Richard Florida

Richard Florida is university professor in the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, a distinguished visiting fellow at NYU’s Schack Institute of Real Estate, and the cofounder and editor at large of The Atlantic’s CityLab. In his modern classic The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books) urbanist Richard Florida identifies the emergence of a new social class reshaping the twenty-first century’s economy, geography, and workplace. This Creative Class is made up of engineers and managers, academics and musicians, researchers, designers, entrepreneurs and lawyers, poets and programmer, whose work turns on the creation of new forms. Increasingly, Florida observes, this Creative Class determines how workplaces are organized, which companies prosper or go bankrupt, and which cities thrive, stagnate or decline. Now updated with a new preface that considers the latest developments in our changing cities, The Rise of the Creative Class is the definitive edition of this foundational book on our contemporary economy. The New York Times called noted that “An important book for those who feel passionately about the future of the urban center. [Florida] changed the framework for discussing social and economic inequality.”