Richard Florida > Quotes

“The creative individual is no longer viewed as an iconoclast. He—or she—is the new mainstream.”
― Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class--Revisited

“It's not that gays and diversity equal high technology. But if your culture is not such that it can accept difference, and uniqueness and oddity and eccentricity, you will not get high tech industry.”
― Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life

“As the economy has become more specialized and the occupational division of labor has deepened, the Creative Class has increasingly outsourced functions that were previously provided within the family to the Service Class.”
― Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class--Revisited

“The combination of economic inequality and economic segregation is deadly. It reinforces the advantages of those at the top while exacerbating and perpetuating the disadvantages of those at the bottom. Taken together, they shape not just inequality of economic resources, but also a more permanent and dysfunctional inequality of opportunity.”
― Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class—and What We Can Do About It

“the New Urban Crisis is also a crisis of the suburbs, of urbanization itself, and of contemporary capitalism writ large.”
― Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class-and What We Can Do About It

“Over time, this growing tendency of like marrying like will only reinforce clustering and geographic sorting along class lines, giving the emerging map of social, economic, and cultural segregation even greater permanence.”
― Richard Florida

“Economic systems do not exist in the abstract; they are embedded within the geographic fabric of the society - the way land is used, the locations of homes and business, the infrastructure that ties people, places, and commerce together.”
― Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity

“the Creative Economy is driven by the logic that seeks to fully harness—and no longer waste—human resources and talent.”
― Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class--Revisited

“Who can ever forget George W. Bush, in the days and weeks after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, exhorting people not to be afraid, to get out and do the right thing, the patriotic thing, the one thing that could get the economy moving forward again: start shopping.”
― Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity

“Beneath the surface, unnoticed by many, an even deeper force was at work—the rise of creativity as a fundamental economic driver, and the rise of a new social class, the Creative Class.”
― Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class--Revisited

“Music, in fact, plays a central role in the creation of identity and the formation of real communities. Musical memories are some of the strongest and most easily evoked. You can often remember events in your life by what songs were playing at the time. Simon Frith writes that music “provides us with an intensely subjective sense of being sociable. It both articulates and offers the immediate experience of collective identity. Music regularly sound tracks our search for ourselves and for spaces in which we can feel at home.”20 It”
― Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class--Revisited: Revised and Expanded

“Too much of what led up to the crisis in the old bubble days—the conspicuous consumption, the latter-day Gatsbyism—was fueled by a need to fill a huge emotional and psychological void left by the absence of meaningful work. When people cease to find meaning in work, when work is boring, alienating, and dehumanizing, the only option becomes the urge to consume—to buy happiness off the shelf, a phenomenon we now know cannot suffice in the long term.”
― Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity

“If you are a scientist or engineer, an architect or designer, a writer, artist, or musician, or if your creativity is a key factor in your work in business, education, health care, law, or some other profession, you are a member.”
― Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class--Revisited

“Infrastructure is always hugely expensive, and there's no clear way to measure the overall future return on investment, whether it's in the form of innovation, development, or new communities or jobs. Infrastructure provides a skeleton on which to grow a new economic model. The infrastructure investments we make now will determine the kind of economy we have in the future.”
― Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity

“whosyourcity.com”
― Richard Florida, Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

“We need to build the infrastructure of the future, not just patch up that of the past. Failure to do so will only stall the current Reset and hold back recovery. We must make intelligent investments in new infrastructure that can move beyond the constraints of our current energy-inefficient, environmentally destructive, time-devouring infrastructure. We need to increase the velocity of moving people, good, and ideas.”
― Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity

“Ideeën zijn de motor van vooruitgang.”
― Richard Florida

“The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, and the highest rate of metabolism. "Velocity" and "density" are not words many people use when describing suburbia.”
― Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity

“There are three key attributes that make people happy in their communities and cause them to develop a solid emotional attachment to the place they live in. The first is the physical beauty and the level of maintenance of the place itself - great open spaces and parks, historic buildings, and an attention to community aesthetics. The second is the ease with which people can meet others, make friends, and plug into social networks. The third piece of the happiness puzzle is the level of diversity, open-mindedness, and acceptance: Is there some equality of opportunity for all? Can anyone - everyone - contribute to and take pleasure from the community?”
― Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity