Who's Your City?
How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
In the age of globalization, some claim that where you live doesn't't matter: Alaska, Idaho, and Alabama are interchangeable. The world is, after all, flat.
Not so fast. Place, argues the great urbanist Richard Florida, is not only important, it's more important than ever. In fact, choosing a place to live is as important to your happiness as choosing a spouse or career. And some regions, recent surveys show, really are happier than others. In Who's Your City, Creative Class guru Richard Florida reports on this growing body of research that tells us what qualities of cities and towns actually make people happy -- and he explains how to use these ideas to make your own choices. This indispensable guide to how people can choose where to live and what those choices mean to their lives and their communities is essential reading for everyone from urban planners and mayors to recent graduates.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Choosing a spouse and choosing a career are important life decisions but perhaps even more predictive of our all-round personal happiness is our choice of living location, argues Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) in this informative if somewhat dry tome. As globalization makes the world effectively smaller, economic growth concentrates in certain mega-regions of large "superstar" cities, leaving other regions in the proverbial dust. The areas where we live are also affected by our increasingly mobile culture, housing priorities that change as we age (from starter homes to family-friendly suburbs to empty nests and finally retirement centers) and the global economy. Few of the author's conclusions are new people gather where they can make friends with others like them, personality types tend to cluster type A to urban areas, type B to rural and the book's tone wanders from broad, Friedmanesque discussion of the world economy to home-buying advice as well as statistic-and-theory-heavy text as though unsure of its intended audience. Yet the author opens up a complex, underexamined subject along the way.
