Reading Guide
From Who's Your City?
Who's Your City? by Richard Florida
Part Jane Jacobs, part Boom, Bust and Echo, the Vintage Canada edition of the internationally bestselling Who's Your City? has been Canadianized and updated for its life in paperback, bringing it to a whole new group of readers.
Paperback
1. Do you find Richard Florida’s analysis of the new importance of place convincing? Why, or why not?
2. Is the world spiky, or flat, or both?
3. How do you feel about the book’s claim that places have personalities?
4. Are you surprised by the findings of Richard Florida’s Gallup poll about the importance of aesthetics to people’s rating of their home city?
5. Richard Florida acknowledges the influence of thinkers like Jane Jacobs, disagreeing with others such as Thomas Friedman. How do his ideas relate to theirs, or to those of other scholars’?
6. Are you thinking of moving? How will Who’s Your City? affect your decision process?
7. Richard Florida presents many personal stories about migration in Who’s Your City? — including his own family history. Which story chimed with you most strongly, and why?
8. Do you agree that there are three major points in one’s life when one’s decision about where to live is most important? If not, why not?
9. How do you see the urban trends Florida identifies — ethnic enclaves, boho-burbs — at work in your own city?
10. What brought you to where you live now? Does the analysis of place in Who’s Your City? make you look differently at the trajectory of your life? How?
11. WhosYourCity.com hosts a variety of resources, including a lively discussion board about the merits of different cities. How do the opinions expressed there about your city, or a city you might move to, change your view of it?
12. How useful do you find the book’s appendices and its Place Finder in choosing a place to live, or in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the place you live now?
13. Does the economic turmoil of 2009 have any effect your sense of the book’s ideas?
14. How does Who’s Your City? build on the ideas of Richard Florida’s previous books, particularly The Rise of the Creative Class?
15. What map or statistic in Who’s Your City? surprised you the most?
16. If you met Richard Florida, what would you ask him about Who’s Your City?
17. Will you recommend this book to your friends? Why, or why not?
Richard Florida, Author, Who's Your City? and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
Richard Florida is one of the world's leading public intellectuals. Esquire Magazine recently named him one of the 'Best and Brightest' in America. He is author of the national and international best-selling book, The Rise of the Creative Class, which received the Washington Monthly's Political Book Award and was cited as a major breakthrough idea by the Harvard Business Review. His ideas have been featured in major ad campaigns and such as BMW and are being used globally to change the way regions, nations, and companies compete.
He is founder of the Creative Class Group, an advisory services firm, charting new trends…
The Great Reset
Richard Florida