Who’s Your City?

How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

By: Richard Florida

Narrated by: Mark Boyett

Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

All places are not created equal. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Florida shows that where we live is increasingly a crucial factor in our lives, one that fundamentally affects our professional and personal prospects. As well as explaining why place matters now more than ever, Who's Your City? provides indispensable tools to help you choose the right place for you.

It's a cliche of the information age that globalization has made place irrelevant, that one can telecommute as effectively from New Zealand as New York. But it's not true, Richard Florida argues, relying on 20 years of innovative research in urban studies, creativity, and demographic trends. In fact, as new units of economic growth called mega-regions become increasingly specialized, the world is becoming more and more spiky divided between flourishing clusters of talent, education and competitiveness, and moribund valleys. All these places have personalities, Richard Florida explains in the second half of Who's Your City?, and happiness depends on finding the city in which you can balance your personal and career goals to thrive. More people than ever before now have the opportunity to choose where to live, but at different points in our lives we need different kinds of places, he points out. What a couple of recent college graduates want from their city isn't necessarily what a retiree is looking for. You have to find the place that suits you best: a boho-burb neighborhood isn't likely to be the best fit for patio man.

Sparkling with Richard Florida's signature intellectual originality, Who's Your City? moves from insights to studies to personal anecdotes, to surprising data on the difference aesthetics makes to people's sense of place. A perceptive and transformative book, it is both a brilliant exploration of the fundamental importance of place and an essential guide to making what may be the most important decision of your life.

Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2009 Richard Florida (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"The book is a superb treatise on the location paradox: the idea that as the world becomes more mobile, the more decisive location becomes...We learn why San Francisco is the best city for young singles; why Washington D.C. is the best place to raise kids; and why New York City is one of the top spots for retirees. Something to look forward to!" (BusinessWeek)

Great book on understanding society better!

This book teaches you about how cities are
different and how your surroundings impact your life. Where you lice matters.

Put me in the right direction.

Good info. I suspect it might be a little out dated, but still good info.

Narrator Sounds Like Male Version of Siri

The narrator sounded like a male version of Siri. He was robotic and excruciating to listen to. Otherwise, the book was good!

Not worth reading

This book offers nothing original and left me feeling frustrated that I stayed with it.

Disappointing

The narration is a little fast, but the content is what I found disappointing. The author has noticed patterns of various kinds of people who end up living around cities. Late in the book he brings in some ideas about psychological types. Nowhere does he help the reader decide what type we might be. Also he loses steam before he gets to seniors. Maybe he will write something else to clear all this up. Things is what they is. If you're going to find a job, a house, nice schools, etc. you're going to have to do the research and visit the places. Meanwhile, take your sweetie out to dinner and then think about spending money on this book. You can learn almost everything on the website anyway.