Sense of place and the global economy

I don’t know if you’ve heard of Richard Florida and his book Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, but he makes an interesting argument:

It’s a mantra of the age of globalization that where you live doesn’t matter: you can telecommute to your high-tech Silicon Valley job, a ski-slope in Idaho, a beach in Hawaii or a loft in Chicago; you can innovate from Shanghai or Bangalore.According to Richard Florida, this is wrong. Place is not only important, it’s more important than ever.Globalization is not flattening the world; on the contrary, the world is spiky. Place is becoming more relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. The choice of where to live, therefore, is not an arbitrary one. It is arguably the most important decision we make, as important as choosing a spouse or a career. In fact, place exerts powerful influence over the jobs and careers we have access to, the people meet and our “mating markets” and our ability to lead happy and fulfilled lives.

Intuitively, this makes sense to me, because (as Florida puts it in the first chapter of his book, excerpted here)

The place we choose to live affects every aspect of our being. It can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose, and the options available to our children and families. People are not equally happy everywhere, and some places do a better job of providing a high quality of life than others. Some places offer us more vibrant labor markets, better career prospects, higher real estate appreciation, and stronger investment and earnings opportunities. Some places offer more promising mating markets. Others are better environments for raising children.

Even if the sense of place our ancestors had is indeed fading away, Florida’s right that place matters, in and of itself; that’s the reason sense of place developed to begin with, and the reason that even as we become more moble and mix ourselves up more and more, different places still have different identities and characters and subcultures (and sub-subcultures). Given that, and given our need to belong, and our need for self-definition, I suspect that while our sense of place may evolve somewhat and weaken with the mobility of our society, it may look different in our children and grandchildren, but it will never really disappear. Who knows—add in the tendency of each generation to react against the generation before, we may even see a resurgence, and an intentional effort to recreate an older, more settled form of community. It would be nice.HT: Chris Forbes