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Not so long ago, some techies proclaimed that communications technology and the Web would make geography irrelevant. In fact, the opposite is true: Talented people keep congregating in cities because they understand intuitively that working with other talented people spurs them to be even more creative.

For the first time, people aspire--even expect--to do work they love and to live in a community where they can be themselves. At the same time, the world of work has become increasingly temporary and insecure. As a result, talent is shifting to regions that offer dense concentrations of other talented people, tolerance of differences, and a great quality of life. These are the places that lure what Richard Florida, the Hirst Professor at George Mason University's School of Public Policy, calls the "creative class." They're scientists, engineers, artists, cultural creatives, managers, and professionals, who together comprise more than 30% of the total U.S. workforce and nearly half of the economy's wage and salary income.

The country's epicenters of such talent--San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles--are well-known. To find out which up-and-coming places show the highest rates of creative-class growth--the country's truly fast cities--we drafted Florida and his crack team of data crunchers, led by Kevin Stolarick, assistant professor with the Information Systems Program at Carnegie Mellon University. They identified the seven U.S. cities with populations between 1 million and 5 million and the three cities between 400,000 and 1 million that have offered the most potent mix of talent, technology, and tolerance in recent years. To top it off, we found a member of the creative class in each emerging city to tell us what's appealing about where they work and live.

Florida, the author of The Rise of the Creative Class (Perseus, 2002) and The Flight of the Creative Class (HarperBusiness, 2005) asserts that for 60 years, the United States had much of the world's talent pool to itself. But now, his research shows that the creative class has gone global. U.S. cities are competing with Dublin and Helsinki for creatives. And so we also asked Florida to pick five international cities that are winning chunks of the world's talent pool. Maybe one of this new generation of Fast Cities, in the United States or abroad, is the next San Francisco. You won't know until you make it happen.

Sacramento, California

[Poster Child]

Sandra Gonzalez grew up in a family that picked fruit throughout California. "I got into the wine business by osmosis," she says. But it was during her 10 years working for the Wine Institute, a California trade association, that she came to realize that wineries were doing little to cater to Latino customers. In 2002, she founded Vino con Vida ("wine with life"), a wine-education company, to change that. Gonzalez, 36, has worked with such wineries as Round Hill Vineyards, writes for trade publications, and appears at industry events. She picked Sacramento rather than San Francisco because it's between some of the largest wine-producing regions and because "Sacramento represents a lot of the changing demographics in the country." Living in the state capital also helps her stay attuned to new legislation that could affect the wine industry. And as California goes, so goes the country. As Gonzalez says, "I don't think people realize the impact that Sacramento has on the world."
-Michael A. Prospero