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Bright
Lights, Big Cities
We make three
critical choices in our modern, globalized lives. One's job: What to do? One's
partner: Who to do it with? One's home: Where to live?
From GLOBE & MAIL by JOE
BERRIDGE
2008 March 15
BOOK REVIEW
How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision
of Your Life - By Richard Florida
Random House Canada,
Publisher 374 pages, $32.95
Richard Florida is a phenomenon. An intellectual entrepreneur, a travelling
road show with a fully outfitted website, there is no academic quite like him in
Canada. Which is where the author of The Rise of the Creative Class chose
to move last year, to the University of Toronto, his arrival fêted by everyone
from Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty on down. He is a major catch.
Florida thinks about cities, about why they are important and what makes them
successful. His first book crystallized a simple idea and introduced it, to
general acceptance. The successful city is not the one that has the lowest
taxes, cheapest labour or most functional efficiency, but rather the place that
can best offer the wealth-creators of the modern economy, those key knowledge
workers, a sympathetic place to live.
That creative class wants tolerance, nightlife, parks, culture high and low,
great places to eat and talented people to meet. It's been a powerful idea.
Florida's influence on Toronto was felt long before he moved here, fuelling the
collective will to fix the waterfront, build the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art
Gallery of Ontario and the Opera House, and to undertake all the other cultural
initiatives that are making the city more attractive to people who can choose to
live anywhere.
Who's Your City? carries on from that conclusion. We make three
critical choices in our modern, globalized lives. One's job: What to do? One's
partner: Who to do it with? And the third, no less important, as it vitally
affects the first two, which city: Where to live?
The first part of the book is an intriguing exploration of the global
geography of the new urban world. Florida takes issue with the premise of Thomas
Friedman's bestseller on globalization, The World is Flat, although he
shares that breezy, generous, anecdotal delivery, a style guaranteed to give
conventional academics heartburn.
The world is not flat; it is spiky. Florida has the maps to prove it,
plotting the highly localized distribution of GDP, patent applications and
top-ranked scientists by city rather than by country. Greater Tokyo is the
equivalent of the third-biggest economy in the world. Seoul, New York, San
Francisco, Boston and Tokyo dominate the world's production of innovation. Top
scientific brains live in the Boston-Washington corridor, San Francisco, London,
Amsterdam, Paris and Tokyo again. (Toronto and Vancouver make the middle/top
ranks on his charts, performing distinctly above average.) It is not the choice
of country that is important for individual economic, cultural or even marital
success, but the city.
Not that the term "city" is an adequate description any longer;
mega-regions, agglomerations of large urban areas, are emerging as the
production units of the ideas economy, places far more significant than the
countries that contain them. Florida has some truly ugly names for them: Bos-Wash,
Lon-Leed-chester, Barce-Lyon and our very own Tor-Buff-chester.
What that regional city status masks, Florida acknowledges, is the extreme
differences in culture, income and social prospects increasingly occurring
within cities, rather than between countries. The residents of New York's Upper
West Side, London's Islington and Toronto's Cabbagetown may share an effortless,
distanceless commonality, but so too do their South Bronx, Peckham and Malvern
neighbourhoods. It may indeed be less globalization than the imperatives of the
knowledge economy that exacerbate inequality.
Florida maps the uneven distribution of education in the United States.
Cities with high percentages of university graduates are prosperous cities,
since without postsecondary education, it is increasingly impossible to earn a
living wage. Well-educated people marry well-educated people, doubling both
their good fortune and that of their chosen city.
The policy implications of Florida's work have not been lost on cities, even
if they are on our federal government. Cities are in competition for brains and
must do what it takes to get them.
The second part of Who's Your City? is less compelling, particularly
for Canadians; it's a guide on how to choose which city is for you, using
largely examples from the United States. Like all self-help books, it suffers
from the assertive blandness of soft psychologizing. In judging a city's
educational offerings, Florida notes, "Studies have shown time and again
that expanding one's mind can add years to your life." Maybe he should
stick just a bit closer to academe.
Florida has clearly made an informed personal choice about where to live. And
one thing else is clear. He is in love, passionately, intelligently,
endearingly, with Toronto. And he counts the ways, not only in this informative,
insightful, imaginative book, but in his frequent columns for this newspaper.
For that he is to be welcomed, and thanked for putting a spring back in the step
of our city, the over-abused husband of the Canadian family. It's nice to hear
those words again. - 2008
March 15 GLOBE
& MAIL
BOOK EXCERPT: WHO'S YOUR
CITY?: HOW THE CREATIVE ECONOMY IS MAKING WHERE TO LIVE THE MOST IMPORTANT
DECISION OF YOUR LIFE
Charting the future through a 'geography
of personality'
Urban theorist and Globe and
Mail columnist Richard Florida always believed the world was shaped primarily by
social and economic factors. Then he discovered the central role played by
psychology
Where we live matters more than we may think, says the man who made the
"creative class" part of the lexicon. In his new book, Who's Your
City?, Richard Florida examines how "mega-regions" are driving the
global economy and how each one is informed by its own distinct personality.
Where we choose to live, argues the director of the University of Toronto's
Martin Prosperity Institute, is crucial not only to how we live and who we share
our lives with, but also to what kind of career we end up having.
In this passage, he describes how this
"geographic clustering" is dictated by five basic personality traits:
openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and
neuroticism
We know that values, beliefs, and attitudes cluster
geographically and are sustained over time through social interaction - that's
what defines culture. According to Sam Gosling, a psychologist at the University
of Texas, and Jason Rentfrow, a psychologist at Cambridge University, these
places (and their inhabitants) will also assume certain personality traits.
They refer to these as "social founder
effects." That is, people come to acquire personality traits that reflect
their practices, lifestyles, and beliefs. Places that tolerate or encourage
openness to experience will ultimately attract people who seek environments in
which they can feel free to express themselves.
Even people who are not initially open-minded may, to
some extent, internalize some of those values and preferences over time.
Eventually, large segments of the population may end up embodying these traits.
Another factor is what Rentfrow and Gosling call
"selective migration." Geographic differences in personality, they
write, "could have emerged as a result of immigrants selectively migrating
to places that satisfied and reinforced their psychological and physical
needs." According to the theory, these initial groups establish personality
traits that are then passed down to subsequent generations - a notion, Rentfrow
and Gosling point out, that is supported by ample evidence.
Because of the "genetic founder effects,"
they argue, the migration of like-minded people to certain areas may reduce the
amount of variation in the gene pool over time, thereby increasing the
proportion of people who possess particular traits.
These effects are reinforced by social pressure and
social influence. Clearly, certain kinds of personalities are more attracted to
certain kinds of places. We seek out places to live that reinforce and reflect
aspects of who we are and who we want to become.
Seeing the strong clustering of personality types and
learning more about the relationship between psychology and place was causing a
subtle but profound shift in my own thinking. All my professional life, I've
looked at how social and economic factors shape the world. I'd never really been
into psychology - never thought about how personal proclivities might affect
innovation or economic development. But all of a sudden it was dawning on me
that psychology plays a central role.
For years I had sought to develop better and more
refined measures of what economists refer to as human capital or skill. My own
measures of the creative class, and of creative occupations, which we discussed
earlier, were my attempts to add the kinds of work people do to economists'
emphasis on human capital or level of education.
Traits vs. skills
But what if skill is more than education and more than
work? Rentfrow suggests that personality involves the capacity to acquire and
perform certain tasks competently and effectively. The type of skill economists
are interested in, he writes, "implies something that can be acquired with
proper training, talent, motivation, and resources." But, he adds,
"it's more consistent with personality theory to argue that personality
traits predispose people to acquire certain skills. For example, highly
conscientious people have a disposition to be detail oriented, plan ahead, or
stay organized. Openness influences people's ability to acquire new skills
relatively quickly."
Neuroticism is negatively associated with top talent
in the form of human capital or the super-creative class. In more advanced
models, it also turns out to be negatively associated with the creative class,
high-tech industry, and wages. In other words, regions with high concentrations
of highly educated and ultra-creative individuals tend to be more emotionally
stable, less volatile, and more resilient. This suggests, among other things,
that these are places where people may be more likely to take risks because
they're less concerned about failure.
Agreeableness is associated with jobs in management
and health care. And, while it is positively associated with innovation,
high-tech industry, wages, and income in our more advanced models, the effects
are quite small. This could mean that the ability to work well with others
contributes, albeit slightly, to innovation. Extroversion is significantly
correlated with management and sales jobs, but it too has no effect on human
capital overall, high-tech jobs, or regional income.
Conscientiousness is an important characteristic to
success in many fields and industries. A management consultant I know likes to
say that for every open and creative person who comes up with a new idea, a
company needs 10 or 20 conscientious ones to carry it out. Psychologists have
found that entrepreneurs possess a mixture of openness and conscientiousness,
particularly stick-to-itiveness - the ability to persevere in the face of
adversity. But as our statistical results show, conscientiousness is not a big
factor in regional growth. In fact, it turned out to be negatively associated
with innovation, wages and income, and housing values. Then again, as Rentfrow
suggested, conscientious individuals tend to be rule-followers; give them a
clearly defined task and they will develop the most efficient procedure for
completing it. But when the task is not clearly defined and requires creative
thought, someone who is highly conscientious but not very open will struggle to
create something completely original. The way I see it, conscientiousness alone
is not enough to power regional growth. However, it may play a role in
combination with other factors, say, in places where conscientious personalities
mix with open people.
Openness to experience is the only personality type
that plays a consistent role in regional economic development. It is highly
correlated with jobs in computing, science, arts, design, and entertainment;
with overall human capital levels, high-tech industry, income, and housing
values.
The gay and bohemian index
The role of personality in
regional economic development became even clearer when we ran more advanced
statistical tests. Openness to experience had the biggest positive coefficient
estimate in every case and was involved in at least eight of the 10 top models
for every variable. Furthermore, it was the only variable to be positive and
statistically significant in every equation. Out of 60 top models generated,
openness was a factor in more than 50.
But the strongest results by far were those that
looked at my Gay and Bohemian Indexes and openness to experience - literally off
the chart. The finding for openness and the Gay Index was the strongest of our
entire analysis
t's not gay and bohemian concentrations in and of
themselves that drive regional concentrations of creativity and innovation, but
the broader, underlying regional environment of openness to experience that
those two measures actually reflect.
The more I consider these results the more I am
convinced that the clustering of open-to-experience personalities is a driving
factor in regional innovation and economic growth. Openness is a key factor in
the ability to attract and capitalize on diversity. At the bottom, regional
economic growth requires two dimensions - depth and breadth. Depth comes from
specialization and developing deep experience in certain key fields. Breadth
comes from diversity and the open-mindedness required to accept, generate, and
convert new ideas. Places that are innovative and that can sustain themselves
over the long run - places like London, New York, or the San Francisco Bay area
- are those that can constantly develop and capitalize on breadth. Their
resilience stems from more than the level of education, skill, or technology in
those areas. It is part and parcel of their personality profile - their ability
to attract and to mobilize open-to-experience people.
Personality plays a significant role in understanding
cities, regions, migration, and economic growth. And it is the interplay between
the two - personality and place - that is key. "The ways in which
personality manifests depends, in part, on the situation one is in,"
Rentfrow writes. Clearly, personality affects which situations and environments
people approach and which ones they avoid, he continues. "But sometimes we
find ourselves in situations that we didn't choose. I think it's this aspect
that's especially interesting to consider at the regional level," he adds.
"If we broaden the situation to include the neighbourhoods and cities
within which people live, then we can begin considering how the social climate,
economic conditions, and available resources in a place interact with the
personality traits of the region to affect regional growth."
What does this all boil down to? For cities and
regions, it means that their leadership - political, business, and otherwise -
must be aware of the powerful role played by psychology. Places really do have
different personalities. Those personalities stem from their economic structure
and inform and constrain their futures. It's a lot easier to go out and attract
a new company, or even build a new stadium, than it is to alter the
psychological makeup of a region. Regional leaders must become more aware of how
their region's collective personality shapes the kinds of economic activities
that it can do and the kinds of people it can attract, satisfy, and retain.
For each of us as individuals, the key is to find the
right fit - to think strategically in order to identify our priorities and
choose the place that best fits us. - 2008 March 15
GLOBE
& MAIL
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