
• Why place matters
• Why it’s important from a career/jobs perspective
• Why place is important beyond your career/job
• 50 million Americans move every year – very few of those moves are job-related
• Why might place be so important when we have new technology that allows us to be anywhere? (he’ll talk on that later)
• Supplemental reading – Friedman, T. – The World is Flat
• “In order to innovate, you no longer have to emigrate” (Friedman).
• 50% of people live in an urban area
• Population + economic activity + innovation + scientific discovery = CONCENTRATED populations
• Globalization Dialectic = Decentralized but Concentrated
• Job markets are becoming increasingly concentrated (e.g. Silicon Valley for tech or NYC for investment banking; counterpoint – healthcare is more spread out)
• Florida’s example: Why would The White Stripes move from Detroit to Nashville?
• A  musician should really be drawn to a market
• A musician doesn’t really have any physical restraints – music is not a “factory” system
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Not because of economies, products, factories, etc. – - but because we (people/communities) are there
• The Clustering Force – Demographic diversity creates Cognitive diversity
  
• People gathering together to increase their collective value
• Companies specialize (prevents innovation)
• Cities have the diversity of people (increases innovation)
• Cognitive diversity – different thinking styles are critical for innovation
• Demographic diversity creates Cognitive diversity
• CreativeClass.com
• The Mating Market – has a big influence on where you (should) choose to live! (Singles Map link)
• 3 most important “big move” decision making times when you choose to move:
• What you do after college – consider career, mating, etc. (various) markets
• When we have kids – the temptation is to move to the nice suburbs
• When the kids leave and you’re an empty nester
• The “Place Finder“
• Not just an economic class divide but a geographic class divide
• Sorting and segregating by skill level and education in a handful of geographic regions
• The “means migrations”
• To move up the ladder, you need to move to areas of opportunity
• 3 main “classes” of social mobility
• Those who are mobile – can move and have few social ties that they are willing to let go of
• $100,000 = the psychological loss we incur when moving away from a loved one
• Those who are rooted – can move but choose not to because they value their family/friends where currently at
• The “Stuck Class” – those who cannot move due to terrible economic conditions (think: Katrina)
• 5 Kinds of People (social psychology)
• Agreeable
• Conscientious
• Extroverted
• Neurotic
• Open-to-experience
• Chicago = salespeople and flight attendants = extroverted people
• NYC + Boston + DC + Denver + Seattle + LA + Portland + San Francisco + Austin = Open to Experience People
• The most likely people to migrate = Open to Experience People cluster in these cities
• E.g. the area around Stanford, Silicon Valley… is one great research university (educational capital) + Venture Capital (money) = Innovation
• 28,000 people asked “What makes us happy in our lives?”
• 1) Family and friends are critical (money matters very little); we need a job we love; self-expression
• We get joy and stress from all those things listed above, but the place we live is an incredible stress reliever and does not cause us stress
• 2) When we think about place, we need to revise our framework
• 5 factors to having a positive social relationship with community
• Basics: 1) good schools / education, 2) police / public safety, 3) economic opportunity, 4) good mayor / government
• Key Finding: 5) How open to diversity the community is – (Is your community a good place for senior citizens, ethnic diversity, GLBT, etc.) – - Community happiness rose when people said “My town is a good place for all of those groups”

End of Notes