Published in Canadian Bookseller, Volume 3 2008:
     “In terms of both sheer economic horsepower and cutting-edge innovation, today’s global economy is powered by a surprisingly small number of places,”writes Richard Florida in his book, Who’s Your City? “The tallest spikes – the cities and regions that drive the world economy – are growing ever higher, while the valleys – places that boast little, if any, economic activity – mostly languish.”
     Florida was the speaker at the first morning session of BookExpo Canada’s program for June 13, and “The Book World is Spiky” was the title of his session.
     It is innovation that is most concentrated, Florida writes later. “The leaders – the tallest spikes – are the metropolitan regions around Tokyo, Seoul, New York, and San Francisco. Boston, Seattle, Austin, Toronto, Vancouver, Berlin, Paris, Stockholm, Helsinki, Osaka, Taipei, and Sydney also stand out.”
     Florida’s talk traced the journey of discovery he took to arrive at the findings in his latest book. Its subtitle, How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, refers to his previous bestseller, The Rise of the Creative Class.
     An Italian-American kid who grew up in a tough working-class district of New Jersey, Florida was happy in college “because I could be smart and read books without getting beaten up,” he said. He went on to get a PhD, but he declared “PhD programs destroy your writing ability.”
     His work explored where high-tech companies locate, and he believed the pattern that a company creates jobs and draws people to it, causing the town to thrive. His thinking was turned upside down when he read a newspaper headline that announced that the big company Lycos was leaving Pittsburgh for Boston.
     Boston had a higher cost of doing business and there was no industrial incentive for Lycos to relocate, he realized. The reason they were moving turned out to be to get access to a group of people already in Boston.
     “I had always thought that if you create jobs, people will move to them,” Florida said. “Here, jobs were moving to the people.” He suddenly realized that his academic work was irrelevant –  “BS” as he called it. He asked his students where they wanted to work and live.
     “Their answers blew me away,” he said. “And I felt an obligation to write it down in a way that makes sense, so that even my parents could read it.” What he wrote ended up as the book The Rise of the Creative Class.
     “Having this book published changed my life,” he declared. “Academia thought ‘Florida’s lost his mind!’ but people identified with the creative class.”
      Some critics thought that the “class” part of “creative class” was an elitist term, but Florida said he was just writing his observations of the world.
     “We’re undergoing a monumental shift in the nature of our economy and society,” says Florida, “from an industrial one to a creative economy.”
     In a review of the book, Mary Whaley, who is with the American Library Association, writes of the creative class in the U.S., “The author estimates that this group has 38 million members, constitutes more than 30 percent of the U.S. workforce, and profoundly influences work and lifestyle issues.”
     Florida pointed out the massive social and cultural changes that have occurred between 1950 and 2000, listing civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights movements. He mentioned the “Bohemian index factor,” saying that the number of artists and creators in a town has a huge effect on the economy. He added that it is the open mindedness of an area that attracts creative thinkers, and that places where gay men are concentrated are high economic cities.
      “The main message of The Rise of the Creative Class is that every human being is creative,” says Florida, “and it’s important to find out how to unlock that creativity. Some companies don’t harness that creativity while others do.”
     He mentioned the agricultural sector as one that is good at using creativity, and gave the examples of ice wines and designer cheeses. He believes that any company can harness creativity, especially if the workers are allowed to design new systems.
     “It’s not the machines and technology that make factories great,” declared Florida, “it’s the knowledge and creativity of the people.”
     Florida goes so far as to suggest that there should be two new human rights: to use your talents and to be able to express yourself. While he believes that everyone has creativity, he notes that creativity crops up where there is diversity.
     Who’s Your City? resulted from Florida’s research into place. He said he wrote this book in order to get the message to a bigger group of people than just intellectuals.
     While most people agree that deciding what work to do and choosing a spouse or partner are two of the most important decisions we make in life, Florida has come to believe in a third decision, where to live.
     “Finding the right place is as important as – if not more important than – finding the right job or partner because it not only influences those choices but also determines how easy or hard it will be to correct mistakes made along the way,” he argues in the book. “It can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose, and the options available to our children and families.”
     Florida refutes the notion that in today’s electronic information age, we can live and work anywhere we choose. Declaring that this is wrong, he points out that productivity is not at all distributed evenly across the global economy. To the contrary, there is significant concentration in certain locations.
     “In today’s creative economy, the real source of economic growth comes from the clustering and concentration of talented and productive people,” he writes. “Because of the clustering force, cities and regions have become the true engines of economic growth… And cities and their surrounding metropolitan corridors are morphing into massive mega-regions, home to tens of millions of people producing hundreds of billions and in some cases trillions of dollars in economic output. Place remains the central axis of our time – more important to the world economy and our individual lives than ever before.” It is these mega-regions that he calls the “spiky world.”
     The second-largest mega-region in the world, second only to Greater Tokyo, is what Florida calls “the Bos-Wash corridor,” stretching 500 miles along the east coast of the U.S. from Boston, through New York and down to Washington. Together, this region specializes in finance, business services, arts, culture, biotech industries, education, media and strategic intelligence.
     Florida identifies “the Cascadia mega-region” as going north from Medford and Portland, Oregon, through Seattle and into Vancouver. It has strength in aerospace manufacturing, software and Internet industries, and lifestyle and consumer companies.
     Another bi-national mega-region that he identifies covers Toronto, Buffalo and Rochester, and includes Waterloo, London in Ontario, and Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Syracuse, Ithaca and Utica, U.S. This region offers arts, culture, technology centres and research-intensive companies.
     Florida has a theory of why these mega-regions form. “When people – especially talented and creative ones – come together, ideas flow more freely, and as a result individual and aggregate talents increase exponentially: the end result amounts to much more than the sum of the parts. This clustering makes each of us more productive, which in turn makes the place we inhabit even more so – and our collective creativity and economic wealth grow accordingly.”
     Yet Florida acknowledges that economic mega-regions do not always hold appeal. “Not every person wants the same thing out of their community, nor do they desire the same things at every stage of their lives. Ultimately, being truly happy with one’s place comes down to figuring out what best complements one’s lifestyle and core values.”  
     Our preferences may also change during different times of our lives. Post-secondary students may want to live in busy cities until they marry or have children or just want to take up gardening, at which time they may prefer a town or rural area. Of course in late life, these people may change their minds and want to move to a warm climate or a small village or a high-rise waterfront condo. 
     Florida believes that recognizing the “spiky world” is only an important first step. “Only by understanding that the spiky nature of our world’s economy is one beset by growing disparities and tensions can we begin to address them. Managing the disparities between peaks and valleys worldwide – raising the valleys without sacrificing the peaks – is surely the greatest political challenge of our time.”
     Noting that the world has a geographically unequal system, he ended his presentation with the urgent call “Don’t squelch people’s creativity.”