Richard Florida Week 1 Follow-up - Cohort 3

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En provenance du cours de University of Toronto

The City and You: Find Your Best Place

51 notes

University of Toronto

The City and You: Find Your Best Place

51 notes

Welcome to The City and You: Find Your Best Place. I'm excited to have you in the class and look forward to your contributions to the other learners in our community. This free course will provide the knowledge and the tools needed to understand what cities do, why they matter, the forces shaping the greatest wave of urbanization in history, and how to pick the right place for you. The course will also help you develop critical thinking skills. We'll accomplish this by providing evidence of the importance of cities, and why and how they matter to you. Then we’ll ask you to apply what you’ve learned in an exercise which will help you assess your own community and find your best place. This course is accessible and open to anyone who is interested in learning more about cities and the ways they affect our lives. It is organized around five key modules: (1) Why Cities Matter, (2) A World of Cities, (3) The Creative City, (4) The Divided City and the New Urban Crisis, and (5) How to Find the Best Place for You. After completing the course, you will be able to: (1) Identify why cities are the drivers of economic prosperity; (2) Explain the drivers and implications of fast-growing urbanization worldwide; (3) Outline the key characteristics of a creative and innovative city; (4) Describe the social divides and challenges facing cities and the solutions cities are using to address them; and (5) Recognize the trade-offs of staying in your current city versus moving, and identify the best place for you and your family to live. Good luck as you get started, and I hope you enjoy the course!

À partir de la leçon

Why Cities Matter

This session will help you to understand the importance of cities for both the economy and society, as well as, you and your family. Today, more than three and a half billion people live in cities, which is more than half of the world's population. That figure is projected to rise to as many as 10 billion people or 85 percent of the world's population over the next century. Cities are our premier platforms for generating new innovations, higher levels of economic growth, and new and better jobs. We will discuss why and how cities are important, and why picking the right city to live is important to your career, well-being, and life.

Course Overview - The City and You (Instructor Video)1:29

What The City and You is About & How It Will Benefit You (Instructor Video)3:29

Why Cities Matter (Instructor Video)8:36

Richard Florida Week 1 Follow-up - Cohort 16:13

Richard Florida Week 1 Follow-up - Cohort 23:08

Richard Florida Week 1 Follow-up - Cohort 34:16

Richard Florida Week 1 Follow-up - U of T Alumni Edition9:08

Rencontrer les enseignants

Richard Florida
University Professor and Director of Cities, University of Toronto
Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management

Hey, Richard Florida here.

Welcome to our newest and latest and bestest iteration of The City and You.

It's really fantastic to have you in our course.

You've seen some of the videos.

You know that I care deeply about cities and hope

that you will come to share my passion or maybe you already

do on why cities are important and why

urbanization in urban areas are a factor that is shaping our economy,

our society, our culture and our lives.

And I guess most of all, the reason I wanted to build this course

is to help you think about and find and choose the best place,

the best city or community or neighborhood for you,

and if you have a family for your family.

So thanks for joining us and it's a pleasure to have you in this course.

Thank you for taking the journey with me

and I really look forward to working with you and I

hope you get some meaningful information about this really critical decision,

an aspect of our life where we live and the place you live.

We're well into the second week of the course and you've already been through week one,

which is about why cities matter and what they do.

And we have two comments based on the readings and

conversations and videos so far for week one.

The first comment is that cities have kind of two functions.

They play two roles in the economy.

First is kind of this purely economic utilitarian role.

They provide jobs, they provide a business infrastructure,

they host clusters of companies,

they host banks in multinational corporations,

they're the place that economic activity and economic development gets done.

The second part is that cities play a kind of broader role or they shape our culture.

They're where different kinds of people live.

They're where different cultures,

different kinds of cultures can exist together.

They're a place where creativity flourishes and innovative ideas come to the fore.

And I think that sort of part and parcel of the course.

I think that's what we're going to discuss, you know.

We're going to discuss why cities are important to the economy,

why people move to cities,

how they cluster us together.

But as we go on, we're going to have a whole session devoted

to the creative city and how cities are so important in

this creative and innovative impulse and how that comes

from not just the clustering of businesses and industries and jobs,

that comes from the talented and creative people of all diversity and all backgrounds,

all walks of life, ways of life,

and kinds of people living together and combining and recombining in cities.

So that be a real focus of the coming weeks of the course.

The second comment builds on the first.

Look, there are certain things cities do.

They have economic functions,

they have ecological functions.

They bring talent together.

They bring people together.

They create jobs, increase our living standards.

They make us more diverse, more culturally cosmopolitan.

But I really like this question.

This person says a really compelling question,

an intriguing question is,

what these cities do not do?

And the only way I can answer that,

I mean, there's a lot of things cities do not do,

there's lots of things, lots of places do not do,

is what Ed Glaeser,

an economist said about cities

and he said they reduce the distance between people and ideas.

So I guess what cities do not do is they do not keep us far apart.

They bring as close together.

What cities do is they reduce the distances that separate us.

They just force us closer together.

So and I welcome more comments from all of you on what cities do not do.

Thanks again for being part of the course and please send your comments

in and also please contribute especially as we embark on the second week.

Please contribute to the discussion forums and discussion boards.

Please send us your comments and also take the time to read

the comments that other learners put up there and respond and build on those comments.

Thanks again to being part of this fantastic journey about the city and you.

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