At some point in the next year or so, an immigrant seeking a better life – or a refugee fleeing regional violence, or a retiring Boomer who wants to be closer to their children – will move from the hinterlands to one of the world’s sprawling metropolises, further tipping the global population from one that is primarily rural to one that is predominantly urban.

Canada is on the leading edge of that trend: city residents have outnumbered their rural counterparts for a number of years now, and major urban centres – Montreal, Vancouver, and especially Toronto – are growing at an exponential rate. But as Alan Broadbent argues in Urban Nation, politicians continue to view this country the way the Fathers of Confederation did – as a vast and lonely wilderness, “the Canada of furs, logs, wheat fields, canoes, and the cry of the loon at the lake.”

In this brisk and punchy polemic, Broadbent proposes redrawing the map of the country to reflect our increasingly urban, increasingly cosmopolitan, and increasingly multi-ethnic reality. His bold plan calls for severing the country’s three largest urban regions into “city-provinces,” semi-autonomous regions with increased powers of taxation and the tools of self-government.

An entrepreneur with a long record of civic activism (he counts the late Jane Jacobs as a friend), Broadbent is an able, upbeat policy wonk, tackling many of the details that would make such a plan work. He also mirthfully skewers politicians he believes lack vision or tenacity – former Ontario premier Mike Harris is a favourite punching bag, but Broadbent is equally derisive of many city councillors.

The book’s only fault is its disproportionate focus on Toronto. This Toronto-centrism may be justified – Broadbent believes Toronto, the “cash cow of Confederation,” has been particularly maligned – but it does weaken his argument. For example, it’s hard to imagine Alberta, with its newfound wealth, agreeing to form a regional coalition with the two poorer neighbouring provinces, as Broadbent proposes. And as he rightfully points out, Quebec minus Montreal would be a “simmering separatist rump,” one with a stagnant population to boot.

Still, Broadbent’s book is an insightful look at Toronto’s recent civic past, one that might be of interest to Richard Florida, the bestselling author of The Rise of the Creative Class, who recently moved to Toronto to join the faculty of U of T’s Rotman School of Business. Canadian readers who pick up the marketing guru and urbanist’s latest book for his impressions of his new home may be sorely disappointed by the fact that Who’s Your City? is almost entirely focused on the U.S. When Toronto does come up, it is described in familiar terms – i.e., diversity and clean streets. (It also scores highly on the Trick-or-Treat Index, Florida’s measure of how family-friendly a neighbourhood is.)

On the surface, Who’s Your City? is no great departure from Florida’s earlier work, which argued that creativity and ingenuity are the engines of postindustrial economies. Here, he attempts to show how the creative class is clustering in a relatively small number of places. Midway through the book, however, he begins to dabble in a “geography of happiness” that attempts to correlate personal well-being and place. This has Florida at times adopting the jarring, oleaginous tone of a self-help guru: “I wrote this book to help you pick the place that’s right for you,” he intones. “By the end of this book, you’ll better understand … how to maximize your chances for a happy and fulfilling life.”

As you might expect from the man famous for creating the Bohemian-Gay Index, there’s plenty of pseudo-science in this book, too. But there is something disquieting about Florida’s zealous use of charts, coded maps, and statistical correlations to explain both complex phenomena (the dense urban fabric) and things we already know (“different cities – and different types of communities – affect our happiness in different ways”).

Florida’s future city isn’t a pretty one, and it certainly isn’t just; it’s one where a new class of elites has displaced the masses employed by the service and manufacturing sectors of the economy. But by treating this increasing stratification as a natural, unavoidable law, he imbues worrying social trends with the hard edge of inevitability. In contrast, Broadbent’s emphasis on policymaking seems like a breath of fresh air. Aligned more closely to history and politics than scientific discourse, Broadbent presents himself as an architect of a better, more just, urban reality.