Richard Florida published a book earlier this year that continues his work on the creative class. Called Who’s Your City?, the book argues that where you live is very important.
One of the dominant thoughts of today is that globalization and technology are flattening the world - making it more or less equal no matter where you are geographically. Florida has taken a contrary position with this book, saying that we are not in a flattening world, but instead, a spiking world. This spiking represents pooling of like minds in certain geographic areas. Many intriguing excerpts and maps from the book are featured on the Who’s Your City? website, such as the Mega-Region map (Tor-Buff-chester and Char-lanta being two of them), the Personality Map (which shows where neurotic, extroverted and agreeable people live) and the Innovation Map, seen above. Lots of food for thought here.
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hmm it seems like no innovation whatsoever happens in the southern hemisphere at all according to this map…This all reminds me of that famous quote “There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics”.
September 3rd, 2008 at 2:53 pm
@Dan: Indeed. I’m curious as to where the data comes from. The definition of “innovation” is most likely very limited. if you look at the work of Jan Chipcase (http://www.janchipchase.com/ ) there is a whole lot of ingenious, diy level stuff going on in developing regions.
September 3rd, 2008 at 2:58 pm