‘When we moved from DC to Toronto, we were amazed by how polite people are, that cars stop for pedestrians, and virtually no one raises their voice or blows their horn.”

That’s not a testimonial from the next Toronto Unlimited tourism campaign — it’s an aside from Richard Florida in his new book Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy is Making Where You Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life.

With it, the public intellectual is leveraging his reputation as a social scientist, closely associated with coining the terms “Creative Class” and “Bohemian Index,” to nudge closer to the self-help section. In the process, he’s been boosting the self-esteem of many highly placed Torontonians: his thesis says that your neighbours define you and, while writing the book, he decided the neighbours he desired were… us!

Being recruited to run the new Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management — with an office under construction in the MaRS Discovery District — was probably an incentive, too, with $120 million dedicated to the urban studies think tank — and Professor Florida’s wattage.
He gained prominence by extolling the worth of certain subcultures — a measure called the Bohemian Index gave credit to starving artists for giving a city appeal (and raising its economic fortunes by drawing high-tech industries).

Can the quality of people moving to a new town validate the most eccentric residents? Florida will show you the money, and the data, along with some bombastically anecdotal evidence that it does. Consider development on Queen Street West. It’s a perfect example of how a once-beleaguered area can prosper due to the Creative Class — and the condos that followed the bohemian renaissance have names like “Bohemian Embassy.”

That seems like the kind of fusion Richard Florida has in mind. Not too terrible so long as gentrification doesn’t scare all the artists away. But who is his message for?

The stages given to Florida provide a clue that it isn’t eclectic artists: The Globe and Mail heralded the arrival of the 50-year-old Newark, New Jersey native — whose academic career flourished in Pittsburgh before he spent the last few years in Washington, DC — by giving him a curious amount of ink. Not only were they publishing opinion columns under his byline, but taking him on walking tours around downtown Toronto to think?

Kensington Market: “There’s now a whole generation of Americans who’ve never seen a neighbourhood like this.” Yonge and Dundas: “What I think is good about this space, even though it’s not my aesthetic, is that it’s being used.” University of Toronto: “You have an urban university a couple of kilometres from the main financial city core, accessible on foot, by subway, by mass transit, in a real neighbourhood with functioning shops and residences where people live, work, learn and play.” Thanks for noticing, Rich.

Florida’s first major local address, after moving here with wife Rana last fall, was at the Toronto Board of Trade’s dinner in January. The message? I’m creative. You’re creative. We. Are. All. Creative.

Tom Cruise’s motivational speaking character in Magnolia — let alone Cruise in that Scientology indoctrination video — couldn’t have put it more bluntly. And while Florida projects comparable charisma, he’s not looking for an argument, though he frequently alludes to televangelist types taking issue with his two Creative Class books for documenting that wherever gay people like to fornicate, knowledge workers are sure to follow.

Who’s Your City? was spawned in response to a book by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman — a DC neighbour of Florida’s — who postulated that new technology means home is near-irrelevant in The World Is Flat. Florida’s own retort: “The world is actually very spiky” (backed up by stalagmitic graphs).

Which brought local devotees to the Rotman School of Management April 3 to hear him launch the book — another chance for Florida to tell how he went from blue-collar background to academic stardom. In doing so, he outgrew his home base: the location of Carnegie Mellon University, where he taught for 17 years, became the bane of Florida’s existence — his personality was no longer Pittsburgh.

Toronto isn’t so much serving Florida’s sense of place as much the “mega-region” we belong to is (one of 40 identified). Did you know we’ve been living in one corner of what he’s branded “Tor-Buff-Chester”?

Florida might be assertive, but he’s not especially arrogant — he’s articulating his enthusiasm. Take a shot at his Toronto cheerleading, and he’ll just as likely link to it and earnestly respond on his Creative Class blog (www.creativeclass.typepad.com), where the EYE WEEKLY Scrolling Eye reviews of his Toronto talks were noted for the recurring “zingers.”

“Just imagine if Jane Jacobs blogged,” said Florida after his Board of Trade dinner speech. “Imagine if Karl Marx blogged, imagine if Leonardo da Vinci blogged. How valuable would it be to have a record of their thoughts, to read the evolution of their thoughts?”

And he aims to be accessible not just in his Web 2.0 approach, but in his subject matter. Though the prose isn’t going to be mistaken for Lester Bangs, let alone Chuck Klosterman, musical taste informs Florida’s sense of place. He enthuses about a colleague who used iTunes playlists to gauge personality types, and has started research into a forthcoming book on alt-rock scenes. Who’s Your City? uses Jack White of the White Stripes moving to Nashville from Detroit as an example of an artist who found his place.

And the first wave of publicity for the book stateside focused on the “singles map” of America, which gave the girlie media something to chew on: data showing that there aren’t enough single guys in New York might as well be quoted on the movie poster for Sex and the City.

But he isn’t all pop. When the audience is more interested in wealth management, like at the Rotman book launch, Florida tailors his spiel for them — focusing on how empty nesters are also the relocating kind. It’s this kind of focus on economic opportunities for big industry and government — the reduction of the Creative Class to an indicator like housing starts — that leads critics to wonder how bohemian the message is.

Florida protegé Elizabeth Currid, a 29-year-old University of Southern California professor and author of The Warhol Economy, has nothing but praise for the Creative Class guru’s demographic versatility. “Just because he’s not the lead singer in a rock band doesn’t mean he can’t send a message about a city being an open and accepting place because it accepts that kind of performer,” she says. “I don’t think he has to be a bohemian to understand what bohemia is about.

“If you want to seriously research an issue like poverty, you don’t go to impoverished people, you go to the policy makers and foundations that are capable of making things happen.”

But from the perspective of those who’ve savoured the city coming into its own, counterculturally speaking — to become a city where the Creative Class would often rather stay than leave — this Globe-approved Music Man might well be trying to sell us a new monorail.

Max Allen, the CBC Radio producer, Textile Museum co-founder, and close friend and collaborator of Jane Jacobs (they both moved here from the US in the late 1960s and were neighbours until her passing in 2006) didn’t need a city self-help book 40 years ago, and doesn’t want it now. “Florida’s idea that artists and programmers are the wave of the future seems to me to be too narrow,” he says. “A lot of other jobs matter, too. And my sense of Richard Florida is that he just doesn’t matter.”
Alana Wilcox, co-editor of the uTOpia book series for Coach House Press — bona fide bohemia a stone’s throw from the Rotman School — is slightly more sanguine in her assessment of his motivation. “He’s talking about creativity to people who never thought of creativity as anything positive,” she says. “That credibility might help us all in some way even if that stuff has always been so obvious to me.

“Maybe it’s going to take him to explain it to a group of people who otherwise wouldn’t have wanted to listen? And why didn’t anyone think of that before?” Is it tunnel vision from those who came of age with a sense of Toronto, perhaps, compared to an American moving in midlife?
Jane Jacobs is frequently praised by Florida, who thinks her greatest insight concerned the clustering of people, and their creativity, on economic growth. And now he followed in her footsteps by relocating here around age 50.

But Allen objects to a reading of Florida as Jacobs’ intellectual heir. “Toronto back [in the late ’60s] had as much in common with what it is now as it does with an ice shelf. Jane had observations — not charts and graphs. Do you point to Toronto, and tell people in Medicine Hat that’s their ideal? How exactly do you manage that one? Cities don’t operate by recipes.”

Yet who’s going to resist a slick academic with a global reputation, hitting the stateside media circuit for Who’s Your City? and telling everyone how he decided area code 416 was Richard Florida’s home.

“He looks like a million bucks so that probably helps,” says Allen. “But I lived here for 30 years before I dared say anything about this place.”