My friend/fellow student Brian posted his own take on the entry from a few days back regarding my love/hate relationship with Toronto, which included mention of Richard Florida, a social and economic theorist and author of Who's Your City?. He was the keynote speaker at a conference Brian recently attended, where he discussed how, "place is evidently quite important, despite how common it is for people to travel between cities and work from various remote locations." (They also noted how during his speech, he recommended that a good way to choose a great city is to look at "where the gays go," which is actually really worthy if you think about it: Amsterdam, San Francisco, Montreal, New York, Sydney, Berlin...)

Anyway, this all really interests me right now, for obvious reasons, and I checked out Florida's book's website, which has a great feature that involves a series of questions that help you decide what city may or may not be a good fit for you. Its obviously not the end-all of knowing where you should end up, but I did it with the 5 communities I have either lived in or know well enough to answer the questions: Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Trenton (Ontario, where I grew up), and New York.

My results were a bit too close to call:

You should definitely consider staying in Montreal, Quebec
final score:80 (amongst the highest scores)

You should definitely consider moving to New York, New York
final score:81 (amongst the highest scores)

You should definitely consider moving to Toronto, Ontario
final score:74 (amongst the highest scores)

You should probably not move to Halifax, Nova Scotia
final score:58 (below the average [62.2] score)

You should definitely not move to Trenton, Ontario
final score:12 (way below the average [62.2] score)