Urban Identities

In his newest offering, Who’s Your City?, superstar urban economist Richard Florida explains that each of us faces three cardinal decisions in our lives: what career to pursue, where to pursue it and with whom. Most of us devote enormous mental energy to the first and third, but the second is more often than not an unconsidered byproduct, the result of following a significant other or pursuing a great new job opportunity in a city far afield.

Florida contends that we need to deliberate more over our choice of location, especially given that everything else could go awry. As bad as it is to lose a job or suffer a breakup, both are “substantially worse if you find yourself in a place that offers few options in the job market or the mating market,” he writes.

“It’s exponentially easier to get back on your feet when your location has a vibrant economy ... or a lot of eligible single people.” A significant departure for Florida, Who’s Your City? is a self-help book with wide-ranging discussion of location’s importance in our lives. Appropriately, the book is long on theory and short on specific recommendations. Locations, personalities and life goals vary enough that no one place will fit two people for exactly the same reasons. So even though he covers some of the cities best suited for “The Young and Restless,” those “Married with Children” and empty-nesters, the book aims rather to give the reader the “mental framework” necessary to find the right location, which, Florida says, “can be a hedge against life’s downsides.”

Florida first says that, even in the globalized world, location remains important. In no uncertain language, Florida rejects Thomas Friedman and his “death of distance” ilk. If the world were really getting flatter, Florida argues, economic output would spread away from the traditional urban centers. But the opposite is true: A greater proportion of output is occurring in fewer places. “By almost any measure,” Florida writes, “the international economic landscape is not at all flat. Place continues to matter — a lot.” Behind this phenomenon, we’re told, is the economic “multiplier effect” of smart people working and living in close proximity, who then share and develop innovative ideas at a more rapid pace. 

Each of us faces three cardinal decisions in our lives: what career to pursue, where to pursue it and with whom.”

Unfortunately, Florida has mangled and misinterpreted Friedman’s titular concept, overstating the contrast to his own “spiky world” where higher output peaks emanate from global cities. Friedman at no point claims in The World Is Flat that location is unimportant, only that advances in technology and transportation, together with geopolitical shifts, have divorced output and opportunity from the geographic determinism of yesteryear when coal, deep water ports and heavy tariffs ruled the economic roost. Competitive advantage now relies less on superior access to natural resources and more on human talent, information and innovation — all of which, Florida shows, have a tendency to cluster in specific cities.

Thankfully, Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, has summarized this “location paradox” in a way that harmonizes the two theories: “The more things are mobile,” he claims, “the more decisive location becomes.” Florida goes on to show that this “clustering effect” underpins the vast geographic sorting currently underway, in which the highly educated and the highest paying jobs funnel toward a small subset of cities. This growing concentration, Florida hints, will ultimately wreak havoc on job markets, real estate prices and population demographics in second- and third-tier glarcities nationwide. He then encourages readers to approach the issue of location intelligently — and crosses his fingers that they don’t wind up jobless or brokenhearted.

In a later chapter, Florida tips his hand about the impetus for Who’s Your City? It seems he’s still a little sore that some unnamed “culture warrior” accused his previous works as strictly for the “yuppies, sophistos, trendoids and gays.” He has responded with a noble, but halfbaked, effort to enlighten the masses by appealing to our sense of self-interest. Awkwardly straddling two universes, the academic and the self-help, Who’s Your City? fails to fully satisfy on either front. But as in his other books, Florida simplifies and broadens the conversation, deftly mixing disparate ingredients from economics, urban studies, demographics and sociology into one easily digestible narrative; his work is valuable — and duly famous — for making otherwise arcane topics accessible to the everyman. Florida gets across the pernicious confluence of economic and demographic factors that are widening the gap between rich and poor, mobile and rooted, but he doesn’t dwell on them, content to leave the morbid exegeses to others. By the end of the book, you just might feel a touch of elation, confident that a wisely chosen relocation is just the cure for what ails you.