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Spacing Radio is back for season two!

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back in March 2009, Spacing launched our first season of Spacing Radio, a bi-weekly podcast hosted by the CBC Radio’s David Michael Lamb. After six episodes — including interviews with former London mayor Ken Livingstone, Mayor David Miller and NYC’s transportation guru Janette Sadik-Khan — we shut it down for the summer to collect some stories and regroup. As of today, we’re back!

Season Two’s first episode sees Spacing contributing editor Edward Keenan sit down with renowned urbanist Richard Florida to discuss his creative class theories from his new book Who’s Your City? and how they apply to Toronto (this interview complements a Q&A article by Ed that you can find in the current issue of the magazine). Other people we’ll be talking to this season include Found magazine‘s Davy Rothbart, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, and a cast of city politicians from across Canada.

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6 comments

  1. 1) Glad you’re back.
    2) The NYC episode was awesome from last year.
    3) David Byrne! Sweet!

  2. I find it so hard to listen to Richard Florida. The whole ‘creativity’ thing is so intangible and unquantifiable that it escapes debate.

  3. Glen: except they are tangible. He has three books packed with facts that back it up. Readers here know you like numbers so it shouldn’t be hard for you to understand it.

    Now, I think he can extrapolate too much from some of those numbers, but he is pointing out trends that are quite quantifiable. Also, most people dismiss him without reading his books or following any of his writings. He is one smart cookie and should be given credit for it. You may not like the trends he supports, but outright dismissal is only seems to come from the armchair commentators (not specifically you Glen, but the whole anti-Florida crowd).

  4. lisa,

    That is the problem I have though. It is a large jump, requiring a preponderance of evidence, to correlate trends with specific assertions. By Floridian metrics Toronto should be doing much better than it is/has. We have the ‘creativity’, so why has it not?
    http://www.toronto.ca/business_publications/pdf/2009-august.pdf

    That is somewhat of a rhetorical question as there are many macro economic (and non economic) policies that are going to be far more influential. This is where I have the most trouble with Richard’s work. Extrapolating macroeconomic patterns from limited microeconomic ones is a dangerous game.

  5. Stop giving Richard Florida a free ride.