Are there any Richard Florida rankings of Canadian cities?

[Hceux]

Currently, I'm reading Richard Florida's Who's your city? book. It got me curious about what are his rankings of Canadian cities. I haven't lucked out with searching for this information on Google. I did do a quick search on the Cyburbia Forums, but didn't find anything.

So, do any of you know anything about whether or not there are rankings of Canadian cities done by Richard Florida's school of thought?

I'd be somewhat surprise if there isn't any as Richard Florida now lives in Toronto, Canada.

[Chet]

Not to be sarcastic, but to be sarcastic.... WHO CARES. He's a wind bag.

[Brocktoon]

Not to be sarcastic, but to be sarcastic.... WHO CARES. He's a wind bag.

Thank you...I completely agree. But he can fill a room like no other...

[Hceux]

Wow, I didn't realized that he's a detested figure in this community.

May I ask why?

[Howard Roark]

Florida... He's soooo 2002

Actually, though he offered some interesting concepts his attempt at qualification and quantification were pretty weak, and if you cant prove it, its faith, and if its faith you can not ask an urban area to bet on it for success.

[Mud Princess]

Hceux, why not e-mail Richard Florida and ask him? I think he has a website... I'm sure you could find his e-mail address.

He's a featured speaker at the IEDC conference in October, and I'm supposed to get a copy of his new book for being one of the first 500 to register. (I've never actually read any of his books, so I can't answer your other question.)

[pirijan]

While I don't sip the Florida kool-aid, I do think he has a lot of interesting concepts, and while he may not have hard factual data to back a lot of it up, in his defense, often the things he's measuring, like social tolerance, don't really have any concrete ways to measure them. I've never heard Florida speak, but in an economics class we had one of his associates in to discuss the creative class.

And while they're a few (maybe many) holes in the theory and it's applicability is far from universal, I get the sense that he acknowledges that.

[pirijan]

Hceux,

oh, I just found this on florida's blog site
http://www.creativeclass.com/creativ...onto-and-more/

the link on the site doesn't work, but when they eventually fix it maybe it may help

[DetroitPlanner]

Here is what Dick Florida would say: Toronto and Vancouver = Good; Hamilton and Subury = Bad. Everyplace else is somewhere in between, but ranges widely from Windsor to Banff.

He would also forget that the Maritines or Plains are part of Canada.

[JimPlans]

I believe that Mr. Florida only analyzes U.S. cities, because he is using one uniform data set to make comparisons. Were he to create a similar ranking system for Canada, he would have to find similar uniform data sources on the north side of the border. While I'm sure these data sources exist, he would have to take time out from his speaking engagements to do this, and at $50,000 per engagement (last time I checked), I'm sure he has better things to do.

Why would people "hate on" Richard Florida? Well, he took ideas that were not original to him, crunched a bunch of data in ways that others before him had done, and drew conclusions that sound nice in a book but aren't really deep or even actionable. (Hey, Boston is successful because it has Harvard, MIT, and lots of patents for products in high-tech industries? Let's make that happen in Syracuse!)

Also, he made an entire, lucrative career out of one book and is now famous. The bastard.