Richard Florida

Richard Florida is University Professor at University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, where he also serves as Chief Urbanist in the Creative Destruction Lab. He is a Distinguished Fellow at New York University.

He is the author of more than ten books including The Rise of the Creative Class and more than one hundred books chapters and articles in peer-reviews academic journals. 

He is a Senior Editor at The Atlantic, where he co-founded and serves as Editor-at Large for CityLab, the world’s leading publication devoted to cities and urbanism.

Florida previously taught at Carnegie Mellon, George Mason University and Ohio State University, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard and MIT and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He earned his Bachelor’s degree from Rutgers College and his PhD from Columbia University.