Product Description
From the best-selling author of The Rise of the Creative Class, a brilliant new book on the surprising importance of place, with advice on how to find the right place for you. It's a mantra of the age of globalization that where we live doesn't matter. We can innovate just as easily from a ski chalet in Aspen or a beachhouse in Provence as in the office of a Silicon Valley startup. According to Richard Florida, this is wrong. Globalization is not flattening the world; in fact, place is increasingly relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. Where we live determines the jobs and careers we have access to, the people we meet, and the "mating markets" in which we participate. And everything we think we know about cities and their economic roles is up for grabs. Who's Your City? offers the first available city rankings by life-stage, rating the best places for singles, families, and empty-nesters to reside. Florida's insights and data provide an essential guide for the more than 40 million Americans who move each year, illuminating everything from what those choices mean for our everyday lives to how we should go about making them.
|
|
 A book that makes you keep reading
I placed order as new copy but found the product doesn't look like brand new one when I received it.
Yet the content of the book is very interesting. It contains a lot of useful information.
|
 strong start, weak finish ( wilson1264 )
I enjoyed some of "Who's Your City?". It's actually two books - one (Part 1 and 2) a fine discussion of economic localization and the second (Part 3) a ranking of various US places by a variety of usually not very interesting or persuasive metrics (that are supposed to help you decide where you want to live). The book would have been more interesting if Florida had just left off Part 3 and expanded Parts 1 and 2. For example, his Chapter 4 on the "Clustering Force" would have benefited by including the recent work by economists on the idea of 'increasing returns to scale'. Paul Krugman just won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in this area and his total absence from the book seems kind of embarassing. I would have loved a chapter comparing Jane Jacobs' work on cities and economic growth with Krugman's on 'economic geography'.
|
Interesting Statistics, but Dry Presentation ( atshaffer )
Read the charts of statistics in the back of the book, but skip the actual text. Unlike some other statisticians who employed co-writers ("Freakonomics" comes to mind), Richard Florida couldn't keep my mind on his prose. Statistics are recycled and explained over and over. Yes, every city has a personality...but where to live is hardly the "most important decision of your life," as the title implies. The statistics don't lie about such measures as happiness, but they also don't tell a compelling story worth reading.
|
Good but....
Like all good things, there must be end; so goes this book; very relevant last year but with the real estate market as it stands, all bets are off. That being said, still very helpful and it does a great job at narrowing your options on where and why you would choose a particular place to live.
|
Interesting, but has too many mistakes ( tstroll )
It's frustrating to read books like this. Florida's insightful observations are undermined by the number of errors in this book.
Florida melds psychology, sociology, and economics to try to determine the importance of humanity's displacement from rural areas to cities and, now, megalopolises. Some of the ground he covers is well-trod, but he comes up with a number of ideas that I find insightful. I particularly liked his categorization of urban districts into such places as, e.g., strollervilles (wealthy neighborhoods full of two-year-olds being strolled around by nannies while Daddy is at the law firm and Mommy is either working or doing something else), designer digs (e.g., Aspen, La Jolla), ethnic enclaves (think Fremont, Calif.), preservation-burgs, and boho-burbs (chic neighborhoods, often on old streetcar lines, with lively shopping areas; e.g., the Sellwood district and N.W. 23rd Ave. in Portland, Ore.). The Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland, Calif., is both a strollerville and a boho-burb. Florida goes beyond the usual accolades one might expect to be conferred on such places to point out their drawbacks. It's very well done.
If only Florida and his publisher had taken better care to vet the manuscript before publishing it! I'd read only a few pages before I started noticing typos: paarticular, New "Dehli" (must have excellent pastrami sandwiches), São "Paolo," Brazil (must have changed its official language to Italian). Then I started noticing factual oddities: Seoul, Korea, described in two different and seemingly mutually exclusive categories; San Francisco described as a place in which single women predominate when the accompanying map shows just the opposite. By the end of the book, the number of glitches had made me suspicious of every empirical datum Florida was presenting--so that when I read his statistic that only 1 in 20 U.S. households contains someone living alone, I couldn't trust it. It sounded too low. I went to the Internet and found an Associated Press report that "About 27.2 million Americans lived alone in 2000, accounting for about 26 percent of all households . . . ." That sounds right. A Population Reference Bureau web page confirms that Florida's statistic is highly inaccurate.
In summary, the book is well worth reading for Florida's impressionistic observations, but I'd be careful about relying on any conclusion he draws that is based on empirical data.
|
|
View Larger
Add to Cart 
