• 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