But can you get a decent bagel there? The anxiety of choosing a city to live in.

• Author: Taussig, Doron
• Position: Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life - Book review

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

by Richard Florida

Basic Books, 256 pp.

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Back in August 2005, the New York Times published a story that caused a minor hullabaloo in Philadelphia. Noting that many onetime New Yorkers were relocating to their cheaper, more manageable neighbor city to the south, the Big Apple's paper of record declared a trend, and dubbed Philadelphia "the sixth borough."

Once you got past the condescension and the logical problems with the label (if you wanted to start adding boroughs to New York City, wouldn't Philly be, like, seventeenth on the list?), the story had a lot to offer. It documented a phenomenon that affected the life of two cities, and correctly identified its causes as cost of living and convenience.

The part that struck me the most, though, was a throwaway line in the middle, about new Philadelphians who were reluctant to give up their New York phone numbers, because they couldn't admit that they'd really left. See, I myself am a native New Yorker who relocated to Philly, and I worry a fair amount about my decision to be here. I worry, for example, that I'm far from my parents and friends, and that, while I really like the City of Brotherly Love, I'll always feel more at home listening to old men argue about the Mets in a bagel store. Other urbanites, I'm sure, have their own concerns. Probably there are New Yorkers just scraping by who wonder whether they could have a higher quality of life in a smaller metropolis like Philly. The well-to-do in the Big Apple may ponder whether they'd prefer the weather in, say, San Francisco, and Bay Area residents, I can only imagine, are racked with guilt over their decision to live in a veritable resort town. For those of us fortunate enough to have a choice--because of youth, education, resources, or whatever--the question of where has become a difficult one. We have a wealth of options, a wide range of possible outcomes, and, unlike with, say, career choices or love lives, no archive of platitudes to guide us.

Enter Richard Florida, guru of all things young and urban. If you know Florida, it's probably from his smash book The Rise of the Creative Class, in which he argues that, in an era when people's creative faculties are the real means of production, cities grow by attracting creative people; to do that, he says, they need to be hip, open, and gay friendly. The book won this magazine's Political Book Award, became a national best seller, and changed the way cities thought about economic development. (This infuriated people on both sides of the political spectrum: conservatives, because it gave municipalities a development tool beyond slashing...