Who's Your City - Richard Florida

Have been doing a quick read of a number of Richard Florida's books lately. His thinking surrounds the creative class - a segment of the population who have the potential and are engaged in jobs that involves the creation of meaningful forms. This would include professions such as scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and architects. people in design, education, arts, music and entertainment, etc.

Florida's arguments are compelling - that the world is not becoming flat. Rather, talent is congregating in ever increasing concentrations in specific places, and this effect feeds upon itself, for talent is naturally attracted to other talents.

Other aspects of a place that attract talent includes cultural and intellectual diversity. Florida attempts to measure the "openness" of a place through proxies such as the Bohemian index (concentration of artistic talent in a place) and the Gay index (concentration of gays in a place).

In this book, Florida introduces the idea that different cities actually have different personalities, attracting people of certain characters and talents to cluster. For an individual, choosing a place to live is as much about finding a place to be at home emotionally as it is for one's full economic potential to be realised. I find this concept behind a place very interesting. Florida further introduced the idea that there are different locations for different stages in an individual's life. Given that talent is going to be increasingly mobile, a different kind of housing model that lies between home ownership and short rentals should be explored. I, for one, am very open to this idea :)