Richard Florida Biography
Richard Florida is an American urban studies theorist focusing on social and economic theory. He is a professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.
Florida received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1986. Prior to joining George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, where he spent two years, he taught at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College in Pittsburgh from 1987 to 2005. He was named a Senior Editor at The Atlantic on March 2011 after serving as a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com for a year.
Richard Florida Age
Richard L. Florida (born November 26, 1957, in Newark, New Jersey he is 61 years old as of 2019
Richard Florida Family
Florida lives in Toronto and Miami and is married to Rana Florida
Richard Florida Education
Florida graduated from Rutgers College in 1979 with a B.A. in political science. He then attended Columbia University where he studied urban planning M.Phil. in 1984 and Ph.D. in 198
Richard Florida Career
Theories
Florida is best known for his concept of the creative class and its implications for urban regeneration. This idea was expressed in Florida’s best-selling books The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), Cities and the Creative Class, and The Flight of the Creative Class, and later published a book focusing on the issues surrounding urban renewal and talent migration, titled Who’s Your City?
Florida’s theory asserts that metropolitan regions with high concentrations of technology workers, artists, musicians, lesbians, and gay men, and a group he describes as “high bohemians”, exhibit a higher level of economic development. Florida refers to these groups collectively as the “creative class.” He posits that the creative class fosters an open, dynamic, personal and professional urban environment.
This environment, in turn, attracts more creative people, as well as businesses and capital. He suggests that attracting and retaining high-quality talent versus a singular focus on projects such as sports stadiums, iconic buildings, and shopping centers, would be a better primary use of a city’s regeneration of resources for long-term prosperity. He has devised his own ranking systems that rate cities by a “Bohemian index,” a “Gay index,” a “diversity index” and similar criteria.
Florida’s earlier work focused on innovation by manufacturers, including the continuous-improvement systems implemented by such automakers as Toyota.
Richard Florida
plentiful creative class grew over 12 years
The “rise of the rest” is often looked at through the lens of startups and venture capital. As a new CityLab analysis from a noted urbanist shows, there’s also room for talent in the conversation.
In a new look at the “geography of talent,” Richard Florida teamed with the University of Maine economist Todd Gabe to track the growth of the creative class in cities.
First, of course, it’s necessary to define the creative class. Instead of focusing on college degrees, Florida writes that this group is defined by occupation, working in areas including “education, healthcare, law, arts, tech, science, and business,” Florida writes.
So Florida and Gabe set out to find where there were concentrations, and Baltimore is found in top-10 lists throughout. Within the examined timeframe of 2005 to 2017, data here shows that Baltimore’s creative class is both already highly concentrated, and growing
In 2005, Baltimore had the seventh-largest share of creative class members making up the workforce, with 38.7%. In 2017, it had grown to 44.9% — still good for seventh place.
Between the two timeframes, the growth of this cohort in Baltimore was also in the top 10, both when it comes to overall shares and growth per 1,000 people, the report states.
“Established tech hubs like San Francisco, San Jose, and Washington D.C., continue to lead the nation in their concentration of the creative class. But Baltimore and Philadelphia also boast high concentrations, attesting to the power of the east coast corridor,” Florida writes. Earlier, he noted that the area’s research centers around Johns Hopkins were also a driver.
On a wider scale, Florida writes that housing prices are closely tied to the growth story, observing “increasingly unaffordable housing in established hubs and the improvement of the economies in less-established hubs.”
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