What Does Your City Say About You?

Is it just a cultural quirk that the New York women in "Sex and the City" are constantly kvetching about their love lives? Not according to "urban expert" Richard Florida, a business professor at the University of Toronto who studies how place affects lifestyle. In a new book out this week, "Who's Your City?," Florida says the world is far from flat, as New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has argued. In fact, it's spiky, with money, innovation, and distinct personality types increasingly clustering in the world's major metropolises. Using data collected from satellites and census surveys, Florida describes how a "creative class" of people is changing the economic landscape by congregating in a shrinking set of cities located farther and wider than ever before. What's more, different types of these creative innovators are sticking with their own kind, molding each city's distinct demographics, job markets, and mating markets (or dating scenes). So despite the gadgets that now allow us to work from anywhere, says Florida, choosing where to live is more important than ever before. And as to all the frustrations expressed in "Sex & the City"? Well, just blame the 210,820 more single women than men living in the New York metropolitan area. NEWSWEEK's Katie Paul spoke with Florida to find out what our chosen cities say about us. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: The conventional wisdom is that, with technologies that allow us to work from anywhere, place is mattering less and less. Why is that not the case, and how are we getting it wrong?
FLORIDA: What I realized after studying this for a couple of decades is that no one's ever really given advice about how important the place you choose to live is. We now know that place is really important. It's part of a triangle of career, family, and the place you live. You know, people said the same thing about trade and technology making place less important when the telegraph was invented. But what we found in our research is that 40 million Americas move each year, and 15 million make really significant moves 50 to 100 miles out of the county they live in. That's a lot. And young people with high levels of education are the most likely to move. I call this the "brain migration" or the "means migration." In the past, mostly every city had the same profile of people: some college graduates, some graduate school graduates, some high school graduates, some high school dropouts. But now more and more highly educated people are moving to a smaller number of cities.

What does that mean for a given city?
In a place like San Francisco or Washington, D.C., about 50 percent of the total population in those regions is composed of people with a college degree or more. A place like Detroit might have 10 or 12 percent. And it's not just educational profile. What we're also seeing is a migration of people with a certain personality type. They want to have a new thrill, experience new things, and be in an interesting neighborhood. They're also the kind of people most likely to create new innovations, whether that's in music or film or high technology. Those people are seeking out a certain number of places, like greater New York, greater Washington, greater Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles. So from a technology point of view, there's a link between where people migrate and the psychology of those people, and where people innovate and create new ventures.

Cities have always drawn talented people. Is the increase you're talking about unprecedented?
We don't have enough historical information to say. But certainly over the past three decades that we can track this, yes, it looks like a pronounced trend. The world is getting smaller, so more places can play in the world economy, but the number of places that play is fewer. If you think about what happened to the car industry or the electronics industry over the past 20 years, there used to be a car company or three companies in every country, and then there was globalization in that industry. Now GM and Ford and Nissan and Toyota are battling it out, while many companies fell by the wayside. I think the same thing is happening with urban areas. Every country used to have a dozen or two dozen great cities. Now people are saying, "It's a global world. I'm mobile and I can go to New York, London or Beijing, or Bangalore." We're picking from a smaller set of cities, not just nationally but globally. So the biggest cities in the world are getting bigger and more expensive.

Sounds like this is all due to those very same technological innovations—teleconferencing, Internet access, etc.—that led people to the "world is flat" idea that you're refuting.
Technology makes the world smaller, but it also makes the world spikier. I'm not arguing against Thomas Friedman, but saying there's this additional force. I think he and others are aware of it, but I think people have glossed over it. Economic activity is not only becoming more concentrated but also more specialized. New York is great in fashion design and investment banking. San Francisco's great in software. L.A.'s great in entertainment technology. And Nashville is the epicenter of music production. So if you want to pursue a given career, it's not just that you can make it in any big city, because now there is a smaller number of big cities that will be the key places for you.