So, now we're in week five of the course.

We've covered why cities matter.

We've covered the boom in global urbanization and where cities are

growing and the billions upon billions of people

will put in cities and how we're gonna build those cities.

We've covered the creativity and innovativeness of cities

and we've looked at the challenges that cities are facing with the new urban crisis.

Now in week five and in many ways it's my favorite week of the course,

and now really what we want you to try to

do is put together everything that you've learned from the videos,

from the readings on your own,

from engaging in to discussion forums,

from taking part in the exercises and quizzes,

and really what the course is about is not only understanding life cities

and locations and geography is important but really the core theme,

the real reason I wanted to make this course was to

help you find the place that's best for you and your family.

You know. And I wanna reinforce this.

It's something I've written about in my book, Who's Your City,

it's something that we talked about in the other videos but it's really key.

You know, in your life,

you make three big decisions.

You pick what you're going to study in school or in university.

You pick your career and you work really hard on that career and

you get a lot of advice about that you take it seriously, at least many of us do.

The second big choice you make is your choice of life partner or your spouse.

And you know, there's a lot of people giving you

advice about that books to read, newspaper columns.

But the third big decision is the one most people just take for granted.

They don't pay attention to.

They make this decision by default.

It's where you are gonna live.

And even if you don't make that choice consciously,

you're still making a choice about where you live.

So really we make that choice and there are

three times when we make that choice that's really important.

The first is when we're a younger person and we want to establish ourselves and we maybe

have gone to college or university and we're looking to establish our career,

so where we gonna look for work and how we're going to establish that career.

The second time is not necessarily when you get married but when you have kids.

Where are you gonna raise your family?

What are you gonna look for in a community?

What do you think about schools?

And then the third big time you make this decision is when the kids leave the roost,

when the kids go off and you're an empty nester.

What are you gonna do then? Are you gonna downsize?

So one of the most important points I want to

make is that we need to take this seriously.

And in this week of the course not only tells you about that but

with the place finder tool that we've developed that

gives you a simple set of questions that you can go through and kind of get a sense of,

well, is the place you're living the right place for you?

Compared to several other places you might want to live.

Are they the right place to you?

And after you do this tool,

it gives you a set of numeric rankings which allow you to way that.

And that's what the assignment's about.

So I think this is kind of that not only a culmination but

the high point of the course and that it enables you to take what

you've learned and apply it to making

the decision about where you live now or where you may wanna live,

where your friends and family may wanna live and doing it in

a structured way that will give you the best possible outcome you can have.

The first question or comment from one of the learners this week is,

how do you balance career and family?

It's a really good question and that's why

I wanted to do this course and this section of the course.

And that's why I developed the place finder tool.

There is no one answer.

It's not like all of us should go moving back to the city center.

It's not like all of us should be in the suburbs.

It's not like all of us should be in New York or London or

San Francisco or all of us should be in Houston or Charlotte.

We have to pick the place, the city,

the metropolitan area, the neighborhood that best fits us.

So one questioner asks,

well what if we've kids?

We want our kids to be in good school systems and in our community,

maybe it's different in your community but in our community,

the urban schools near the city center aren't very good.

If we're gonna live in the city center in a smaller apartment,

we're gonna have to pay a lot of money to put our kids in private school.

Outside the city center in the suburbs,

there are very good public schools.

We could have a bigger house,

and we're gonna have public schools.

Well, that's a choice that lots of people make.

We've seen a migration especially in

the United States because of all the historic problems,

of schools and urban schools,

and crime and other things,

this migration of people when they have - that's why I said.

The key decision, second decision,

location decision, you make in your life is

not when you get married but when you have kids.

And you have to do that, there's no right or wrong.

Some people would choose the city in the city center.

It fits them better. They'll find a way to use a charter or a magnet school,

or they'll find a way to use a private school or parochial school.

Other people say, "The heck with that.

I want more space. I want my kids to have more space.

I want to enroll them in a public school." That works for them.

The point here is there is no right or wrong.

The point is to make the choice that's best for you and your family.

The second questioner on this theme

says certain places have certain advantages for careers.

This person specifically mentions, you know,

if you wanna do oil stuff and resources stuff, Houston is for you.

If you're in the sun belt and you're thinking about banking,

maybe Charlotte or maybe New York is the place to do banking, or Toronto.

If you're doing automotive,

the Detroit or Stuttgart.

If you're gonna I could go on,

if you're gonna be an actor, probably L.A. or maybe New York.

If you're going to be a fashion designer, it's other cities.

Caribbean tack, maybe it's the Bay Area or Seattle or Austin.

The point is that many of these job markets are clustered.

I talk about that in my book,

Who's Your City, and you have to take that into account.

Either you have to think about the career you want to

go in and how it matches up with location or you've

gotta try to make it go where you are because one

of the things we know is that many of these occupational fields,

many of these job markets,

the opportunities are quite highly clustered.

Other jobs may be in law or in

management or in medicine or in education are more spread out.

But the point of view you need to pay attention to that.

You need to think about in my field,

in my career, where is the opportunity?

And will that require me to move?

Look, I'm a professor.

There are professor jobs all

around the country and all around the world but they're hard to get.

They're even harder to get now.

So, when I was a young person,

I was living in New York.

I moved to Buffalo for a job.

I moved back to New York.

I moved to Columbus, Ohio for a job.

From Columbus, I moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

From Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I move to Washington D.C.. From Washington D.C.,

I moved to Toronto and in between,

I took sabbaticals in Boston. I don't know.

I think I counted once I moved 17 times in about 20 or 25 years.

The point is that academic careers,

you go where jobs are.

It's not like you can pick.

There aren't a lot of jobs.

It's like if you're in theater or if you wanna do ballet or symphonic music,

you gotta go where the jobs are.

Other careers you have a lot more choice.

But the point is you really need to think about

those tradeoffs and those choices about the kind of career you want,

the place you wanna live and the kinds of people you wanna surround you with.

And again, there's no right or wrong answer.

It's being aware of those tradeoffs and making

the best decision that you can possibly make for yourself and your family.

The next question about this theme about picking

your place is about jobs and career and vibrancy.

And when I boil it down,

when I think about this learner's question,

it's really about something I called and

rise of the creative class with thick labor market.

That in the old days, you know,

my dad who was a manufacturing worker with

the second grade education had one job for life.

He worked in the same factory in Newark New Jersey from the time he turned 13.

And he went off and served in World War II and he came back and he

worked in that factory until he retired in his 60s.

The average length of stay in a job for an American is about three years.

The average length of stay in a job for a younger person is about one year.

We know that businesses are no longer as loyal to us.

I'm fortunate I work in a university.

I have a tenured position so I do have a degree of loyalty.

And people are no longer as loyal to their employers for a whole variety of reasons,

many of them are not so good reasons.

Our economy is more flexible and has a great degree of less loyalty.

In that situation, a lot of people who are pursuing

careers know that and I've heard it from my students time and time again,

I can't go to a city that offers me just one job.

Well, I have a spouse or partner.

They need a job or a two career household.

But moreover, what if I don't like the job?

What if the people don't like me? What if it doesn't fit me?

I'm gonna have to go off and find another job.

So, this idea of a vibrant city with lots of opportunities,

a diverse labor market what I call a thick labor market.

I had a student once who I met when he was at the University of Iowa,

really smart young man.

And he came, he helped me do writing and he worked with me and my team

and I asked him why he was

interested in coming to Washington D.C. and he had the best answer.

He said, well it, you know, it's gonna be great to work with you and learn things

but I realized that almost anything I wanted to do,

I have this great interest in public policy,

in global affairs, in diplomacy.

If I wanna do that in Washington D.C., I could do that.

I have this great interest in urbanism,

in city building and all of these things.

If I wanna do that, I can be in Washington D.C.

If I wanna work for the federal government, I could.

But he said, you know one of the things I've really wanted to

do is I wanted to be a musician.

He actually became a very successful musician,

formed what was the most popular band in Washington D.C..

But this was before all of that happened he said,

Washington D.C. is a really great city to do

that because it has a lot of young people with a lot of

discretionary income who are looking for stuff to

do at night and wanna go out and hear live music.

And he said, by the way,

if I wanna go back to graduate school, I could do that there.

There was a diversity of economic options and in

graduate school options that made it an attractive place for him to base his career.

And so everyone's different.

You know, some of us might be in a career that requires us to go to certain places.

Others have more broad-based choices.

Some of us maybe have a dual career household,

others just are solo actors.

The point is to really think long and hard and strategically about where you

live lines up with the other things that matter to

you in your life and how that place could enhance,

best enhance, the things you wanna do.

And I guess the biggest point I want to make is don't take this choice for granted.

And one last thing,

there's a great article in The New York Times,

I think it was this week,

where a young woman was saying she lived in an urban area.

I believe it was in Brooklyn.

Her family was growing.

The quarters were cramped and tight.

She was gonna go out and test drive the suburbs.

It's actually a phrase I use in my book, Who's Your City.

I say you not only need to do your research,

you need to test drive these places.

So she either got a place with a friend or rented a place or rent an airbnb,

but she was test driving the neighborhoods that she might wanna live in.

And as the piece went on,

she wasn't sure she really liked it.

She didn't know if she wanted to go back to Brooklyn or move to the suburbs.

The point is so many of us go visit a place for a week or a weekend,

we think we have a job,

our boyfriend or girlfriend are there,

our friends might be there, it's a nice place,

we go there, we look around, we find an apartment.

This is the single most expensive and gut ridging, you know,

people say that moving to a new house

is one of life's three or four most stressful activities.

It's like having a kid or getting married or losing a loved one.

And people just make it in a blink of an eye,

oh I can find that apartment, that's fine.

The point is to take it very seriously and

actually not only take it very seriously and do your research,

but when you get close to go out and look

around and use your eyes and walk the streets and test

drive the place to see if it really fits you because undoing a wrong move,

it's not only the most expensive decision,

it's a very expensive and time consuming decision to undo to move again.

So the point of this section of the course is to use

all of this material we've given you to

enhance your ability to make that choice better

and a way that best fits you and your family.

I just wanna say congratulations for those of you who have

completed this course and done the readings,

watch the videos, engaged in the quizzes,

done the final assignment.

Congratulations.

Hope you've enjoyed the course and we've certainly

enjoyed more than we would have expected that actually when we built,

but we certainly really enjoyed being there

to help you learn about this phenomenal field, you know,

which I think is the greatest field in the world, our cities,

our communities and how to choose the places,

how to better choose the places we live in.

I'd like to ask you a favor.

Could you please use the discussion forums to give us general comments on the course?

Tell us what you've liked, what you didn't like,

what worked, what didn't work and you can be specific or as broad as you want.

You know, you can tell us about videos that worked

or readings that worked or assignments that work,

but things you think that worked well and we should do more of and

ways to do that better and things you think that didn't work because,

you know, you guys were kind of a test case in many ways.

You're the first learners to take this course

and we're gonna offer it over and over again.

And one of the things I know from teaching for

more than 30 years is that courses

get better from the interaction you have with learners,

from the comments you get back from students and those who take the course.

And by your own ability to then change

the course and revise the course and make it better.

So we'd really really consider it a deep favor.

Really appreciate your comments on the course on what we've done well,

what we didn't do well and how to improve for future generations of learners.

Again, thanks for taking the course and being with

us and congratulations on all you've accomplished.

Richard Florida Week 5 Follow-up and Final Remarks - Cohort 1

The City and You: Find Your Best Place

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