Hey, Rich Florida here, U of T alumni. Thank you for hanging with our course. I actually got my enrollment statistics, and we are at record enrollment. So thank each and every one of you for being part of this course on The City and You. I know you're in week four of the course, and you're now wrapping up week three. So we've covered what cities do and why they matter. We've covered how we now live in a world of cities, where we're all experiencing around the world. This incredible wave of urbanization, bringing billions, billions, upon billions, of more people into cities and urban areas. And, now, in the past week, in week three, we were talking about, why cities? Not only today. Of course, today's cities are centers of innovation and high tech industry. Well, Amazon is currently having this search for its second headquarters. And it's looking at cities, more than 50 cities across Canada and the United States. So high tech companies have moved back to cities. Cities have become kind of these cradles of innovation. Cities have long been cradles of creativity. I wrote a book called Rise of the Creative Class about this group of artists, and musicians, and techies, and knowledge workers. But throughout all of human history, going back to when we became human civilization to our earliest settlements, when we were building rudimentary tools and actually making rudimentary cave painting, our creativity and innovativeness has always been a part of living in denser, more urban-like, or even proto-urban like settings. So cities have always been these kinds of fonts of creativity and innovation. This week, we have many comments, and thank you all for participating in the discussion boards, in the discussion forums, and providing comments. But we selected three comments that we thought were reflective or exemplify the kind of comments we got from all of you. So the first comment says, "Cities can be creative if they foster variety and differences in perspective and in a safe environment. If the daily demands of living in a big city way down on people. Well, how can they be creative? They have no time." For a creative city to flourish, it needs a kind of safe and inclusive environment, and people need time. Well, one one place you see that is when you look at the cities that are part of the developing world. Every single human being is created. Every one of us has this incredible creative furnace that lies deep within us. But when you look at people in these rapidly urbanizing parts of the world, they have to use all of their time just to make ends meet. They have to build their house, fix their house, maintain their house, go about gathering food, go about gathering water. And they don't have advance transit. They have to walk or take a bicycle. They don't have a transit system. So just that going about day to day life, takes all of their energy. And I think that's why we've seen the explosion in creativity in modern cities. Today, only about one percent of the workforce in advanced countries like Canada or the United States are involved in farming. Only about five percent of us, actually are six percent of us workers working in factories and produce things. There's a large share, 45 percent who engaged in service activity, caring professionals, personal service, retail work. But about a third of us get to use our minds, get to use our creativity at work. And I think part of the reason we've seen our cities become cauldrons of creativity in this creative explosion is because many of us can use more of our time, not enough. It needs to be more of us. But many of us can use our time today to engage in creative activity. The second question says, "Creative cities are the cities which adapt new ways of living and thinking, while transforming the economy." And I think that's absolutely right. Right now, I think one of the thing that creates a lot of anxiety, a lot of consternation, is the fact that the rise of a new and innovative economy organize around cities. Is coming and it's disrupting as part of the disruption of many of these older ways of organizing the economy, a large scale industrial economy which produced a lot of high-paying factory jobs. My father had one that produced this kind of working middle class, is being annihilated. And people are scared. They see the rise of a new kind of economic system and a new kind of creative city. But maybe that only houses a third of people. Only a third of people are doing well in that economy, the upper middle class or the creative class, while many more people are sinking further, further, behind. So that creates anger and anxiety, and a sense of uncertainty. So I think that's absolutely right. And how do we then configure a new and creative kind of economy to lift many more boats? And I actually think in the wake of the kind of this populist backlash that we've been living through, now, I think we're beginning to see politicians, and political actors, and even business actors, begin to think of how can we address this and how can we create an economy, which creates more opportunity for more kinds of people? How can we create cities in urban areas that do so? Next week, we're going to talk a lot about the new urban crisis. So this will come up. I wrote a whole book about it. But one thing that I truly believe is that, in the old industrial economy, we solve problems based on the nation state. My hunch is in this new kind of highly urbanized economy, the real way we're going to solve these problems, and build a new middle class, and spread the benefits, and create more affordable housing, and better jobs is by doing it locally and by transforming our local politics and our local policies. Third question, "Creatives need to be inspired. Cities are the places that bring together the diversity of creativity sparking activities. Creatives can be drawn to places that stimulate people." And places can stimulate creative peoples and spark their creativity. That's absolutely right. In research that I did with a young man named, Jason Rentfrow. He's a social psychologist at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. He shows who moves. And there are five personality types. There are introverts and extroverts. There are highly conscientious people. There are agreeable people. There are emotionally stable and neurotic people. And then there's one type that tends to be very high on creativity and very likely to move. Those people are called open to experience. They're the kind of people who need constant stimulation, are always looking for the next new thing, want to live in a dense environment that has this kind of creative energy. And I think one of the things that happens is that creative people seek out these diverse and inspiring places, where they can be themselves. In my work, one of the things we looked at was where artistic people, musicians, designers live. I call this the bohemian factor. In another set of research, trying to probe for this connection between diversity and creativity, we looked at where gay and lesbian people were locating, where they were migrating to as a proxy indicator, approximate indicator of the kind of diversity that would spark this kind of creativity. But I think it's absolutely right. And that's the reason cities and creativity go together because creative people need to have their creativity inspired. They need to have the kind of environment that really fuels and energizes their creativity, and that tends to happen best in cities that have a lot of things going on. Thank you again for participating in the course. Thank you again for giving us these really record enrollments. It's really heartening to see how many people are enrolled and participating in the course. Please do, if you have any questions. We've been tried, my course team and myself. When people send us an email, if you have a question, if you have a comment, if you need help, you need help with your account, send us an email, and we'll be on it. And, please, continue to participate and send it. Participate in those discussion forums. Participate in the course, and send us your comments and questions. Again, it's a pleasure having you in this course and going through this experience with each and every one of you.
