The Authors@Google program welcomed Richard Florida in March 2008 at their Google New York City office where he discussed the methodology behind, and evolution of, his latest book Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life.
Who moves, and who stays put? A new study by the Pew Research Center takes a close look. The study finds that fewer Americans are moving now than previously. Some 13 percent of Americans moved from 2006 to 2007, down from a high of 21 percent in 1951; the Census predicts a further decline to 11.9 percent by 2009. That said, America remains a highly mobile society. Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of adults said they have moved to a new community at least once in their lives; 15 percent say they have lived in four or more states.
Highly educated people are much more likely to be mobile: more than three-quarters (77 percent) of college graduates have moved at least once compared to 56 percent of those with a high school diploma. Younger Americans, unmarried people, and those who are foreign-born are among the most likely to move. The Midwest is the most rooted region; the West the most mobile. The main reasons stayers stay: family ties, a desire to stay in their home town.
Would a ban on fast food restaurants in our cities and towns help lower the rate of heart disease? Would a program to collect Dog DNA from poop left on our streets and sidewalks help us target negligent owners? Could we harness our own bio-mechanical energy to charge our cell phones, even our cars? Does ‘redshirting’ children, holding them back so that they can enter grade school at an older age, wreak havoc on social security programs? Would local stock markets for regions no larger than Barrie, or Muskoka, help citizens allocate capital more efficiently to businesses that need financing? Could we switch our dietary habits from cow to kangaroo to help save the planet?
If you think I’ve just stolen and plagiarized part of the manuscript for the yet unpublished Freakanomics 2.0, you’d be wrong. These are the hypotheses and real life programs that earn brilliant and bizarre minds recognition in The New York Times’ “Year in Ideas.” If these few examples tickle your fancy, try “spray on condoms” on for size (not literally- these bespoke coital solutions are not yet widely available). Human ingenuity never ceases to amaze, eh?
One thing that stood out for me while reading these stories was how many of these truly remarkable ideas came from Canadians - three from Toronto academics and scientists alone. For The New York Times, where Canada’s parliamentary crisis earlier this month barely registered a blip on their radar, that is a pretty impressive showing from the Great White North, and I believe it speaks to the creative incubator that Toronto has become. Read the article and take notice of where many of these ideas began. There is perhaps no better indication of a “creative city” than the brilliant ideas it fosters and develops, and some of my favorite creative cities - San Francisco, Montreal, Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, and Boston, as well as my hometown, the T-Dot, get plenty of love.
I’m a member of the Net-Generation, people born between 1978 and 1997. At first glance, my cohort seems tailor-made for a decentralized and “flat world,” so we shouldn’t care so much about the place where we work. After all, the internet, like no other technology, has lowered geographical and temporal barriers for communication and collaboration, and N-Geners, like no other generation, are the most comfortable and capable working, learning, and communicating online. Case in point: I recently found myself collaborating on a project with two college pals on Skype (the free online video phone application): one in Palo Alto, California, the other in Alaska, while also chatting and sharing photos with a friend who was in an internet café in rural Vietnam.
However, while technology has lowered barriers and allowed people all over the world to participate in the global economy, it’s a mistake to suggest now that ‘place’ is no longer important for today’s emerging creative workers. Indeed where one works matters now more than ever.
Whether interested in finance, law, politics, computer programming, consulting, or medicine, young friends and colleagues of mine are drawn inexorably to the epicenters and major nodes of their respective fields; in cities, suburbs, and exurbs that also happen to score very high on the creative class index. This is certainly true for my friend in Palo Alto, a city straddling the area between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. He is a talented computer programmer working for an internet start-up. But what about my friends in Vietnam and Alaska, you ask? Did Google just open a server farm in Juno? Is rural Vietnam the new Silicon Valley? Why do your friends want to live there? Truth is they don’t.
My Alaska friend was working for Mark Begich, a Democrat, who defeated the incumbent Senator (and convicted felon) Ted Stevens. If ever there was an appropriate time to say “got out of there like a bat out of hell,” Jeff’s escape from Alaska after the big victory was it. Jeff is passionate about politics, and he is now in Washington, D.C. looking for full time work. Truth is he would rather struggle for a little while in D.C. than be instantly employed anywhere else. After all, every politically engaged young person he and I know wants to be in the U.S. Capitol and, as a result, a burgeoning social scene of smart, creative, and ambitious young people has flourished there. Dave, my friend in Vietnam just graduated from McGill’s School of Management and is wandering Southeast Asia barefooted and bearded trying to ‘find himself,’ but really he’s just on vacation. Like me, he will soon find himself up to his elbows in financial statements and spreadsheets. He is returning to Toronto to work at a boutique private equity group. Jeff was drawn to the epicenter of the political world. Dave, a former business student with an entrepreneurial streak, will return to Toronto- Canada’s financial capital, because he knows the city offers great opportunity for a person with his interests (it also helps that he is a die-hard Leafs fan). In both instances, the where did not merely influence their decisions, it determined them. If anything, their stints in Alaska and Vietnam simply reinforce the notion that the Creative Class, and young people in particular, travel and move throughout the world with increasing ease.
Though not identifying it as the “Net Gen” specifically, Richard Florida presciently foresaw the emergence of a new generation of the “Creative Class” in The Rise of the Creative Class, a theme that has surfaced in ensuing works. His experience interacting with students at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University revealed that young people are drawn to certain hubs, crowding together in thriving and diverse places where like-minded individuals share lifestyles, cultural tastes, and work interests. While the moniker ‘Creative Class’ is not generation-specific, by 2018, when all members of my cohort will be of working age, the Net Generation will, simply put, dominate the creative class. As Boomers retire and Generation Xers fill the ranks of senior management, there will be an overwhelming demand for these young, highly educated people. Attracting them to companies and regions where they can thrive and prosper will be the next great imperative for today’s corporate leaders and politicians.
I encourage everyone to share your thoughts and opinions with me. If a conversation begins, I will be happy to engage in it with you.
What a time to be in Ottawa! Just when the city dodged the bullet of the 2009 municipal budget, the city is hit with a blizzard and then a transit strike:
Sam Barr left his home near the airport at 5 a.m.
“I’ve been walking for 2½ hours to get to work now. It’s pretty tough,” Barr told CBC’s Steve Fischer after meeting him on Bank Street in the Glebe.
He was heading to the Elgin Street Diner downtown, the rendezvous point for him and his colleagues, who do electrical work.
In North America, particularly in the past 50 years, residential planning has been dominated by the concept of the suburb. A demographic that didn’t exist at the time of the first American census now represents over 50 percent of the American population in the 2000 census and is overwhelmingly where children are being reared in Canada as well - in an analysis of the 2001 Canadian census data, it was determined that 17 of the 25 fastest-growing municipalities in Canada are suburbs. Without the automobile opening up the option of living beyond the limits of mass transit, these kinds of demographics wouldn’t be possible.
As the strike lengthens and the (rather surprising) public vitriol towards labor unions grows, a city is getting to know itself by foot in a way that it hasn’t for some time. Pedestrian scale thinking is setting in and people within the region, many without cars, are being forced to re-think the way they navigate automobile-scaled environments.
This means that even moderate distance travel is now delimited by one of three things:
For those without the cash flow to support taxis as their primary mode of transportation, walking distance is the first option for individual movement - a position that it hasn’t enjoyed for quite some time. As I prepared myself to leave my house the other day, I also realized that I hadn’t thought about distance in those terms since I was 11 or 12. And that’s when it struck me:
This strike is to the average non-driving adult in Ottawa what life is like for any kid in the suburbs without a license. While being somewhat inconvenient, this strike also offers an opportunity to appreciate something that we might take for granted: the transportation reality of youth in an auto-scaled world.
If we find those delimiters challenging during this strike as adults, imagine the experience of a young person moving into a suburb with limited access to public transportation. Their movement is restricted exactly the way that mine is now, except compounded by parent-set boundaries, inexperience, and limited income - space is really a challenge for them.
So while it might be a bit to the left, what this transit strike really has me thinking is: how can we include the perspective of someone limited by those three things - cash flow, walking distance, and network capacity - in suburban planning practices? Not specifically for transit-strike situations like this, but overwhelmingly for kids in general?
And now, as always, some music.
The relationship between our personalities and our choice of locations is one of the hottest topics for understanding cities and urban areas. A new study in Psychological Science shows the connection between psychological “temperament” and migration. Not a psychology expert myself, I consulted with Cambridge University psychologist, Jason Rentfrow co-author of a path-breaking study of personality and place.
As Rentfrow explains, the concept of temperament comes from “developmental psychology and is generally regarded as the inherited.” They appear early in life and serve as the foundation for personality. In other words, they are the aspects of our personalities that are tied most closely to our genetics. There are three kinds of temperament - activity, sociability, and emotionality - and the study looked at the effects of these types on who was likely to migrate and where.
The study shows that temperament or personality influences whether someone moves, how frequently they move, and the kind of place they move to. Highly sociable people are the most likely to move, and they are more likely to move to urban areas than rural areas. The study suggests one explanation may be that urban areas have more people and therefore provide sociable types with more opportunities to meet and mingle with others. People with an active temperament were more likely to move, and to move more often.
I asked Rentfrow for his thoughts on the possible relationship between active temperament and open-to-experience people. My interviews with creative-class types reflected a preference for activity or “energy” often combining an intellectual energy with a need for outdoor activity as well as for street level cultural activity. He responded that “being open and curious involves having an active imagination. And physical activity is sometimes required to satisfy intellectual activity. ”
The study is here.
No, not the baseball teams! Which is the better city?
In a light-hearted nine-inning match-up, I compare the two cities head-to-head in the categories we normally use to rank places for quality of life. The categories include such areas as climate, crime, economy, and housing.
Which wins? Gritty Philadelphia or sun-splashed Tampa Bay?
After nine hard-fought innings, the winner is crowned in the World Series of Cities.
The Freakonomics guys (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner) have invited me to answer reader questions on their blog in the New York Times.
My work is all about finding “Best Places,” and studying differences between the cities, metros, and communities of the U.S. and Canada. So it dovetails nicely with Richard’s work in Who’s Your City?
I hope you’ll check it out and ask some questions of your own. We’ll take questions for about three days, and then answer them in another post.
“Best” always,
Bert
Maclean’s magazine contacted me last month to ask for my comments about a recently released mega-study of “lifelong learning.” The subject of the piece was the 2008 Composite Learning Index (CLI), from the Canadian Council on Learning.
Here’s a link to the Maclean’s article, which has some insightful quotes from CCG’s Kevin Stolarick, and some boring ones from me.
The Maclean’s article is a good overview of the ambitious CLI study, but it’s really worth a look in its raw form. Here is the home page for the Composite Learning Index, and the 2008 report itself.
Your time is valuable, so let me just give you my thoughts about the study, having done many similar ones over the last 25 years or so.
All in all, the CLI is a wonderfully ambitious attempt to quantify “learning” and provide a road map for the future. But a Swiss Army knife is rarely the best tool for the job, or even any job. By dividing the components of the study into more meaningful sections, better insights may be gained.
Have a look and tell me what you think. Do their rankings fit with your experience?
Best, Bert
