Creative Class » University of Toronto

Celebrating Words and Ideas

CCE Editor — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:00:07 +0000

This weekend, instead of picking up your cumbersome Kindle, how about kicking it old school instead? You know, books and paper, readers and writers mingling… meeting authors in person, shaking hands, making eye contact. It’ll do your heart and soul good.

Dig into the feel-good feeling that books and knowledge can prompt by attending The Globe and Mail Open House Festival: A Weekend of Words and Ideas, which is being celebrated at the University of Toronto this weekend, May 8 – 10.

Richard Florida will be speaking on Friday, May 8 about his groundbreaking book Who’s Your City? and the critical importance of weighing the pros and cons of where you live. There’s plenty of advice out there about careers and relationships, but finding your place in the world, literally, is just as crucial to creating a happy life.

Richard himself has moved 17 times. And as you’ll learn by watching Bravo!’s Seamus O’Regan’s compelling interview with Richard for this Arts&Minds special, mobility is something that can enhance your life and career, but there are also costs to leaving behind the people and things you love.

What have been your personal trade-offs in choosing the right city to settle in? Have you given up a certain job or left behind family and friends? Have you traded off on hobbies for a certain lifestyle? Is your life stage winning out over your personality’s needs?

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Richard Florida — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 15:18:58 +0000

Nobel-prize winner, Joe Stiglitz says the stimulus should invest in the innovations that can power our future, and not just breathe life back into the industries and economic patterns of the past (via Mark Thoma).

“I’ve been a bit astonished that all the discussion around the private-sector stimulus has centered on infrastructure … Bailouts, too, are aimed at correcting mistakes of the past, so they are backward-looking. We would be much better off spending our money forward-looking. If we spend $700 billion on new technology and innovation, we’d have a stronger, new, real economy. Up to now, the discussion has focused on the sectors that have been mismanaged rather than the sectors that are creating our future.”

I agree wholeheartedly. But, infrastructure broadly construed is critical in creating the demand required for new industries to develop and new innovations to spring forward as my University of Toronto Chris Kennedy notes. Innovation expert Christopher Freeman long ago argued that innovations continue during crises but tend to bunch up due to insufficient demand. The way out of crisis is to reset the market by opening up new patterns of demand and broad new patterns of lifestyle and consumption. This requires changes in economic geography, in the physical landscape, and the ways we work and live. This is essentially what post-war suburbanization did in the United States, what the canals and railroads did before that, and what propelled London after the great fires of the 17th century. So it’s more than investing in the innovations and technologies of the future. And, in fact, politics can badly skew these kinds of investments – as is evident right now with the bailout – because older, failing industries wield considerable political power, as Mancur Olson long ago identified.

History seems to suggest that broader public investments and regulatory and rule changes which spur new modes of transportation create new development patterns which intensify the use of land and the built environment, and set in motion new patterns of demand and consumption required to reset the economy for long-run recovery and growth.

So when and where do we have that conversation?

Toronto Dialogues

Richard Florida — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:39:38 +0000

Spacing Toronto on “Kingwell versus Florida?” That’s Mark Kingwell, my distinguished University of Toronto philosophy colleague and author of among many other things Concrete Reveries. I’ve not met him, but I like what Kingwell has to say and find myself more in broad agreement with the issues he cares about – social justice among them. I’ve long been fascinated by political philosophy. I took a good dose of it as an undergraduate, and I like to think social contract theory, Hegel and Marx and a little bit of critical theory inform my own work, though my last “foray” in the field was a paper I wrote on Habermas at Rutgers in 1979 which won a small undergraduate paper award. We’re lucky to have a philosopher of Kingwell’s stature weighing in on cities and urban issues. Kudos to Spacing Toronto – one of the best urban sites out there, the writing and coverage are first rate; and the comments consistently as good or better than any around the blog-sphere- for providing some nice context on our different approaches and perspectives. I think they got it about right. It’s healthy when a university and a community are home to different points of view, different analytical approaches, and different emphases. For me it represents the flourishing of a distinctive “Toronto school of urbanism” – descending from Jane Jacobs but evolving from the very real material conditions, issues and challenges facing Toronto in the world economy. For someone who worked in isolation for too long, it’s a real privilege to be part of a city where so many people care – and think deeply and carefully – about urban questions.