Not so fast. Place, argues the great urbanist Richard Florida, is not only important, it's more important than ever. In fact, choosing a place to live is as important to your happiness as choosing a spouse or career. And some regions, recent surveys show, really are happier than others. In Who's Your City, Creative Class guru Richard Florida reports on this growing body of research that tells us what qualities of cities and towns...

From Richard Florida, author of the bestselling books The Rise of the Creative Class and Who's Your City?, comes a book that frames the economic meltdown of 2008-09 not as a crisis but as an opportunity to "reset." In doing so, he paints a fascinating picture of what our economy, society, and geography will look like--of how we will work and live--in the future.

The whole landscape of research in urban studies was revolutionized by the publication of Richard Florida s The Rise of the Creative Class in 2002, and his subsequent book entitled The Flight of the Creative Class has helped to maintain a decade-long explosion of interest in the field. While these two books examine the creative class in the context of the United States, research has emerged which investigates the creative class worldwide.

This book brings together detailed studies of the creative class in cities across the globe, examining the impact of the creative class on growth and...

More than half the world's population lives in cities, and that proportion is expected to rise to three-quarters by 2050. Urbanization is a global phenomenon, but the way cities are developing, the experience of city life, and the prospects for the future of cities vary widely from region to region. The Atlas of Cities presents a unique taxonomy of cities that looks at different aspects of their physical, economic, social, and political structures; their interactions with each other and with their hinterlands; the challenges and opportunities they present; and where cities might be...