Richard Florida, author of Who's Your City? How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Random House Canada), 384 pp.

Using research methods as diverse as satellite imaging of the world's cities at night and analyzing the personality types of cities across the U.S., Florida uses data to show the places where the creative class tends to be flocking to and to investigate the qualities of those places to better understand what attracts the right people to them. "Picking that right place, now - it is the greatest decision in your life and it will structure how the other ones flow from it... This one you really need to think about," says Florida.

By analyzing his data and providing anecdotal evidence from interviews and from his own life, he tries to provide some rules of thumb to consider before making this very important decision. Considering that, I asked him to assess the Canadian number one spot. In many ways, Ottawa resembles the types of places he has championed in his work: post-industrial, highly educated at large, relatively wealthy and rife with what economists call "human capital."

"Ottawa comes out first in a lot of our indicators too, including the creative class measures," he says as we begin to look over the stats. When I asked him how his measurements compared to those in the MoneySense survey, he answered, "I think income levels and housing prices - I mean I'd like to know a lot more about a place - but they do tell you a certain dimension of it. It doesn't tell me how innovative or creative or entrepreneurial a place is, but it tells me that it's going to have a relatively high level of human capital."

In other words, it can be shown that Ottawa has the financial capital, but what can't be shown is how much there is or how well we're spending it. He continues, "I worry when I see income levels like that, as an American, because when you see income levels like that in the United States you find that a place may be ethnically, racially or, while being open to sexual orientation even, economically homogeneous... When you see that in the States you expect a place to be middle-class, affluent or above without a lot of diversity."

In the U.S., that is a valid concern. There is a legacy of exclusionary housing policies that kept minorities out of the types of places that match the kinds of income profiles that Ottawa shows. In Canada, things are a bit different because there was less red tape between ethnic minorities and the dream of private suburban home ownership. But that is not to say that groups have not clustered, sometimes between the margins.

This is typically less of an issue in cities with post-industrial profiles like Ottawa, but in industrial cities like Newark (where Florida is from), Detroit (where his wife is from) or Toronto (where they have recently immigrated to, from the States), the respective histories of the race discourse and the place discourse cross like figure eights - as economic development via site selection and location picking helped builders decide where and what to build, and for whom.

Generations of fighting, migration and change have produced a messy urban sensibility in many of these old industrial cities. "I like messy cities," says Florida. "I like the messy old industrial city like Pittsburgh, I like the messy London and I love the messiness of Toronto. It [messy urbanism] explains what I love so much about cities..."

There is something very important in Florida's "messy urbanism" theory - the conflicts, stalemates and resolutions that come from contested space; the lessons that are learned when people are brought together for reasons beyond their jobs and economic opportunity; and the vital sense of earned diversity that comes from that process.

It's out of this messy urbanism that one of the greatest cultural innovations of this century arose - hip-hop. It arose out of the very buildings that the race and place discourse intersected in New York City, and changed the ways in which the world would look at art, music, language and culture as they relate to the city.

Hip-hop's cultural innovators accomplished this with limited resources in minimal space - are they represented in the creative class, though? While Florida's research reveals that nine out of ten people with a university degree are in the creative class, only 50 per cent in the creative class have a degree. This statistic still doesn't account for the fact that, in his work covering cities and culture (music in particular, when Florida discusses Nashville in his book), no mention of hip-hop or any other urban music can be found.

"I am a rock-ist," he admits, "and my students have informed me of this, but I'm learning." As it turns out, Florida reveals that one of his future projects will look at the relationship between music and the city, and that he was already taking that opportunity to look at hip-hop culture.

(As we were discussing how intimately hip-hop and the city are related, I began to think of certain recent developments in New York and how they relate to both Who's Your City? and Florida's upcoming work on music. Follow this link to learn more: www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/nyregion/04building.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin.)

What doesn't come through in Florida's work is the effect of the creative class as its members choose where to live. It's very easy for a liberal, creative group of people to act conservatively in their place selection, simply because they can - and they do. The kinds of places that are the least expensive in cities - the kinds of places that seem to draw members of the creative class - are the very same places that some groups, be they defined by culture, nationality or race, fought to establish themselves out of necessity.

How is the movement of the creative class affecting these communities? "Probably the reason I don't write about it [race] is that when I wrote about gay issues, I had a gay collaborator. So I felt, as a straight person, that I could then work on gay issues. It's probably a part of my age, I'm very sensitive when trying to weigh in on those issues."

This is fair - we must appreciate how many great discourses have been shipwrecked on the rocks of race, including discussions of city. Florida has been immensely successful in helping establish terms of reference that people are comfortable using, but it is important that we don't convince ourselves that we've become so creative that the old issues, which urban society suburbanized away from 50 years ago, simply don't exist, because those issues have decided to come back.

While this book definitely accomplishes its objective in making us think about the places we choose to live and the importance of that decision, it gives the impression that things might be a bit tidier than they actually are for all of the parties involved. Florida made it very clear in our interview that he would never want the creative class arguments to be entangled or confused with the gentrification process in cities, but by opting not to acknowledge any of the problems that mass human migrations may cause, he creates as many questions as there are answers. Perhaps a little messiness in topical focus would help with that.
 
 

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