Today on the Scroll: Richard Florida talked, lots of people listened, possibly perplexed Scrolling Eye columnist attempts to explain why. 

Consider the stroll from Union Station to the Toronto Board of Trade’s 120th annual dinner at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on a winter Monday night, the first major address to the business community by Creative-Class guru Richard Florida since he moved here last fall.

Taking the Skywalk means nearly colliding with jackass skateboarders, but hardly another pedestrian in sight.  The route is blanketed with posters instructing you to “Break Free” in a shadow font that recalls “Break Free” anti-smoking commercials from 1989 — back when the domed stadium embodied those boom times, even if what’s advertised is the MP3-era Sony Walkman with FM tuner.

Yes, the scent of recession is in the air, all of those waterfront CityPlace condos may become the next St. James Town faster than Adam Vaughan thought — could there be a better time to fire up “world class city” rhetoric all over again?

The evangelist is new in town, though: Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, has made the pages of The Globe and Mail his beachhead. His byline is attached to a monthly column for the Focus section, which sends him on monthly walks — so far through Yonge-Dundas Square, Kensington Market and U of T – chronicled by editor Peter Scowen. A freelance correspondent who doesn’t need to actually write anything? Now that’s creativity.

But the most relentlessly American of Florida’s traits might be his dogged desire to spin social-science headlines, quirky online items and the rise of Barack Obama into his theory of the “Creative Class.” And he’s equally determined to counter-spin everything posted about him — as Toronto Life scribe Philip Preville experienced after a recent blog post: “Toronto’s shit smells of roses, says Dr. Florida.” Florida dismissed this as “negative,” “insecure” and a little too typical.

No such detractors at the Board of Trade dinner, where the salad comes with Cirque du Soleil acrobatics onstage, followed by Canada AM host Seamus O’Reagan gloating about how he never set foot in a city “so effortlessly diverse as this one.” Case in point, far as Seamus was concerned, was last year’s inaugural Luminato festival — an earnest display of highbrow arts that was hardly on the radar for most locals.

And then more introductory remarks, and a quick-cut tourist video of downtown sites, all providing the reassurance that everything in this town is really going to work out OK. Maybe. Perhaps.

Because, through it all, there’s gotta be the fear that the starchitect creations and boutique hotels and Trump Tower are just foreshadowing another Bread, Not Circuses-style reaction, which thwarted the 1996 Olympic bid (and probably helped blow it for 2008, too). Jack Layton and Olivia Chow are still political royalty in this place. Bob Rae is returning to the scene to stir up those old mixed feelings …

How is the “world class city” circa 2008 going to fare any better than the one that fell flat on its face 15 years ago? The difference might be that most creative types aren’t angling to get the hell away from here.

Can they be found anywhere to eat a Board of Trade dinner, though? The head of the organization, Carol Wilding, even confessed the need to try harder to reach out — gesturing to a table of “Gen Xers” as if they were a persecuted minority group. She mentioned the effort to try and connect with groups like DemoCamp, and other web 2.0 types. These are the very sorts who’d chortle at the suggestion that a Washington Post fluff story proclaiming that Toronto is “so cool” in wintertime was a long-overdue validation. Will those who came of age before SkyDome was built ever get over this complex?

George Smitherman seems over it, however, and the MPP is perfectly qualified to deliver an infectious Toronto-boosting keynote: “I was born in York, grew up in Etobicoke, and came out downtown,” he qualifies in his moments at the podium. Living proof of Richard Florida’s most original ranking system, a Gay Index, citing that a city can attract and retain knowledge workers based on the number of non-straight people who feel there’s no place like home.

Florida takes the stage to the shuffle of “The In Crowd” and his appeal as a keynoter is immediately evident. With big screens flanking him, this must be what it’s like to watch one of those megachurch sermons: “My friends in the press, they say I’m too positive, too boosterish. But we really, really love this city.”

Like any good sermon, debunking critics plays a large part, even if he doesn’t quite turn a phrase as well as some of the online responses on the Globe’s site. (“It’s kind of like Christopher Hume meets Douglas Coupland in a faculty club.”)

Those who’ve stood up to Florida have mocked him for playing into the hands of “yuppies, sophistos and trendies.” He’s been hectored for having a gay agenda. And he’s even been accused of running an endgame designed to “undermine the tenets of Judeo-Christian society.”

Well, of course not, but wouldn’t it be interesting if he got gigs like this to secretly spread some kind of anti-bible agenda? It would put the collective efforts of Tom Cruise, Christopher Hitchens and Anton LaVey to shame.

From there, the main focus was on how Dr. Florida got here (generally covered in a Globe column). Grew up in North Arlington, New Jersey (you might have seen it on The Sopranos). Father got a job in an eyeglass factory at the height of the Great Depression, went to fight for his country, came back to the eyeglass factory. Son becomes an academic, paying his dues at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, even if it’s the sort of place stuck in the rut  he’s talking about. Publication of The Rise of The Creative Class makes Florida a known name. Moves to George Mason University in Washington, D.C. where his neighbour Thomas Friedman is working on a book called The World Is Flat — how you can be successful in business no matter where you live, work and play — which is basically the opposite of what Florida believes: “Place has become more important than ever,” he exclaims.

Florida is inspired by Toronto’s network of ravines, presumably the ones closest to his Rosedale abode. He goes for regular walks, looks forward to riding his bike, wife Rana — herself an escapee from Detroit — even bought him a pair of cross-country skis for Christmas so that he could explore the ravines that way.

Few of the business-folk the Convention Centre’s ballroom have heard Toronto’s topography described in such rhapsodic terms by someone who isn’t a real-estate agent. Younger media types, on the other hand, have watched the emergence of Spacing and other public space-related movements during the mayoral reign of David Miller.

Creative Class isn’t much of a polemic, though — if anything, Florida needs to emphasize that his methods have detractors, to lend his points a bit of sizzle and counter anyone who calls him an elitist.

What those anarchists in the public-space realm lack is a magnetic spokesperson casting a shadow on par with Florida’s chiseled looks and mini-series-president delivery. Can they hire Nicholas Campbell? Nick Mancuso? What about the Canadian Tire Guy, is he looking for work?

That membership in the Creative Class — which extends well into the business world, Florida repeatedly stresses to the crowd — needn’t equate with abject poverty should at least be a relief to those unsuccessful artists around town who don’t seem to be under pressure to work for a living due to inherited wealth. Maybe he’s giving them license to no longer feign being broke by pretending they can’t afford to pitch in for the platter of nachos.

Community is the focus of Florida’s forthcoming book, Who’s Your City, packed with advice on how to find the right place for you.   

Florida has found his place in Toronto, but gives credit to Seattle, recalling when he first happened upon the fact that Microsoft zillionaire Paul Allen had commissioned Frank Gehry to build a museum — not of science or technology, but a rock hall inspired by the legacy of Jimi Hendrix.  (The Experience Music Project has struggled to find its niche. A similar local project, Metronome, fruitlessly flounced around different proposed sites for a dozen years before claiming land on the waterfront.)

For a scrum after his speech, reporters — delighted to have finally walked into one of those stories Tom Wolfe used to write — were handed business cards by Rana as her husband described his early Toronto encounters. While he visited as a student in Buffalo, and didn’t find much that was thrilling, Florida says a trip in “the late '80s or early '90s” ignited him to its potential  recalling a night hanging out at the old Bamboo Club on Queen West in particular.

And what of the tireless posting on his website? “As a public intellectual you have to engage your audience,” Florida holds forth. He spends four hours a day on the blog, and his wife calls him “the electronica husband” but he just can’t resist it.

“Just imagine if Jane Jacobs blogged, imagine if Karl Marx blogged, imagine if Leonardo DaVinci blogged. How valuable would it be to have a record of their thoughts, to read the evolution of their thoughts?”

Most of all, Florida relishes that his critics in Toronto are coming from the left side of the political spectrum, eager to scrap with him over issues of social justice, inclusion and sustainability. “It’s a gift to me,” he says. “And that’s no bullshit.”

So, there you have it. Richard Florida isn’t quite the Hardee’s to our Harvey’s, the M&Ms to our Smarties, or the Ryan Seacrest to our Ben Mulroney. Rather, if Toronto is an iPod, he wants to be our new Zune.

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